Anyone seen the Joyce Carol Oates MasterClass trailer that begins, "The great enemy of your writing isn't your own lack of talent. It's being interrupted (pause) by other people."
No. Nope. I'm so not into a writer who had no children telling me that the enemy of my writing is -- well, for all intents and purposes -- the people I love. 
This feels so incredibly damning for writers who want to create lives with lots of crying, barging-in types. And even more damning for writers who have already created lives with lots of loud, laughing, crying, barging-in types. 
It sets up such an adversarial relationship between children and work. It's from another generation. And I completely reject it. 
"Constant interruptions are the destruction of the imagination," Oates goes on to say.
No. They're only destructive if your process has been built around long uninterrupted fields of quiet and solitude.
If your process was forged in loud, messy, dinosaur-infested, stained, un-showered, sour-milk stenched, scraps of paper, long-stare while making peanut-butter sandwiches, your process is solid. 
AND I'd add that the blur of your own world -- with its wounds and bad dreams and longing and fresh terror and fear and love -- with your written world ... that blur is rich. Lean into it. 
AND if you're lucky enough, one day, to get some time when the interruptions ease up -- and the kids build their own loud beautiful hard scary wonderful challenging lives and share them with you -- you'll find yourself in that field of uninterrupted time and you know what you'll do? 
You'll self-interrupt. You'll look for the blurred terrain. You'll long for the harder days -- you'll long for a kid to barge in having cut holes in a flowered comforter to make an amazing full length cape -- even though you're thankful for quiet. 
Nah, Oates, you got it all wrong.
I'm not a better writer despite those interruptions by other people. 
I'm a better writer because of them. 
They weren't the destruction of my imagination. 
They are the stuff my imagination was made of -- is fueled by.

a poem.

Your World is Harder than Mine: Instructions for Children Heading off to School

If your dream comes to life
and the houses
on our street lift themselves up

and walk off

on their leggy stilts and find different
roosts
          before you come home from school

I will meet you at
the spot in case of fire
under the dying pine -- whose roots are not legs.

But promise me:
if the gunning madman
appears in the schoolyard and your teachers

shout the warning
Shark’s in the tank! Shark’s in
the tank!
pick up your dreamy head and run

on your stilty legs
to the herd’s heart. 
Only I will tell you how to survive:

Let the other children take the first shots.
I will find you
under the pile of bodies -- alive.

[I wrote this poem for my children after a school shooting almost ten years ago. I consider it a brutal poem, one written before we started telling children to run at the gunman. It first appeared in Ploughshares, guest edited by Terrance Hayes. It's now collected in the book Instructions, Abject & Fuming.]

Julianna's latest essay is now up at Oprah Magazine...

"By the time I was ten, I was my mother’s confessor. My older siblings were teenagers or already out in the world. I was the only one left, and she was bored and a little lonesome—or maybe, for the first time, she had the bandwidth to reflect on her own life and childhood. She would keep me home from school to do banking, play casino, and tell me the darkest stories you’ve ever heard...."   Click here to read the rest. 

If you like this one, it's part of an anthology, WHAT MY MOTHER AND I DON'T TALK ABOUT, which includes essays from some absolutely brilliant writers. Enjoy. 

the fascinating podcast

so the good people at THE FASCINATING PODCAST invited me in to talk creative process. AND we created a 25% off discount code for their listeners. 

(psst -- if you want 25% off the audio series ... the code is: FASCINATING .)

enjoy! 

new weird work

I've got a new weird story up at CONJUNCTIONS --
"THE GASLIGHTER'S LAMENT."

(I wrote it for you.)

Powerful poet whose work I just happened upon... Here are four amazing poems on Harriet Tubman up at OXFORD AMERICAN.

More on the poet herself, Ashley M. Jones received an MFA from Florida International University. She is the author of Magic City Gospel and dark / / thing. She directs the Magic City Poetry Festival, and she teaches at the Alabama School of Fine Arts in Birmingham.

My essay, Modern Love

My essay "Play Role Reversal with my Therapist" which first appeared in the The New York Times Modern Love column has been voiced by Oscar-nominated actress Isabelle Huppert. You can hear her along with an interview from me, here. This is the original art that accompanied the piece -- by Christopher Silas Neal. I love it so much -- we framed it and have since moved eleven times or so ... I wonder where it might be...

CreditChristopher Silas Neal