Dear No Ones,

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a fellow writer about Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man. It prompted me to return to the novel and revisit what had first fascinated me about Ellison’s beautifully difficult masterpiece.

In Ellison’s Invisible Man, the protagonist in the prologue muses about his appreciation for Louis Armstrong as one who “made poetry out of being invisible.” Expounding on the “benefits” of invisibility, he adds that, “Invisibility…gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat.” Later, boasting about his pirated source of light he has used to complement his underground abode, his new home away from his pressing against a world to which he was invisible, he says, “I’ve illuminated the blackness of my invisibility—and vice versa. And so I play the invisible music of my isolation.”

Toward the end of the prologue, after nearly killing a man for refusing to recognize him, even as he held the man to the ground by the collar, wielding a knife over his choking body, he reflects: “Irresponsibility is part of my invisibility…But to whom can I be responsible and why should I be, when you refuse to see me? Responsibility rests upon recognition, and recognition is a form of agreement.”

The prologue represents the novel's conclusion, a journey of the self that ends in a rejection of those who rejected the protagonist. He ends up living underground.  

Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953. He was the first African American writer to receive that honor. When I first read it, I was unsure what to make of the novel. I loved the novel, the writing, and especially the story, but the takeaway at first confused me. It was only after reading it a second time in graduate school that I landed on a conclusion I could make sense of. Ellison was writing about the no ones, those who couldn’t fit in a world that demanded your identity fit a specific category.

To be a nobody, what I sometimes call a “no one,” is not necessarily to be unseen, uninvolved, or disempowered, like a kind of subaltern. The Invisible Man is the struggle of subjectivity without the security of a specific identity group that results from a “peculiar” freedom of the self.

In graduate school, I coined the term “The (Para)altern,” based on Ellison’s Invisible Man, who “makes poetry” out of a certain invisibility to a societal recognition that has already refused its strangeness in advance. But a No One, a (Para)altern, doesn’t have to be hidden. They can make a difference, be significant, play a part in the community. After reading The Invisible Man for the second time, I tried to think of historical examples of this so-called (Para)altern. It didn’t surprise me when my research led me to the Bebop jazz movement of the 1940s, which heavily influenced Ralph Ellison’s writing.

Jazz as Resistance

Renowned poet and music critic LeRoi Jones (also known as Amiri Baraka), in his influential work Blues People, begins his work on Bebop Jazz, musing:

That there was a body of music that came to exist from a people who were brought to this side as slaves and that throughout that music’s development, it had to survive, expand, reorganize, continue, and express itself, as the fragile property of a powerless and oppressed people.

How did it do this? What was so powerful and desperate in this music that guaranteed its continued existence? Even beyond its creator’s existence?

Bebop jazz grew out of the inherited tactics of its forerunners who had to face, as Jones writes, the basic conflict “regarding the way the ex-slave was to make his way in America. Adaptation or assimilation.” In the early part of the 20^th century, “Adaptation was the Negro’s [only] way… He had no sufficient knowledge of, or experience in, the dominant culture to become completely assimilated within it.”

Jones writes that this incapability for Blacks to easily conform (or be accepted in) to the mainstream, even when not on their own terms, forced the “Negro culture [to have to be] a brilliant amalgam of diverse influences.”

Between the Black and the mainstream, Jones writes, “there was always a border” and there “was always a possible limitation to any dilution or [excess] of culture. The Negro could not ever become white and that was [his] strength…”

Incapable of sharing the differences of the Black experience within the mainstream center and doubly incapable of even having a share in the experience of the mainstream center, the expression of the Black person had to be cultivated on the margins to which it was relegated. It was an experience besides the center, at, as Jones writes, a ”juncture that [the Black person] had to make use of other resources, whether African, subcultural, or hermetic. And it was this boundary, this no man’s land, that provided the logic and beauty of [the] music” (emphasis mine).

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Anti-Assimilation as Power

With the ending of the war, young folks in American cities were starting to think differently about the security of the world; this was no different for young black men and women, and this change would manifest in the music. “When the moderns,” writes Jones, “the beboppers, showed up to restore jazz, in some sense, to its original separated-ness, to drag it outside the mainstream of American culture again, most middle-class Negroes (as most Americans) were stuck…”

The young beboppers, inheriting the cool from legends of hip like Lester Young, Bill Eckstein, and others, grew tired of the big bands and their commercial uniformity and servility to the white mainstream, and began experimenting with a “willfully harsh, anti-assimilation sound” that was almost rejected by everyone but them. This new sound, mostly represented by Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk, to name a few, “was the coup de grace…[that] abruptly lifted jazz completely out of the middle-class Negro life,” according to Jones.

This new generation didn’t share the eagerness to be recognized by the white mainstream that the Black middle class did. They didn’t play the sound that the major Big Bands were paying for the consumption of a moneyed white audience. They stylishly rejected the American dream. As Jones states, this generation

began to understand the worth of the country, the society, which it was supposed to call its own. To understand that you are black in a society where black is an extreme liability is one thing, but to understand that it is the society that is lacking and is impossibly deformed because of this lack, and not yourself, isolates you even more from that society.

Jones mentions that beboppers “like Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk, and Dizzy Gillespie were all quoted at various times as saying, ‘I don’t care if you listen to my music or not’.” The beboppers cultivated the margins they were relegated to, and they did it in a way that encouraged a community of those of similar relations.

Jones notes how the beboppers even received white “boppers” into their community on their own terms, a reversal of the Blacks trying to assimilate to mainstream America:

The white boppers of the forties were as removed from the society as Negroes, but as a matter of choice. The important idea here is that the white musicians and other young white who associated themselves with this Negro music identified the Negro with this separation, this nonconformity, though, of course, the Negro himself had no choice.

The boppers were an example of how the (Para)altern is an other that is not entirely-other. It is not a subaltern movement. It is not a fringe group. It is merely a way of insisting on the freedom and dignity of one’s own difference, rejecting a culture that is closed to difference.

It is a bricoleur of personhood open to community. And one of the key strategies of a good bricoleur is to use (sometimes pirate, as in Ellison’s example) all that is available to you. This key strategy of movement for the Beboppers, and, as Jones argues, black music in general, was “in the most impressive instances lateral and exchanging” of differences, “constantly changing, determined…by the sum of the most valid social and psychological currents available.”

The (Para)altern playing its game and music without authority was at first seen to be queer and useless for the Center. Jones notes an outsider’s view on Bop as: “It had no ‘function,’…’You can’t dance to it,’ was the constant harassment…[to which bop youngsters would say] ‘You can’t dance to it.”

The queerness of the bopper’s music, the inability for the Center to recognize it, to make sense out of it, and perhaps most importantly, make use of it, Jones writes, “for many young Negroes…was as satisfying as it was amusing. It also put on a more intellectually and psychologically satisfying level to the traditional separation and isolation of the black man from America. It was a cult of protection as well as rebellion.”

