Whenever I get stuck I don’t go to one single thing to unlodge myself. I might shuffle through one of my tarot decks one day or clean some fossils. Reading poetry can also do the trick (lately: Jennifer Moxley and John Wilkinson). But I think the key is knowing how something is stuck and when it makes sense to walk away. That is to say: any exercises meant to set something new loose can have as much value as writing something “important” or meaningful in the first place. That has been what I’ve been trying for, at least. Reading and contemplation as their own ends. It is tough, but at some point something switched in my brain and reading became utilitarian—to glean craft to parse for my own work (even when reading for pleasure, that part of the brain is always present). I just finished W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and am now starting The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera, which is fantastic. When there is time (and I have very little free time), it becomes a challenge to give myself a little slack with readerly hobbies or rocks embedded with dead plants. To say nothing of phones! Forget writing. To put away the phone and go off and breathe with inert objects or books, that is the real challenge.
—Anya Johanna DeNiro, author of OKPsyche (Small Beer Press, 2023)
Photo credit: Tiffany Bolk