I want to say Welcome to many of you who joined This Precious Dark Skin this week. If you want to know a bit about me, check out my About Page.

I’m swamped with writing a novel proposal for an upcoming deadline. So for today and the next three Saturdays I’m going to reshare my favorite posts I published here. Starting from Flash stories, then Craft Essays, then Essays.

Here’re my 3 favorite flash stories I wrote:

And:

These Things We Not Saying published on SmokeLong Quarterly.

Small Scale Sinners by Mahreen Sohail

This was a delightful read. My book is full of highlights.

There’re untranslated Urdu words in this collection, which has won the 2026 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction. I learned a few words of Urdu language translating them into English in my mind from the context where the words appear in this collection.

I love the first-person plural voice in the first story “Our School Year”. This collective voice pulled me in right from the first paragraph. And there’s a vast range of POV choices in this collection—first-person plural who is the voice of girls, another first-person plural who is the voice of a brother and a sister, POV shifts between different characters in a single story, omniscient POV.

To me, the most fascinating thing about these stories is their structure and forms. My favorite form from these stories is “Sisters” and the list story titled “A List of Places My Mother Was Old”.

The last lines of these stories took my breath away. They’re startling, insightful—they demand readers to read them again and again. Like the last line from “Sisters”:

“Nobody has taught me that living a life that is entirely your own is also an act of mourning.”

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw

This collection is one of those books where after you read it you say, I’m so glad these stories were written, were out in the world. This collection has dazzled me in its intensity, in the wants of the lead characters.

This collection has won several awards—winner of the 2020 L.A. Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for Fiction, winner of the 2020 Story Prize, winner of the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award, and finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction.

This is my favorite story collection where what patriarchal traditions and norms of the Church do to girls and women is bared—in every moment and scene in the stories—to its bones.

Insurrections by Rion Amilcar Scott

This collection is the winner of the 2017 PEN/Robert Bingham Prize for Debut Short Fiction.

Years ago, before I started reading the books the press publishes in contemporary fiction, I didn’t know the University Press of Kentucky publishes contemporary fiction. “Insurrections” is the first story collection that introduced me to the New Poetry & Prose Series the press publishes every year. What a talented writer Rion is and what an unforgettable stories the stories in “Insurrections” are. After reading this collection I remember writing the press’s name on the back of a large spiral notebook I keep and circling the name of the press. I do this when I love reading the book a press published—and I dream of having my own work published at the press.

My dream has come true.

The University Press of Kentucky is publishing my debut story collection “The Town Under the Mountains: Stories” in New Poetry & Prose Series. My book will be released to the world in May 18, 2027.

Etna by Paul Yoon

I love how the name Etna sounds, the dog narrator’s name, until I learned that he was named after a volcano. But I still love how the name Etna sounds on my tongue.

This short novel about a courageous dog reminded me of The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. The weight of what the war did to the dog and the humans (there’re things we are told and things we are not told) is heartbreaking.

There’s this passage I keep thinking about long after I finished reading the novel when Etna tells us how humans taught him to attack, he tells us this without any emotion attached to it.

And there’s one heartbreaking moment when Etna licks a dead woman’s face, then he realizes what he is doing, licking her face as if she is alive, then he stops licking her face, and he tells us he is ashamed. In the entire novel the way the dog tells us the story is detached, as if the war (the story begins after an unnamed war has ended) and the devastating ways war takes away from people and animals and the environment was not happening to him, and around him, but in such tender moments he tells us what he feels and we feel for him.

And there’s another heartbreaking description he makes about his friend’s eyes, how a war has changed her. “And the blue in her eyes grew less blue, and I could never explain that.”

This novel is full of sensory details and heartbreaking moments. The many short sentences throughout the novel perfectly fit this story told through the POV of a canine narrator.

Rabbit, Fox, Tar by P. C. Verrone

I love that there’s narrative propulsion and mystery throughout this novel. I wanted to keep on reading—to find out what happens next.

My favorite part about this novel is the POV choice, omniscient and third person POVs, and the only first-person POV of the mysterious girl who is one of the lead characters in the story, which comes only a few times, for a short section, which is a deeply moving first-person voice.

How To Fake It in Society by KJ Charles

I read this historical romance in one glorious day.

I’m a fan of KJ Charles’s historical fictions. You know a writer who you trust will write a good historical novel? For me, KJ Charles is one of those writers. I love her evocative historical novels and she has never disappointed me. Her latest—Titus and Nico were a delight to read.

Cat on a Hot Tin Woof by Spencer Quinn

Book #16 from Chet & Bernie Series.

Spencer Quinn has nailed the language in the way the dog narrates the story. In my book recommendations about my favorite books where dogs are central characters I wrote that Chet & Bernie Series is my favorite series where the entire series is told through the POV of a canine narrator.

The latest from this series is a delightful read. I love how in every book in the series Chet (the canine narrator) translates human expressions literally and the literal translations makes me laugh out loud.

I have other favorite magazines and journals where I read essays and short stories like Craft, The Rumpus, , Short Story, Long, and , but the following are my favorite publications to read memoirs, essays, and short stories.

Narratively

It publishes only true stories.

It’s been years now since I started reading memoirs published at Narratively. Once I started reading the memoirs publishes I never stopped reading. In fact, I was enamored with the kind of stories they publish that I became a Submissions Reader for the publication.

Narratively has a unique style. To read a true story published in Narratively is like watching a great movie, scenes unfolding in full dramatic details in narrative real-time.

Narratively also looks for untold stories, stories that are unfamiliar to most readers, stories most people would not have read or seen on TV. From Deep Dives to Secret Lives to Memoirs, from special categories like Heart of the Matter series, The Personals, and The Ever-Present Liquid series, all the stories published at Narratively are untold.

Here’re a few of my favorites:

• How to Mourn a Sexually Abusive Father

• As My Face Disappeared So Did My Mother and Father

• The Obsessive Life and Mysterious Death of the Fisherman Who Discovered The Loch Ness Monster

• The Gutsy Undercover Cop Who Took Down Chicago P.D.’s Most Crooked Crew

• The Monk Who Ghosted Me

• Anatomy of an Absolutely Wild 1970s Hijacking You’ve Never Heard Of

Longreads

Publishes only true stories.

Longreads used to send the five best picks of the week every Friday but now they send the best five editors’ picks every Wednesday too. My favorite thing about the week’s top picks that Longreads sends to its subscribers is the description Longreads’s staff gives under the headline of the top 5 picks. Each staff writes their own thought on what they think about the piece. I can tell this description, which is a short paragraph, is written by a staff member who read the essay carefully. Just from these descriptions you can decide whether the subject matter of the essay interests you and you want to read it or not.

I’ve read some of my favorite essays in Longreads like

• Nathan

• My Name is a Mountain

• We’re More Ghosts Than People

• The Bullet in My Mother’s Head

I’ve noticed one consistent detail in the essays Longreads publishes. The topic an essay explores might be a very familiar subject like grief or searching for identity but the lens into which the topic is explored goes deep.

Longreads also has a reading list. These lists are not boring lists like ‘5 Books That Made Me Feel Something’. Rather they’re the most unique, intriguing, and memorable lists like

• A Reading List on Waiting

• A Prismatic Reading List on Pigment, Paint, and Perception

• A Reading List for Criers

• A Reading List for Library Lovers and Realists

• A Reading List About Extreme Jobs

Electric Literature

The Faraway World by Patricia Engel.

Green Frog by Gina Chung.

The Disappeared by Andrew Porter.

These are at the top of my favorite story collections. I knew about the collections because I first read one of the stories from the collections on Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading the publication sends to its subscribers every Monday. I learned about many talented emerging and established writers from this recommendation alone.

When someone asks me for short stories recommendation Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading is the first publication that comes to my mind.

Electric Literature also publishes remarkable essays every Friday. The essays they publish are not as scene-driven as Narratively’s memoirs but they’re unique in their own way.

There’s one phrase I always think about every time I read an essay published by Electric Literature—deeply moving.

Here’re my favorite short stories:

• On the Origin of An Ending

• The Great Silence

And my favorite essays:

• My Body Remembers the Story You Want to Erase

• We Were Boys Being Boys

• I’m Afraid I’m Going To Lose My Boys To This Country

• You Can’t Unsubscribe From Grief

The Sun

Publishes both short stories and essays.

Every now and then someone mentions to me a short story published by The New Yorker. But I’m not fascinated by the short stories The New Yorker publishes. I don’t remember a single story that made me want to read more of their stories. The only short stories I remember fondly years after I read them on The New Yorker are George Saunders’s stories. But there’re memorable short stories I read on The Sun I remember vividly years after I read them like

• Heavenly Bodies

• Nectar

• I Got You

And memorable essays like

• Ghost Dogs

• Penumbra

• And These Too Are Defensive Wounds

Roxane Gay’s Emerging Writer Series

Publishes essays only.

Is there another publication—where the most diversified, the most wide range of essay forms, the most lyrical, the most focus on essays by emerging writers, the most thought provoking—that publishes essays?

For me, ’s Emerging Writer Series is that publication.

My favorite part about these essays is their form. There’s no one form, there’re all kinds of essay forms like lyrical essays, braided essays, and fragmented essays. Sometimes the essays use none of these forms and instead use their own unique form to tell their stories.

Here’re my top favorites:

• Black Negation

• The Yellow Car

• The Demulcent of Shame

• How to Name Your Black Son in a Racist Country

• The Switzerland Schedule

I’m not fully against “write what you know” writing advice. I read most of John Grisham’s legal thrillers. I could read on the pages of his books how his legal expertise and professional experience (he was a lawyer before he became an author) played a significant role in the writing of his bestselling novels. Years ago I read two thriller books that are set in the sky I remember vividly now—Falling and Drowning by T.J. Newman. After I read the novels I learned the author, before she became an author, was a flight attendant. What T.J. Newman knew about how to stay alive inside planes and when planes drop from the sky into an ocean was rendered deliciously on the pages of the novels.