Leroi Jones summarized the Beboppers’ attitudes in a way that connects back to Ellison’s Invisible Man: “In a world that is basically irrational, the most legitimate relationship to it is nonparticipation.”

For the (Para)altern, that is not a pure non-participation as Ellison’s protagonist wrestles with, or as we can see from the great body of work the Beboppers have left us. The (Para)Altern is non-participation in the Center's insecure world, refusing to participate in a world that disregards the environment and the injustice of its ways.

To make poetry out of Ellison’s invisibility is first to refuse to be in agreement with a world that refuses others. After that, what we are doing is just jazz, working with what we have and who we have to make a better kind of music.

Dear No Ones,

It has been a busy summer. I hope you have all been finding moments of peace and rest along with the joy (and shade from the heat, good grief, Europe!). After a long period of relentless work and concentration, I am finally resurfacing with a clear mind, a stack of finished books, and some major personal milestones to share.

At the release party for my friend Lauren Collins’s already bestselling book, They Stole a City, I had many conversations with great writers, and I was fortunate to have a moment with Poppy Harlow to discuss the importance of writing and storytelling. She probably didn’t know how much impact her words had on me when she summarized writing by quoting Ram Dass. In the end, she said, “We are walking each other home.”

Those words resonated deeply. Two weeks after our chat, I wrote “the end” to the final draft of my novel, a labor of love that I have been working on for the last five summers and one year of sabbatical.

The Map of a Manuscript

Pamela Druckerman, another brilliant writer I enjoyed spending time with in Paris, recently asked what inspired my novel. It had been so long since I first started that I almost had to pause and think. At its core, the story is about the important Nigerian men in my life who struggled with pride, pain, and the quiet inability to express their vulnerabilities to love, fear, shame, death, and resentment.

The novel is loosely autobiographical. It helped me explore questions of identity, memory, intergenerational trauma, and the complex “in-betweenness” of the immigrant experience that I have had to wrestle with. And while the novel had developed beyond that initial question, it was helpful to remember how it started, when I wondered how the older Nigerian men in my life would face life's questions in those final hours. Poppy’s connection to writing as a reminder that “We are walking each other home” was what made everything click for me. How is my story about home? Going home. Finding home. Being home.

Writing this novel entirely on travel—away from home—helped me place those heavy questions of identity and home in deep relief. Looking back, the manuscript has its own distinct geography:

• Impruneta, Tuscany: Where the initial spark and idea first came to me, followed by gathering notes and building out timelines.

• The South of France (Provence, Aix, Marseille, and Menton): Where I spent the following summer writing the first three chapters, feeling incredibly optimistic about the direction of the story.

• Stanford, Kentucky: Where I took a foundational writing retreat with Goodlit Writers to push through the narrative during my sabbatical to finalize the first draft.

• Paris: Where I spent subsequent summers inspired by fellow writers and thinkers to refine and complete the later drafts.

• Johannesburg, South Africa: Where, just last month, I finally finished the final draft.

Celebrating this milestone in Nelson Mandela Square felt like a profoundly fitting conclusion. It was a journey that took me straight back to my roots—to my first home.

The theme of an arduous return home has felt especially resonant lately, with the massive cultural resurgence of The Odyssey following Christopher Nolan’s latest film release. Like Odysseus, a writer’s journey toward the final page is a winding, multi-year voyage across borders. But the true revelation is realizing how the journey itself reconstructs the traveler. Finding home—writing “The End”—requires surviving the space-and-time of crafting, revising, solving problems, facing fears, sharing with others, in order to understand truly what home actually means for you.

I know the next phase of this publishing adventure will be a roller coaster, but for now, I am satisfied, grateful, and ready to embrace whatever it holds. I am not quite home yet, but I am letting the journey prepare me for when I get there.

I am also thrilled to share that a standalone chapter from the novel, titled “Of Dust More Than Eros,” will be published in The Carolina Quarterly later this summer. I am excited to share a preview of the book and its characters with you all very soon!

Agency, Automation, and the Echoes of Soweto

While in South Africa, I also had the opportunity to present on Student Agency and Writing in the Age of Automation. In an upcoming post, I’ll be sharing an abridged version of my transcript and key talking points for those interested in how I think about teaching writing.

However, the true weight of my talk—which focused on the crisis of human agency in an extended age of automated voice and thought through AI and algorithmic echoing—was brought into even sharper relief by the conference’s keynote speaker, Seth Sandile Mazibuko.

Mazibuko kicked off the conference by reminding us that this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Soweto Student Revolts. The revolts were the result of students rejecting the forced Afrikaans language instruction in their schools, in addition to the unequal education, and a deep, righteous anger against apartheid. They would no longer sit and let their voice be marginalized.

Hearing Mazibuko speak was a humbling, solemn experience. At just 15 years old, he was a central figure in the revolt. He witnessed over 150 of his classmates shot and killed, and was subsequently imprisoned on Robben Island alongside Nelson Mandela for seven years, including 18 excruciating months in solitary confinement.

Listening to his speech provided an even more urgent context for the importance of human agency. The young people of the Soweto Student Revolts literally gave their lives for their agency, and it served as a stark reminder of what is truly at stake when we talk about voice, freedom, and self-determination.

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Summer Reading for Fun and for Teaching

When I wasn’t wrestling with my own manuscript across the finish line, I was diving into summer books, some for my comps and some for upcoming classes.

1. Flesh by David Szalay

I really enjoyed reading this book. While many critics have framed it as an exploration of contemporary masculinity, I saw it through a slightly different lens. Yes, it is about masculinity, but to me, Flesh is a brilliant study of a specific kind of character who lacks any real inclusion in a place, a man without a home.

The protagonist reminded me of Meursault from Albert Camus’s The Stranger. Istvàn is utterly detached, drifting through his life without any real, rooted social connection. Szalay is a masterfully shrewd storyteller who refuses to waste words or rely on flashy, heavy-handed figures of speech to move his narrative. The storytelling feels entirely naked: raw, vulnerable, and fiercely honest. It is stripped down to the absolute bones, making the title Flesh feel completely earned.

2. Audition by Katie Kitamura

Another book that completely captivated me was Audition by Katie Kitamura, which was the runner-up for the Booker Prize just behind Szalay. Like Szalay, Kitamura is an author who does not waste a single word. However, her narrative deploys that economy of language for the exact opposite purpose.

Audition is a book built entirely on radical interiority. It explores a fascinating psychological truth: how the mind accepts something as reality, and how that internal acceptance ultimately dictates the conditions under which we believe something to be true in the wider world. The story reads with the quality of a dream. As a notoriously slow reader, I usually take my time with fiction. Yet, I devoured this entire book in just four sittings. It is an incredibly fast, tense, and mind-bending read.

3. Vigil by George Saunders

For my flight to J-Burg, I picked up George Saunders’ novel, Vigil. Now, I absolutely love Saunders when he is talking about the mechanics of writing craft—his insights are usually standard-setting for writers. But with Vigil, I realized I don’t love the execution of his fiction in this story as much as I do his theories.

