The hardest part is the week before, the day before, the hours before. I feel wired with nerves and excitement. I feel supercharged. A part of me loves this feeling — unmistakably, terribly alive — and at the same time I have no place to channel this electricity until the fight begins. Because fight week is deload week. No hard sparring, no long grinding conditioning sessions. We focus on staying sharp and fresh and make sure there’s plenty of space for good recovery.

[Hands get wrapped with gauze and lots of tape]

On the day of the fight I will go through many different steps. I’ll weigh-in, I’ll see the ringside doctor for a quick check-up, I’ll eat something, my coach will wrap my hands, I’ll stretch and get warmed up, I’ll get my gloves from an official, I’ll get even more warmed up, and then it is almost time. The last step is the walk from the warm-up area to the ring.

For my first fight that walk was a long florescent lit hallway in a hotel in Atlanta. The walls were beige, the carpet a muted gold. The next was a much shorter walk from the back of an American Legion hall in Watertown, MA to the front. Maybe 20 or 30 steps. The next was a very long walk from the green room of a multilevel music venue in Boston, down a dark hall, down several flights of stairs, and out into the bright churn of the crowd. My last two fights were hosted by a Boston area gym. The gym is next door to a church, and they agreed to let the fighters use a common area to warm up. It was a big space, with white walls and white tables and folding chairs. My coach got me warmed up in the hallway that connected the church and the gym and so when it was time to walk it only took a few steps for us to leave one kind of world for another.

This was a tournament and I fought back-to-back days and on Sunday I could hear the service, the church music, through the walls.

I have walked out on my opponent’s turf, to the sound of people shouting her name. I have walked in the near-dark and in the too-bright light.

The walk is always long, no matter the literal distance. Once you start to walk you know that, without question, the fight is really happening. Time slows down and I just want to be through, to the other side. I want to run into the fire and confront whatever awaits. Often the anticipation is far more intense than the thing itself. I feel this sometimes with writing too, that the fear of starting or starting over or committing to a major revision is more ferocious than the actual work of it. Once I’m back in the world of the book, messing around with language, I’m like oh yeah, I know how to live here.

[an official checking my wraps before handing over my gloves. In the amateurs, the gloves are provided, either red or blue depending on your corner]

I was recently talking with a teammate who has his first fight coming up. We were going over some practicalities and logistics and then all of a sudden I was talking about that walk. How it is like no other feeling on this earth. How you move through a wall of nerve and noise and if you can just keep on walking until you make it to the ring—it is no small thing, to do only that. The walk is the fight before the fight. It’s your last chance to get right with yourself. If you let the doubt get louder with each step, if you start to pull away, to hesitate, that’ll undo you faster than any opponent. The walk is what I think of now whenever I come upon the iconic Rilke line “let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.” The walk is the choice to open myself to that everythingness.

This week is fight week. Next week is fight week. I have a wave of walks on the horizon. New venues, new opponents, so many unknown dimensions. Already I feel the beauty and the terror. Already I feel the call and the challenge to “go to the limits of [my] longing” (Rilke, again). See you on the other side.

The Final Bell—

• Paul’s new novel, Etna, has been out for a few weeks & is already having such a beautiful life. You can read more about the book (and our beloved dog Oscar!) in the NYT.

• I’m really excited to be teaching in American Short Fiction’s MFA for All, a program I’ve admired from afar for a while now. You can register for an entire semester or for a single class (the classes from Lidia Yuknavitch and Mat Johnson look so good). I’m teaching a class on endings called “Stick the Landing.”

[Art Omi in Ghent, NY]

Take this excerpt from Jeff VanderMeer’s novel Annihilation:

“The tower, which was not supposed to be there, plunges into the earth in a place just before the black pine forest begins to give way to swamp and then the reeds and wind-gnarled trees of the marsh flats. Beyond the marsh flats and the natural canals lies the ocean and, a little farther down the coast, a derelict lighthouse. All of this part of the country had been abandoned for decades, for reasons that are not easy to relate. Our expedition was the first to enter Area X for more than two years, and much of our predecessors’ equipment had rusted, their tents and sheds little more than husks. Looking out over that untroubled landscape, I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat…

Far worse, though, was a low, powerful moaning at dusk. The wind off the sea and the odd interior stillness dulled our ability to gauge direction, so that the sound seemed to infiltrate the black water that soaked the cypress trees. This water was so dark we could see our faces in it, and it never stirred, set like glass, reflecting the beards of gray moss that smothered the cypress trees. If you looked out through these areas, toward the ocean, all you saw was the black water, the gray of the cypress trunks, and the constant, motionless rain of moss flowing down. All you heard was the low moaning. The effect of this cannot be understood without being there. The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you.”

The physical reality of Area X is vividly described: the tower, the black pine forest, the marsh flats. It is a dense landscape, layered with different kinds of ecosystems (presence). There is also a vastness and a mystery we can sense but don’t yet fully grasp (essence). What direction is that wind coming from? And what exactly is the threat? We get a sense of the place’s history: abandoned, desolate, the carnage of past, failed expeditions (tiers of reality) still visible to the narrator, who is critical to this description as it also conveys how the landscape has been working on her (“and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you”). This is a person looking back (“I do not believe any of us could yet see the threat…”) vs. a person experiencing the world in real time. She is narrating from a place of knowledge and this description is infused with that terrible and revelatory knowing. In Wonderbook VanderMeer writes that: “Landscape not invested with emotion or POV is lifeless.” Here we don’t yet know the shape of the narrator’s knowing but we can feel the heavy dread-soaked shadow of it.

There is a particular trick to describing a world we know intimately. I actually find this to be much harder than describing a place I know only loosely or a place that is built almost entirely in my imagination. Because then that collaboration between the tangible world and the consciousness taking in the world, selecting and interpreting detail, comes more naturally; they are dreamed into being alongside one another.

When I started my next novel, Ring of Night, I was struck by how difficult it was to describe the boxing gym that becomes a central place in the story. Sometimes, when I’m describing a world I know really well, a world I am still very much in, it feels a bit like trying to read the label from inside the jar. I have notebooks filled with details from my own gym, from fights, from other gyms I’ve traveled to for sparring. The fighter who stuffed white twists of toilet paper into his nostrils, to staunch a bloody nose, and walked around for the rest of the night with the paper sticking out like little tusks. The time I got a kid’s blood in my eye. The fighter who got his mouthguard knocked out during sparring and, instead of letting his coach pick it up and clean it and put it back in, dropped to his knees and leaned forward like he meant to kiss the canvas and then snatched up the mouthguard with his teeth. The young fighter who is coached by her father; he is deaf and he signs to her from the corner. Somehow she has learned to keep one eye on her opponent and one eye on him at all times.

[the seconds before a decision]

But none of these details are attached to the perspective of one of the novel’s central character, a fighter named Tina. How does she gaze upon the world, at this moment in time? How does it feel on her skin? What does she notice? The first time we encounter Tina in her gym it’s early morning, empty, dead quiet (whereas when I’m at the gym it’s late afternoon and packed, a riot of sound). I can remember finally writing this passage and thinking okay, yes, this is what Tina would see: “The mouth of the gym was a wall of light, blotting out her view of the street. She focused on the fine details inside: the slender columns of dust suspended in the air, the deathly stillness of the heavy bags, the white bucket of hand wraps, all rolled into neat little balls, the coveted locker.”

It was interesting and challenging to describe Florida from the POV of someone who was raised there (Tina) and another central character (Fay) who is arriving in Florida for the first time, to search for a missing person. What would Fay notice that Tina would gloss over? What is ordinary to Tina that is strange to Fay? The flatness, I decided. The weather.

[New Smyrna Beach]

I recently read and admired Alfred Jung Lee’s essay “On Description,” where he talks about a lot of things, including attending spousal loss meetings:

“I remember one time when I felt I understood something about one of the other dead spouses. Instead of her spouse, a woman described an electric razor. It had belonged to her husband, and he had used it on many mornings. She used to hate the noise, but now that he was dead, she missed the sound of the stupid thing when she woke up. Somehow, he came alive to me then, though this detail was routine and did not distinguish him. She held the razor in her hand and flipped it on for us.”

Sometimes the most striking and expressive descriptions come at the task a little sideways. Sometimes when we approach the object of description too directly, listing out straightforward detail after detail, it can be a bit like staring straight into the sun; perspective gets blotted out. The description Jung recounts doesn’t give us any factual information about the husband (height, age, eye color). It doesn’t tell us about his interests or his work. We just know he was someone who liked to use an electric razor most mornings. The description is powerful because it is such a specific evocation of the wife’s grief. Of the trivial little things that bug us about the people we’re close to and that we miss wildly when they’re no longer here. So wildly that you might bring an electric razor to a spousal loss meeting and actually turn it on. Grief can be mysterious in that way, surprising. Why, of all things, does she miss the razor so much? You miss what you miss; there is no arguing with the stricken heart. I felt the life force of her grief when I read that passage. I felt the specificity of her perspective. I felt the multiple operational realities (the death of her husband; her memory of their old life together; the world of objects and the histories they hold; the meetings themselves). It made me think of all the mundane, sometimes annoying things I miss about my dad now, like how he always put me on speaker phone when I called, for no good reason, which sometimes made it harder to hear him. Or the state of his cast iron pans. Because I would love to be annoyed by my dad again. Because that would mean that the clock has been run back and that absence has been restored and ordinary life is ordinary life again. It’s the little things, in the end.

The Final Bell—

~ I’m teaching a class on novel revision next weekend. If you vowed to finish your novel this year & you’re feeling a little at sea I am here to help.

~ I’m finally getting to Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume and it is so delicious and propulsive. I don’t know that I’ll read all the books but verry into this first installment.

~ Paul’s new novel Etna comes out on August 4th! Hudson Valley people: there’s a launch event at Oblong Books on the 4th at 6:30, with the magnificent Jo Ann Beard. Come say hi!

The heat was so intense it felt exorcising. I felt stripped down, wrung out. I felt present in my body. The kind of heat makes it hard for the mind to wander; the needs of the body are too immediate. After training I craved sugar. Sometimes I’d swing by the Dairy Queen on the way home, bite right into the cold sweetness of soft serve swirled up in a cake cone. The ice cream would start melting right away, drip down onto my bare legs. At night I slept the deepest, more dreamless sleep.

Now I train at a gym in the Berkshires. The summers are nothing like Florida summers, but still we have our moments. A few weeks ago we had a hard night of rain, so the roller doors were all closed tight. We worked inside a dense, wet cloud of humidity. We had hard conditioning to do that night. The workout had a sparring component, which meant we needed to wear our rubber mouth guards, our headgear, for the duration, making it even harder to suck down that thick hot air.

By the end my clothes were soaked through. When I took off my boxing shoes my socks were wet. My shoelaces were wet.

I’m registered for fights in August. Fight camp is on. I love that feeling of being in the middle of something. Endings are weird. It’s that feeling of being in the thick of process and possibility that I miss after I turn in a book, which I did earlier in the month, but now I’m finding that same feeling in another space. In camp we work on the same stuff we always work on, but with a fresh sense of urgency. If there are certain improvements we want to make since my last fight we no longer have an infinite amount of time to do it; we have a deadline. That little bit of pressure is the terror and magic of deadlines, whether for writing or in the ring.

A couple of weeks ago I visited Bennington’s low-residency MFA Program to give a reading and a talk. I was there for twenty-four hours, just long enough to participate in karaoke night and to take a good long walk around that very beautiful campus. I was there during a heat wave, with highs in the 90s. The morning I gave my talk was blazing hot. It felt good to sweat under the bright lights of the stage. Bring the heat, I remember thinking. I’m ready.

During the Q & A someone asked a really good question. I can’t remember the exact wording but the gist was: What if each time you sit down to write you go so hard you burn yourself out? What if you don’t know when to stop?

I thought immediately about how sometimes new fighters turn up and, despite not being conditioned for the work, go incredibly hard for a few days, even on the days we’re not supposed to be going hard, and then vanish. They burn their bodies to the ground. I offered that our writing practice does not exist to hurt us; it should not be a weapon that we wield against ourselves. I suggested scheduling intentional breaks, more breaks than feel necessary even, and to use these breaks to attend to the body: water, food, rest, time outside, whatever. Going at a pace that is utterly unsustainable can be an avoidance tactic, a form of flight. See? I knew I couldn’t possibly stick with this. My coach says that a fighter can train every day but they can’t train at the same intensity every day. We don’t want to burn out after a few weeks. We want to build a space that holds.

Give it everything you’ve got. Seems like straightforward advice, but what is everything? How can we know when we’ve reached the outer edges of our abilities? It takes a tremendous amount of work, energy, faith, and fortitude to get even remotely close to that edge, let alone surpass it. It’s a long haul, ideally — and requires more than frantic, tempestuous bursts of effort. Have you given everything? my coach will ask me in the corner, before the third round. Have you done everything you came here to do? We pace fights so that we are able to give everything, truly everything, when it matters most.

The counterpoint to my love of heat is all the things I do to cool down. In Florida, I would pour ice water over my head in that steaming hot parking lot. I would stand outside in the rain. I would take cold showers. I would freeze towels and drape them around my neck. I’m from Central Florida, where we have beautiful springs. The water is translucent and gemstone bright; you can get an inner tube and float. In New York I love jumping into a cold lake. My dog hates the heat, but loves soft serve, so we’re on a little quest this summer to find the best pup cup in the area.** When I got home after that recent steamy training session I took him to a soft serve place down the road. Two kids rode their bikes around a gravel parking lot, in the brightness of the early evening sun. I’d changed into dry clothes but my skin was still warm and damp. I felt that familiar hunger for water, sugar, salt. I got a twist with sprinkles. My love for heat hinges on knowing how to break it.

The Final Bell—

• I’m teaching 2 craft seminars with the this summer. First one is “Making a Scene” on Sunday, July 12, 2:00-4:00pm ET. The second is “Building a Roadmap: How to Revise a Novel” on Sunday August 2, 2-5PM EST. Both are designed to expand possibility and to help writers bring new ideas + energy to their work. Come hang!