Personal and professional experiences are great, they give us an advantage, and they save us time—we don’t need to spend time researching about a place or people or situations we’re not familiar with. So yes I’m in favor of writing what you know but I’m also in favor of writing what you do not know. More times than I care to admit I read writing advice that tells me to “write what I know.” And every once in a while I come across a writing advice that favors “write what you do not know”. In “Writer’s Block Is Part of Maggie O’Farrell’s Process” Maggie, the author of Hamnet whose TV adaptation won the Oscars last year, answers that “write what you know” is a piece of writing advice she never wants to hear again.

“You should write what you don’t know. For me, the best start is writing something I don’t understand, something that baffles and confounds me.” –link

I agree with this completely.

My mother was born and grew up in Tiya, a small town in Ethiopia. I was born and grew up in Addis Ababa, the capital city and the largest city of Ethiopia. It takes only about two hours to drive from the city to reach the town but the difference between the city and the town—the people and the place and the tradition—is as tall and as big as Ras Dashen, the tallest and the biggest mountain in Ethiopia, as deep as Lake Shala, the deepest lake in Ethiopia, and as wide as Lake Tana, the widest lake in Ethiopia.

The deep-rooted centuries-old tradition that do not serve the girls and the women in Tiya, the place where the eleven stories in my forthcoming story collection are set, it baffles and confounds me. This is where I began writing my stories. In the writing and rewriting of my stories it was the discovery and the learning about the people and the place and the culture that was a constant delight. In that discovery I felt different emotions—admiration for the girls and women who live in the town under patriarchy and long-standing traditions that do not serve the girls and the women in town, anger about the men and the elders who impose centuries-old traditions on the women in their lives, love for the place that has centuries-old culture that does not exist anywhere else in the world. And a deep-rooted desire to understand the girls and the women and the men and the elders and the tradition and the place, the place my grandfather called his beloved town until he died.

The one powerful thing that inspired me to come back to my stories again and again was the NOT knowing, the journey to discovery, the surprise found along the way.

Like a tourist who is coming to a new town or city or country for the first time who asks a million questions about the place and the people there’s magic in NOT knowing, in finding everything you can about people’s way of living you don’t know, places you don’t know, cultures you’re not familiar with.

In a recent comment thread I almost went to battle with a stranger on the internet.

In a story published by Narratively last week titled ‘You’ve Got to Keep Going Till It Bleeds’ I came across an insulting comment made to a comment I wrote to the heartbreaking story. This stranger on the internet wrote that it was written by AI. It takes a lot to make me enraged but this comment enraged me. I do not engage in battle with strangers on the internet who jump in my shoes and say things about me as if they know me and the words I write. But I needed to make my stand on AI clear to this comment, even to this stranger who didn’t have a single post published on substack. This felt particularly important because the published story was receiving many comments and readers were engaging with the writer who wrote the story and with each other. I responded to the comment saying if the commenter was talking about my two sentence comment (“Another favorite to add to “The Personals”. One significant moment is written evocatively in this moving story.”) that I wrote it and not AI and if the commenter was talking about ‘You’ve Got to Keep Going Till It Bleeds’ it was not written by AI. Every story Narratively publishes goes through several rounds of reading and reviewing. And the editors work closely with writers whose work has been accepted—editing rigorously. And this editing is not just grammar. It’s looking closely at the big picture, it’s molding it, it’s deepening the story and the people in it to make that big picture clear. It was not necessary to write this to the commenter. So I just wrote that Narratively does not publish AI generated stories and that I know this because I’m part of the Narratively team.

A day later I received a response to my comment. This commenter wrote that they read a piece I published on Narratively titled “One Die-Hard Reader’s All-time Favorite Narratively Stories.” Because I used em dashes in the piece the commenter said that I used AI and that usage of em dashes is a sign of a distinctive ‘AI voice’.

I laughed out loud when I read that.

Em dash is my favorite punctuation and I use it in my writing—carefully and intentionally. This commenter wrote that AI uses em dash as one or two words at the end of a sentence to make a point. Is that even true? I don’t think so and I don’t believe it. You need a human mind and a human instinct to make an em dash pull its weight in a sentence. You have to look at a sentence closely, see what the em dash is doing, whether the sentence can live without it or whether the sentence makes the most meaning and the most emotional weight—with a placement of an em dash in the right place in a sentence.

Only a human being can make that decision.

And I know one thing for sure—to dismiss the time and energy and love editors put to bring each story to fully polished pieces is to dishonor those hard working editors, and to claim a writer who uses em dashes in their writing is using AI is an outrageous accusation. Am I supposed to think some of my favorite novels like Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, A Guardian and A Thief by Megha Majumdar, and A Dog in Georgia by Lauren Grodstein where em dashes are used intentionally and beautifully are the works of AI too?

This commenter then wrote that I do not know about the advancement of large language models, that AI now can write long forms.

I laughed out loud when I read that comment too.

And then the commenter recommended an app that detects AI writing. Thanks for this recommendation, I wanted to write a response as a sarcasm but I didn’t. I was also tempted to write a response saying that he insulted me when the commenter wrote that I don’t know anything about the advancement of AI but it wasn’t worth to write a single word response to this stranger who doesn’t know who I am and the writings I write and who clearly doesn’t know the human stories publishes. I know applications like Pangram this commenter recommended that detect AI writing, even though I don’t use any of the apps to detect AI writing, even though I’m not sure about their accuracy, even though I judge words on the page the old-fashioned way (using my instinct and logic and gut feeling and years and years of reading literature written by human beings).

This commenter then continued to ‘You’ve Got to Keep Going Till It Bleeds’ listing sentences from the piece saying that they’re written by AI, that the sentences do not make sense and the em dashes in the sentences do not make sense. After I read the comment I reread the piece two times paying attention to the sentences the commenter listed. One question kept repeating in my mind when I reread the piece. What’s this commenter (I don’t know if the commenter is a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ or a ‘they’) talking about? Has the commenter read the piece? Really read it? In memoir writing, the sentences the commenter listed like

“At the time, I took it as instruction. Later, I realized it was philosophy.” —link

And

“Pain and beauty weren’t opposites—they were reflections.” —link

And

“That correction stopped me. It wasn’t defiance—it was insistence on personhood.” —link

are what are called thematic wells, insights or meanings writers make out of scenes/moments that just happened. For me, not only do the sentences make sense they make the most powerful and memorable meaning in the context of the story, including the words at the end of the sentences that come after the em dashes.

In an age of AI where an alarming number of people are using AI to write, for the rest of us who choose NOT to use AI in our writing in any capacity (from writing the first idea of a story or an essay or a novel to the last revision of the last sentence of a story or an essay or a novel) there will be times when we will be accused of using AI. But we know who we are and what we write and how we write: old-fashioned pen and paper or typing on a keyboard of a laptop and using our unique minds and hearts, minds and hearts that belong to us and to no one else in the world, minds and hearts—if you give them a chance—will give you a story or an essay or a book only you can write, minds and hearts that are capable of producing the most beautiful stories in literature, minds and hearts that are incomparable with a machine that spits out words written by human beings.

Related:

In 2022, the first year I started submitting my work to literary journals I opened Submittable every day. I refreshed its page throughout the day. Every time I did this I felt utterly exhausted and frustrated. I wondered why I was playing this game—waiting and waiting and waiting some more to hear a response from an editor or publisher of a literary journal. More times than I care to admit I thought about giving up competing to be published in literary journals. I thought about publishing all the stories I write on my publication on substack. I have no gatekeepers here. I don’t have to wait 8 months before I receive a rejection email. I don’t have to wait 8 months before my piece is accepted by a publication. I don’t have to wait for readers to read my work. I can publish my stories whenever I want.

In the publishing world we don’t know many things.

We don’t know when we will hear a response.

We don’t know if we will receive a response.

We don’t know how long it would take before we receive a response (one month? Six months? A year?). We don’t know if publishers would adhere to their response-time written in their guidelines.

We don’t know if our work will be rejected or accepted.

This NOT knowing is part of the publishing world.

But there’s a part of me—a big part of me—who believes in competition. That it makes our work better. That it pushes us further to make our work stand out. That competition makes the long journey to publication worthwhile when you finally receive that YES from an editor of a literary journal.

I self-published some of my short stories on substack and I’m happy about my decision to forego the gatekeepers. But I’ve to admit something I hate admitting. I feel proud when I publish my work on substack and readers comment that they love my short stories but I feel more proud when I receive that long-awaited YES from a publisher. I hate feeling this way, that I’m putting more weight on external validation for my work, that every time one of my stories is accepted for publication by a literary journal I feel like I’ve won a coveted award for something I love doing.

But there’s one wonderful upside to competition: my stories published in literary journals, including the eleven stories in my forthcoming story collection, are better from what they used to be, from their earlier drafts, because I chose to compete with other writers. Because I chose to compete for my stories to get past the gatekeepers.

I don’t have thousands of subscribers on substack. I don’t have a large following on other writing platforms or social medias. But I do have one important thing—my work, my stories. I can revise them to make them as good as they can be.

There’s no guarantee that publishers will accept your story. But there’s one guarantee—the work that you come back to, again and again, because you want to compete with other writers, because you want your work to stand out from the crowd, it makes your story better and it surprises you and it changes you.

Every single story I’ve come back and revised, again and again, it has made the story better and it has surprised me and it has changed me.

Like your favorite person in the world you want to talk to again and again, coming back to your work makes you notice things about your favorite person you didn’t notice before—the light on their face when they speak, you wrote about it before but now you see a different light on their face and you pick your pen to write what this light means.

Every time I came back to my stories to revise there’s a sense of familiarity (I know this place and these characters and this situation) but there’re also questions on my mind—what else is there in each moment/scene? What else is this scene saying? This is our job as writers, to dig and dig more, to find out more about our characters, even characters we think we know, to find out what the story is really saying, how “what the story is saying” is shown and told in the story.