Where Flesh and Audition perfected the art of the novel by knowing exactly when to stay quiet, Vigil is the polar opposite to me. There were far too many digressions, meta-asides, and sweeps of incredibly chatty writing for me. The characters at times devolved into something bordering on the comical, which pulled me entirely out of the story's emotional weight. I hate to feel that way about a writer I respect so much, but contrasting it against the lean, sharp prose of Szalay and Kitamura made the stylistic differences hard to ignore.

4. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

I have a whole separate set of notes for this re-read, which I absolutely hated and do not look forward to teaching. Yes, I am deeply disturbed by the relentless use of the N-word (220 times in a 295-page book). The excessive deployment of a slur—which was considered disturbing and excessive even by his editor in 1884—reflects what I critique not as “vernacular realism” (as Twain’s writing is so often labeled), but a Cabaret Realism that connects directly to Toni Morrison’s concept of “Africanism” in Playing in the Dark. (And yes, I am a little disappointed that Morrison herself defends Twain here, but more on that later).

Ultimately, I found the novel childish (especially the last third when Tom Sawyer returns), irresponsible, and racially pornographic. If you want to read white writers depict an injustice of Blackness in a literary way, see the restrained silence in the writing of Damon Galgut’s The Promise and all of Coetzee’s work. Twain’s Blackness isn’t even realistic, and his satire viewed from this side of history is merely histrionic, throwing haymakers at low-hanging fruit. Whew—ok, got that out of the way. More on that in a future post if I can stand to revisit it.

5. The Road by Cormac McCarthy

On a far better note, I also re-read The Road to prepare for teaching this school year, and oh, what a treat. McCarthy is doing so much more than constructing a dystopian story; he turns some of our biggest ideas and values completely inside out.

It is a story about love without hope, and religion without gods. McCarthy is clearly obsessed with questions of theodicy—where is God in all this suffering?—and nihilism—does life have meaning? What happens when nothing matters and all the gods are dead? The Road seems to answer: love, still. I am genuinely excited to teach this novel in the coming term.

6. Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka

Finally, I picked up a book that is looking like it will be my favorite read of the year. It uses an incredible narrative conceit: written in the second person, it places the reader inside the book. But rather than conventional second-person immersion into the text in general, it places the reader directly inside a character—Ansel Packer, a serial killer scheduled to be executed in twelve hours. This narrative device does more than what Susan Sontag calls “extending sympathies”; it transubstantiates those sympathies, almost like being held hostage in the person of Packer to do more than read his story, but be his story for the time being.

It is brilliant. I only started it two days ago, so I will report back when I finish, but so far I am completely hooked. (Her narrative conceit also mirrors an experiment with a short story I have been shopping and have contemplated making my next long-form project. So that’s another reason why reading this excites me.)

Upcoming Workshop: Read Short Stories with Me!

Looking ahead to the fall, I am excited to announce that I will be hosting another workshop for The Porch starting October 1.

This six-week course, titled Close Readings of the Truths of Realism in Literary Fiction: A Short Story Book Club for Writers, will examine how the invisible machinery of fiction generates what we will define as the story’s “Unit of Affect”—that unified emotional weight, literary conviction, and intellectual resonance that lingers long after the final sentence is read.

Together, we will analyze brilliant short fiction by James Baldwin, Edwidge Danticat, Albert Camus, Sandra Cisneros, Lauren Groff, and Kate Chopin. I will share the official promotional graphic as soon as it’s finalized, but mark your calendars in the meantime!

School starts back up for me next week. It has been a great summer. Talk soon.

Much love,

C.I.

Dear No Ones,

Tomorrow, I will begin another writing getaway to Paris, France. My goal is to finish what I hope will be the final draft of my novel and meet a self-imposed deadline of August 1st. Returning to Paris is always a beautiful reunion with my sister’s family and friends. I get to take in the city when it is at its most intoxicating to me—right before the mad rush of tourism in July, but in time to enjoy the jasmine vines pouring out their heavy, sweet scent over stone walls and down balconies. (I actually have a short story based on my experience of that jasmine from last year that I am currently shopping around. Fingers crossed it finds a home soon.)

To close out my travels, I will be speaking at a conference in Johannesburg, South Africa, in early July. I will be discussing my teaching of academic writing under the threat of AI. My talk is titled, “Writing by the Numbers: Resourcing Student Agency under the Threat of AI,” a sister talk to one I gave earlier this year in San Francisco.

As you can see, it will be a deeply full and incredibly busy month. Because of that, I don’t expect to write much on Substack over the next few weeks, save for the sporadic Notes I post. As I understand it, that perk is only available for those who use the Substack app—so get the app!

Before I get into deep writing mode, I abbreviated an essay I’ve been taking notes for to share today. It is based on that pivotal moment I know is coming for me (sooner, hopefully, than later) when I will stand behind my own pages and say, “I believe in this.” I have become increasingly aware of how fraught the business of believing in the written word has become in the larger culture. This note speaks intimately to my current state as a writer, but I believe it speaks just as intimately to any of my friends who write, especially the wonderful writers I’ve worked with at The Porch, and to those of you who love to read the written word.

This is a note about belief.

The New Witch Hunt

The impetus for these thoughts came to me recently when I noticed a sharp increase in articles and cultural anxieties surrounding “AI detection.” I saw it break open in full force with the Granta essay scandal, in which a writer was accused of using AI to win an award. From what I understand, the writer never claimed to have used large language models; rather, they were flagged by a detector or a critic based on various phrases and word structures deemed “AI go-to words.”

Shortly after, I saw an Instagram post by a college instructor listing the “top five moves” she spots in student papers that immediately signal AI usage. She slammed these techniques as if they were derogatory flaws of writing. I was shocked to find that every single “move” she vilified is precisely what I teach my own students to use to elevate their prose: syntactic parallelism, joining shorter clauses with semicolons, and—she actually railed against this—the “obvious” use of the rule of threes. Wow.

I sat there thinking, That is exactly how we teach good writing. I will add that I didn’t care that she went after the em dash, too. My colleagues and students know I have long preached against the overuse of the em dash, offering an appreciation of the noun in apposition instead. But that is a stylistic choice. I try to steer young writers away from the cheeky overuse of digressions, parentheticals, and unnecessary adjective clauses, just as much as any rhetorical devices that are cliché, unclear, or redundant. But the fact that she categorized these classic rhetorical tools as the robotic fingerprints of a machine troubled me. I felt sorry for her students.

And while I, as a teacher, have already shared with you how much I hate that I have to worry about students using AI to automate their work, I have never allowed myself to believe (nor could I really honestly convince myself) that I can accurately detect AI use. Nor do I want to lean into that way of thinking out of the fear of ever accusing a student of cheating who had worked very hard to write something that impressed me. Rather, as I have always relied on as a teacher, writer, and reader, what I believe I can detect, and practice trying to detect, is bullshit, cliché, and canned writing. Slop is slop, artificial or superficial.