• I’m reading Earth 7 by the great Deb Olin Unferth, and I love the way the novel moves through time, the pace at which the world is revealed to us. I’m also reading The Best American Short Stories 2024, edited by Lauren Groff. I’d already read some of the stories—Marie-Helene Bertino, Lori Ostlund, and Paul (!) all have amazing stories in here—but I decided to read the whole anthology in order and there are so many bangers. Not all the way through yet, but adored especially Madeline Ffitch’s “Seeing Through Maps” and Shastri Akella’s “The Magic Bangle” and Jamel Brinkley’s “Blessed Deliverance.”

**If anyone is curious about the leaderboard for the “best soft serve / pup cup” (Hudson Valley / Catskills) so far the contenders are: 1. Evelyn’s Ice Cream Parlor in Livingston Manor 2. Fortune’s in Tivoli 3. Jolly Cow in Lake Katrine.

I’m in the editing homestretch with my new book, and this stage is all about the details (I wrote about the first stage, the macro edit I got back in March, here). I got line edits back from my editor last week, which means a document full of track changes looking at everything from commas to small clarity questions to character details. Notes that highlight where the language could be a sharper. Notes that put everything under the microscope: word choices, transitions. The placement of a single paragraph. Should it go here or there?

All of a sudden it’s summer in the Hudson Valley. We’re coming to the other side of a little heat wave. Everything is green-green-green. The sunsets are neon. I’ve been at my desk early, windows open, going through one edit at a time: accepting, rejecting, reimagining in a different direction. Then once I do 50 or so pages I print them out and read them aloud, input those edits and keep moving forward. I’m so close to turning the novel in but also this is the time to go slow.

I once heard a boxing coach say that “small things are all things.” If a fighter doesn’t understand distance then it’s going to be hard for them to land any punches. If their defense isn’t tight, if the reach out to block their opponent’s punches, then they’re leaving themselves open. A faultline in the details can create bigger problems.

This is why the slowness is so important in the editing homestretch. Sometimes a line edit is just a line edit, and sometimes the edit evokes a bigger question. A handful of my editor’s track change notes, for example, made me realize that there was something about a character’s voice that I had not quite fully untangled. In Garth Greenwell’s excellent “How to Become a Better Stylist,” he writes: “A highly functioning style, I like to say, gives the impression of an entire life, and therefore an entire world, condensed to a voice…In all great writing, I think the prose itself conveys a particular quality of existence, the texture of a psychology, the essence of a world.” Where does the voice have the heft of a world behind it? Where does it convey a “particular quality of existence?” And where is that substance absent? Where does description and observation feel like it could come from anyone and not only from this specific person?

I’ve always preferred concision at the level of the line. I love a maximalist novel (Life & Fate, 2666) but I want to read sentences that pull me in a particular direction. Directionless prose is one of my least favorite things in literature. Ring of Night will be the longest novel I’ve written and the most densely plotted and I knew from the jump that I wanted the pacing to crack. So I’m also searching for areas where the sentences can become more distilled. This is less about cutting and more about making sure the language is energetically intensified.

In the ring the two hallmarks of skilled and experienced fighters are relaxation and efficiency. This is another reason why the details are so important. Fighting is exhausting; you don’t want to waste energy. Slipping a punch so that you miss by a mile is using more energy than needed. Highly skilled fighters move in such a way that every step and shuffle and block and counter contributes to the realization of their game plan, their vision. This is my favorite kind of boxing to watch, where all the technical units pull together and create a movement that feels transcendent in its accuracy.

Line editing is the time to look at all the technical units of storytelling and to see how they are creating (or not creating) the desired mood and feel and emotion and vision. On a practical note, looking at hundreds of pages of sentences can feel overwhelming, so breaking the work up into specific chunks really helps me; looking closely at 50 or so pages at a time is a lot less daunting. After I finish this first cycle of editing / reading aloud I’ll print the whole thing out and read it through again and see how it all feels. And then in a few weeks it’ll be back in the hands of my editor and by then I’ll be fully in camp for my next fight, working on all those details.

The Final Bell:

Some exciting film news: FirstGen, a production company whose credits include The Testament of Ann Lee, is developing a feature adaptation of my second novel, The Third Hotel. Michelle Garza Cervera will direct and Isa Mazzei is writing the screenplay. I’m really excited about this team.

I’m teaching two 1-day seminars this summer: Making a Scene on July 22 (because I think we don’t always talk enough about what scenes actually are and the many different ways we can approach scenic writing) and How to Revise a Novel on August 2nd (because I know what it feels like to be lost in the revision wilderness).

If you’re looking for more essays on style I also love Garielle Lutz’s “The Sentence is a Lonely Place.”

This semester, one of my students participated in her first boxing match. She shared the video with me afterwards. She and her opponent looked pretty evenly matched, save for one significant difference. My student had a beautiful stance: she moved fluidly around the ring; her feet were never too close together or too far apart; she stayed balanced. Her opponent’s footwork, on the other hand, was a mess. She was tough and strong, but her feet were often too far apart, which slowed her down and in turn gave my student more time to react. Sometimes she crossed her feet, which left her off-balance. She got dropped by a cross in the second round simply because her feet were not right.

Watching the bought brought me back to my early days in the sport, the hours spent stepping forward and back, left and right. I struggled to grasp the fundamentals of the fighter’s stance, how my feet were supposed to be at once light and planted, my movements quick without being rushed, precise without being stiff. My coach at the time described the fighter’s stance as a solid place I could always come back to. I didn’t know much about boxing then but I did know that I longed to find something solid.

Small-town amateur boxing is not like anything the boxing you might watch on TV. Our fights are in veterans halls and gyms scattered around upstate New York and New England and in high school gymnasiums. In this world storytellers abound. Sit down next to a wizened coach or a ref and there’s a good chance you’ll hear some of the best stories of your life. I still remember a coach in Albany telling me about the time his gym caught on fire while he was shadowboxing but he was so focused on the task at hand that he didn’t notice until the fire department came. It wasn’t until I got home that I realized everything – my sweatpants, my hand wraps – smelled of smoke. I still remember a ref in Boston telling me about the time a novice boxer, terribly nervous before his first bout, went to the bathroom, climbed out a window, and ran all the way home.

Here is one way to learn about narrative form: listen carefully to the people who are good at telling stories. We all have these people in our lives: the family members who hold forth at meals, the friends who magnetize other people to them at parties, anyone who makes us lean in a little closer.

These people are constantly navigating time, shaping time, making choices about how time will be represented. First, they must consider the timeline: what is the clock? A story that covers two years means something fundamentally different than a story that covers a single day. Whenever we change the time we change the story; in this sense time is as much a philosophical concern as it is a technical one.

Then there’s the question of how the timeline is represented. How much specific time? How much general time or summary? Do they cut around to different points in time? Where do they compress time and where do they stretch time out? Do they know what parts of the timeline to skip over? We notice when stories are guided by a deeper logic and we also sense when that logic is absent. What is more stultifying than a storyteller who is entombed in linear time, unable to separate out what is important to the story from what is not, who includes every detail.

A writer must also be alert to the emotional qualities of time. How is time supposed to feel? Is the character mired in past time? Do they often find themselves lost in the wilds of imagined time? Is time stable, or does it become distorted, with timelines that fracture and multiply? Take the opening paragraph of Edward P. Jones’s story “All Aunt Hagar’s Children”:

“In what was to have been one of my last days in Washington, my mother, my aunt, and murdered Ike’s mother came up to the second-floor office I had been sharing with Samuel Jaffe. This was three weeks after Sam had gone to Israel, and a little more than nine months since I’d left the Korean War. When the big front door downstairs opened and shut, it shook the windows of our building on F Street, and as the three women came in I watched the giant window in our office do a quick, awful shaking, then slowly come to rest. I heard the three coming up the stairs and learned seconds later that it was murdered Ike’s mother who was wearing those heavy black old-lady shoes, which made the loudest sound as the women clumped their way up to me. This was two months since I’d told Sheila Larkin as kindly as I could that she and I were finished.”

Conventional wisdom, which is often not very wise at all, might discourage writers from writing an opening paragraph with so many timelines and time markers: three weeks, nine months, two months. But all these references to past time give the feeling of a character who is drowning in history. The narrator is struggling under the weight of the past, this trio of departures. The layers of past time are usefully contrasted with the women coming up the stairs: a clear, immediate line of action. Note also how “murdered Ike’s mother” compresses character history (we now know Ike has been murdered) and how the first line sets a clock: In what was to have been one of my last days in Washington… Will the narrator end up leaving Washington or not? If he stays what changes his mind? If he leaves how does he spend those last days? This narrator tells us little about how he’s feeling or what he’s thinking and yet the presence of past time imparts a sensation of weariness, of regret, of a person trying to get out from under something.

What is time doing to this person? What has it already done? Which is to say time and perspective cannot be separated out. There is the question of the timeline but also who is moving through this period of time. And why are they representing or experiencing time in this particular way? Time and perspective: these are the two most foundational, essential elements of narrative writing. When I saw my students’s match on video I wished I could show it to the whole workshop, to point at her opponent’s feet and say, look, look right here, this is what I’ve been trying to tell you. Until she fixes her feet all those other strengths are not going to be legible. Because my student’s opponent did a lot of things well; she had sound instincts. She was moving forward, she was trying to counterpunch, but those good efforts were being obscured by this one foundational misalignment. On the page time and perspective = footwork. If these two things are not right—and by “right” I mean right for the story you’re trying to tell—then nothing else will be. Time and perspective are the first two things I look at whenever I feel stuck.

In my last fight, I was better able to hear what my coach was telling me in the corner and to carry those edits into the next round and the next, which felt like a breakthrough. Sometimes your coach will tell you to do something that seems impossible but you have to trust that they are seeing things you cannot. Possibilities, openings. They have to focus on the most essential edits–you only get a minute between rounds, and some of those precious seconds are spent getting the fighter water and helping them to breathe and cool down–and they have to not only tell you what to fix but how to fix it. You’re getting hit coming in. Double jab with your head off the line. Earlier this year, after Teofimo Lopez lost a fight to the expertly elusive Shakur Stevenson, Lopez’s coach–who is also his father–was roundly criticized for his corner work. “Hit him, bro,” the father kept saying as though that was not what his son had been trying and failing to do out there. I’m pretty sure Teofimo Lopez knew he was in a fight! If he could have hit Shakur Stevenson he would have.

There is a real art to corner work, but also some fighters are not coachable. They think they know better. I remember a guy who came to our gym once and then stormed out when the coaches did what they are there to do: correct, instruct, guide.

Some writers take pride in not being coachable, in not ever taking notes, which feels unhinged to me. I love getting edits. A good editorial letter deepens my relationship to the project. It brings me closer to it. It allows me to see the dimensions that I could not see from the center of the storm. “Good” is an important caveat here: I’ve seen editorial letters that are the literary equivalent of “Hit him, bro” or that project an entirely different book onto the one the writer has turned in. I have been lucky to work with two outstanding editors at FSG and my current editor, Jackson Howard, writes editorial letters that leave me feeling like the exact right kind of help has arrived at the exact right moment.

[Midori notebooks are my hands-down favorite]

In the revision class I’m teaching this semester, I promised my students that I would keep them updated on what was happening in my own writing life and so when I told them I’d gotten edits back from Jackson they were curious to know how I felt about the notes. Did I like them? What would happen if I liked some and not others? Did I have to take all the notes, or could I pick and choose? Did I worry about having to “compromise my vision?”

There is an art to taking notes. One extreme is the writer who is totally closed to outside ideas; they are too deep in a trench of their own making. The other extreme is the writer who is highly suggestible and too eager to please. They feel like they can’t say no, or that if they disagree they will make people unhappy. You cannot be afraid to disagree. So, as a starting point, you have to know yourself and your work and what you want. This is one reason why I believe in having as few readers as possible for a work-in-progress until it reaches a certain point. Notes can be really confusing–derailing even–if they come too soon. Let it be yours and yours alone for a while. This thing about “compromising your vision” comes up a lot with students and I find the worry a little puzzling. Like: don’t ever write things that you don’t believe in! Problem solved. But if you don’t know what you do believe in, for a particular project, then it gets harder to make those distinctions. Artful edits–and artful incorporation of edits–should help a book to become more itself.

For me edits fall into 4 buckets: 1. I was hoping deep down that I would not have to think about this but clearly I must; 2. Perfect articulation of the problem + gorgeous solution; 3. Perfect articulation of the problem + I need a different solution; 4. I have a totally different perspective on this.

The “perfect articulate of the problem + gorgeous solution” are the edits that feel like little gifts; I take them no questions asked. This is by far the easiest category to deal with. The edits that compel me to think about some aspect of the book that I had been willfully ignoring usually signal more exploratory work needs to be done. There is something that I haven’t quite faced up to. “Perfect articulation of the problem + I need a different solution” just means I want to approach the question from a different direction.

I think it was bucket 4–the edits where I have a totally different perspective–that my students really wanted to know about. I mean, most editors do not expect their writers to take every single edit so one solution would be to simply ignore the edits that fall into bucket 4. But time and experience has taught me that these edits can usefully spark curiosity, questions, conversation. I have a totally different perspective on this AND that perspective does not seem to be coming across to you. What would it look like for this perspective to be clearer, more fully embodied?

The space for conversation is a good indicator of a generative, supportive editorial relationship. Edits should be a dialogue. It is actually the back-and-forth that deepens my relationship to the imagined world. Getting to talk through my decisions and why I made them and how I might re-approach some of them with a smart, invested reader is so clarifying. And in the end the solutions have to come from within the writer. We are the only ones who could have imagined our world and are therefore the only ones who can reimagine it. The same is true in the ring. My coach can tell me to double jab with my head off the line all day but I am the only one who can move my body in a particular way. In its best form taking notes is when your belief in yourself and your belief in another person and their belief in you all join forces.