I spent about eight months last year revising my manuscript, which I thought I’d finished revising. I knew which publishers I was going to submit my manuscript. I knew I wanted my manuscript to compete with other manuscripts. But I decided to revise my manuscript again and spent time with it for months because I wanted to make it stand out from the overwhelming manuscript submissions queue. Now, after my book deal with the University Press of Kentucky (UPK), I’m thankful for those eight months I spent revising my already “good enough” manuscript.

After five years of consistently submitting my stories to literary journals I’ve learned Okay is not enough. Good Enough is not enough. Your essay or story or book must stand out from other hundreds and sometimes thousands of submissions. For example: one of my favorite journals One Story accepts 2000 short story submissions when it opens its window for submissions. To be published by One Story is one of my writing dreams. I don’t know if I will ever be published by them but I do know one thing for sure. There’re stories I wanted to send to One Story I revised again and again, because I wanted my story to stand out from the competition, which later were accepted by other prestigious journals. Jaana, which is published in print by midnight & indigo, is one of those stories.

I feel a huge sense of accomplishment that UPK has accepted my debut collection for their New Poetry & Prose Series. But sometimes I wonder. Would I have competed with other writers to get published by traditional publishers if I have massive email subscribers or followers like Ryan Holiday? Would I have worked so hard for so long to get a YES from the gatekeepers? Would I have spent a better part of a year revising a manuscript I thought I finished revising? Or would I have published the “good enough” manuscript on Amazon? Honestly, I don’t know the answer to that. I also wonder something else. The royalty earnings on Amazon are better than the earnings traditional publishers pay but I wonder if I would have been this proud if I’d self-published my manuscript.

Still, I see the value of competition. I see its value in my work as a Submissions Reader for Narratively. The submissions I forward to the next round of reviewing I can tell the writers have spent time (lots of time) on the piece. They have come back to their story again and again.

This is why I’m in favor of competition despite the road to publication being so crowded and so competitive. It pushes us to come back to the work, to revise it several times.

Favorite Essays I Read in the Past Month:

• Beneath the moon

• Living in an alive world

• The end of books

• The man who reads books for a living

• Homeless at ‘Harvard High School’

• What training my chaotic dog taught me about power, control—and human beings

• I spent months with an AI companion. It was worse than being alone.

• A dying world is still a world

• My father wants to age in place. AI will be watching.

Favorite Short Story I Read in the Past Month:

• Ping-Pong Kids

Favorite Sentence I Read in the Past Month:

“If a machine makes a painting that no one ever sees, it might be well-crafted or match some objective form of beauty, but it’s not art.” –link

Favorite Paragraph I Read in the Past Month:

“Decoration is important. Beauty matters. But decoration and beauty are insufficient to create art. Music, images, tastes and words become art when a transformation happens.” –link

Favorite Craft Essays I Read in the Past Month:

• A novel is not a machine

• A writer’s guide to rejection letters

• Ninety random thoughts about writing

• The worst use case for generative AI is writing

Etcetera

• The most anticipated books by women of color for Summer and Fall 2026

• How to survive the hottest summers in human history

• You might be a late bloomer

• Why reading is now restless

• Should fiction writers use AI?

• ChatGPT gave me chilling advice—as I simulated planning a mass shooting

• The most striking images of 2026, so far

• The biggest tell that something was written by AI

After reading this post where we get to know the well-read who writes the thought-provoking and beautifully written posts in Woman of Letters, I’m inspired to write a list of details about me. I’m sharing in the hopes that I’ll see the view behind the curtain for the writers I read online and admire—not boring stuff like where they were born or how old they are or where they got their MFA or what they’ve achieved in their lives but what is their most memorable childhood memory? What’s that one thing they can’t write without? What one thing do they do when no one is watching? When they failed, what one thing did they do that embarrassed them?

Here’s my life in 39 sentences:

1. My name in Amharic has 6 characters and it means “let you be the last one”, but I’m an elder sibling.

2. I have a thick voice, like a man’s; people who don’t know me, when they hear my voice without seeing me, assume I’m a man—once, in my childhood home, I had an entire conversation on a landline with a family member who wanted to talk with my parents and the whole time he thought he was talking with my brother and I didn’t correct him.

3. I played women’s football for one year when I got my degree at Alemaya University—not for the love of the sport but the good food the university provided for students who play sports.

4. At a university where we received our Bachelors, my best friend and I were very different: when electricity went out she hated the darkness and I was comfortable with sitting by myself in the dark without lighting candles, and she loved playing tennis, which I hated, I loved playing chess, which she hated, I had a boyfriend and she didn’t, she was brilliant at mathematics and physics and I hated anything to do with numbers—yet we were the best of friends, and she has a beautiful Amharic name, Tsigereda, which means “Rose” in English.

5. The beginning of my reading job at Narratively began in a supermarket: in a line-up, after a random Google search, I was reading one of Narratively’s memoirs How to Mourn a Sexually Abusive Father on my phone and I was moved beyond words, which led me to know about Narratively.

6. I love Ethiopian coffee, especially the coffee I drink when I travel to Tiya, where my grandparents were born and lived, where the stories in my forthcoming collection are set.

7. I’m fascinated by certain English words: for example, after reading Familiaris by David Wroblewski, I couldn’t stop thinking about the scientific name for dogs for weeks—Canis Familiaris, and the week I read Killing Monarchs by Cary J. Griffith, I couldn’t stop thinking about the name of the butterflies—Monarchs.

8. I finished high school in a private, all-girls school where my love of reading began.

9. I’ve never met , Executive Editor at Narratively (I know her because of my work at Narratively) and Lisa Williams, New Poetry & Prose Series Editor at University Press of Kentucky (I know her because of my book deal at UPK), in person but I feel like they’re my literary sisters.

10. From true love stories I know, from true love stories I read, my beloved grandfather’s and my grandmother’s love story is still the one that moves me the most.

11. I don’t remember who told me writing is not a viable career choice but I believed him or her or them and I didn’t write in public until my late 30s.

12. My mother has her name tattooed on the outside of her left hand and two small crosses on her two left fingers when she was eleven or twelve—not because she wanted it but because it was tradition in Tiya where she was born.

13. As I get older I’m noticing I love dogs more; I loved dogs even when I was a little girl but now that love is more and I think this change is because in the recent years I’ve read many novels and memoirs where dogs are the central characters.

14. I’ve met many strong Ethiopian women but my mom is the strongest one for me; when I was a child and I was overweight and sick and I couldn’t keep the fluids the doctors gave me she raced to the nearest church, knelt, and circled the church—on her knees.

15. I’m an Orthodox Christian; in Addis Ababa where I live every time I pass by a church I make a cross sign three times.

16. I almost died once—ectopic pregnancy rupture; the day I was saved, a brilliant woman doctor, whose name I’ll never forget, rushed me through an emergency laparoscopic surgery, and every month, on the 23^rd in Ethiopian calendar, the day I was saved, I go to Saint George church to thank the saint for saving my life. (In Ethiopia, Saint George is celebrated every month on the 23^rd day.)

17. I’ve always loved reading but I never thought reading could be a job, that I could be paid for it, and I’m so glad I was wrong; reading is a delightful job, it’s something I always look forward to, and I love it so much that I’m jealous of this man’s job—he reads books for a living (one book every two days).

18. I love writing longhand using colored pens (I’ve several pens in all colors, including my favorites—pink and orange pens); all the short stories and essays I published here and my eleven stories in my forthcoming collection, before I rewrote them in my laptop, I wrote them longhand in different colors.

    

19. In my late 20s, I gave $50,000 birr to a famous motivational and public speaker as a loan, a man I trusted, then he left Ethiopia and disappeared into where I didn’t know and I still don’t know: what hurts is not the money I lost but the person I, and many Ethiopians, idolized turned out to be a false man, and friends sometimes ask me what I’ll do if he and I meet on a street in my country or somewhere else in the world and I know one thing for sure—I’ll keep walking and he’ll cross the street to avoid me.

20. I’m 46 years old but people look at me and think I’m in my late 30s.

21. I have a degree and a masters and both have nothing to do with a practice I love the most—writing.

22. My brother is my favorite person in the entire world but when we were kids, he was the most difficult kid: I was two years older than him and I was responsible for him, to pick him up when school ended each day and every day he made it impossible for me to find him, hiding somewhere in the school grounds with his friends and even when I found him he completely ignored me, continuing to play with his friends.

23. I don’t have memories of my father (to have memories you need to spend time with that person) but there’s this memory I vividly remember: I was in 6^th or 7^th grade and in the 1^st semester I ranked 42 from 80 students and in the second semester, my father spent every evening with me, helping me study, and I ranked 9^th at the end of the semester.

24. I don’t meet new people often in person anymore because I work mostly from home but when I worked at an international company who distributes nutritional supplements and I gave trainings I got personal with people to sell products, asking them questions about their lives and even though this was effective in communicating well with others it was also exhausting—most people, if you give them your ears and your attention, they talk about themselves all day long, without once asking about your life.

25. Every time I sit to write there’s a white A-4 paper I see from nearby: it comforts me to read the words on the paper I wrote, words that help me focus on the here and now.

26. I love watching theatre.

27. Habesha Kemis (the dress I’m wearing on my About Page here on substack) is my favorite Ethiopian traditional dress.

28. I don’t wear makeup on my face and I’ve never worn makeup in my entire life.

29. The first time I realized I read more than the average person in the room was at a university: I don’t remember why I and many students from different departments were there in the room and someone asked who wrote the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries and I was the only one in the room who knew Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s name.

30. Once, I was a columnist for an Amharic magazine: the columns I wrote in Amharic, I still have the original copies and I wrote about positive thinking and motivational stories, but I don’t believe in that stuff anymore, just thinking things will turn out alright and we will succeed is a dangerous path; yes, we should see the light at the end of the tunnel, we should strive to reach for it, but—unless we are the 1% and everything we need and want is at our fingertips—we must work, work hard, and work some more, and fail, and fail again and again, learn how to pick ourselves from our failures and get back to work, to reach the light at the end of the tunnel.