However, the posts I mentioned raised two major concerns about where this panic is leading us—and by “us,” I only mean the literary establishment, because thankfully, the average reader doesn’t have to worry much about this

1. The Transformation of the Reading Act: We are turning the act of reading into an AI witch hunt. How can I, as a teacher, give my student not only the benefit of the doubt, but more importantly, my undivided attention if my reading of their text is part reading, part proofing for AI? I can’t even fathom how much less charitable editors and readers for the literary establishment have become in light of this.

2. The Poisoning of the Craft: We are teaching students and young writers to fear the enterprise of writing because the entire relationship has become fraught with distrust, suspicion, and disbelief. For new or young writers, this operates as an imposing form of gatekeeping. Yes, of course, our concern to detect AI should intimidate the cheaters, but when certain rhetorical moves by humans prioritized by LLMs are considered “suspect,” the writer who can’t afford to rest on their laurels, or has no laurels to rest on, becomes anxious. This is what makes it a form of gatekeeping.

The epigraph to Nabokov’s essay, “Good Readers and Good Writers,” reads: “My course, among other things, is a kind of detective investigation of the mystery of literary structures.” Later in that essay, he says, “In order to bask in that magic [of literary mystery] a wise reader reads…not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle…” A great writer is an enchanter, he says. Therefore, a great reader seeks after the shimmer of the story’s song.

My concern as a writer, reader, and teacher of literature is that a forensic turn in reading can corrupt the world of literature far more than an artificial intrusion of writing. What is lost when reading literature becomes literally proofreading is the hope to make-believe that makes the whole enterprise possible.

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Freedom in Belief

I have never loved the old adage that reading fiction requires a “suspension of disbelief.” I don’t imagine myself entering a text with that kind of defensive posture. When I read, I am hoping to get lost in the story’s world, which is why I prefer Harold Bloom’s number one rule for reading: “Clear your mind of cant.” Cant is such a beautiful word for what it means: Hypocritical, sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature. In other words, you cannot really read a book if you haven’t opened your mind to its possibilities. You are hypo-critical.

Today, the obsession with AI detection has become our newest form of cant, a rigid, bureaucratic layer of suspicion that paralyzes the reading mind. Reading, as the critic James Wood beautifully notes, is a freedom in belief. It is a free belief, wholly unlike the severity of a religious dogma that is perpetually pending a crisis of faith. In The Broken Estate, Wood writes:

“Narrative corrugates belief—puts bends and twists in it. I don’t mean that it relativizes belief, only that it makes belief more difficult. A story is a formal filibuster. It slows down belief until belief falls asleep and begins to dream its opposite, its negative.”

The opposite of what Wood speaks of is the radical freedom to choose whether you want to believe or not. A story slows us down enough to let us play with reality. Later, he clarifies this relationship between belief and the novel, writing that every novel is its own reality and its own realism, and that “the real in fiction is always a matter of belief.” He adds: “The gentle request to believe is what makes fiction so moving.” This is the beauty of literature. It is a belief requested by an author, but it is a belief we can refuse at any time. It is under our constant surveillance. Wood calls the belief of fiction the true secularism of fiction, the enemy of superstition, and the slayer of religions of all kinds. It is the ultimate scrutiny of falsity.

“Fiction,” he writes, “moves in the shadow of doubt… It knows that at any moment it might fail to make its case. Belief in fiction is always belief as if. Our belief is itself metaphorical. It only resembles actual belief, and is therefore never wholly belief.”

This is the crucial distinction for the writer that our current moment of proofreading overlooks. AI detection tools approach a text with a severe, unyielding demand for a sort of empirical proof, which is the precise opposite of how literature functions. Fiction doesn’t demand blind faith; it requests our faith on the basis of its story. I often prefer to think that fiction presents us with a representation of reality for us to accept, but in the end, it amounts to the same beautiful, voluntary exchange of belief between writer and reader.

The Kindness of Strangers

I am profoundly grateful that there are still many readers who do not have to entangle themselves in the preoccupation of the AI witch hunt currently plaguing the academy, education, and the literary establishment. Of course, figuring out what is AI and what is authentic has its place. We have a busy student honor council for that very purpose, and authentication has always been a bureaucratic concern. However, I am not convinced that AI detection is nearly as important—or even as possible—as the greater calling of the reader, which is to cultivate a sensibility of mystery. We need to figure out which books we pick up are texts we actually believe in. We need texts where we can enjoy the act of performing belief, a make-believe that serves as a vital practice run for real-world belief.

I am equally grateful for the people still taking writing workshops, like those we hold around the tables at The Porch. These brave writers sit with strangers, share raw pages, take terrifying chances with new literary techniques, and practice the communal belief of fiction. They clearly are putting their money, their time, and—most importantly!—their belief where their words are. They prove that writing doesn’t thrive under a magnifying glass of permanent suspicion but thrives in an ecosystem of trust.

What I don’t want us to lose in this technological panic is the celebration of belief that fiction uniquely affords us, whether we are the ones holding the pen or turning the page.

Audrey Hepburn said that to plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow. I would say that to write a story is to believe in the reader of tomorrow, to believe that the story whose mystery you have worked so hard to bring alive will be discovered by a future, unknown reader. It is an act of vulnerability, faith, and courage. You are gambling on the hope that a reader will approach your words with an open heart rather than a cynical itch for a “gotcha” moment.

This ecosystem of trust connects back to that haunting line from Tennessee Williams, a line I am not entirely sure he valued enough, based on a recent conversation I had with the playwright Bruce Norris. It is the well-known line that rings out from Blanche DuBois’s mouth in her final desperate moment in A Streetcar Named Desire: “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Yes, Blanche was a victim of her desire to make us believe in her magic rather than in an unforgiving realism. And a reader with a mind full of cant will easily withhold any kindness from her stories. But that misses the point. The point is not whether we are fooled by her lies, but how much we all depend on kindness, and how desperate our world becomes without that kindness of belief. That is the realism of Blanche’s tragedy.

AI has given us an abundance of reasons to doubt literature. My hope is that it doesn’t take away from our abundance of reasons to believe in literature. Belief is the point of the whole thing.

I could easily quote Journey and say, “Don’t stop believing.” But I would rather lean into the deeper soul of Curtis Mayfield, who looked into a bar filled with Blacks and whites while the outside world was aflame with racial unrest, and said, “I Plan to Stay a Believer.” Who’s with me?

See you on the other side of the deadline.

Much love,

C.I.

Dear No Ones,

For the last five years, I’ve been hosting workshops on Realism and writing fiction while grinding away at my own novel. During this time, I found myself thinking more deeply about my core values as a writer, a reflection that was sparked by James Woods’s essay, “Hysterical Realism”—a critique aimed primarily at Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. In the essay, Woods argues that the “big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish silence, as if ashamed of silence” (emphasis mine).