Otherwise it’s the ass-end of winter in the northeast. It’s not as cold but also still cold enough and grey and damp. Even beautiful places look kind of ugly. Little green shoots are starting to appear in the front yard but spring still feels far away. This is the hardest stretch of winter for me, but also it feels like a good time to take notes, to do that alchemical work and emerge with a transformed thing.

[Saunas + cold plunges have been getting me through winter. Highly recommend Big Towel if you’re within striking distance of Germantown, NY or Kingston!]

The Final Bell:

I’m teaching two classes in April via The Work Room at the Shipman Agency: The Speculative Short Story: How to Imagine a World on Sat April 14th & On Intuition: Finding Our True North on Sat April 18th.

If you’re in the Boston area: I’ll be reading at MassArt on March 24th.

Last but hardly least: my favorite writing buddy Oscar was featured in a NYT piece on writers & their dogs! (My husband Paul contributed a gorgeous essay to the recently published anthology The Best Dog in the World).

I’m back to training too, and just the other day an acquaintance remarked on how hard it must be to stick to my training program amidst the school semester and writing books and life. Where do you find the time? I’ve heard many versions of this comment, I think usually meant as a compliment (?), and yes the training takes time and because I choose to box there are other things I’m choosing to not do but also it’s like: I will always find time to save my own life. That probably sounds a little melodramatic, but that really is how I feel about fighting on some days. Writing too.

[Behold my Bolaño t-shirt, aka my favorite teaching attire]

Last week I was talking with a student about the role of intuition in the writing process. How sometimes we feel a strong pull in a certain direction and usually it’s a good idea to follow that energy. “It’s like an internal compass,” I said. A compass that takes us to places that the intellect might not. Then the student asked: but what happens when your internal compass feels broken?

I thought it was a really interesting question, for which I had no immediate answer. I started talking with the hope that I might eventually wander in the direction of usefulness. I thought back to last summer, a period of time when my own radar felt really off in the ring. There seemed to be an ever-widening gap between how my sparring rounds felt and what I saw later, when I watched the videos (it’s common to record your sparring rounds so you can break everything down with your coach).

In the rounds I would feel like I was landing and moving well only to see so many hesitations and missed counters and lulls in the action on tape. Why couldn’t I seem to clock any of this in the ring, while the action was unfolding? Why was I not able to accurately assess what my body was doing and not doing in the moment? And, if I could not accurately assess what my body was doing and not doing in the moment, how was I supposed to trust myself?

I ended up setting a very simple goal: aim to be exhausted by the end of each round. Hold nothing back. Fight to close that gap.

This little experiment yielded two important insights: First, I realized I’d been trying to find openings with my brain and not my actual eyes. I had been going into each round with a list of things to remember, and the over-thinking was slowing me down. Second, I had not yet vanquished my fear of gassing out in a fight (if you have ever experienced such a thing then you know it is one of the very worst feelings). But once I got out of my head and stopped worrying about my conditioning the gap between how the rounds felt and how they looked on video started to close. Intuition and instinct seemed to switch back on. My compass wasn’t broken but it had gotten temporarily obscured.

Intuition is a slippery thing to write about (for starters it means different things to different people) but it’s worth thinking about the importance of developing a sharp and sturdy internal artistic compass. Otherwise it can be hard to determine what a project needs, or what it is we’re even setting out to do. I decided to try and concretize how I experience artistic intuition and how I differentiate it from other feelings. Here’s what I came up with:

Intuition has a direction attached to it. I don’t think of intuition as some omnipotent force that is always correct. I think of it more as an energetic current. Here’s an example: I’ve been slowly working on a few stories as I await novel edits. One takes place at a party and at first I thought the perspective would be a collective “we.” Then all of a sudden I wrote a sentence in the first person. The voice was weird and a little secretive and aggressive. I mean, this character turned up at a Halloween part dressed as Aileen Wuornos. Who is this person and where did she come from? I knew right away that I wanted to stay with this first person voice. To keep following that energy. To move in a specific direction.

Free-floating anxiety, meanwhile, tends to be directionless. Will I ever finish this story? Is this the right point-of-view? What if it isn’t? Is this the right story for me to be working on right now? What if I never finish anything ever again? These kinds of thoughts stun and stagnate; intuition invites forward movement.

Intuition is felt in the body. My first novel was a lesson in the perils of ignoring intuition. There was this one section that I worked hard on for years, 150 or so pages that I revised in a million different directions when I should have CUT THOSE PAGES AND MOVED ON. Each time I read this particular section I felt queasy with dread. But I’d sunk so much time into these pages that I kept talking myself into various attempts to “fix” them even as my body told a different story. My internal compass knew that while I could make these pages better I could never make them right. And when I did eventually delete that section and start fresh I felt an immediate lightness. A big physical wash of relief.

Intuition gets stress-tested. Let’s go back to that new story, the one that’s set at a party. The presence of the first person was an intuitive choice, but that doesn’t mean I won’t question the choice later in the process if it feels right to do so. Sometimes those initial intuitive leaps are bridges and not destinations. Or they are drawing us towards a destination that takes time to fully comprehend.

Also! It’s natural to get lost sometimes. I have never experienced a meaningful breakthrough that did not involve some period of bewilderment. We wouldn’t need compasses at all if navigation was not difficult. My own compass has definitely gotten thrown off, maybe because I’ve been actively ignoring it or because I’ve gotten wildly conflicting advice on a project or because I’m in the midst of some weird transition and what once made sense no longer does. Here’s what helps me recover my bearings:

Go back to the absolute bare-bones basics. Set aside all your macro ideas and plans. What do you want the work to feel like? As in: how do you want the world to feel for readers moving through it? Or how do you want the world to feel as you move through it? Why did you start this thing in the first place? What is your absolute favorite thing about writing?

If those questions feel too daunting: go back to some of your favorite books. When I say “favorite” I mean the books that make you feel glad to be alive on planet earth. The books that fuck you up and light you up and move you deeply and freak you out and make you laugh so hard it hurts. The books that opened new doors in your imagination. Spend some time thinking about what exactly it is about these stories that make you glad to feel alive on planet earth. And then build from there.

The Final Bell:

*Upcoming events, if you happen to be in the Boston area or Western MA: Williams College, March 12 & MassArt, March 23rd, 6PM.

*I don’t do much outside teaching these days, but I’m going to be offering a few one-day sessions through The Work Room at the Shipman Agency this spring. One will be on world-building in the speculative short story. I’m also working on dreaming up a class that considers the role of artistic intuition: how do we know when our intuition is sharp? And what can we do when our inner compass gets scrambled? If you’re interested, keep an eye out for details later in the month!

In New York I had a cough for six weeks and it stopped within twenty-four hours of my arrival in Florida. The body knows when it’s in its right climate.

Normally I’d be on the grind at my old boxing gym, but I’m currently rehabbing an ankle injury so I’m following a rehab program and cross-training however I can: KB strength, sprints on the rogue bike and ski erg, and something called “hot mat pilates,” which I am finding to be surprisingly difficult. Fingers crossed I’ll be able to get some boxing work in before the end of my stay, but either way I’ll check in on my old coach and teammates. That’s always another kind of going home.

Last year I came to Florida with a draft of my current novel project, Ring of Night, packed in my suitcase (yes, I read drafts in hard copy). I was returning to the book after two years away and I knew I had worrrrrk to do. Last week I sent the book to my editor. I want to share a little about what happened over the last year.

A little background to start: I sold two novels to FSG at the end of 2022. State of Paradise was published first, in 2024, and so I set my draft of Ring of Night aside to edit and publish SOP. But I thought a lot about Ring in the intervening years. I collected notes, questions, loose plans. But I did not actually revisit the draft until the morning of January 2nd, 2025. I was tucked into bed in my mom’s guest room, drinking lukewarm coffee. My plan was to read the draft straight through without making a single line edit or taking a single note.

This is not normally how I read drafts. Usually I’m scribbling all over the pages and filling notebooks with ideas. But it’s not my usual practice to put books away for years either, and I wanted to take advantage of whatever kind of perspective I might have acquired. Zadie Smith has talked about how the writer needs to somehow step into the perspective of a “smart stranger who picks it off a bookshelf and begins to read. You need to get the head of that smart stranger somehow. You need to forget you ever wrote that book.” So my plan was to read the draft as though I had just found it on a park bench.

And would I line edit that random book I found at the park? No, I would not.

I almost wish putting Ring away for several years hadn’t been such a game changer, because it’s kind of hard to imagine doing this for every future project, but damn: I felt like I could really and truly see the thing. My perspective felt panoramic, multi-directional. I could go granular and I could zoom out. As I read I was flooded with ideas. I softened my “no notes” policy a little and let myself record a voice memo at the end of each day. After two weeks I had finished reading the draft.

This is the point where I feel a lot of writers become overwhelmed. I have a headful of ideas and a shit ton of voice memos: where do I even begin? And this is where I think it can be really helpful to start with small, tactile steps. For me that meant I started by transcribing the voice memos. I listened to them and I typed them up. Simple. A task with a clear purpose and end point. Then I organized the notes by section (this iteration of the novel was in three parts). I also made myself a little syllabus of novels I thought would be good for me to read right around now.

In my experience, this kind of organizational work will generate a task list. A loose roadmap. I then follow that task list based on where I feel the most clarity and momentum. I started with the third section, because it was the part of the draft I wanted to transform the most substantially and I had a clear vision of how to do that work. I wanted to make some pretty significant architectural changes to the first part (adding perspectives, cutting perspectives, adding timelines), but I felt less clear on where and how to begin. So I tackled the end first. While I was working on that last section–and making my way through my self-designed syllabus–I started to get ideas for the first part, so I went there next.

A question I like to ask myself is what do I want to feel different by the time I print out another draft. I want the pacing to feel much tighter, everything blade-sharp. I want X event to feel more effortless. Like fate locking into place. And then I spend some time thinking about what would need to change in order to achieve that feeling. That’s another way to build your roadmap.

All of January and February was devoted to this kind of organizational work, dreaming forward into the next draft, plotting and planning, making my way through my reading list. In March I started the work-work. I did a big revision and then read it over and then, following roughly the same process, did another big revision. This took me into late May.

I did a mid-level round of revisions and then sent the novel to my agent at the end of June. She is such a sharp reader and so whenever she tells me I’m close, as she did this time around, I believe her. She sent me excellent notes and I spent the rest of the summer doing another revision, guided by her ideas, which really helped dial the form into sharper focus. And then I put the novel away from September to November. I wanted to see if all the work I’d done would hold up with a little distance.

In the first week in December I printed out another draft and started reading. The work had held up, but also there were some new insights. I realized that while revising the third part I had not fully committed to a choice I’d made (half-measures can cause so many problems in a draft). I had a late-breaking realization about a connection between two characters. I had a late-breaking realization about something a character has been holding back.

Now, you might be wondering if I had, at this point, gotten stuck on some sort of revision hamster hell wheel that I would never be able to extricate myself from. How do you know you’re not just going in circles? How do you know you’re actually going forward? I know because this work in December felt so, so different than the work I was doing earlier in the year. The late-breaking realizations might sound like big things but actually implementing them was a matter of doing some minor rearranging or adding a few paragraphs. In a sense, these elements already existed in the world of the novel–it was just a matter of me recognizing them and then drawing them to the surface. Imagine walking into a house and thinking good bones but it’s a gut job vs. walking into a house and feeling like everything is nearly right but also a little something is missing–and then you hang a painting on the wall and it pulls the whole space together. Writing is rarely linear but ideally with each draft you will feel, as time passes, that you’re getting closer to home.

One practical thing I haven’t yet touched on is when and how I got all this work done. I have a full-time academic job and I’m a competitive athlete and I am often wishing for more hours in the day. I write in the morning, first thing. The only things I do beforehand are feed my dog and get coffee. I write at my desk, at home. When I’m at my mom’s I write around the same time but in bed. Routine, practice: this is another area where I feel newer writers sometimes struggle. Maybe you get a task list going but don’t make a plan for when and how the work will get done. My advice is to identify the time of day when the world is least likely to fuck with you and then guard those hours with your life. When I was working on my first novel that period of time was a 50 min commuter train ride from Baltimore to DC. Once I figured that out I did not do anything on the ride down except write. Work with what you have.

I finished that round of late-breaking edits right before Christmas and then I took another little break and then I did some tinkering. And now the novel is in the hands of my editor, who will surely have more ideas and notes, because he is a great editor and that’s what great editors do (I sent Ring to him on January 5th, so one year and three days after that initial read). But I am really reluctant to send a book off until I feel like I know the thing inside-and-out and that is one way to think about the work I did over the last year. I stayed in the world of the novel long enough for it to reveal itself to me, layer by layer. And even at the very end it still had tricks up its sleeve.

The Final Bell:

My piece on the third Katie Taylor vs. Amanda Serrano fight is out in the new issue of The Believer. It’s called “Rule-Breakers.” I got to do on-the-ground coverage from Madison Square Garden, where two of the world’s most decorated female boxers squared off this summer for one final, history-­making bout. And to ask: what does this trilogy mean for the future of women’s boxing?

The Slip centers on a boxing gym that’s based on a real gym in Austin. Lord’s Boxing, I believe? As an aside: my husband and I moved to Austin at the start of 2020 and ended up leaving during the pandemic but I trained for a short while at South Austin Gym and my sense was that Austin had a really good boxing culture. How did you find your way to this particular gym? Where drew you there?

I moved to Austin in 2006 for a very Austin reason: no reason. I was twenty-four and had been floundering around Brooklyn with writerly aspirations but little writing to my name. In college, I’d studied with Larry Goodwyn, who’d lived in Austin decades before and had been an editor at the Texas Observer, and he suggested I give the city a try. I knew almost no one in town, so when I saw an ad for an evening boxing class at R. Lord’s Boxing Gym on North Lamar, I thought I’d give it a shot.