31. The first time I stood in front of students to teach I was 23 and before I entered the class, which was in the 2^nd floor of a building, my legs shook and I was terrified, I raced down the stairs, then walked slowly up, then raced down again, before that moment, I’d stood in front of students and department advisors and heads once, at a university, to talk about my research, which was the last requirement to get a degree, and in that building, at the bottom of the stairs, I remember I kept looking at the rows of taxis that would take me away from the class to the safety of my home and to this day I don’t know how I found the courage to walk up the stairs again, to enter the class, and to teach but I remember one thing vividly—the fear of standing in front of many students had vanished a few minutes after I started teaching.

32. I remember the name of the street I heard the death of Michael Jackson: I was on my way to an Amharic magazine I wrote columns and I was a big fan of Michael’s work but I didn’t think the image of the street where I heard about his death would be so vivid in my mind many years later—I can still hear the blasting sounds of his songs coming from every shop in that street.

33. My beloved grandfather wanted to call me Selam, a common Amharic name, but he was outvoted by my parents who wanted to call me Banchiwosen.

34. I don’t have a child—but not by choice.

35. My first job was an export supervisor in a rose exporting farm called Enyi Ethio Rose, I worked there only for one year, but I left with love for all kinds of roses—red, yellow, white, and especially black roses known as Black Baccara.

    

36. Before I began writing professionally I read and reread Dushka Zapata (her answers on Quora and her books) and Brianna Wiest (her essays on Thought Catalog and her books). What their words say and their prose took my breath away.

37. The act of writing has surprised me in the most unexpected ways: after receiving a rejection email, the next day or a few days later, I sit at my desk, open my laptop, and get back to writing, somehow, in spite of the setback, in spite of my heart breaking into million pieces because the world had rejected my writing again, writing finds its way back to me and I find I have the energy to keep writing—maybe not on the day I read my rejection email because on that day all I think about is the phrase “we regret to inform you …” but I will get back to writing days or weeks later because I will not self-reject, because if I don’t write when editors and/or publishers reject my words then I’m not a writer.

38. My two proudest moments in my life are when I presented a training in Al Ain, U.A.E. to several hundreds of international guests on spirulina (a nutritional supplement) representing the international company I worked for, representing Ethiopia, and last year, June 2025, when I was done with revising my debut book.

39. I love walking; many story problems I couldn’t solve while staring at the words in my computer, I’ve solved them while taking long walks.

• choosing a book over my friends

• my mom’s tattooed hand

• my high school English teacher

• a vivid image

• my father’s voice

• jealousy

• inspiration

• memorable craft lesson

• a laugh-out-loud moment

• an AI character that brought me to tears

• etc.

This week I searched my laptop in the folder titled “Favorite Books I Read”, and read the titles of the books, just to see the one memorable detail I remember the most about the novels and the story collections and the memoirs and craft books I read. These memorable details about my favorite books surprised me. Some of these books, I read them years ago. And some, decades ago. Sometimes nothing came to my mind. Sometimes why I loved the book was a vague memory. And sometimes, there was one memorable detail I remember about the book.

While I was writing the following lists I found it interesting what my brain remembers from my favorite books.

How to Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

I looked forward to both English and Amharic classes in high school because of the readings of both American and Amharic literature and this novel was one of the books we read in English class.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

My mom bought me this book when I was thirteen. When she gave me this book I remember her hand, her tattooed left hand, cradling the slim book, before she gently placed it in my lap. She knew how much I wanted to read that book.

Love Unto Crypt by Sisay Ayenew

This is a translation of a famous Amharic novel, considered a classic of Ethiopian literature, on the love story of two people in two different classes. This book comes to my mind and I recommend it, while being honest that the original Amharic language is incomparable, whenever someone who is not an Ethiopian asks me for a recommendation for an Amharic-English translated novel.

The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Before I left for a university my father and I read most of the stories, together, and there was this fun thing we did while reading—we talked about the mystery in each story and how Sherlock Holmes would solve the mystery in the end.

The Captive Prince trilogy by C. S. Pacat

This is a novel series about two men protagonists who are enemies and the one memorable detail I remember is the point of view. In the three books there’s only one POV, we are told about the story through the eyes of one protagonist. Throughout the three books we don’t know what the other lead character thinks and feels and we get why the other lead—whose thoughts and feelings we don’t know—does all the horrible things he does through the POV of the protagonist who is telling us the story. I remember there’s only one chapter (or maybe a scene?) in book 3 where the writer gets into the mind of the other protagonist. Because of this POV choice, the suspense throughout the 3 books is at the maximum.

The Lost Spell by Yismake Worku

Another Amharic to English translated book. The premise of this novel whose author is a famous Ethiopian author is memorable—a man turns into a dog somewhere in the city of Ethiopia and he fights to get back to his home in Addis Ababa where the spell that will turn him back to his human form is.

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

Memorable fantasy world.

A Chet & Bernie Mystery series by Spencer Quinn

I remember starting reading the first book in this series one Saturday afternoon. The canine narrator’s voice hooked me so much that I cancelled hangouts with friends (sorry, my friends). Some books are like that. You know you can read them tomorrow or the day after tomorrow but, if at all possible, you just don’t want to wait.

African Stories by a Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing

After reading this collection I remember asking myself why I was not writing the stories of my people, the stories of Gurage people. That’s the beginning of my journey to my debut story collection forthcoming in spring 2027.

Delicate Edible Birds by Lauren Groff

After reading this collection, which was my first from Lauren Groff’s books, I became a huge fan, and I was also, to be honest, so so jealous. This collection made me think I wish I had written something so mesmerizing myself.

Master Slave Husband Wife by Ilyon Woo

This is an unputdownable nonfiction. This historical true story reads like a tightly plotted, immersive novel.

Refuse to Be Done by Matt Bell

This craft book has completely changed my mind about revision.

Truth is the Arrow Mercy is the Bow by Steve Almond

This book has its own chapter about failures, which is the one detail I remember the most about this essential craft book. The phrase “the Wisdom of Failure” is stuck in my mind because of this book.

The Mountain by Paul Yoon

After I read this collection I knew I would read every book by the author. This’s why I look forward to read Etna written by the same author, which will be published in August 4, 2026.

The Thing Around Your Neck by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

My publisher, the University Press of Kentucky, did peer reviews for my book, which I found was one of the unexpected surprises of being published by a university press. One of my peer reviewers wrote a list of comparable titles for my story collection and Chimamanda Adichie’s The Thing Around Your Neck, in its focus on women across different contexts of tradition, was one of them.

In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods by Matt Bell

The breathtaking prose.

Merle’s Door by Ted Kerasote

This is the book I recommend to people who ask me for memoirs about the love of a man for a dog and a dog for a man.

Hunger by Roxane Gay

This memoir introduced me to the works of . I didn’t know about her, about her other books, and her newsletter on Substack where she runs Emerging Writer Series, one of my favorite places on the internet where you can read the most diversified essays in terms of subject matters, themes explored, and the form of the essays.

Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert

Years have passed since I read this book but I remember one memorable image vividly—fear sleeps at the bottom of my bed if I keep on creating in spite of the fear.

The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

The first time I read the book I teared through it. And I didn’t know that I would come back to the book again and again. That I would read it slowly again to study the craft of the writing, and to study the prose.

The Bourne Identity by Robert Ludlum

I like the movie adaptation of the novel but I like the novel more.

The Sign and the Seal by Graham Hancock

This book, where historical research is at its finest, is about the author’s quest to find out the mystery behind the disappearance of the Ark of the Covenant mentioned in the Bible. Spoiler alert—he finds the Ark in Ethiopia. Reading this book—part an adventure, part a travel book, part mystery-thriller—made me glad I’m an Ethiopian.

The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa

There’s one scene when the cat character Nana, a male cat, sits on a bulky, rectangular TV, one of those TVs that were popular in the 1970s and 1980s. The TV is on and it is hot. The way the cat describes the feeling of sitting on the TV is endearing and funny. The cat was glad it was not a flat TV, those do not have places to sit, places to wiggle around. The cat makes himself at home on top of the toasty TV. I remember laughing out loud when I read that moment.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski

I read this epic novel a decade after it was first published. And I remember thinking I can’t believe I waited this long to read this novel. Not because I knew about it, I didn’t, but because I wondered why I didn’t hear about it when it was so good, why I didn’t see the book in the Google search engine when I searched for novels with dogs as main characters.

In the Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune

I don’t know if there’re any novels where there’re AI characters, I’m not looking for them, but this is the only novel where I was moved by the AI character.

What about you? What is the one memorable detail you remember from your favorite books? Even if you read them years or decades ago?

On September 2024, I sent my debut manuscript to Iowa Short Fiction Award and John Simmons Short Fiction Award.

Before I received their rejection, which they sent in December 2024, I was revising my manuscript which I thought I’d finished in September. I really thought I was done. That it was time for another writing project but then I read posts on Substack that made me think my work was not done, that made me want to return to the work again.

I didn’t hire an editor when I revised my story collection. Before I thought I was finished with my book I revised it via these 2 invaluable craft books:

• Refuse To Be Done by Matt Bell

• Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to Edit Yourself Into Print by Renni Browne and Dave King

There’re many craft books on self-editing and self-revising but, for me, these two books stand out. In the past five years I read them many times and I took notes from them.

In Refuse To Be Done my favorite is the chapter titled “Third Draft” where you revise your work via specific craft checklists:

• Read aloud often

• Scene structure

• How does the camera move through a scene

• Work the verbs

• Explanations

• Backstories

• Where you’re moved

It takes time, a long time, to revise your work through each of these checklists, but I see revision as an opportunity to make my stories better. Revision is where your story fully forms. Where you have the opportunity to develop your story, your characters, and the theme of your story.

In Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to edit yourself into print, each chapter is dedicated to specific craft. Again it takes a long time to revise your work via these crafts, focusing on one chapter at a time, but it’s worth it. My favorite from this book is chapter 2 titled “Characterization and Exposition”

I can’t tell you the number of times this chapter helped me make my stories better. Every time I thought I was finished with a story I revised my work via the 2^nd chapter, highlighting characterization (lines and paragraphs that reveal characters) and exposition (information, backstories). Later, when I read only my highlighted characterization and exposition parts, what I previously did not see I could now see—duplicate information, a chunk of background I wrote all at once that took two pages, I’ve written about characteristics that I later showed in dialogue or action, etc.

This book is so important to me that I wrote highlighted paragraphs from the 12 chapters on large spiral notebooks, and I go through these highlights every time I revise a new story.

This is why I thought the manuscript I sent to Iowa Short Fiction Award and John Simmons Short Fiction Award is a final version, it had already gone through several revisions. But then I read these 4 Substack posts and I paused.

By that point I’d read and revised my manuscript so many times.

I wanted to do anything else but read it again.

I thought nothing would make me want to go back to my work, would make me want to revise as if I was revising for the first time, but these posts were a delightful surprise.

I took notes from these posts, because every time I read a craft advice—that helps me to add depth and gravity and plumbs emotions—I write it down, ending the note with the writer’s name and the title of the post.

I believed in revising my manuscript via these posts that I didn’t send my manuscript to other presses that accept story collections, which I previously planned to, like Grace Palez Prize in Short Fiction, their window was open in January and February 2025, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, their window was open from mid-January to mid-March, Mary McCarthy Fiction Prize, their window was open from January to mid-February.

I took a break in October 2024 and then I started revising my manuscript via the notes I took from these posts. I did this until the end of April 2025. I went at my stories with highlighters and colored pens. The insights in these posts helped me see my stories with new eyes. It’s like looking at a flower you pass by every day. You think you know this flower, its color, what it smells like, what its texture is, but then someone describes the same flower in a different way and you find things about the flower you didn’t notice before. This is what revising my manuscript from the notes I took from these posts felt like.

At the beginning of May 2025, I started sending my final revised manuscript to several presses.

At the end of July, I received acceptance for publication by the University Press of Kentucky for their New Prose & Poetry Series.

These are the 4 Substack posts:

1. Suzanne Grove, Go through your work with highlighters and pens

• Where there’s mystery

• Question(s) raised

• Little moment of intrigue

• Motivations and stakes

• Beats of action and reaction

• Transition sentences and narrative modes

In this post Suzanne Grove, assistant fiction editor at Write or Die Magazine, writes about buying your favorite novels and going at them to highlight the above points. The moment I read this craft advice I remember writing the points—I wanted this exercise for my own work too.

This is a single post (in fact, Suzanne’s advice takes only a few paragraphs from the post) and yet every time I read the lists it feels like an entire craft book is embedded in this short post. I love that revising every scene in my stories via these lists takes me out of my writer identity and makes me see my work from a distance, that it makes me read my work like a reader would read it. You have to wear the metaphorical reader hat to highlight these points. Later, after you filled your manuscript with different highlights, you clearly see where your strength is on the page and where exactly your weakness is, perhaps there’s no mystery in one of your scenes that took two pages.

2. Rebecca Makkai, Let’s Make Things Tense

• Dramatic tension

• Character tension

• Narrative tension

• Atmospheric tension

Focusing on just tension in your story and identifying what kind of tension runs through your story does wonders to your stories.

3. Junot Díaz, Fundamentals of Setting: Activating Demands

After I read this post, I never saw settings/place the same way again, just a place where characters are interacting with each other.

My debut story collection is set in a small town in Ethiopia. The place is an integral part that binds the eleven stories in my collection. Highlighting every moment when characters are in conflict with the place, when the place is in conflict with the characters, when the place demands something from characters, when the place is told, when the place is dramatized, when telling details reveal the place, makes you hold a light on the place in your story. Because of this light, you can see what the place in your story plays in your story. You can follow this light and add color and texture and depth and meaning to it.

4. This Will Change the Rhythm of Your Writing Forever,

There’s a remarkable resource on how to improve your prose right here on Substack, Stunning Sentences by . And there’re craft books on prose I read again and again: Artful Sentences by Virginia Tufte. The Anatomy of Prose by Sacha Black. Spellbinding Sentences by Barbara Baig. And I read works of remarkable authors where the prose is simply magic and I’m jealous of their prose and I want to learn from them, like Matt Bell’s In The House Upon The Dirt Between The Lake And The Woods, written in rhythmic and mythic style of writing, Leza Lowitz’s Up from the Sea, told in poetic verse, and all novels by James Salter.

And there’s this post by Jo Gatford, part of a series of lessons on the rhythm and flow of lines and language, which brings lasor focus on your lines and the language you use in your stories. When you focus on one line at a time—and not on the line that comes after it and not on the line that comes before it—you see, you really see, what your line is saying. Where the weight of the words in your line lies.

Highlighting anchor words in each line—words that give the most emotion, words that give the most meaning, words that give the most information—is one of my favorite final revision checklists now.

Bonus:

What’s your vision? by Suzanne Grove

This post is a memorable inspiration. I dare you to read it and not be tempted to open a blank document or your WIP and get back to writing. Every line from this post is a gem. Every time I read it the words make me want to put my own words on the page right away.

Related:

• ‘Which Books Helped You the Most in Publishing a Short Story on Literary Magazines?’

• My Favorite Newsletters on Substack on The Craft of Writing

2035 E.C.

Shadem ran, smelling choking dust, to the green heaven she’d found two weeks ago, with her dusty goats who ran in front of her, at a distance from each other. Two hours remained before noon and yet the bright yellow above the mountains burned her.

The wind behind her five goats blew hard. Pushed at them. Her goats looked weak, like the wind was going to blow them away. And they did something she didn’t understand. She knew they were hurrying to reach the green heaven and yet they stopped running. And ran toward each other, their thin legs flying in the air. When they reached each other, they stood with their heads down, and the wind whipped dust against their flanks, into their eyes. They shook their heads, shaking off the dust. Then they ran, toward the green heaven, running close to each other.

Shadem smiled. The wind behind her goats still blew hard. Still pushed at them. Yet. Her goats looked tough.

She ran behind her goats. But she stopped smiling when the same wind that pushed at her goats pushed at her, from behind her, easily.

An hour later, at the green heaven, her goats’ bellies belched and they pulled at the grass with their teeth, making tearing sounds. The smell of sweat dripping from her drenched long skirt didn’t bother her. She breathed the cool air that blew on her face, slowly, greedily, as if she was breathing air for the first time. She should have brought her girls, she thought. But they would have melted if they walked for two hours from their hut to the green heaven. Staring at their dusty coats that didn’t look dusty in the green heaven, she didn’t see it at first. In her mind, the green heaven thinned out. Quickly.

She ran.

At the middle of the grassland, she knelt. Touched the teared-out grass. A woman had been here, a woman with goats. Who brought her goats to her grassland? She pressed her right thumb into the inside of her left palm and winced. She came to the green heaven in midmorning to avoid the afternoon sun, but the woman who’d been here with her goats must have left her home the moment the sun appeared above the mountains. An unexpected thought dusted her head. She didn’t want to share the green heaven with any other goats, even if that meant the other goats would die of hunger. She shook her head, as if she could shake off the dusty thought.

The next morning, Shadem arrived at the green heaven before the sun appeared above the mountains. She heard the other goats before she saw them, tearing the grass. She wondered if the woman she could see from a distance, a woman with stooped shoulders, who wore long dusty brown skirt, spent the night there. She’d thought it would be a few months before other goat herders found out about the green heaven. Shadem approached the woman, walking slowly, until she recognized the woman.

She ran, startling the other goats who shrieked away. She hated it when people startled goats and scare them away, but she was doing the same thing. In her mind, she only saw her fading away goats. Then she stopped running. There was nothing to shriek about, she wanted to tell the shrieking goats, that she was sorry for startling them, that she would never hurt them, that they could tear the grass in the green heaven, that when the green heaven emptied out she would walk beyond the mountains to find grass for them, that she would never stop searching until she found grass, but she found herself running again, past the shrieking goats, running toward the threat that stood between her goats and their death. The howling, the roaring, the whooshing sounds she heard behind her were forcing her to run past the shrieking goats, she told herself. She didn’t have the strength to fight against the howling, the roaring, the whooshing sounds, she told herself, even though she was starting to see something in herself she never saw before.

When she reached wife #1, she stopped. Ever since she married her husband, a husband who was now their husband, she’d avoided her. Shadem opened her mouth, but, before she said a word, wife #1 said, “This grassland not yours.”

“I found it first.”

Wife #1 moved her lower lip to the left, and she looked away from her, not just her face but her whole body turning away from her. Shadem could tell that she hated speaking to her, the same way she hated speaking to her. Wife #1 stared at the grassland. Maybe she was cursing the grassland, Shadem thought, the same way she was, for forcing them to face each other.

“This grassland belongs to me.”

“Who says?” Wife #1 asked, her face and body still turning away from her.

“I do.”

Wife #1’s face sharply turned toward her. This grassland didn’t belong to her, Shadem knew. Women in her town didn’t own land, but she’d found the last grassland in town and the grassland was the only thing that stood between her hungry goats wobbling on the doorsteps of death and their tumbling through that dark door.

“This grass belongs to my goats,” Shadem said.

“What about my goats?”

The look that drained the blood from wife #1’s face was familiar. Every time she walked around town, for hours, looking for a firewood, every time she thought she wouldn’t have a firewood to cook gomen for her girls, every time she milked her goats and she thought they would stop giving her milk and she wouldn’t have any milk for her girls, every time she walked around town, seeing the once green but the now greenless town, her blood drained from her face. Wife #1 must love her goats, the same way she did. And she had three boys to raise. For a moment, she wanted to reach out and touch her shoulder. They could walk, next to each other, and talk about how to share the green heaven. But then she looked at her goats. At their thin coats. She could add more days to their lives if she didn’t share the green heaven.