I was interested in what Woods meant by the contemporary novel “ashamed of silence.” Woods contends that contemporary writers have drifted away from creating the “truly unhostaged” characters of writers like Anton Checkov. In fact, he suggests that “literature has only rarely represented character,” noting that even masters like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy frequently “resort to stock caricature, didactic speaking over characters, and repetitive leitmotifs.”

Charles Dickens, according to Woods, was the ultimate master of the leitmotif, relying on a recurring shorthand of predictable tics, catchphrases, or flattened eccentricities to define a persona. Dickens, Woods argues, has become the overwhelming, and perhaps detrimental, influence on post-war fiction. He laments that “some of the more impressive novelistic minds of our age do not think that language and the representation of consciousness are the novelist’s quarries anymore. Information has become the new character.” Novels are loud because they are far more eager to tell than to show. They talk a lot. Know a lot. Presume a lot. He directly links this symptom to Zadie Smith, quoting her admission that her concern as a writer is with “ideas and themes that I can tie together—problem-solving from other places and worlds.” Woods asks the vital question: at what cost to realism does a writer prioritize ideas and thematic problem-solving over human consciousness? In other words, what does the novel lose if it is more about ideas and solving problems than it is about exploring the often speechless depths of the human consciousness?

To capture consciousness, after all, is to capture something inherently strange and resistant about human truth and experience (ask cognitive scientist David Chalmers about this).1 It was in grappling with this tension—the realization that the ultimate task of the realist is to map the unpredictable, weird vitality of human interiority—that my obsession with the true stakes of literary realism was renewed.

Shattering the Mirror: What Realism Is

So, if our quarry as writers of literary realism is human consciousness, according to Woods, we have to start by nailing down what realism is.

We all know the classic line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where the prince famously declares that the purpose of art is “to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.” It’s an enduring, attractive metaphor, but it has completely misled our understanding of craft.

In fact, Oscar Wilde had a wonderful, biting takedown of this exact line. In his brilliant essay on aesthetics, “The Decay of Lying,” one of his characters points out:

“They will call upon Shakespeare–they always do–and will quote that hackneyed passage, forgetting that this unfortunate aphorism about Art…is said by Hamlet to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matter.”

What Wilde’s provocative, half-joking criticism raises is a vital axiom for us to remember: Hamlet has tricked us. He’s tricked centuries of writers into thinking realism is just a passive, photographic replica of nature. As if existence were merely a flat, static snapshot to be reproduced.

But literary realism is never a photocopy. It is an artful translation of reality’s underlying, chaotic systems, not its mere surfaces.

To understand this distinction in realism, we can look to Vladimir Nabokov. Beyond being a master stylist, he was a serious lepidopterist. He spent years meticulously studying the deceptive camouflage of butterflies. From that work, Nabokov observed that it was nature who was the stylish artist, “the ultimate trickster.” Nature doesn’t simply display reality plainly; it cloaks it, varies it, plays with it, using complex and surprising designs to pull off its artistry.

For me, as a fiction writer, Nabokov’s lesson is clear: if you closely watch the world’s hidden patterns and erratic movements, you don’t find a boring, flat snapshot to copy. You discover an energetic, soulful model. Realism utilizes technique not to mimic a captured reality, but to replicate the wild, unpredictable vitality that gives us reality.

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Dear No Ones,

It is a fascinating irony that “aura” has found its way into the slang of today’s youth just as adults sound the alarm against AI’s threat to that very concept.

Nearly 90 years ago, philosopher Walter Benjamin introduced the term for criticism in his 1935 essay, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, defining aura as the authenticity and authority of a work rooted in its “unique manifestation” of time and place. He warned that technological advancement was causing art to lose its “aura” through the ease of mechanical reproduction. It has been easy to dismiss Benjamin’s critique as nostalgia and elitist gatekeeping, but his definition of “aura” still holds up despite its contested value.

Ironically, while adults worry that AI is killing off our sense of aura, young people have resurrected the exact same concept in their own everyday slang.

Benjamin’s concept of aura draws on two pillars of thought: G.W.F. Hegel and Karl Marx.

For Hegel, creativity is an act of freedom, a way to see our identity reflected in the world. In his Aesthetics, he writes that art “speaks to the mind [of its creator] through the senses by showing the mind its own freedom in [an artistic] form.” Ultimately, art is how we externalize this inner freedom, making it tangible. Hegel beautifully compared this artistic self-realization to a parent proudly recognizing the best version of themselves in their child.

Karl Marx, however, looked at the dark side of this equation: what happens when “artistic” fulfillment is stripped away from craft. In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, he observed that when work ceases to be self-affirming, the worker feels the craft “denies himself... he feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home.” For Marx, modern labor forces a profound estrangement, robbing individuals of the very freedom Hegel celebrated.

Hegel saw creativity as the way we enjoy and realize ourselves, while Marx exposed how labor alienates us when that creative connection is severed. Despite their differences, both dialectical thinkers viewed craft (art and labor) through a similar lens: as a manifestation of human labor that should serve as an empowering expression of identity, or what Benjamin calls our aura.

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I recently shared these ideas about Marx, Hegel, and Benjamin with my 10th-grade class after our school held a symposium on AI. My students immediately recognized how AI can alienate us from our work, but they also noted that ‘alienating’ assignments can actually drive them toward AI. If a task doesn’t express their freedom, they may feel no claim to it. I admitted that we teachers must be diligent in how we design labor. Marx, after all, directed his critique not at the worker but at the supervisors who assigned the work. Still, my students pushed back against the binary of “easy” AI versus “hard” human effort. They argued that our 'aura' shouldn’t only be a matter of convenience, but a product of challenge. Aura isn’t a simple thing.

I appreciated their pushback against an “easy” aura, their recognition that value lies in challenging tasks which may seem antithetical at first but, in true Hegelian fashion, can be overcome and integrated into their identity. It reminded me of a conversation with my 12th-grade book club on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. They debated Aristotle’s claim that in the arts, “excellence lies in the result itself,” whereas in the expression of virtue, excellence is a matter of the actor. While their critique stemmed from a mistranslation of Aristotle’s techne (technology or artisanship), their point still resonated with me: if excellence lies only in the result, we are justifying the most sinister rationale of AI: that the product matters more than the process of the person. They argued that the product only reflects the person’s process. Excellence is the authenticity of effort and intent. That is what makes work virtuous; that is what 'aura' is really about.

Harrison, whom I have worked with since 6th grade, soon to attend Stanford this fall, said, during the discussion on Aristotle: “I feel like all this fuss about AI, with all the cheating and arguing to change how we think about writing, is only going to set up another renaissance, a human renaissance, that will remind us again why human authenticity, with all its imperfections and unique brilliance, will always be what matters most.”

I agree. Aura is about our authenticity, our authorship, our authority. Aura is about us. That is my infinite hope.