I was immediately enamored. Part of it was the workout itself. There’s nothing like a boxing workout. Three rounds on the heavy bag and I was sure I could kill someone with my bare hands. (I could not). It’s the best workout there is.

But more than that, Lord’s was a melting pot in ways that are true of very few places in the U.S. Every race, religion, profession, age, every everything was at the gym. Richard Lord, the owner, has trained men and women, pros and amateurs. There were recent immigrants and people who’d been in Austin 60 years. For a newcomer, it was the perfect introduction to the city.

I find gyms to be a hopeful place in terms of the very diverse range of people who are able to pull together for a common cause. And I love the idea of Lord’s as a perfect introduction to Austin. I actually had Lord’s on my list of gyms to check out but ended up going to South Austin because it was considerably closer to where I was living—now I’m having belated gym fomo!

It says something about Richard’s inviting spirit, I think, that the gym has been the inspiration for quite a bit of culture, well before I wrote The Slip. W.K. Stratton has an excellent biography, Boxing Shadows, which he wrote with and about one of Lord’s most well-known fighters, Anissa “The Assassin” Zamarron. The renowned documentarian Frederick Wiseman has a wonderful film that was shot at Lord’s during my time there, Boxing Gym. (Any footage of me was, thankfully, edited out).

I worked out at Lord’s very consistently for five or six years. At some point, I moved a little south and the gym moved a little north, and I switched over to the Town Lake YMCA (another gym worthy of a novel, though we’ll leave that for someone else to write).

It’s funny you mention your time in Austin, because I remember when you were preparing to come to UT—this would’ve been after I’d stopped going to Lord’s—a professor asked me if I had any gym recs to pass along to you. I felt a little self-conscious because I have almost zero knowledge about other boxing gyms in Austin.

I’m not really a boxing person, it turns out. By which I mean I don’t like watching boxing; I don’t follow the sport. I think it’s because as I became friends with boxers at the gym—I had a boxer roommate for a year—I realized I did not enjoy watching people I knew and liked getting punched in the head. Or doing the punching! A boxing workout? Exhilarating. Boxing gym culture? Endlessly fascinating. Boxing? Not for me.

Boxing gyms are dense ecosystems, and my coach often talks about how important all the different members of the ecosystem are. The boxers who spar but don’t compete, for example, often help their teammates prepare for fights. What can you tell us about your own training? Where were you situated in the ecosystem of the gym?

This is my experience, too, and part of why I was so attracted to writing about the gym. As is true of Terry Tucker’s Boxing Gym (the fictitious gym in The Slip), Lord’s has a lot of hobbyists like me—people who not only have no amateur or professional aspirations but who don’t spar, either. Part of what appealed to me about the gym was how mixed in the non-boxers were with the boxers. The hobbyist class is not helping anyone prepare for fights, but I do think the hodgepodge nature of who is there at any given time of day is part of what gives the gym its magic.

During my last year or so at the gym, I decided it would be fun to spar. I did the whole song and dance—the body cup, the headgear, I boiled the mouthguard—and while I wouldn’t say I ever spar sparred, I got into the ring a couple of times. The second time, the guy I was “sparring” with—he was much more experienced and just showing me what’s what—said, “Didn’t you tell me you wanted to be a writer?” I told him I did. He was like, “You sort of need your brain for that so I might skip the sparring if I was you.”

The last time I was all dressed to spar, Jesus Chavez, who trained with Richard and was a world champion in multiple weight classes, happened to be in. He gathered maybe eight of us in the ring—all hobbyist types—and told us he was going to spar with each of us for thirty seconds. Real light, just to give everyone some pointers. The first guy goes in, then the second, then the third. Well, they get to the seventh guy and then it’s time for me. And I just… don’t go in. I’m like, I’m good. Afterward he said, “Why didn’t you go in?” and I babbled some excuse but later I thought, Man, isn’t the better question “Why did those other guys go in?” Like, what is motivating you—an accountant or a lawyer or whatever—to get in the ring with a former lightweight champion of the world? But that’s what’s great about boxing gyms.

That is a very reasonable response! When I first started out I can remember feeling both magnetized to and petrified of sparring. I wanted to be in the ring and also I wanted to run away from it. That tension is the thing that moved me forward, I think. Also, there’s this one line from The Slip, a description of boxers training: “They release themselves from themselves.” When I read that I thought: wow, yes, that’s exactly what I needed.

I avoided writing about boxing as long as I could, despite all the narrative possibilities (characters for days!). I used to claim, in fact, that I would never write about boxing (lol). One of the initial draws, for me, was that the gym felt like such a separate world. Did you always know you’d want to write about boxing?

I didn’t. Between 2006, when I started at Lord’s, and 2013, when I began my MFA at the New Writers Project at UT-Austin, I did very little writing. I was in a writing group for much of that time, but much like the gym, it was more a way to meet people than part of a consistent practice. I think, frankly, that this is the only reason I was able to write the book. Had I gone in like an anthropologist—knowing that I wanted to write about it—I wouldn’t have become part of the community. And it was the community aspect—that gym magic—that provided the inspiration for The Slip.

Yes, I totally get that. I hate the idea of going in like an anthropologist. It feels distancing.

When I did sit down to write a novel, I knew I wanted to explore the questions that preoccupy me both as a writer and a citizen. How do we all live together in this country? Can we all live together? Is that a worthy goal? Is it possible to see ourselves, to find ourselves, in each other?

Knowing that’s what I wanted to write about, well, the boxing gym was the only place to start.

Is there anything you picked up from your time at Lord’s that have shaped your writing practice at all? Any habits of mind or habits of being?

There’s a line that I think I ultimately ended up cutting from the novel. Terry Tucker, the gym owner, asks one of his trainees if he knows what doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is. “That’s not insanity,” says Terry, “it’s boxing.” I’m self-deprecating about my own boxing ability because I don’t want to suggest I was anything I wasn’t, but also: I did get better. You stand in front of the speed bag every day trying to find the rhythm and one day you find it. You skip rope and skip rope and your legs get stronger. You run, you get faster. That insane, infuriating repetition is also, I think, how you learn to write. How you write. In this era of shortening attention spans, there is something powerful about committing to a practice, whatever it may be, and dedicating yourself to that thing day after day after day. That’s what I learned from boxing. There’s no shortcut. If you want to do it, you need to do it and do it and do it. And there’s still no guarantee that it will turn out how you want it. But it’s the only way that it might.

I did not keep a log of how many rounds I sparred, but my guess is at least 100. Each round taught me something. Often the lessons were simple: do better, try harder, take more risks, trust your skills, trust your will. I learned that sparring will only help me if I am willing to risk making mistakes. I learned that I do not need to fear getting tired. I learned that each time I take a little breather in a round I’m giving away momentum. That I might as well be handing my opponent points. I learned that I can fight tired, angry, sad, hungry, stressed, distracted. I can fight when the conditions are deeply imperfect because the ring is its own universe, with its own conditions, and I can choose to live in that world.

Here’s a little round-up from my year in the ring & on the page:

Favorite moment in the ring. I was at an open sparring event at another gym in the fall and did a round with a girl who had a strong forward style and everything I’ve been working on just, like, came together. Movement, punching off movement, punching off angles, being evasive while still landing my shots. For 2 minutes I felt invincible, unhurtable, untouchable.

Least favorite moment. gotta be when I dropped a weight on my hand in August and smashed one of my fingers to bits (all good now).

Most important question I learned to ask myself. What if it all worked out? What if I won?

Favorite recovery. Cold plunge + sauna reboots my brain, though I also maintain that there is no better recovery than 10 hours of solid sleep. Cupping dramatically helped tendinitis in my shoulders. I also recently discovered Voltaren cream which is the best otc pain reliever I have ever found.

What I wrote this year. I wrote my first-ever sportswriting piece on the final Amanda Serrano vs. Katie Taylor fight, which is in the new issue of The Believer. I’m proud of how this piece turned out and would love to do more sportswriting. My big project, though, was a sweeping architectural revision of a new novel, Ring of Night. This draft has been in a drawer since the summer. Soon I’ll read it over and see if the work I did earlier in the year holds up. If it does then I’ll send the draft off to my editor. Might do a future post on how I approached doing a big revision of a project I’ve been working on for a minute / how I determine when something is ready to send to my editor.

A paragraph that I like. This is from a story called “Just Another Family” by Lori Ostlund, which I read in January and have been thinking about all year. It’s in Ostlund’s new collection Are You Happy?

Shirley Koerber lived on the lot behind my parents, her sole companions a band of dogs at which she yelled for various infractions. She was a stout woman with legs that bowed severely, as though she were straddling an invisible barrel as she walked, and she possessed a deep hatred of small animals—squirrels, chipmunks, birds—all of which the dogs chased with limited success and at which she shot with far greater. As a child, I’d awakened often to the sound of her gun, rising to watch from my window as the dogs circled the felled animal, howling, while Shirley rode her imaginary barrel toward them. Once when I was hanging laundry on the backyard line, a bullet whizzed past my head and I ran inside, leaving the basket of wet clothes behind. When my mother came home and asked about the abandoned clothes, I explained that Shirley had been shooting again, and my mother nodded as if I’d said it had started to rain, my options akin to opening an umbrella or going inside, for there was no option that involved making the rain stop.

A book I read this year that has haunted me like a ghost. A Truce That is Not Peace by Miriam Toews. I exited this book dazzled and wrecked. One of the best accounts of why a writer writes (and impossible question and Toews somehow turns that impossibility into a subject)—and the value of choosing expression over silence.

But writing is life, listen to me, you clown, you don’t quit, you don’t grimace and wave away your audience, tell them the show is over. Writing is life and silence is the final step before the metal rail, the sharp smell of creosote, the wind.

What I am taking into the new year: I have been thinking a lot about what happens between the bouts. After a fight, people tell me that I must be so excited to rest, but when I do take a break I tend to feel more tired and not less. Partly because I am really on my “living well” game when I’m training like a beast, really on my meditation and my sleep and my vitamins and my mobility. I start slacking on all those practices post-fight, and I need to get better at tending to my well-being even when I’m not on the brink of stepping into the ring.

There is a definitely a void, after a fight.

I guess I am at home in the trenches. At work on something I find challenging but also meaningful. Under at least a little pressure.

For years my chosen trench has been writing books. I am rarely without a big creative project. But recently it dawned on me that after I finish-finish Ring of Night I have no idea what my next project will be. Like zero. I would not expect to start working on a new book until I finish edits on Ring, but at this point I usually have some idea of what the next thing is going to be—a hunch, a sliver of knowing, a shape I can just barely start to see.

The fight void will be filled soon enough, and in the year ahead I’d like to embrace my trench-person-nature and see how far that can carry me. No big breaks. Just keep going from one battle to the next. Just keep daring to ask myself: What if you can do so much more than you sometimes think you can? What if you won? But I don’t want to force myself to start a new book because I find the not-knowing unsettling. I want the project that will smash the limits I didn’t even know I’d been working within, that will make me think differently about the world in some way, that will surprise and delight and terrify me, that will be radically and unmistakably itself. That is my standard, and all I can really do is cultivate the conditions for the next thing to emerge.

The waiting is hard. I have to keep reminding the panic-prone quadrant of my brain that likes to whisper what if there are no more ideas to zip it. In some ways the path of lesser-resistance would be to just start something new for the sake of it. Because that’s what I’m used to doing.

At my old gym in Florida my coach would say “easy work” before moving us through a training session that felt like being slowly—and then swiftly—murdered. At first I was very confused: “all easy work today” seemed to portend hell on earth. But eventually I got it: in time the work becomes habit. You learn to talk to yourself differently. “Easy” is not a physical reality, but a mindset. For me the work, even the worst work, becomes easier when I feel certain that I am exactly where I am supposed to be, doing exactly what I’m meant to be doing. The work becomes easier when I feel called to it. That’s the kind of work I’m looking to do.

Stef writes for Autostraddle, and is the co-host and co-producer of the podcast Fat Guy, Jacked Guy with Brendan Walsh. The podcast is currently in its third season, “Optimized Idiocy,” examining and critiquing absurd health, wellness, and fitness trends Stef and Brendan love to hate. They’ve also produced a documentary called Margate Misfits on the gym and the gymgoers who have helped shape their lives as strength athletes, Margate Barbell. Below we get into changing your life, competitive weightlifting, misfits, community, and why the deadlift is the King of All Lifts.

I’d love to learn more about your relationship to lifting: how and why did you start? How has your relationship to the sport evolved over time?

I used to think my relationship to lifting wasn’t a conventional one, but I think there are some important connections between my journey and a lot of the lifting journeys of people (mostly men) I know. I didn’t get into lifting for the love of the sport or for the aesthetic benefits. I started lifting because I was desperate — a different kind of desperation than I’ve encountered in other people’s stories, but desperation nonetheless. Before the last few years, my relationship to my body and to physical fitness was obscured by dense layers of trauma from growing up fat that I never fully examined or exhumed. As a young person, I was forced to participate in so many fad diets and weight loss interventions, and I was pushed to take on grueling cardio regimens that weren’t fun and made me physically ill. Everything related to fitness — to the size and shape of my body, really — felt like a punishment I didn’t think I deserved. When I got older, I mainly chose to sever my intellectual relationship to the mundane operations of my body. I did what I did and I let it do whatever it did. Outside of sex, I didn’t think about it much, or at all really, until I was experiencing pain I couldn’t ignore anymore. That’s what led me to lifting.

I felt desperate when I came to boxing too. I had sky-high anxiety and terrible, unbreakable insomnia and I can remember lying in bed at night, sweating through my clothes, heart-racing, and thinking: something has got to change.

That’s exactly where I was — the pain in my knee felt so inescapable. Some days were better than others as far the pain scale goes, but most days were terrible. And my mobility was getting more and more limited because it was simply too agonizing to perform certain tasks like walking long distances, climbing stairs, and walking along the beach — that last one truly hurt me more than just physically.