“I not care about your goats.”

Wife #1 stared at her, in silence. That silence hotted her face. Then something she’d not seen for a long time caught her eyes from a distance, behind wife #1.

Shadem ran.

Wife #1 ran after her.

She was twenty and eight, ten years younger than wife #1, and yet stooped shoulders ran past her, approaching the strawberry she’d seen from a distance.

Shadem’s legs flew in the air. She couldn’t remember the last time she gave a strawberry to her goats. She passed wife #1. Reached for the strawberry, but a hand hard tugged her long skirt.

She fell.

Wife #1 moved past her. Reached for the strawberry, but, before she touched it, Shadem reached for the dusty brown skirt. A strong wind blew, blowing their skirts in the air. When the wind blew harder, when it watered her eyes, when it made her believe it wanted to blow both of them away, she thought she would stop fighting with the threat that wore a skirt. But she reached for the dusty brown skirt again. They stayed on the grass, tearing at each other’s skirts. For how long, she didn’t know. When the grass rustled, she was aware that the wind was now blowing gently. She stopped tearing at the threat in her hand and stood.

And she blinked.

The wind had blown away the strawberry.

For the next few days, every morning, Shadem ran to the green heaven, to arrive before wife #1 and her goats did. They never said it out loud, but the wife who arrived at the last grassland first stayed with her goats at the middle of the grassland, where the grass was thick and long. The other wife stayed at the edges of the grassland, where the grass was thin and short. A week later, she heard them before she saw them. Her goats, unlike before when they waited for her to run to the green heaven together, didn’t wait for her. In the middle of the grassland, the horns of her goats thudded, cracked, with the horns of the other goats. And they smelled of fear.

A harsh hacking behind her.

Shadem turned.

Wife #1 stood behind her, at a distance, coughing.

Shadem turned away and faced her goats. She pressed her thumb into the inside of her left palm and hesitated. Should she ask her if she was okay? How her goats were surviving in their grassless town? But if she asked her she would start caring about the other goats. That would mean she would see them as goats who were trying to survive in a grassless town. Just like her goats. And she would have to be happy about sharing the green heaven with the other goats.

Another harsh hacking behind her.

She turned to look at wife #1. But, before she saw her face, a retching sound made her turn to look at her goats. One of her goats was down on the grass and one of wife #1’s goats, a reddish-brown goat, was up on the grass, her forelegs on her goat’s flanks.

The next morning, she found her, alone, away from the other goats, in the middle of the green heaven. The reddish-brown goat. Her bones sticked out through her coat and she looked like a light wind would blow her away. The goat looked up and bleated loudly. Shadem was going to allow the goat tear the thick grass, but she saw one of her goats down on the grass in her head, forelegs on her flanks. She heard her goats’ moanings, moaning their hungers through the night in the barn inside her hut, through their dry mouths, which they started a year ago when the sun appeared above the mountains not to warm but to burn.

She walked toward the goat with silent feet. The goat didn’t look up when she stood behind her.

Shadem bent and raised her right hand.

Her hand dropped on the goat’s back like dark rocks dropping from the mountains. The goat screamed, a wailing tearing through her throat. Then she scrambled away.

Shadem sweated through her skirt and yet she shook like the hot air around her had suddenly turned cold. She walked toward the goat, slowly. But the goat ran away from her, her thin legs flying in the air. Shadem stood still. For how long, she didn’t know. And a painful thought ached her. The goat was more scared of her than the threat that surrounded them. There was no one in the green heaven who saw what she did. She could pretend her hand didn’t do what it did. But the trembling, a trembling she tried to hide from herself by looking away from her hand, told her she stood in a place she didn’t recognize.

Ramming heads against each other behind her.

Shadem turned. Her goats were fighting with the other goats, with their horns, like the morning before. But then she saw something that made her doubt her eyes.

Wife #1’s goats stared at her goats, then moved away from them, and started tearing the grass. Her goats stood, unmoving, for a moment. Then they approached the other goats, started tearing the grass too. Wife #1’s goats looked up, stared at her goats, then they went back to their tearings. Shadem didn’t know if they knew what they were doing, or if they were just tired from the fighting, but she had a terrible feeling that the goats knew something she didn’t.

The next morning, Shadem’s goats teared the grass, then turned around as if they were looking for the other goats, as if they were waiting for them to fight them for the grass. When her goats did the same thing the next morning, and the next, she wondered if she was wrong about her goats. If they were waiting for the other goats to share the grass with them.

The next morning, she found the reddish-brown goat at the edge of the green heaven, lying on the thin grass, her eyes open and still. Shadem didn’t see the goat in the green heaven for days. She knew death was coming for all her goats and the other goats. But this goat. This thin goat. She tumbled through the dark door of death, wailing for grass, while there was still grass.

Shadem wailed.

Her wailing reminded her of the goat’s wailing when she’d lashed at her back, and she knew she would hear the wailing for the rest of her life. Would tear at her ears, reminding her of what she did. Shadem ran to the middle of the grassland, looking for her goats and the other goats. Something hotter than the unbearable heat lashed at her face. At her hands. At her feet. Her goats sat on the thinning-out grass with the other goats and they made a circle. When the wind blew harder the goats tightened the circle and she could see their furs blowing in the air. They must be so scared, she thought. Yet. They stayed, sitting next to each other, as if they knew the wind would have a harder time blowing each of them away if they sat closely together. And she remembered the strawberry. It came to her then, that the wind would have had a harder time of blowing away the strawberry, if she had stopped fighting with the threat that wore a skirt. If she and wife #1 had sat close to each other, their faces facing the strawberry and their backs against the wind. Shadem watched the goats, even though the wind kept pushing her, even though she found it hard to see because dust rose in the air and blew in her eyes, unable to look away.

1.

This was what it felt like, to want to be a published story collection author with every bone in my body and to also be overwhelmed by this want.

Just because I want the journey to writing a book feel like I’m walking through an open door doesn’t mean my love for writing should be in question. In the past four years, in writing a book I’d always wanted to write, I’ve learned, even for creative acts we love doing—when we think of the big writing projects we want to do—we feel overwhelmed. My colleague didn’t understand that even though I wanted to write a story collection this want felt too big, too overwhelming, and too complex to handle.

What helped me to move, to walk toward where I wanted to arrive, is to focus on one small thing—and that small thing was writing into a particular moment in my characters’ lives. From the many insightful writing advice found in Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, my favorite is about a one-inch picture frame where we focus only on this picture, at this time, and write into that picture. I read Bird by Bird a decade ago but I didn’t know how this advice makes writing your way into big writing projects feel like walking through an open door instead of banging your head against a wall, until I started writing the stories in my story collection. Every time the idea of the big writing project hit me and made me want to run to my basement and hide, every time I felt the warm tingling hands press down my shoulders, I thought of the one-inch picture frame, I thought of a particular moment into my characters’ lives and wrote into that moment.

A colored note hangs on a wall in front of me in my writing room that includes a list of cues in a particular moment, which I learned from Writing the Intimate Character by Jordan Rosenfeld—physical-action cue, sensory cue, dialogue cue, other characters’ reactions, image cue, and interior monologue. Sometimes more cues come to my mind the first time I write into a particular moment. Sometimes I can only see the physical-action cue in a moment, like

I began writing my flash “How to Lose the Love of Your Life” with only that physical-action cue. Later, I added additional moments linked with the initial moment, and added more cues into the initial moment, fleshing the moment into a fully-realized scene.

Writing this way is how I wrote the first draft, the consecutive several drafts, and the final draft, of my debut story collection “The Town Under the Mountains: Stories” forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky in New Poetry and Prose Series in spring 2027, one particular moment at a time. This kind of writing felt like accomplishing the big writing project—and arriving at the destination, without even trying.

I’ve started writing the first draft of my first novel. Sometimes it hits me out of nowhere, that I’m writing a novel! In that moment, the idea that I’m working on a big writing project makes me want to run away from my writing room, from myself who wants to complete the big project, who wants to see the big project in print more than any other writing project. Then I remind myself that all I have to do is write into a particular moment in my characters’ lives, and the most surprising thing happens—time flies away and before I know it I’ve written pages and pages of several moments into my characters’ lives.

Sometimes a particular moment is an ordinary moment in a character’s life and I write into that moment to find out a moment that changes the “ordinary” moment. Sometimes a particular moment is an extraordinary moment, like the final moment in my flash “These Things We Not Saying”

Sometimes a particular moment is a short paragraph. Sometimes a particular moment stretches into five pages and more.

Sometimes a particular moment leads to another moment and another and before I know it a story is formed. Sometimes a particular moment is just that—a moment that doesn’t lead anywhere, and the only way I could know that was by writing into the moment. Sometimes a particular moment is a climactic moment of a story, and I write backward to find the moment that led to the climactic moment, like the final moment in my short story “The Oak Tree”

Sometimes a particular moment is a moment of an opening disturbance, and I write into that moment to find out what happens in the next moment, and the next, like the opening moment in my short story “Jaana”

Sometimes a particular moment is a blurred picture I see from a distance and the way to clear the picture is to walk toward the blurred picture and write into the moment, like the moment that was the starting point for my essay “Black Tea”

Sometimes a particular moment is a clear picture I see right in front of me and the way to see the nuances of the moment is to walk several steps away from the clear picture and see the same clear picture from a distance and write into the moment, like one moment in my essay “Empty Platitudes”

For weeks, while writing “Empty Platitudes”, I could see the moment clearly and I wrote that moment but I could not see what lied beneath the surface of that moment, until I pretended I was someone else watching that moment from a distance and the meaning of the moment (people lie even when they’re not okay because of social obligations) revealed itself to me with this distance view.