Much love,

C.I.

https://youtube.com/shorts/C057RNu3C7s?si=pyN3wbk2ILo7toCs

The Page is Your Dancing Partner as a Writer

“We write to taste life twice.” — Anaïs Nin

Dear No Ones,

In my last workshop at The Porch, a writer admitted she initially struggled with the specific challenges of a “slow” writing assignment. She said the work felt heavy with intentionality, full of “birth pains.” At times, she was frustrated, but eventually she realized something that was a game-changer: writing slowly felt more like designing a story than depositing one. Writing, in this sense, was a kind of caretaking of imagination.

Writing as caretaking is how I have come to understand writing, especially writing fiction. A labor of craft, writing fiction is more like pointillism, a cubist deconstruction of thought, a tango with the page rather than a transfer of genius. The blank page is not a bank account or a center stage for performance; it is the external hard drive of the writing process, our patient partner through an imperfect tango. When we write slowly, the writer and the page are in a reciprocal dance. We go back, we go forward, we throw our bodies with the beat of our thinking. We feel for the story, feel after it, waiting for it, reaching after it, then writing, revising. A tango in every sense.

The end result is a consequence of a kind of history, a maturation of the ebb and flow of the relationship between your mind and the page. A story is convincing, I believe, less because of a proficiency of technique or language and more from the result of its coming alive on the screen. It first had to live as a story in the making, a being (v) in time, before it became the story we hold and share.

Taking Our Time: Being is an Action of Care

“Human life does not happen in time, but rather is time itself.” — Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

My graduate days studying ontology (the philosophy of being) helped me appreciate the word being as a verb, an action in the sense of existening in time, rather than merely a state or an entity, which a chatbot is better designed to simulate.

AI can’t simulate being-in-time. Its purpose is to overcome time. German philosopher Martin Heidegger coined the term “Dasein” to describe humanity as a being unfolding in time, particularly a time mindful of its mortality, which makes time all the more meaningful.

To be in time that will not last forever, to Heidegger, made care and concern (Sorge) the heart of human experience. But care doesn’t mean we rush time; it means the very opposite: we take our time, we are careful with our time. We slow down with time. We appreciate it.

All writers know, despite how often we are tempted to wish otherwise, that a story isn’t a being or a thing we pull out of our heads instantly or quickly. Stories become. They come to be, over time, through time, and as a result of the time we take with them.

AI cannot do that, of course. It exists without time, outside of time. That is its selling point. But that should also be its telling point, what gives it away, what defeats the point of its promise to writers. The line between convenience and automation is razor-thin, and while the former may support or supplement our care, the latter certainly supplants it.

There is no art without the risk of caring.

This truth is at the center of James Baldwin’s short story, “Sonny Blues,” which my class completed this Friday. It is a story about how the possibility of healing and freedom waits for us in the communion we have with music, or any art, for that matter. There is a costly freedom at stake in the communion between the composer and the “consumer,”1 and Baldwin’s narrator eventually understands these stakes, both for the listener and the creator.

Having long traded the 'darkness' of his roots for a 'square' life of mainstream assimilation, the narrator finds himself in a jazz club where he finally notices that his brother, Sonny

[A]nd his boys up there [on the stage] were keeping [the music] new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen…Freedom lurked around us, and I understood, at last, that [Sonny] could help us to be free if we listened, that he would never be free until we did.

The freedom couldn’t have come otherwise. It needed the accumulated time, it needed Sonny “to fill it…with the breath of his life, his own.” For Sonny, who had struggled with heroin, isolated in the darkness without his brother, had “to speak for himself…[his] fingers fill[ing] the air with life, his life. But that life [which] contained so many others.” Composing his own music was a great risk, and what it gave birth to was freedom, freedom for himself and his brother.

There is no art without the risk of caring, without the stakes of caring that accumulate over time. Because of time, we care. Because we care, we take our time, we bear it, hold on to it carefully. Again, this is what AI cannot do. It cannot take its time. It cannot slow dance with you.

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Reading Poetry is An Act of Rebellion: The Page is Also a Dancing Partner

“It was beautiful because it wasn’t huried…I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours…” — James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

People often ask me, because I write poetry, why it is so difficult to understand. I tell them that poetry is not about “communication”; it is about communion.2 It’s not about getting the poem to turn over some information; it’s about getting ourselves to take time with the poem, to attend to the poem, which means to be patient and available.

T.S. Eliot suggested that communication cannot fully explain poetry. Communication is the transfer of data; it’s fast, efficient, and can be superficial if needed. You can do it by scanning a page or asking a chatbot for a summary. But poetry is the great slow dance. It exists to make the moment last longer, the reading experience grow deeper. It is for saturation, not exchange. When we read a poem, we aren’t trying to “get” the information; we are trying to inhabit the poem we are “holding.”

With everything telling us to go fast, the “Slowdown” of poetry is the act of rebellion. It is a tango made up of trust and mistakes and feeling our being-in-time. Reading poetry is our recovery of reading in general, the act of reading all things (or, at least, many things) in terms of poetry, in terms of slowing down, holding what we have.

This is the Slow Dance manifesto. AI can give you a product, but it can not give you a process. Its job is to take you out of the process.

If we want to roll back the automation of the soul, we have to return to celebrating process, risk, and the element of time.

We have to return to the slow dance.

We have to remember our being-in-time again in terms of a slow dance with the muses around us, a slow dance with writing, reading, living, a slow dance filled with mistakes and risks and time in the world.

To get tangled up in the dance, the risks, the world, is part of the tango. It is part of the process. It is part of the humanity of the whole thing.

We can never forget that the whole purpose of writing, reading, living, is, after all, the very act of it, the doing of it, our own writing, our own reading, our own living, with all the mess and the risk and time that comes with it.

AI can’t slow dance with you. But we still can. At least for now.

Much Love,

C.I.

Dear No Ones,

My next essay on AI and writing is broken into three parts, which I will share throughout this week. The primary metaphor is the slow dance. But this is not an essay about dancing. I am using the metaphor of dance to name the poetry of reading and writing the language of bodies in real time and space, a poetry threatened by a takeover of AI. The metaphor of the slow dance names the embodied poetry of human engagement, our desiring, writing, and reading. I am thinking about dance as a metaphor of our being (v) in the real world.

I am sorry to say it, OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest of you guys, but your AI can’t dance. And it never will. See you below.

Much Love,

C.I.

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About three weeks ago or more, my school’s Monday assembly opened with a rendition of “Por Una Cabeza.” I hadn’t heard the number in some time, and when the violins began to swell, I was pulled back to that unforgettable scene in Martin Brest’s Scent of a Woman when Al Pacino’s Frank Slade, a blind, bitter old man, teaches the young, disillusioned Charlie Simms (Chris O’Donnell) how to embrace the raw and beautiful risks of life through the tango.