After about 2 years of chronic pain, I finally sought the help of an orthopedic surgeon who, very gently, explained to me that I have advanced stage osteoarthritis in my knee. Basically, in that knee, my bones are ramming into each other without the protection a buffer zone of cartilage usually provides. This probably came about because of a variety of reasons — genetics, my weight, overuse from athletic endeavors in my youth, etc. — but it doesn’t matter either way because there is no cure for this, only treatment. One of the major suggestions for treatment is movement.

For a lot of people I’d imagine this diagnosis would make them hesitant to lift, to carry weight.

I think that’s probably true. It seems counterintuitive to put stress on the joints that are already hurting so badly. But it made sense to me that strengthening your muscles can make up for the weakness of your joints. That reasoning is why I half-heartedly gravitated toward it when I learned I was going to have to work out regularly again if I wanted to reduce some of the pain I was experiencing. Brendan, one of my closest friends and the co-host of the podcast I help produce, has been involved in strength sports for half of his life, and the enjoyment and sense of accomplishment he got from lifting made me feel like there might be something there for me to discover, even if I hated the idea of exercising and going to the gym. I hired his coach, Vinny, to coach me, and then I started lifting with Vinny at Margate Barbell in August 2022.

What were those early days in the gym like?

I hated every single second of it when I first began. On days when I don’t feel confident about my progress, my girlfriend reminds me that I came home from every gym session and cried over it, which is very true and very funny looking back now. But I know it’s because I was moving through so much physically and emotionally, and I really didn’t want to lose more of my “me” time than I already do to work. Around 2 months in, I finally stopped crying. I honestly don’t know where the change came from. I think I was just feeling less pain in my knee for the first time in so long, and I felt like I was winning a little bit every day I was lifting in the gym. On top of that, I was experiencing a new kind of camaraderie I had never been part of before. I was building relationships with people in the gym and going through the ups and downs of succeeding and failing at this with them every day. And those things together were changing my life a little bit at a time, which helped me truly commit myself to the practice of lifting.

I love that idea of “changing my life a little bit at a time.” Sometimes there’s this idea that changing one’s life is a thing that happens in one big motion, like a lightning strike, but in my experience the deepest changes are so slow, so incremental. Like you don’t even realize your life is changing until the transformation is well underway. How did you make the transition to competition?

True powerlifting training and, then, competitive powerlifting didn’t come into my line of sight until a little while later until about 10 months after I began lifting. My coach would joke that he was going to “make” me a powerlifter in the earlier days, and I’d just brush it off and laugh about the concept of me becoming an athlete out of nowhere. It started to become a real consideration after I was finally able to squat to appropriate competition depth for the first time, a year and some change into lifting. I still didn’t feel comfortable enough to squat in competition at that point, but Brendan and I decided we’d compete in one of South Florida’s biggest powerlifting competitions together — him in full power (squat, bench press, and deadlift) and me in push/pull (bench press and deadlift).

Training for that first competition — not even the competition itself — is what made me fall in love with the sport. Getting stronger, feeling stronger, and then getting to test that strength in a variety of ways changes your relationship to your body and what you know and believe you’re capable of. And that’s only one of the benefits of training in strength sports. The others — building new community ties and increasing the longevity of your body — are equally important. Since 2023, I’ve competed in three powerlifting competitions, one strongman competition, and I’ve done a Highland Games, as well. In a little over three years, I’ve moved from being completely ambivalent about my body to being in despair about the pain it produced to being totally unafraid of challenging it.

That’s beautiful, to feel unafraid–of challenge, of testing your strength. One beautiful thing about sports is the way they can teach us that we can trust ourselves to stand up. That we can depend on ourselves.

Boxing is sometimes described as the “loneliest sport,” and I’ve heard you talk a little about how lifting is sometimes seen as the world of the lonely, the weird. I do think certain sports attract people who feel out-of-step with mainstream culture, for whatever reason. What discoveries have you made about the world of lifting? The community?

I think three things are simultaneously true about lifting — people often view it as a solitary and individualistic activity, many people who practice strength sports would classify themselves as “misfits,” but even when you’re lifting alone, you’re never truly alone in the practice of lifting.

Of course, this is just my personal experience, but the majority of people I’ve met through strength sports are people who are somewhat on the fringes of the “mainstream” as it is. For the most part, they are working class people or people who have unusual jobs or people who work in service of others. Many of them are creatives, and they have worldviews that don’t fit neatly into one box or another. There’s a lot of racial and ethnic diversity among the people who lift, there’s a lot of other queer people in lifting, and there’s simply a lot of people who just don’t see themselves as fitting in neatly to many other places.

There’s a very common narrative among the people I’ve met that I’ve heard more times than I can count: many of them practiced other sports before getting into strength sports but didn’t truly find a home in athletics until they started lifting. This has always stuck out to me because it feels so similar to my own experience. As a kid, I played basketball, softball, and soccer and I participated in a variety of workout programs, but I never saw myself as an athlete and I never wanted to be one. Those spaces didn’t feel built for me, and they certainly didn’t feel as if they had someone like me in mind.

Because so many people are coming from these common experiences, the strength sports environment often feels imbued with a kind “Everyone who does this is our family” mentality. I call all the people in the gym my “brothers” because they are. We’re all there together pursuing strength and pushing our bodies to the absolute limit. There’s a palpable bond in that, in practicing something that’s both extremely beneficial and also a bit ridiculous. That was the most surprising aspect of becoming involved in strength sports to me — the vastness of the community and the way people care for each other. I’ve walked into strength gyms as a total stranger and have been treated as if I’ve always been there. In the strength gym, we’re all going to cheer you on no matter how long we’ve known you. We’re going to give you a spot. We’re going to introduce ourselves and ask you how your day has been. At strength sports competitions, you can see this on an even broader scale: people cheering for total strangers, helping each other put on their gear, sharing the snacks they brought to sustain them, and comforting each other in the event of a “bad” lift. It’s really wonderful.

Oh yeah I get that family piece. Boxing is like that too. We’re all as different as can be but you team-train and you become invested in other people’s journeys along the way. I recently fought at a tournament my husband wasn’t able to attend and when I showed him the videos of the fight he was like who are these guys screaming LEETTTTTSSSS GOOOO LAURA in the background and I was like that’s my gym fam!

That’s really funny because I’ve had the same experience showing gym recordings to my girlfriend! Before we moved from Florida to NYC, she even began recognizing people’s voices just from the recordings. I credit that kind of support for getting me to where I am with it now. It feels good to have your brothers and siblings cheer you on, and it feels like a huge privilege to be able to walk into almost any gym and be absorbed into the fold with everyone else there.

On the other hand, I can see why people think it’s so lonely and individualistic. That’s the vision of lifting that’s been part of mainstream media for so long, and that’s how lifting is for some people. You can walk into any big box gym and disappear into the practice of weightlifting if you want. You can be just another person at the rack without any ties to that community, but I’m not so sure that’s as common as people think. There’s that old Henry Rollins piece, “Iron and the Soul,” that people sometimes mention, where he talks about working out alone because he wants to make sure he’s present to learn the lessons he needs from lifting. And I mean, that’s fair. I just personally don’t know anyone who learns more from lifting by lifting alone.

When you compete, you’re competing against yourself — those previous versions of yourself at different times in your life — so I can also see people viewing the sport as “lonely” for that reason. Interestingly, I think it’s the combination of competing mostly for and against yourself and of being part of an activity that is on the fringes of the competitive sports world that makes these communities even tighter. We’re just a bunch of freaks carrying shit and having fun with it. Might as well form some close and intimate bonds with each other, grab a few beers, and keep pushing each other forward while we’re at it.

Last question! What is your favorite lift, and what is a lift that bedevils you?

Oh man, GREAT question. My friend Brendan, who I mentioned before, and I made a documentary about Margate Barbell called Margate Misfits before we both moved away from South Florida this past summer, and this was one of the questions we asked people that was even hard for us to answer. Whenever people ask me this, I’m immediately moved to say bench press but I know it’s because bench press came easiest to me in the beginning and still does most of the time now. But I’m always a little embarrassed that I’m choosing favorites based on what I’m doing well. So, if we’re talking favorites for the right reasons, it’s the deadlift. They call the deadlift the “King of All Lifts,” and I think the title is earned. The deadlift tests your entire body all the way down to your grip strength, and, let’s be honest, it’s the coolest looking lift out of the three in powerlifting. Deadlift is the final lift in powerlifting competitions, and it’s always a big show for everyone who attempts it at any weight. I love performing the lift, and I love watching people do so. If I had to pick a wildcard favorite, I’d pick the overhead press because, to me, doing a heavy overhead press is tough as hell and looks tough as hell.

Squat is the lift I love to hate. Maybe it’s a little unfair, but with the way my knees are, my progress just isn’t as linear with squats as it is with other lifts. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve come a long way — from barely being able to hit a bodyweight squat to hitting over 200 pounds on barbell squats — but I know they’re going to be tougher than anything else for the rest of my life. That being said, I have a ton of respect for them! A friend from Margate Barbell once described squats as feeling like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders, and I agree with that. It’s amazing to watch yourself (and others!) overcome that challenge.

I’ve never fought back-to-back days before and that alone was an experience. On Saturday I was super nervous, as I normally am, though this time I followed a different routine post weigh-ins. Our team had two other fighters up on Saturday and a good crew from the gym came out to show support. Some of my regular sparring partners were fighting at this tournament too. So I walked around and talked to people. I listened to music. I did a breathing meditation. I did not hype myself up. I was the last bout on the card and so I tried to stay relaxed. My boxing community is a lot bigger and deeper than it was a year ago, and it was really joyful to see fighters who work so hard step into that ring and perform well.

I did not know anything about my Saturday opponent beyond her weight. I had no idea if she was a lefty or a righty, her style, how she would come out when the first bell rang. I did know that I was going into this tournament with some very clear goals. I did not want to repeat the mistakes I made in my last fight in July. My coaches do not accept anything less than my best effort which is a gift if you really want to get better at something. And we all knew I could have performed better over the summer. In that fight I struggled to find my range, my openings. I got overly fixated on looking for certain counters. I got tangled up in my own thoughts. I forgot I was in a fight. This time I was determined to push the pace, score points, start punching when the bell sounded and to not stop until the round ended.

[action shot: I’m in the black uniform]

There is a vulnerability to being in the ring, and I’m not even talking about the punching part. For a moment, you are hyper-visible. You are seen. Are you the person you say you are? The person you want to be? When I give a reading I disappear behind the work, and I have tried to disappear myself in so many different ways through the years, but in the ring there is no place to hide. Over the last couple of months I have come to understand that I am still in the process of shedding that desire to hide, that impulse to protect myself from hurt or disappointment by not laying it all out there. I am still in the process of learning to trust myself for real. To allow myself to think: What if it all worked out? What if I won?

On Saturday I went hard in the first round. In the corner my heart rate was jacked. I’m pretty sure I’ve never thrown that many punches in a round before. But this is where the conditioning comes in: both fighters can go back to the corner winded but the conditioned fighter will recover a lot faster. And knowing that I’d won one round made it easier to leap up from the stool and keep going. My opponent made it a tough fight, so much respect to her. In the end I got a unanimous decision.

[me + one of my regular sparring partners, Helen, who also won her fight]

My post-fight meal usually involves eating a whole ass pizza but you have to weigh in each day you fight, so I went straight back to where I was staying, drank water, ate rice and ground turkey for dinner, talked to Paul, texted updates to my family, and went to bed. Normally I sleep like a champ but I was still buzzing with adrenaline and did not get that much rest. I was honestly tired when I got up in the morning. “I think I’m too tired to be nervous,” I joked with a friend when we were waiting in line to give our books to the officials and get weighed in. But I really was a lot less nervous. The rhythms all felt familiar: check-in with the officials, weigh-in, see the doc. Eat, hydrate, talk to my friends, text updates to Paul, listen to music, breathe, start getting warmed up.

On Sunday I knew exactly what I would be facing in the ring. I knew it was going to be a hard fight and I knew this because I was fighting the opponent I lost to in July. Fighting again on Sunday was not part of the original plan: her opponent pulled out on short notice and her team asked if I’d be willing to step up. I was willing, I wanted the two fights, I wanted a chance to prove to myself that I could improve on my July performance, even though I knew it would not be easy. She is the toughest person I’ve faced in the ring so far: hard hitter, fast, experienced, composed. We battled it out over three rounds and in the end I got the decision. It was a 3-2, so very close. I’m pretty sure I lost the first round this time, but my coach gave me a firm talking to in the corner and I dug in and I got it done. My coach is always telling us to think of our opponent as a dance partner, to imagine moving together in a kind of harmony: none of this is possible without that other person. Her skill in the ring has pushed me and made me better. We are both strong competitors but on the other side I feel so much gratitude, admiration, respect. We are already talking about fighting each other a third time, making it a trilogy.

Sometimes it’s hard to see the progress week-in-and-week-out. During this camp some days I felt amazing in sparring and some days the rounds felt very long. There were days when I’d look at videos and wonder if I had really improved at all. This was a good reminder that progress can feel invisible at times, like a river that’s flowing underground; you don’t even realize the body of water is gathering momentum until it breaks through the surface (I think this can be true for writing also).

A myth about leveling up is once you reach that new level you just get to stay there. This weekend felt like a mental breakthrough for me, but I’m also aware that I will have to work to maintain this progress. In the immediate I’m taking a week off of hard training: after two fights in forty-eight hours I know my body needs some rest. I’m using this week to go over video and make notes in my training journal about what I need to improve on. Light runs, stretching, eating that pizza. Spending time with my beloveds, who see a lot less of me when I’m training for a fight.

The biggest win for me this weekend was learning that I could really depend on myself. That the ring is where I belong and I have what I need to perform well. It is a matter of trusting myself. In my training journal I used to write that the act of getting in the ring is always a win and to some degree I still believe that, but also: I’m in a different place now. Getting in the ring and then fighting to the best of my ability is always a win. I can roll with–or even celebrate–losing a really good fight to strong opponent. The thing I never want to do again is lose to myself.