The next time you feel overwhelmed by a big writing project—a novel or a 5000-word short story or a 3000-word essay—start from a particular moment and write into that moment and that moment alone. If you’re writing fiction, what’s your character doing in that moment? Why are they doing what they’re doing? What do they feel in that moment? You can’t—you’re not supposed to—know exactly where that moment is going to take you. Where you might end up arriving might surprise you. Later, see the moment in the eyes and heart of your character and make meaning out of the moment. If you’re writing an essay, what’re you doing in that moment? Why are you doing what you’re doing? What do you feel in that moment? Later, you can make meaning out of that moment.

2.

When I began writing my essay “I Wish My Children Were Still Living Inside My Uterus”, which is about gun violence in America, for weeks I wrote about gun violence from the top. I wanted to distill the wider and bigger lessons on gun violence. I wrote what my friends and colleagues thought about gun violence. What the old man across my street thought about gun violence. What the world thought about gun violence. At the time I didn’t know it but I was scurrying around what I wanted to write about, particular moments into my own experience in gun violence.

Still, I kept writing from the top, what Twitter says about gun violence, what Wikipedia says about gun violence, what books say about gun violence. My essay (it wasn’t an essay at the time, though I called what I wrote an essay) didn’t have moments. It read as if a human being with no heartbeat wrote it, someone who has no stakes in the story.

Weeks later, I pushed myself to write into particular moments about gun violence,

I took these particular moments as starting points and wrote into the moments and soon the moments blossomed into scenes. The essay began beeping with a heartbeat.

My essay became an essay I could only write, with particular moments that still haunt me.

In a recent book club I participated the moderator asked us to tell the group our favorite novels we read in 2025. I selected The Story of Edgar Sawtelle and Familiaris by David Wroblewski, two novels that are a series. When the book club’s moderator asked me why the two novels were my favorites I opened my mouth to say these novels are about family, the relationship between dogs and humans, and the limitation of language. But then I closed my mouth, remembering emotional and memorable moments from the novels.

I read the novels at the beginning of the year. A year later, I remember many of the scenes, the moments, in the novels. In the book club, I talked about two particular moments I remember the most.

At the end of the book club meeting, most readers and writers from the group told me they would buy the novels. They didn’t know what the novels are about, and yet the particular moments in the novels made them curious to know about the characters who are doing these things. Curious to find out why they’re doing these things. Isn’t this why we read? To be curious about a particular moment in time a writer shows us, to be intrigued by it, to be moved by it, to be disturbed by it, to be changed by it? Aren’t particular moments what we remember the most from short stories and essays and novels and memoirs we read, even if we read them years and decades ago? Isn’t this also why we write? To find out what really happened in a particular moment? Writing into a particular moment is the most interesting thing I look forward whether I’m writing a short story, a flash, an essay, or my WIP novel, the part where I have a child-like curiosity to find out the nuances of a particular moment, either in my own life or a character’s life, the why of the moment, the meaning of the moment.

The next time you start writing from the top to distill the bigger and wider lessons of a particular writing project—an essay, a memoir, a craft essay, a short story, a novel—write into particular moments to produce a writing only you could write. To produce a writing that beeps with a heartbeat. To make your writing emotional, memorable, and meaningful.

Previous Lesson:

When my brother was 19, one early morning, he was lying in his bed—unconscious. His face was clammy. And he didn’t hear us shouting his name.

And I—I froze. Years later, every time I remember this moment, I stop breathing. I can’t believe I didn’t run to bring him sugar. I knew what to do, and yet I stood frozen, while my only brother needed me to save him.

But my mother, Mami, was in shock just like me, and yet she flew and brought him sugar in seconds. I remember that her face had no tears when she gently placed the sugar in his tongue, when she watched his face and waited for the sugar to get in his system—and for my brother to recover from hypoglycemic shock (low sugar levels in his blood).

It was only after he gained consciousness, minutes later, that she dropped on the floor of his bedroom and she allowed her tears to come.

My brother was diagnosed with Type I diabetes at 17. But diabetes had no chance to make him weak against Mami’s love for my brother. After the diagnosis, my brother suffered from diabetes complications. When he took insulin injections through his thigh every morning and night, Mami treated him as she always did.

With love that strengthens in tough times.

When she could not find comfortable shoes—most diabetic people have sensitive feet—she searched every corner of the city. And she did not return home until she found what she was looking for. When he suffered from migraines every two weeks, she went to every specialist looking for answers. When a simple cold sapped my brother’s immune system and he had to stay in bed for a week, every two months, she took a leave of absence from her bank job to stay with him, telling her bosses, who refused to give her a leave of absence to go to hell. When ketone deficiency worsened his condition and he vomited in the bathroom like every other day, she stayed with him on the cold floor of the bathroom until his stomach had no more. When he had to be hospitalized for three days and nights—because his sugar level was over the roof—Mami stayed by his side, refusing to leave him, even for a second. When doctors could not explain why his sugar level could not be controlled, she promised herself she would become an expert on how to treat Type I diabetes. She bought books, magazines, and consulted health professionals in and outside of Ethiopia. She sold her home—a home where my brother and I grew up—because of medical bills.

After my brother’s diagnosis, most people we knew expected Mami to sit in the corner and cry, like a turtle pulling its head inside a shell, to do nothing while the disease slowly weakens my brother’s immune system. But they didn’t know Mami. She was and is a lioness. She had a smile for everyone, and she got along well with all our neighbors. For some reason, they thought that was all she was. They didn’t know that behind her smiles lurked ferocity and death-like anger to protect her children. The lioness in Mami lurked behind her smiles—which everyone compared to the morning sun, which made them assume that she would never be angry—who would do anything and everything to protect her son.

The moment her friends and neighbors started labeling her son as “the sick one,” Mami stood in front of them and demanded they NOT label her son as the disease. He has a health condition, he is not the condition, she told them in a tone bridled with anger.

Today, my brother lives in the United States. By looking at his fit body, no one can tell he has Type I diabetes. He exercises. He takes his insulin regularly. He is conscious of what he eats. He doesn’t drink alcohol. Most importantly, he is not tucked away from the world, cowering under the weight of the lifelong disease, where he could protect himself and watch his sugar level the whole day, praying it does not go up or down. He is thriving, working in the IT industry—which has been his dream since he was a teenager. His job requires him to be focused and is stressful most of the time. But my brother does not give up, and he will not give up. How can he when he didn’t think he could fight this complicated and terrible disease, but our mother fought for him when he couldn’t, when he didn’t know how, when she taught him how to fight?

People ask him, all the time, how he fought a disease he did not ask for.

He tells them, Mami did not give the disease a chance to weaken me.

That is what love does. It barges in when something unexpected, something painful, tries to take away your loved one.

When I was a teenager, when Mami and I walked to my school, anyone who tried to make fun of me or took advantage of me had to pass through Mami. One time, this guy tried to initiate a conversation, an unrequited conversation. I was 13 at the time. Seeing that I was ignoring him, he insulted me. Mami ran back to this guy and grabbed him by his collar and told him that if he repeated his insults and tried to make conversation with me again, he would suffer.

I love the strength inside Mami. The perfect watch-over. The rage, the ferocity, the death-like anger that lurks behind her love for me. To protect who she loves.

When I was in 9th grade, I was required to take language classes. In my lunchtime, I took a French class at a nearby language school away from my regular school. Mami came all the way from her work to eat lunch with me while I was taking that French class. She knew I was shy, and I didn’t have friends back then. Even though the long distance from her workplace to my school exhausted her, she came anyway, every day.

There is love in every effort she made to be there for me. There is love in every word she said to me to encourage me to speak up, to be a brave girl. There is love in every step she took to give me generous love. There is love in every smile she flashed every time she saw me. There is love in her providing me and my brother with every book we wanted, every pen, every pencil, every cloth, and every little thing we wanted.

I’m thankful to God and beyond grateful that I can call Mami and hear her voice, that I can hug her, that I can watch her when she makes my favorite food in her kitchen, gomen with kocho, that we can talk—just the two of us—for hours, and in those hours everything in the world retreats to the background. Everything. Decades after my teenage years, I still remember Mami’s love in the way she showed her love—the forgiveness for a mistake I made, the worried look on her eyes when I was late arriving home, the lingering hugs, the intimate conversations we had in our special walks.

We learn something precious from mothers who love and fight without ever giving up.

When your loved ones go through hard times, call out every strength from your inside to be there for them.

This is what I learned and I keep on learning from Mami: you don’t whisper you love someone and hope the universe does not give you any struggle. If you say you love someone, if you say you are someone’s everything, fight for your loved one like your life depends on it. Like a mother does for her child. What you do for your loved one when the storm strikes is what matters. The action you take when disaster strikes is what matters.

Do you love like the lioness inside every mother who loves her children? Are you the perfect sheepdogs? Do you watch over your loved ones?

If rage, ferocity, and death-like anger do not lurk behind all your affection and love, you do not love. Because the thing that shows that you love—when struggle and pain ingress themselves in the life of someone you love—is this ferocity that will not allow you to sit in the corner and do nothing, while that someone you love needs you.

Mami is my hero. My lioness.

I thank God every day for this beautiful, wonderful, loving, and powerful woman who is my mother.

And I think of Brian A. Bendall’s poem about a mother’s love titled ‘No Charge’

I’ve tried to write so many times,

But it’s been hard to say in rhymes.

I’ll try once more and hope you’ll see

Just what your love has meant to me.

Thank you for your pain at birth

That brought me to my life on Earth.

Thanks for all the times you spent

For cuddles and your nourishment.

Thank you for the stories read

As I lay cozy in my bed.

Thanks for your enlightenment

To solve new mysteries life had sent.

Thank you for the cures and care

When sickness caught me unaware.

Thanks for tucking me in tight

And kisses on my head, “Good night.”

Thanks for comfort when I cried

And tissues used for tears you dried.

Thanks for courage to go on,

To see from night, a day will dawn.

Thanks for your help with school

And teaching me the Golden rule.

Thanks for praise when I prevailed

And understanding when I failed.

Thanks for parties that you gave

And birthday cards I tried to save.

Thanks for meals I loved so much

And baking skills that few could touch!

Thank you for your help to write

My stories you helped bring to light.