The beauty of the scene was not about any technical perfection of dance steps, although the viewer and, for a moment, Charlie Simms, are supposed to be impressed by a blind man dancing the tango. The real beauty was a deeper truth, a bare poetry that, for a blind man, like Frank Slade, who is drowning in his own regrets, the dance was the only way he could “see” his world at that moment, holding its flesh in the body of his dance partner, the younger woman played by British actress Gabrielle Anwar. Slade tells Anwar’s character, “If you make a mistake, if you get all tangled up, you just tango on.” The mistake, the tangle, is part of the tango. The point and poem of the sequence, both of the scene and the dance, is not about the perfection of the result but the embodied poesis of the moment.

It is a holding together of

bodies.

A rhythm of heartbeat and breath.

Trust survived

as dance.

Will All Writing Be AI Writing?

Sam Kriss, in The New York Times Magazine, declared a month ago that soon, essentially all writing might be AI writing. I commented on that post, rejecting his forecast, not only unwilling to believe such a dreadful future is imminent but also unable to believe such a dreadful reality is possible. How could the human species continue after giving up its right to tell its own story? And while I understand his fear, I don’t think there is enough discussion of how we paved the way for the threat of this takeover in the first place.

AI did not come on the scene as an intervention for some desperate need, nor was it a grand design to avoid expressing ourselves, as I argued in my previous essay on AI in the classroom. The advent of AI was the inevitable result of the decline of embodiment, the slow decline of embodied experience that now disregards embodied expression. I recently discussed T.S. Eliot’s poem “Hollow Men” with my students, and before Eliot declares, almost like Sam Kriss, how the world doesn’t end with a bang but a whimper, we discussed how his speaker confesses: “We are the hollow men. / We are the stuffed men…/ Our dried voices, when we whisper together / are quiet and meaningless /as wind in dry grass.”

What we discussed was the tragic juxtaposition of the hollow and the stuffed, the tragedy of his Hollow Men, which maps our current crisis. If AI has, or will, take over human expression, it is only because of the gradual hollowing out of our desire to express ourselves bodily and truly through the rise of a Superficial status quo. Let me explain.

The Slow Dance has Been Canceled: From Boyz II Men to the Hollow Men

“I would believe only in a God that knows how to dance.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

I’m an 80s baby who grew up in the 90s, an era when R&B was defined by the slow dance. From Jodeci to Hi-Five to Boyz II Men, the slow dance was our moment of embodied poetry, a textured, bodily, procedural risk to discover, know, and exchange human contact in real space and time. It consumated the real presence of the gaze, the smile, the wonder, the fragrance, the risk, the gesture, the sweat, the flesh, the writing and the reading of real bodies and their language for knowing and understanding. And while the slow dance was not the only way for this exchange to take place, it serves as a helpful metaphor for the trembling poeisis at the heart of embodied experience.

But then came “Ayo Technology,” and we traded the friction of the slow dance for the superficiality of the swipe. Apps like Tinder, Bumble, and countless others promised a “product” (a connection) without the “process” (the dance). It was technology doing what it does best: make life easier. However, the unintended consequence (or was it the very consequence intended for some?) was an automated shortcut of humanity that bypasses the awkward, sweaty work (and risk) of being present with each other.

The Great Ménage à Trois of Dance: Heat, Sweat, and the Third Presence

To understand why the “swipe” is a poor substitute for the “slow dance,” we have to remember the physics of the dance. A slow dance isn’t a transaction; it isn’t a technology in the Aristotelian sense of the word as a “craft”; it’s a high-stakes communion. It’s a union with the feeling of the room’s air growing heavy, the scent of hair product, fragrance, sweat and anticipation. There is the pull or the wonder from within, the taste upon the mouth, the stirring in the stomach, the simultaneous heaviness and lightness. It’s the specific, grounding weight of your dance partner’s chin against the collarbone, breath upon your cheek, the fit of two bodies so precise it feels like a lock clicking into place.

A heat rises when two bodies move as one. The mingled sweat and fragrance is the shared border, or rather, the agreed suspension of borders for the moment. In that space, you aren’t just moving to the beat or melody of a song; you are participating in a great ménage à trois: the two of you and the music as one. The rhythm is the third heartbeat in the room. You don’t just “hear” it; you inhabit it. This is an embodiment that goes beyond the surface, beyond the superficial. This is the poetry of the slow dance, mapped across many interactions of real bodies sharing space and time.

The superficial nature of apps can never simulate the friction of real presence that a dance consummates. You can’t have communion without the risk of the flesh, the risk of stepping on a toe, the risk of a missed beat, the risk of being seen so closely that your breathing has to synchronize with another’s just to do the beat justice. And there’s also the risk of being rejected, among other things. The app can’t feel the collarbone or the laughable embarrassment. It can’t feel the way the music can turn space and time into a mirage of timelessness—what the Latins called sub specie aeternitatis, “under the aspect of eternity.” The app offers a chance of “connection” that is frictionless, which is to say, it offers a connection that substitutes the heat of humanity.

What’s Desire Got to Do with It? Tinder and the Missing Subject

This is where the superficial lack of depth and body left a hollow vacuum for the artificial to fill. By abandoning the textured risk of the dance floor for the efficiency of the swipe, we changed the medium of connection; we changed the nature of the “self” involved in connection. Dating apps promised a shortcut that bypasses the awkward, sweaty work of being present to the world through our desires, using technology that automates the “desire” of the human encounter. This is the heart of the problem.

In their seminal work Anti-Oedipus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that we have fundamentally misunderstood the nature of desire. Desire isn’t missing its object, but, “it is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire.” We are taught to believe, they argue, that desire is a function of what we need; that we are missing an object (a partner, a product), and we must “get” it to be complete and to complete our desire. This is the logic of the dating app: you are “missing” someone, and the algorithm will fill that hole for you, which is to say, fulfill your desire without you having to be the subject of your desire.

But Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is actually a productive force of personhood, the energy that makes us deeply real, driven to embodiment, beyond the superficial, and certainly anything other than artificial. Embodied desire is the “heat” of personhood exchanged in the energy of the dance, the flow of the music, the feeling of the collarbone, the urge to know the other. But again, do not limit the metaphor of dance and music to only dance and music. The root word of music is “muse,” found in other words like amusement and museum. “Muse” comes from the ancient Greek goddesses of inspiration, the muses, and its connection to dance is to orient yourself to inspiration. It is desire’s role to produce that rich energy after inspiration, after the muses, the music. Desire is not to quench itself, or to solve itself as efficiently as possible. Desire is the drive to embody experience, to make our understanding of the world as real and embodied as possible. It is the opposite of the artificial, which is why it is sometimes fraught with insecurity.

The slow dance is not where you become a consumer, nor a worker, or a data point for analysis. During the slow dance, you realize, as Deleuze argues, a field of pure desire and story, a “plateau” where the music and the dance partner’s heat flow through you without being blocked by the “organizing purposes” of social utility, which is an intimacy more in terms of the language of work, as Erin Williams recently wrote about. The app, conversely, is the Over-Organized Body. It traps us in a loop of “The Feed” and “The Swipe,” exchanging the slow dance for a transaction in which we are merely bystanders to an automated operation of desire.