I knew I wanted to work on a few things. There are many kinds of jabs a fighter can throw. Jab to the head. Jab to the body. Double jab. Triple jab. Up jab. Stepping in with the jab. Jab as you’re moving backwards. Jabs designed to measure. Jabs designed to distract. Jabs designed to set up another punch. Jabs thrown with real power. So this was an opportunity to work on varying tempo and technique. I also found myself throwing the left hook a lot more. This was my main power shot. Left hooks to the head and to the body.

At the end of September, I was able to go back to punching with my right hand. In sparring I noticed improvement to my jab and also my left hook was coming out a little sharper. I was ripping multiple hooks with more speed than I had in the past. Over the weekend, I traveled to another gym for sparring and managed to actually roll some punches and come up with lead hooks.

[Coach got literary for a recent sparring night]

This fall I’m teaching a speculative fiction workshop and, for the first couple of weeks, students write a short-short story (1.5K words) per week, in response to different prompts. For some writers the word count feels like running into a wall. But I believe this constraint is a valuable one. It puts pressure on our choices. It makes us think twice about where we begin and how we represent time on the page and how we use scene. What matters most to the story? What must be on the page? Students get to write long later in the semester, but for the moment the question is: how can constraint encourage innovation? So many of their stories end up making interesting moves that would not have happened, I suspect, if the writers had all the space in the world.

In this interview Helen Phillips talks about constraints: “I’m interested in the idea of the way constraints can breed creativity. In my first book, And Yet They Were Happy, I gave myself the constraint that each story had to be 340 words. It can be anything else that it wants to be, but it needs to be 340 words. And I found that very liberating, even though it’s a ridiculous constraint, because I gave myself total liberty within it.”

And then Phillips widens that picture: “The circumstances of everyone’s life are a constraint. How much time you have, how much money you have, how much energy you have. And you have to work with that.”

Yes. Exactly. One benefit to working with more intense constraints is that it teaches us how to build a solar system in a cube. How to adapt our thinking. How to innovate under pressure. Because even when the writers in the speculative fiction workshop can write as much as they like they will still probably have to navigate other constraints. Some might be creative (the demands of a particular story); others might be more material (time, deadlines, energy, headspace). The idea of being “unconstrained” is–for most of us at least–a myth.

When I was working on my first novel, Find Me, I was living in Baltimore and adjunct teaching at multiple schools. I had very little free time. One of my adjunct gigs was in DC, so I’d take the MARC train down in the morning and I came to realize that my very best slice of uninterrupted writing time was the hour or so it took to get from one city to the other. I would open my laptop and write as much as I could on the train. Or I would write in a notebook. Weird details I saw in trains cars, or through the windows, seeped into the novel. The morning MARC train became a portal. I would sit down and suddenly be inside the world of a book. A world that otherwise felt largely inaccessible to me due to busyness and tiredness and a mind that felt cluttered with logistics and student work and bills and hangs with friends and waaaay too many hangovers and hustle and worry. Yet on the morning train a clear field opened within my imagination.

The fact of the ring is a constraint. Boxing rings are not that big. The borders are clear. As someone who moves a lot I always thought I’d like a really big ring, but last year I did some sparring at a gym in Boston that had two rings of different sizes. With the same opponent I performed better in the smaller ring, to my surprise. In the bigger ring I had trouble finding my distance, my range, and my timing was off as a result. The constraint of the smaller ring actually helped. My options were usefully narrowed.

Sometimes the constraints choose us, and sometimes we choose the constraints, as Helen Phillips did for And Yet They Were Happy. The constraints we choose can sharpen our focus, like that smaller ring in Boston. I have a lot of constraints on my time at the moment, some of which I have chosen (like training for fights) and some of which I have not. Some days it’s hard to figure out how to jenga everything into my schedule but honestly when I have loads of time I tend to just sort of fill it. And then half the time I’m like: how did I end up here and why am I doing this? The various constraints compel me to hone in on where I really want to be and who I really want to be with. It helps me move within a design that is shaped by what I need to be doing and also by what I really really want to be doing. To know that second part is to know so much.

—

A lil writing news:

I got to talk to a beloved friend and one of my favorite writers, R.O. Kwon, for The Believer. Can I tell you that I have always dreamed of having a Believer illustration? Well, now it has happened! (also: I interviewed R.O. about lifting and climbing and writing for this very newsletter over the summer).

I got to talk to numerous writers that I admire for this group conversation about publishing, publicity, connecting with readers, and MONEY for Electric Literature.

Charlee Dyroff is the author of the debut novel Loneliness & Company, a 2024 Indie Next Pick. Her work has appeared in Guernica, Slate, Lapham’s Quarterly, the Southwest Review, and more. One of her essays was selected for The Best American Food Writing of 2019. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, Charlee currently lives in New York City.

Charlee also writes a really cool Substack called Making Stuff Up.

Laura VDB: I’m really excited to learn more about volleyball, a sport I know little about. Can you tell us about your own relationship to volleyball? What drew you to the sport initially? What made you stay?

Charlee Dyroff: Yes! Volleyball is a great sport. I discovered it by accident. In elementary school, some of my friends were trying out for the school team and invited me to go with them. I ended up making the 6th grade team as a 5th grader, which felt like a big deal at the time.

It’s funny though because I grew up in a family of athletes—my dad was a semi-professional hockey player, my mom skied at University of Colorado, my grandfather played football at Ohio State—and they joke I picked a sport no one knew too much about so it could be my own.

What made me stay? That’s a good question because beginner volleyball isn’t very fun. As kids, you can hardly get the ball over the net. But I think I liked the team camaraderie of it all. Volleyball is a sport that has the most high-fives I’ve ever seen—pretty much between every play. I think I liked the spirit of it all.

LVDB: I’m so intrigued by team sports! I’d love to know more about what it feels like to play on a team. Are you more focused on your own position, or are you aiming to move in harmony with your teammates?

CD: This is such a good question. I think it depends on the player, but I loved when the team moved in harmony. In college, I was a libero—which is kind of like a defensive coordinator—and my job was to pass and dig well enough to set my teammates up. There wasn’t a lot of individual ‘glory’ in it, but there’s a deep satisfaction of doing your job well so others can do theirs.

It’s hard to explain the magic of being on a team. I just loved it. (And still love it, which is why I’ve been playing social soccer for the past decade. Though I just fractured my knee doing it…)

There’s just something special about being with a group of people all going after the same goal; about being a part of something bigger than yourself.

Some of my fondest memories were in the locker room after games or bus rides with my teammates. I know it sounds cheesy, but there’s no bond like it. You go through ups and downs together. You meet and bond with women you might not otherwise connect with. You grow close in a way that can’t really be replicated. It’s what I miss most and something that I seek out in my adult life.

(Sidenote! I have a friend who boxes and even though it’s just her in the ring, she’s really grown close with other boxers at the gym/the people she trains with. I wonder if there’s a different type of camaraderie in an ‘individual’ sport.)

LVDB: At my gym all the competition fighters train as a team, so there is definitely a strong feeling of support and camaraderie (and for sure the sport has brought people into my life I never would have crossed paths with otherwise). You might go into the ring alone but you know that your team is behind you.

When you were playing volleyball competitively what did a typical week of training look like? What kinds of things did you do in practice sessions?

CD: I love that idea of feeling the team with you, even if you’re in the ring alone.

When I was in high school, I joined a traveling club team that practiced five days a week and competed every weekend for about nine months of the year. It was intense. (Looking back, probably a bit too intense, but I loved it at the time.)

In college, it was about the same. During the season, we practiced everyday and then traveled to play games Friday and Saturday. Plus, film sessions and team meetings. All of your classes had to be scheduled around practice.

Our practice sessions varied depending on the time of year. During the season, it was more tactical, team sessions—we’d run specific plays that we needed to be able to execute in matches against teams that weekend.

In the off-season it was more individual, in-depth skill development. For example, one drill involved passing a ball into a trashcan from different spots on the court for hours on end.

LVDB: I’m wondering if you can share a little about how your relationship to volleyball evolved over time? When / how did you end up leaving the sport?

CD: I ended up leaving the sport after college. I had grand dreams that maybe I’d play in Europe, but my body had gone through so many injuries by then—shoulder surgery, hip surgery, herniated disc in my spine—that I couldn’t keep playing at a high level without pain (and without destroying myself.)

After my last match, I was so sad. I’d given so much of my life to the sport and I really didn’t know who I was without it. Someone once told me that athletes die twice, the first is when they’re done competing and I really felt that at the time.

LVDB: On a different note I’m sorry to hear about your soccer injury! What helps you get through the recovery period when you’re not able to play / train? (asking for a friend, aka myself, as I am currently recovering from an injury).

CD: Aw, thank you! I’m finally back to walking normally again. Going through a recovery period is tough and there are good days and bad days.I try to distract myself with other projects outside of work, like writing or cooking, but there’s nothing quite like the feeling after a good workout or game.

For this injury in particular, I had trouble navigating our walk-up apartment and getting to the subway from Alphabet City, a neighborhood that’s about 10 minutes walk from a few different stations. It really put things in perspective for me and gave me empathy for those with mobility issues or disabilities trying to navigate New York.

When I’m feeling down that I can’t go for a run right now or play soccer this season, I just try to count my blessings. I know I’ll never take walking for granted again!

Being alive can be a dangerous enterprise, is what I’m trying to say.

Add to that list of injuries: in the last week of August, during team strength training, my right hand got crushed between two very heavy weights. It was one of those freak fluke accidents that could have been easily avoided if I had been moving with a little more caution. I felt a lightning-strike of pain. I looked down at my right hand and one of my fingers was in a shape I did not recognize. I thought I could see a bit of bone. I won’t go into all the gory details but there was a lot of blood. I started to feel nauseous and light-headed and before I knew it I was wilting down onto the black floor mats.

My coaches got my hand wrapped up in gauze and tape. Teammates brought over water, ice, Advil. Once my hand was wrapped up tight the wooziness vanished. My body suddenly felt a little safer, a little less exposed. I got up. We were a little more than halfway through the strength program. I finished the workout with everyone else. I’m not sure why. The remaining exercises were lower-body and there was nothing wrong with my legs. That was what I remember thinking at the time. Also I was no longer in a tremendous amount of pain.

One of my coaches urged me on to the ER. She suspected I had a broken finger and also needed stitches. My gym is in the Berkshires and I live in the northern Hudson Valley, down the street from a hospital.

“I would rather be close to home,” I told Paul once I was on the road. He was worried about me driving back to New York. Maybe I should just go to the closest ER? “And besides it doesn’t hurt as much as you would think.” At the ER I learned I’d broken my hand in two places and did indeed need stitches. I had an allergic reaction to the lidocaine they gave me and passed out cold for several minutes. When I came back around I did not initially know my name, where I was, or what year I was in. Also: apparently I thought Barack Obama was the president (all this was narrated to me later by one of the nurses; I have only a vague memory of waking up and trying to speak and not being able to).

The ER was in a state of chaos. I was in the waiting room for five or so hours before I was brought into a kind of triage area with a nurses’ station and various curtained rooms and another row of chairs for waiting. Not so much progress as moving a layer deeper into the inferno.

The nurses’ island was a square of plexiglas and faux wood. The surfaces were crowded with black desktops, papers, binders, a half-dead philodendron. Pamphlets for hospice and opioids and family planning. A grey divider wall halved the island. The wall was papered with cheat sheets (CODE SEPSIS for an adult patient) and a child’s drawing of a unicorn. I overheard two nurses vent about their struggle to get a patient admitted to the ICU. He can’t stay here. His lactic acid is through the roof.

I would later learn the ER was dealing with numerous ambulance-level emergencies that night, including two car accidents and a woman having a psychotic break (I never saw her but could hear her screaming down the hall). An older woman was waiting back there too. She had a cane and looked very frail. At one point I saw her cough blood into a cloth handkercheif. I was so relieved when her daughter came to wait with her, bearing a pillow and a fleece blanket. There was one doctor on shift. I kept thinking about what was going to happen to this place once the medicaid cuts fully kick in.

A nurse would come by once every hour or two to take my vitals and ask where I was on the pain scale. I never know how to answer this question. What do you have to be feeling in order to say ten? I said maybe I was at a three. “Are you sure?” he said, staring down at the blood-soaked gauze wrapped around my hand.

I have a weird relationship to pain. I inflicted a lot of pain on myself when I was younger. A lot of that pain made me feel better for a time and then much much worse. I wouldn’t say I like pain, or that I wish to be in pain. Chronic pain of any sort is one of the most emotionally grinding things a person can experience. But it is also true that the right dose of pain can still make my brain hum in a beautiful-feeling way.

I ended up being in the ER for nine hours. I came home around five in the morning, slept for a few hours, got up and went for a run. I felt ablaze with energy. I bumped into a neighbor and, after I explained what happened to my hand, which was freshly stitched and bundled in gauze, she asked me if it hurt to run. “I really doesn’t!” I replied cheerfully, and she looked at me like I was out of my mind. At home Paul kept asking me if I was tired, given that I’d been in the ER all night, but somehow I wasn’t. I worked for hours unbroken, my focus sharpened to a fine point. Eventually I realized I was high as all get out on adrenaline, that the pain had done something to my brain. Had done something so amazing I could not register that I was, in fact, in pain at all.

Boxing has taught me to treat myself with so much more kindness. I am really proud of how far I’ve come both physically and mentally, and I know that progress depends on me taking exceptionally good care of myself. And also: boxing is a sport where pain is, in some ways, central. I’m not even talking about the punches, about the ways we hurt each other in the ring. The conditioning one must acquire in order to fight: that piece honestly takes more people out than anything else. It hurts. Some people die a few times on the assault bike and are like no thanks. But I knew from the start that I could tolerate the pain. I could tolerate it and I would like the way I felt once I was on the other side and after that feeling faded a little I would want to get back to it as soon as possible.

In the ER graduating from a very hard chair to a stretcher felt like a miracle. The older woman was on a stretcher now too, her daughter asleep in a chair, the cane tipped against a wall. I never got to a room. My hand was set and stitched up in a hallway. I remember asking the doctor how long it would be before I could punch with my right hand and she said, “Four weeks.” I started to cry. She asked me if I was in pain and I told her I was scheduled to fight on September 14th. “I understand,” she said. Turns out her brother used to be a MMA fighter.

I’m two weeks in now and will not be fighting this weekend as planned, a sentence that breaks my heart to type. But there is just no way: I still have stitches, I still can’t make a fist. I am scheduled to fight in late October and am determined to be ready in time. Injuries are part of being an athlete and also they suck; it is not my feeling that every situation has an upside. But I have been thinking about how sometimes a setback can turn out to be a key.

Writing books taught me this. Anyone who has ever worked on a novel for a long time has likely experienced the gutsick feeling of realizing the narrative architecture you’ve spent years honing is flawed at the root, or that character you’ve tried so hard to bring to life must be cut. And yet often these setbacks, which can feel so crushing in the moment, end up being the key that unlocks the door we must pass through in order to finish the book.

Or that time my laptop died and took with it a few new stories that I believed would become the core of my next collection. I had to retype the drafts from memory and they were so much better for it.

So I feel the task before me now is to discover how training with only my left hand for a bit longer can become a key. I’ve been spending more time working on footwork, head movement, and my jab (aka the most important punch in boxing). Because I can only punch and defend with my left hand I’ve been getting more creative with my combinations and my defense. Rolling the lead hook and closing the distance with taller opponents. Or using my feet and my jab to keep my opponent at the end of my range. Throwing more check hooks. And I can still run and train lower body strength and core and do the kind of conditioning work that hurts.

Another possible key is that I’m getting to practice some life skills too. Like asking for help. I am not great at asking for help! And then sometimes feel a little aggrieved that I have not magically gotten the help I never told anyone I needed. The un-beautiful kind of pain can be so lonely. The key here is allowing someone else to open the door.

R. O. Kwon is the author of the nationally bestselling novel Exhibit. Kwon’s bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Prize. With Garth Greenwell, Kwon co-edited Kink. Kwon’s books have been translated into seven languages and named a best book of the year by over forty publications. Kwon’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker, Time, Vanity Fair, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Kwon is a 2025-2026 Visiting Fellow at the American Library in Paris. She has received fellowships and awards from MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo. Kwon was the Stein Visiting Writer at Stanford University and the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College, and has taught at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Tin House Workshop, and the University of San Francisco. Born in Seoul, Kwon has lived most of her life in the United States.

Laura VDB: You wrote an amazing essay on lifting for Harper’s Bazaar and the opening line is: “One of the only ways I can find calm is by risking injury.” I felt such a strong sense of recognition. Why are we like this?! It was only after trying a bunch of other activities that were alleged to bring about a sense of calm, and having the opposite experience, that I found my way to boxing, which has calmed me down more than anything. Could you talk a little about that relationship between risk and calm?

R.O. Kwon: I’m cracking up at “why are we like this.” Raising a glass to you! It can sometimes feel as though my body is hostile to calm; the way my anxiety works, if I relax I also tend to start worrying that I’ll personally bring on terrible catastrophes by being so foolish as to let down my guard. But also, like a lot of anxious people, I can be pretty level-headed during real crises. At least so far, knocking on wood. And so I wonder if putting myself in small but physically immediate almost-crises—like, “dear god don’t fuck up while lifting this 205-lb. weight”—brings relief by getting the anxiety to quiet down for once.

LVDB: Do you see a parallel with writing too, in that writing can, depending on the project, also involve “risking injury”--even as the injury might be of a different sort?

ROK: Oh, this question hits a little extra hard today. I had a long, stubborn panic attack last night that resisted my usual remedies. It had to do with novel anxiety, and I keep wishing the writing didn’t come with so much fear. But if it didn’t, I’d most likely want to move toward trying to write what does alarm me, so, hey. I trust in fear as a guiding sign to what I feel most compelled to write. And then today the novel-writing went a little better, at last, thank god, which probably means tomorrow’s going to be a mess, and so on.

LVDB: I’d love to hear more about your journey with lifting. Do you remember your first couple of sessions? What were they like? What kept pulling you back to the bar?

ROK: I had a couple sessions with a trainer to learn the basic power-lifting moves, and I remember noticing how closely I had to pay attention to avoid hurting myself and realizing, Hello, yes, this is good, it isn’t boring, I’m fully in my body. And then I started getting stronger so much more quickly than when I’d worked out with only smaller weights. It’s extremely satisfying. As you probably know, I’m not an especially patient person, and so far each novel has taken between 8 and 10 years, so it’s wonderful to have something in my life that can provide clear, quick results. Knocking on wood again!, I don’t want to jinx this.

LVDB: The fully-in-your-body piece is huge. It wasn’t until I started boxing that I realized how much time I was spending in a half--disassociated (or in some cases fully -disassociated!) state. I feel my body more too in writing now. I don’t mean that I write bodies super differently but rather I’m aware of how it physically feels to put down whatever it is I’m putting down on the page. Do you find that physical awareness carries over to your desk? Or do writing and lifting exist in parallel but separate worlds?

ROK: I love that you’re more aware of what you’re physically feeling as you write. It’s easy for me to let my body get fucked up while I’m writing. It seems I can’t help it, since I often forget I even have a body. After periods of deep focus, I emerge with my posture gone to hell. One leg draped over a chair arm, another leg propped on the desk, my neck bent at wild angles. Like a drunk octopus. But maybe especially when I’m feeling very low, it’s helped to remind myself, Wait, I exist in a body, let’s get up. It’s time for a quick dance break. Let’s kick up into a headstand. Writing doesn’t have to be a life of just grimly staring at the page, or so I think and hope. I can inhabit physical joy even when I’m having baroque thoughts about my writing like “All is lost! Why go on?” I can inhabit a joy I don’t yet feel, and then hope that my body can lead the way.

LVDB: You also had a climbing practice for some time. I tried a climbing wall over the summer and was swiftly humbled by how hard it was. I was in a harness so there was virtually no risk of injury but still when I reached a certain height I could feel that reptilian survivalist part of my brain telling me to get down and then I would sort of freeze on the wall. Climbing seems really strategic, in terms of the calculations you make to keep ascending, and also like a practice that takes a lot of trust. What did climbing give you that felt special? And is there anything that carries over from climbing to lifting?

ROK: Oh, if you ever did want to try again we should climb together Laura! I love climbing for that spasm of terror, the point when my body’s shouting, No, no, no, you might die, choose life, get down. It feels exhilarating, incredible, to shove past that and realize I’m fine. It brings tremendous relief. Climbing has proved to be powerful medicine for a panic disorder that’s twisted through my life these past months and years, a panic that has a lot to do with the writing and publishing of my latest novel, Exhibit. And yes, the lessons do apply beautifully to writing: how can I push past the shouting in my body, how do I write as though I’m not afraid.

LVDB: Oh yes, this all really lands. Same with fighting: you have to push through your own instinct for self-preservation. It was striking to need to do the exact same thing but in a different context and struggle so much. I’d love to climb with you one day! In the meantime, one last question: what is your all-time favorite lift?

ROK: I’ve gotten especially into an Olympic lift, the push-jerk! It involves moving a barbell above your head, fast, as your legs jack you up. It makes me feel so strong that I sometimes end up laughing afterward, from the elation.

Some highlights so far have been Valzhyna Mort’s poems; Victor LaValle and Danielle Evans reading from new novels; Elisa Gabbert reading about holes (one of my obsessions); getting to lead a fiction workshop with Dantiel W. Moniz, whose stories I love (also a fellow Floridian!); walks in the woods with Oscar; my first ever maple creemee. My coach wrote me a training program to do up here, and so I’ve been using the early mornings to get my training in. I put out a call in the conference newspaper, The Crumb, to see if anyone wanted to move some weights (I brought kettlebells with me lol) communally. A very strong group of writers showed up yesterday morning for a lifting sesh and it was a good time.

I have a long history with this place. I can glimpse my younger self in the classrooms and in the meadows. I came here for the first time in my early twenties. I’d decided to be a writer in college, after having my “conversion moment,” with an Amy Hempel short story. But I felt bewildered as to what this would mean for me in practice. As a way of life. Being a writer meant writing, of course. Reading, too. But surely there was more to it than that.

In search of answers, I spent a lot of time in a former creative writing professor’s office, pelting him with anxious questions. One afternoon he opened a desk drawer, rifled around, and pulled out a brochure for the Bread Loaf Writers’ conference. “You should go here,” he said. Probably this poor man was just trying to get me out of his office, but nevertheless I took the brochure and applied and got in and went.

That was 21 years ago, all the way back in 2004. I had never been to Vermont before and was knocked out by the beauty. Everything was so green. I was also alarmed to learn that summer nights in this part of Vermont could be in the 40s or 50s—frigid by Florida standards. Within hours I was in the campus bookstore, looking at sweatshirts.

I had never been surrounded by so many writers. We had all taken different paths to get here—a fact that made a big and immediate impression on me. No one was going to hand you a path. There were different models to look to, sure, but it was up to me to chart my own way through this particular wilderness (I also met Paul at Bread Loaf in 2004, so at least I would have a partner in wandering).

Over the last two decades, I’ve been back to Bread Loaf many times, in many different roles. I was a waiter, when the waiter program still existed; I was on the back office staff for three years, helping to operate a very moody photocopier; I was a fellow (a writer who’s published 1-2 books). This is, I believe, my fourth time on the faculty. I have come here bursting with excitement and optimism. I have come here in despair. I have been around for painful moments in the life of the conference. I have been around for deep connection and joy. After I left Florida, Paul and I moved a ton (6 times in 8 years, which is way too many times) for graduate school and then fellowships and visiting gigs at universities. This campus on a mountain became a kind of home for us, an anchor. In many ways I grew up here as a writer.

As I’ve been getting to know the writers in my workshop, I’ve gotten a slightly different version of the same question enough times that it seemed worth writing about here: What do you wish your younger writer self had known going into this life? These are a few things I’ve kept coming back to:

~ You will never arrive. When I was first starting out, I thought if I could only publish a story in X magazine or publish my first book or sign with an agent or…I would arrive in a place of sureness and security. This is a fairly common delusion. Stacey D’Erasmo is on faculty here (and gave an incredible reading from a new project) and when I saw her I told her how much I’d loved her last book, The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry, which is a series of profiles of older artists, inflected with D’Erasmo’s own journey through a life in the arts. She explores how these artists have endured; how they have changed; how they have transformed. How they have managed to keep going deeper. How they have managed to not get too comfortable or too dispirited. To not stagnate. How do we do this? How do we keep doing this? These questions feel just as urgent as they were when I was just starting out, if not more so.

~ Move fewer times! In the moment, all these moves made sense. We were young writers. We needed money, health insurance. And because the fellowships and the teaching gigs were short-term we were already looking to the next thing, the next cycle of applications, before the thing we were in the middle of was even done. Looking back this restlessness took a lot out of us over time. It was almost as though we lost the skillset it takes to really root down in a place and make it home. We both have complicated relationships to home, so maybe that was part of it. But also I think we were reflexively doing what we felt we were supposed to be doing. We’ve gotten to live in some great places, where I’ve made lifelong friends, so regret isn’t quite the right word here—maybe what I’m trying to say is that I wish we’d been guided by some different questions.

~ I wish I could unknow some (a lot?) of what I know about publishing. This is a fine line. I do believe we need to know enough about the industry in which we are working in order to effectively advocate for ourselves and to support our peers—and, for me, I’m not sure I need to know much more beyond that. Some writers have found a lot of agency—and in some cases industry—in learning all that they can and then passing that knowledge on to others. This is helpful and admirable; much of this information can remain gatekept and shrouded in mystery unless someone is willing to pull back the curtain and explain how stuff works. But for me personally I’m not sure how much good it does me to know what is selling well and what editors are buying and all the rest. I’m going to write what I’m going to write regardless, for better or for worse. If by magic I could somehow know what I need to know to move through the industry with care and intelligence and not a drop more I absolutely would chose that option.

~ Advice that includes the words “never,” “always,” or “must” should be met with deep skepticism. For example: short story collections never sell well or all writers must be on social media. There might be grains of truth here—writers who are gifted at social media can absolutely use these mediums to connect with readers; short story collections often have more niche audiences. But the narratives being pedaled are wildly incomplete. And in some ways besides the point? People want to give advice that is specific and actionable, and so that’s partly why these kinds of truisms get passed around—but the good part of charting your way through the wilderness means that you can decide where you want to be directing your time and energy. Try not to let well-meaning-but-basic advice get in your head.

We have two very full days ahead of us here. Camille Dungy and Claire Messud are reading tonight. I’m teaching a craft class on endings in the afternoon. The Bread Loaf Strength Club will meet for the last time on Friday morning. There will be a dance in a barn. See you on the other side.

From 2021-2023, I worked on two novels in parallel. At the time, I was on a fellowship that had gotten me a break from teaching and I knew it would be a long time before my horizons were this open again. I was living in Florida, near my family, and had far fewer responsibilities (and distractions) than I was used to. The time was a gift and I did not want to waste it.

So when I made my list for 2021 “write your mf books” was on it. I decided to see if I could draft two (very) different novels at the same time and it turned out that, yes, I could, if I found the right way to structure my days. There was a good bit of trial-and-error, but what ended up working best was switching every month: January was project A, February was project B, March project A, and so on. I did this until I had two readable drafts down.

The two-novel situation is an unusual example, but my life is such that I am nearly always working on more than one project at a time. This summer I’ve been working on a big novel revision + finishing a longish nonfiction piece + training for fights. At the start of August projects of a different sort have started to creep in: preparing to teach at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences (I’ll write a dispatch or two while I’m there!) and for the fall semester. I’ll be directing our creative writing program for the next three years, so the plates are multiplying at a rapid clip.