If the slow dance is a “Body without Organs” freed from the analysis of consumerism, the Human via AI is a “Body without Organs” emptied of the messiness of the body. A hollow shell, like Eliot’s Hollow Man, whose “heat” of humanity has been replaced by the efficiency of technology. Hollowed and stuffed. When we automate the “reach,” we lose the person who is reaching; we lose the subject of desire. We lose ourselves. We lose our rights to be subjects of our own desires.

What Comes After Desire? Nothing.

From the loss of subjects of desire, we easily get the loss of the writer of desire. Once we decide that “knowledge” is just a deposit to be transferred and evaluated rather than food for thought to create with, we make the human mind redundant. In fact, we make thinking a great inconvenience. It is no longer, “I think; therefore, I am,” but, “I…I…I…?”

And there is where the unthinkable lies, speechless, oblivious, with nothing. The unbelievable in ellipses.

AI is the ultimate capitalist tool because, as Gilles Deleuze also noted, capitalism is “thoroughly illiterate.” It doesn’t want to take the time to read; it wants to transact. It wants the product without the process. It wants the human without the risk of humanity. It wants you without yourself.

No wonder its greatest accomplishment, Artificial Intelligence, threatens to eliminate human writing completely.1

Stay tuned for part two.

Dear No Ones,

It was the great linguist, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who called for language to go “Back to the rough ground!” He criticized the frictionless language of philosophy’s big ideas that failed to relate. The lovers of wisdom had lost their claim to real understanding of what was at the heart of language—namely, the desire to mean something. Language, he said, needed to return to the rough ground, the everyday, messy, raw, imperfect utterance of the human desire to say what it means, a ground that is unthinkable to Artificial Intelligence.

To close out this school year, in the upcoming weeks, I will be releasing three (and a half ) essays I have written over the year on my confrontation as an instructor, writer, and linguistic being with the intrusion of AI. This series is also a reflection on my completion of ten years of teaching.

The essay below describes my first year as a teacher, going from studying philosophy in grad school to finding myself teaching ELA to a class of 4th-grade English Language Learners. It was in that first year of teaching that I found myself “Back to the rough ground!” of language. I learned from those 4th-graders that it was a desire to make meaning that was at stake in language and education. Language was desire, a trembling desire to share what we mean.

The authentic reality of that trembling desire may be the very essence of our humanity that is currently in, to borrow the words of my colleague Mr. Jenkins, “the crosshairs of the LLMs.” What we desire to say has never been more important than it is now.

Much love,

C.I.

A Gentrification of the Mind

A mind is a terrible thing to waste, but a more terrible thing is to displace it. The intrusion of artificial intelligence, which can generate a “perfect” student essay in seconds, has made the importance of preserving ownership of thought the most urgent issue in education today. Whereas educators previously lamented the mediocrity of thought, in the age of AI, we now crave the slightest glimmer of authentic thought, proficient or not.

This educational and technological crisis, however, did not emerge from a vacuum, nor is it a result of students finally uniting to give up their voice. This crisis is the symptom of a much older pedagogical failure, one I witnessed firsthand when I began my teaching career in a fourth-grade classroom.

It was almost ten years ago. I was teaching English Language Arts at a charter school that served minority students from lower-income families. The school’s mission was noble: “to eliminate the achievement gap in our lifetime.” I was up for the challenge. As a person of color who shared my students’ experience of being marginalized by the very language I was now teaching, I felt a deep connection to the work. I soon discovered, however, that the school’s philosophy was built on a troubling foundation rooted in a theory of the “knowledge deficit.” The knowledge deficit argues that underprivileged students fail because they lack the necessary background knowledge required for achievement. The proposed solution was a pedagogy of conformity, a design to correct and fill this perceived void. In other words, teaching as a gentrification of the mind.

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From Gift to Craft

I was a writer before I was an educator. In those days, I never worried…

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Dear No Ones,

Remembering is a gift. But so is forgetting.

That is, at the moment, the current opening line of my manuscript, which I finally completed five days ago. The suggestion for this confession, an admission of the complexity of memory’s coming and going, came to me about a month ago while listening to Daniel Caesar’s latest album, Son of Spergy. …

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Dear No Ones,

It’s the time of year again when the Holidays interrogate us with hope and cynicism, heartache and answered prayers. To some, it’s an easy question to answer, yes, “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.” To others, it's an offensive question: it’s the most painful time of the year. Somewhere in between the hope and the hopelessness is t…

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Dear No Ones,

Some of you may not know that I am one of the poetry editors for Waxing & Waning, a literary journal based in Nashville. It’s a print and online platform for voices that “scream coherently, holler into the abyss, invite the dark or show the light.”

Two years ago, I wrote the foreword for their 11th issue. It was a reflection on life after C…

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Dear No Ones,

The times feel like they unequivocally demand purity. Politically, socially, and culturally, we are expected to choose a side and stay there, to keep our beliefs unadulterated by nuance, our identities unsullied by a connection with the other, and our allegiances untroubled by the complexities of wonder. The demand for purity, however, will…

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Dear No Ones,

“There are always two people working on a poem,” says Louise Glück, “the writer and the reader.” I inhabit both of these roles: a writer who creates texts and a teacher who guides readers through them. It is from this dual perspective that I am consta…

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Dear No Ones,

It is a fine time to be thinking about poetry here in Nashville. Over the last year and a half, I’ve watched an exceptional flowering of work from some of the city’s most celebrated poets: Didi Jackson, Tiana Clark, and Major Jack…

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Dear No Ones,

On October 3rd, Nashville's Porch Writing Collective will welcome author James Stewart III for their Craft & Reading Series. He will host an insightful, one-hour session, “Fragments of Memory, Family, and the Novel,” which will explore the intersection of craft and personal history.

Afterward, I will have the pleasure of joining him in conve…

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Dear No Ones,

Two days ago, made it 33 years since that Saturday morning when our family received the call that my mother had passed away. It’s a memory that stays with me in almost exact recall. Admittedly, remembering each detail has become harder with each year passing away. Still, the fa…

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Dear No Ones,

I love cardinals. I love spotting them out of nowhere, when I least expect it. A surprise of color.

Every time I catch sight of one appearing before me, whether skipping along my neighbor’s fence that my office window faces, or sitting on a telephone wire (pictured above), my eyes light up. The bird flicks its tail, twitches its feathers, t…

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Dear No Ones,

My history books tell me that the spring of 1965 was an unforgettable moment to be alive. Gambia declared its independence from Britain on February 18th. In New York City, three days later, Malcolm X was assassinated. The following month, Martin Luther King Jr. …

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Dear No Ones,

At the moment, the sun is hanging hea…

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