[the more cluttered my desk the closer the deadlines]

I talk to my mom on the phone almost every day and recently she wondered aloud how I could possibly keep training for fights as I return to teaching and also directing in the fall (plus writing, lifeing, etc). And it’s true that there are only so many hours in the day. But if matches come through as planned I’ll fight three times between mid-September and mid-October. I want to keep this particular plate in the air because it makes my life so much better (even as it also makes life harder). Anyway: my schedule in the fall is going to be intense and so I’ve revisiting some tactics that have helped me keep all the plates spinning the past:

1. Identify the time you have to work with

2. Identify what times are best for what kind of work

3. Get constraints on time to work for you

4. Think about how you will recover

5. Occasionally say fuck it

The first one, identifying the time you have to work with, is pretty straightforward. Obviously this piece will look radically different for different people–I’m a writer and an athlete with a spouse, a dog, and an academic day job. I have a lot more time in the summer. But in any season mornings are my most reliable stretch of open time. I get up pretty early and in my world there is no email that needs to be read or sent before 9AM.

[there’s nothing like a Florida sunrise]

The second one is about making sure that open time is as meaningful as possible. If I am writing new work I attend to that first. I don’t need a lot of time to fully wake up. Early morning, just out of bed, is when I’m most creatively alert. In the summer especially I could write in the afternoon, but I won’t have as much to give then. The chunks (or slivers) of open time later in the day are better spent doing something that does not require as much imaginative energy: emails, updating my course websites for the fall, writing a lecture, working on edits for that nonfiction piece that’s due soon, etc. And if I’m not writing new work I still save the morning hours for projects that are more intellectually demanding and the more straightforward work for later in the day.

Another reason I like to write in the morning is because there is a consistent built-in time constraint. My dog, Oscar, usually gets out of bed with me and follows me to my office, where he falls back asleep on his dog bed. At some point, though, Oscar will let me know that it’s time to go for a walk (Oscar is 80 pounds and pretty opinionated so when it’s time it’s time). Most days I’ll have other constraints too, places to be, but even on the most open of days the Hour of the Walk will always arrive.

It can feel frustrating to run up against a time constraint, to feel like you were just starting to get somewhere when the bell rang, but constraints can also help us focus. In the past I’ve done massive amounts of work at artist residences and that’s because your days and nights are totally devoted to writing, yes, but also you know you’re not there forever; even in those settings there is a ticking clock. When I was working on those two books in Florida, I felt like I had so much time day-to-day but also I knew how fast it would go—I wouldn’t have gone as hard if there hadn’t been an end in sight, if there hadn’t been that constraint.

In the summer I usually have hours in the morning to write; once the semester starts that window will shrink. The less time I have the more I try and really lock in and do as much as I can with what I’ve got. Maybe I focus on something really specific, like rewriting a particular moment in a scene. See if you can get that ticking clock to work for you.

[Oscar out on the trails]

I also like to think of time constraints as transitions, markers that give shape to a day. Taking Oscar out marks the end of one phase and the start of another. Training is a kind of time constraint too. I chose when I do my runs but otherwise the competition team at my gym trains from 5-7 on weekday nights. By the late afternoon I’m stretching, drinking electrolytes, eating a pre-training meal, getting ready to go. My focus has shifted to the physical plane.

I appreciate that Oscar gets me outside, in the sunshine, which gets into number four. We do a lot of trail walks and I try and just look at the sky and listen to the birds. This summer we’ve been doing pond swims on hot days. You can’t keep going forever on an empty tank (believe me I have tried). If we’re short on time it’s a neighborhood walk to the coffee shop. A good little wander. The busier I am the more I try and sleep like it’s an Olympic sport. I try and do a few things a week that help me downshift. I’m a big Chani Nicholas fan and like her guided meditations a lot. Training at night definitely helps me shed whatever I’ve been carrying through the day.

And then, on occasion, I look at everything I had planned for the day and say fuck it. I’m not talking about breaking a substantial commitment to myself or to another person; I’m talking about letting the stuff that can wait wait. Maybe I open my inbox intending to mow through a bunch of replies and I am just, like, unable. I reschedule the meeting. I take all the detours. I let it be a problem for tomorrow. (The occasional part is important here—if I say fuck it every time I open my inbox, tempting as that may be, I’m gonna end up in a deep hole of unfinished stuff, which will end up bringing more stress than relief). Academic emergencies are few and far between so your fuck its will look different if you work in an ER, but the idea is just recognizing when we need to set aside what can be set aside.

A solid structure allows me to live a life with a lot of different components, allows me to keep the plates in the air, but occasionally blowing some minor shit off helps me to stay in that structure for the long haul. Maybe this is a form of recovery, a way of putting a little extra gas in the tank, letting one plate fall every so often so the most important ones can stay aloft. A little crack here and there never hurt anyone.

I fought over the weekend and didn’t get the W this time. It was a solid fight, but I needed to stay busier and push harder. I was up against a strong opponent and she did a great job of staying active. There are some technical dimensions to this, but it’s also mental: there’s the leap of getting in the ring and then the second leap of fully unleashing once you’re in there. My conditioning really held up—I did not get tired at all—so I know I have a lot more to give. I’m diving back into training this week with a very clear idea of what I need to work on before the next fight, and what I need to focus on in sparring. It hurt to not get my hand raised. To know that I hadn’t done enough to earn the win. That feeling is getting converted into fuel.

Overall, though, the fight was a great experience and very different from my past amateur bouts because we were in an amazing venue: Big Night Live, a music hall in Boston that’s part of the TD Garden complex. Most amateur shows happen in much more humble settings, so it was amazing to be part of such a profesh event, and to fight in front of a big crowd. We’d been trying to get matches all summer. The best way to get better at fighting is to fight, and I was grateful for the opportunity to finally step into the ring and gain experience. The strongest competition teaches you the most, and I learned a lot from this one for sure. It was a fun day, despite the loss.

There were two big green rooms upstairs, one for red corner fighters, the other for blue. Our room (blue corner!) was packed with fighters and their teams. A soup of water bottles and towels and gauze and tape and open jars of vaseline. Paul was with me the whole time, in the green room as I got my hands wrapped and got warmed up by my coaches. He walked with us down the long dark hallway we followed out to the ring. This was his first time seeing the behind-the-scenes, what happens in the hours and minutes before a fight. Afterwards he talked about the energy in the green room: the boiling nerves, the tension, the edge. From the green room we could look over a balcony and see the ring below us. I don’t like to watch the other fights before I’m up, but Paul was watching and he told me later that he saw three knockouts in a row. That was when he started to get nervous. And even if I wasn’t watching I could hear the thunder of the crowd below. I could hear the snap-snap of fighters hitting the pads to get warmed up. I could see the fighters who came back to the green rooms with belts, aglow with victory, and the ones who returned in despair.

That room was a pressure cooker, he said. I was relieved when we finally got to the ring.

The part that sticks in my mind the most is the walk there: down a long dark hallway and then out into a florescent brightness, surrounded by people, noise. Win or lose this is the superpower that boxing can give you, or has at least given me: if I can make that long walk I can do anything. It’s hard to imagine entering a room that could possibly be more intimidating. That walk is special. Time slows way down. I was nervous af but I pulled my shoulders back and took a deep breath and I kept walking until I was there.

I too was relieved to get to the ring. Once the first round started I had an immediate feeling of yes, finally, we’re here and I know what to do—even as there were things I needed to do better. That’s one thing I’ll carry forward, the understanding that the 24-hours before a fight is the worst and hardest part. My mind turns into a forest and I need to not get lost in there—and even if I do get a little lost I need to remind myself that once I make that walk the hardest part is, in a way, over—and the fun part, the part I trained for, is about the start.

I have never been obsessed with winning in the most literal sense. Like I have been a finalist for literary awards that I ultimately did not win and it was a party each and every time. I have seen writers have full-on meltdowns at not winning which always seemed to me like a waste of a night. I think, in those situations, you can decide to let not winning ruin the experience, or you can enjoy the recognition and have fun. By then the writer has zero control over the outcome. By the time awards are in the mix they’ve finished that books ages ago and now the verdict is in the hands of the judges, who have their own tastes and preferences. When you do have control over the outcome, as you do in a fight, the feeling is different. It’s less about literally winning and more about wanting to know the absolute best version of yourself stepped forward. So that’s my goal for the next fight: for the moment to pull out that very best and strongest and most ferocious self. I’m excited to see what she does in there.

I’m writing a long piece on the fight for a magazine, so much more to come, but whew: it was a thing to see.

I got back from NYC last weekend, and the days that followed have felt intense. I’m about ten days out from my next fight and awaiting notes from my agent on a new novel. Both things involve a kind of exposure: the work I’ve been doing in solitude will soon be visible under the bright lights. Being in the thick of these dual intensities feels a bit like standing on the edge of a cliff: I haven’t gone over yet but I can feel the wind picking up, the change in altitude.

Friends ask how I’m feeling, about the fight or the novel or both. I feel ready. I feel the boom of that mental countdown clock—every day brings me closer to the leap into the unknown. I feel the most alert and connected to the world when I’m in the maw of deep intensity (despite past efforts to be more chill, which seems like a nice way to be!). I feel awake, nervous, and weirdly at home here, in the cold wind of the edge.

[the ring at In Your Corner Boxing, where I sometimes go for sparring]

I used to have terrible stage fright. I did my first reading at an open mic at a bar in Orlando, Florida and threw up twice beforehand. When I started doing events for my first book I would get nervous about a reading days (weeks!) in advance. No doubt I drank too much in an attempt to calm down. I can still remember getting an email from the lovely Penina Roth for the first time, all the way back in 2013, asking if I wanted to read at Franklin Park. I’d heard so many wonderful things about Franklin Park, about the killer line-ups Penina put together, the generous audiences, so I accepted gratefully but also every time I thought about the event I felt like vomiting on my shoes. I hoped the reading might be cancelled, or maybe I would be disinvited. (I’m very glad the reading was not canceled and I was not disinvited—I had a great time and have been back to FP many times since).

The depth of my terror feels a little hilarious to me now—the stakes were so low! By now I’ve attended enough reading to know that I usually remember…very little…of the text itself. On occasion, I do. I remember Tania James reading the end of her amazing story “The Liberator” in the Little Theater at Bread Loaf. The hush that fell over the crowd. Or Kaveh Akbar reading from “The Palace” at Warren Wilson. But most of the time, even when I love a reading, the particulars fade. There is only so much space in the brain! If anything I might remember a style of reading, the kind of energy the writer gave off.

I used to have a very specific fear—when I was reading from loose manuscript pages—that I would put the pages in the wrong order, or lose a page along the way. I’m not sure why I thought this would be The End of the World, but I did. I used to obsessively number and count and recount the pages. Then I saw Ann Patchett read from a new novel in a packed auditorium in Baltimore. Halfway through she paused, shuffled her pages, said something like “hmmm looks like I misplaced a page or two,” gracefully summarized the plot, and carried on.

This was revelatory to me. In my imagination sudden death by sheer embarrassment was the natural consequence of such an error. The mind can truly take the simplest thing and twist it into a hideous knot.

I have done enough events by now—hundreds of readings, lectures, talks, etc—that I don’t get nervous any more. Unrelenting exposure worked, in the end. I have slayed, I have bombed, I have been just okay. I have lost pages and stumbled over words and this one time food poisoning arrived smack in the middle of the event. Earlier this week I did a reading at Rough Draft Books, with three other writers. I read last and was able to really dial into the other readings—at a different time I would have been so terror-stricken I would not have clocked a word. I might get a little flutter right before I go on, but once I’m up there, once I’m in the language, I’m good.

What was the core of that fear? Exposure, for sure. The true fear was that I was pretending to be something (a writer!) that I was not and this was the moment I would be uncovered as a hopeless imposter. Am I really what I say I am, what I want to be? Those were the actual stakes.

That’s a question I always go back to now, when I’m nervous about a public moment. I find that when you strip away the noise in your head and get down to the source the fear often gets defanged in the process. Or at least we can chose to tell ourselves a different kind of story.

When I strip it down with boxing I’m not really scared of not winning. To be clear: I want to win and train to win but it’s not the most meaningful thing. I’m scared of not doing my absolute best in the ring, of letting myself down. If I give everything to every round, if I fight as hard and skillfully as I possibly can, then I’m good. Once I stripped down the more superficial worries and got to the core I realized the piece I was most worried about had to do with me. It didn’t have much to do with my opponent or the crowd or all the other variables that come with a fight. It was fortifying to realize that I had some control over what I was the most nervous about.

[sparring at my home gym]

When I share new work with an early reader the fear is more amorphous. I’m not scared of edits. I’m not scared of critique. But those early reactions can feel like a litmus test, where we long for confirmation that we have, in fact, done something worth doing. Even as I understand that to be a question I can only answer for myself.

It can be so tempting to hold our efforts close. To back away from the cliff’s edge. Over time I’ve worked on understanding the nervousness / excitement that often accompanies performance as evidence of having committed to something meaningful. It’s not about the absence of some crucial thing (ability, readiness, etc) but rather about the presence of dedication and meaning. In order to send a book to early readers one must have first…written the book! Seeing performance anxiety not as fear of failure but rather as evidence of commitment really helped shift something in my mental landscape. We don’t get under the bright lights on accident; those moments are born of a steady accumulation of choices, effort, passion, vision, failure, breakthroughs.

After my last fight I went for a (light!) run the next morning. I wanted to shake off some adrenaline, and also I wanted to get right back to being in process. That’s the place where we spend most of our time, and that is the particular trench of experience that I love most of all. The biggest antidote to fear that I’ve found is knowing that process is always there for me—no matter what happens or doesn’t when the all that private work gets exposed to the light. I can always return to the most basic things. The jab. The feet. The blank page. Stringing together one sentence and then another.