Thanks for helping talents surface

That made me see my life had purpose.

Thanks for tears when I left home,

So I could make it on my own.

Thanks for tears when I returned

For visits that you long had yearned.

But now ….

Your life I loved has run its course.

For time will take us all by force.

Your love for me, not kept inside,

And no conditions were applied.

So, thanks for all things, small and large,

Your love saw fit to do ….. No charge.

P.S.

My favorite essays on the love of a child for a mother and a mother for her child:

· The Love Of My Life by Cheryl Strayed (Even though it has been years since I read it, this haunting essay is still one of my favorite essays on a daughter’s love for her mother. I can’t read this essay again without tearing up.)

· On Dying, Mothers, and Fighting for Your Ideas by Jonathan Morrow (A powerful essay that begins with a love of a mother for her son, and then the essay stands on that love and shows us how to fight for our creative works.)

Sometimes you read a prompt and you want to immediately write words based on the prompt. When I read the prompt for “Substance” The Republic of Letters ran as a contest I had one of those moments. Substance is anything you have nearby when you write that helps you write. For me this is a white, A-4 paper that holds my three favorite writing advices.

The Republic of Letters

A White A-4 Paper That Warms Me Like an Old Friend's Hug

Dear Republic…

Read more

4 months ago · 12 likes · The Republic of Letters

If you’re not familiar with The Republic of Letters, check them out. They publish intelligent and well-thought out pieces on the craft of writing.

Favorite Essays I Read in the Past Month:

• So it goes

• The economics of Black love

• The art of the one night stand

• How a black-market IVF drug deal helped heal my marriage

• Colors of masculinity

• A partial taxonomy of wars

• Showgirls and apologies

• Hey, old friend

• The toughest age

• The year I spoke with Chris Evans

• My absolutely chaotic adventures at sea during the summer of 1984

• The memory maker

• I’m leaving the home where I finally stopped trying to be a ‘good woman’

Favorite Short Stories I Read in the Past Month:

• You might live longer than you think

• Smoke becomes me

• The coat trade

• The gentleman

• The wife

• My mother’s husbands

Etcetera

• The 2026 women’s prize for fiction longlist

• The ‘Shy Girl’ fiasco shows why trust in writers is plummeting

• Our longing for inconvenience

• Substack is self-publishing

• Beloved, you should quit everything else

• Into the darkness

• The horses and mules that moved mountains and hearts

• An optimistic quest in apocalyptic times

• When the bears come back

“The first step of our publication process is peer reviews,”

After my debut book was accepted for publication by the University Press of Kentucky (UPK) in the New Poetry & Prose Series and I signed a publishing contract, that’s the first thing Margaret Kelly, acquisitions editor of UPK, told me when we met over zoom.

This was a surprise to me, a lovely surprise.

When the day came and the two peer reviews landed in my email I was floored by what I read. I think it was from Agents & Books that I read we should write a book we would be interested to talk about five years and ten years ahead from the book’s publication. I had a chance to write about my story collection (called Author’s Response to Peer Reviews), in detail, ahead of my book’s publication, because of the intelligent and extensive feedback I received from peer reviews.

Of course I loved that both reviews loved my work but it was more than that. The level of attention and detail the peer reviewers gave to my work was beyond my imagination. My debut story collection is set in a small town in Ethiopia, a small town Americans don’t know about, a small town even most Ethiopians do not know about. The collection follows Gurages, one of the ethnic groups in Ethiopia, who live in this town, fighting long-standing traditions.

Paragraph after paragraph, the reviews showed me with striking details how my manuscript was read—with careful attention. I was exhilarated and saw in my mind the two authors who read my manuscript and wrote peer reviews for the press, two authors I’m not allowed to know their names, and even though I don’t know their names and who they are, I imagined them reading my manuscript, pausing, then taking notes, the words on the page transporting them to the small town in Ethiopia.

I was moved to tears by the thoughtful feedback that ran for pages, before my book is out in the world.

There’s another thing I read in the peer reviews that surprised me too. More than reading the words “I loved immersing myself in these stories…”, more than comparing my work with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s story collection The Thing Around Your Neck, more than appreciation for my part to add significant work in African literature, there were paragraphs that asked me insightful questions, questions I wanted to answer. Paragraphs that gave me a list of suggestions that zoom in to moments in my stories with a critical eye.

I’m deeply grateful for these suggestions.

I wonder, do we give enough credits to university presses? Even though I read novels and story collections published by university presses for years, until my story collection was accepted by a university press, I didn’t know about this lovely thing called peer reviews from university presses during a book’s publication process. I didn’t know that Peer Reviews from university presses play significant roles in making already accepted manuscripts shine, by pushing further at a craft level, to make manuscripts as good as they can be, by giving extensive feedback to authors with a level of detail and attention that’s humbling. Now, because of my experience at UPK, I appreciate university presses more and I’m in awe of the hard and dedicated work these presses do behind the curtain to bring a work of literature to light.

Before the yellow light appeared above the mountains, the boy sat on his baby brother’s bed, stared at the lightless and colorless small face. At the closed eyes. He looked outside, at the dark mountains through the bedroom’s window. At the enset that stood outside the window. The enset looked very tired to him, like it wanted to bend its tall and wide green leaves. The boy closed his eyes. Said the good words to the tired leaves, keep breathing life into the room, in a silent voice.

He opened his eyes.

His good words worked.

The leaves in the air moved, breathed life into his baby brother’s bedroom. He looked away from the leaves to the small eyes staring at him. To the lightless and colorless small face smiling at him. He smiled at that face, wanting to take the pain away from that face, but he was thirteen and he didn’t know how.

When the yellow light appeared above the mountains, his mother came into the room. Checked the lights in the room, all of them. If they were on.

That night, on the mat next to his baby brother’s bed, the boy saw his mother move from the edge of his baby brother’s bed. At the door, her right hand reached for the ceiling light switch—and she recoiled. Her hand flew to her face and she crossed herself. Then she bit her right hand with her left hand.

The next morning, when the yellow light appeared above the mountains, his mother came into his baby brother’s bedroom, with more lamplights. Since they came from the clinic a year ago, with his three-year-old baby brother who couldn’t move his small body, his mother, every time she came into the room, daytime or nighttime, checked the ceiling light and all the lamplights in the room. If they were on.

The whole day, his mother kept asking him, her right hand on his face, “You see it?”

He saw her hand and nothing else but his mother kept saying, “I see what my hand did.”

The whole day, she scratched at her right hand.

“Emama, there nothing on your hand.”

“You not see it? But I see it. My h-hand reaching to turn off the light in my son’s room. I fear I never stop seeing it.”

The next morning, when the yellow light above the mountains brightened the mountains, the boy stood outside his baby brother’s bedroom, at the window, next to the enset.

“Stop his pain.”

The bad words, from his mouth, dropped. He wanted to unsay the words but his baby brother’s face darkened his head. So, so tired. From whatever was making him look lightless and colorless all the time. He waited to feel bad about his words, but his bad words, in his head, lighted the lightless face, colored the colorless face.

His mother was at the top of the mountains, praying for his baby brother at the church. Still, he turned his head around, looking for her. If she’d heard what he said, the pain was keeping his baby brother alive, she would have told him. Scratch your mouth, she would have told him. He bit his lower lip and his mouth tasted bitter. Until a strong wind blew in the air and one of the enset’s tall leaves touched his wet face, he didn’t know he was crying.

The next morning, the boy woke up to an absence of yellow light above the mountains. He stared at the window, at the enset that didn’t look like the enset he knew. When he scrambled from his mat, and ran outside, in his bare feet, he didn’t look to his baby brother’s bed.

Some of the leaves of the enset had turned yellow.

And the leaves in the air—unmoved.

He dropped on the grass. Crawled to the enset. To the bending yellow leaves, which looked like they would never unbend. I did what you asked, the enset talked to him, in his head. He looked up, at the window, to see if his baby brother breathed, but a stinging smell stung his nose and he couldn’t make himself stand. And look inside the room.

The boy looked up. No yellow light above the mountains, still. He waited for the color of the mountains to change, to lighten. But their darkness looked unfading. Cold, the kind of cold that made him believe would never leave him, entered his body.

Something wet dropped on his bare feet.

The leaves of the enset, the remaining green ones, dripped water. Clean, and dirty water. The boy stood and reached his hands out. Collected the clean water first. When he stood on the tips of his feet and poured the water, back, on the leaves, the leaves took their water, back. Then he collected the dirty water. When he poured the water, back, on the leaves, the leaves dripped their water.

With every drip,

drip,

drip,

he heard the bad words from his mouth, dropping, and even if he wanted them to be back, back in his mouth, even if he had said the bad words to forget, for a moment, that there is something terrifying in the world, even if he would want his bad words to be back, back in his mouth for the rest of his life, with a kind of want that would not fade, the same way his mother would scratch at her right hand for the rest of her life, wanting to scratch away the night her hand reached for the ceiling light switch, his mouth would be like the leaves that didn’t take their own dirty water, back.

In a conference about AI I participated this week people were divided into two groups: one group uses AI for creativity and argues for using AI vehemently, and the other group doesn’t use AI in any capacity in their creative works and they argue against using AI. I sat in the front seat, among the second group.

One man from the first group was speaking on the conference stage. A man who sat next to me suddenly lurched, then ran to the stage. He pointed his fingers at the man who was speaking on the benefits of using AI. “Stop using AI!”

The way he spoke felt like he wanted to tear at the man. The way he spoke was as if he could make the other man stop using AI, if he shouted at him enough.

I stood, approached the men on the stage, and told the man on my side to let the other man finish talking about the benefits of using AI.

He turned to me, “You’re a writer, and you’re on our side. How can you tolerate listening to this?”

There’s a memorable advice I use in my effective communication classes. I don’t remember where I read this advice and who said it but the advice is insightful and I use it in my classes as my favorite advice to bring down walls for disagreements. The advice (not verbatim) goes something like this. “I believe in what I am saying. And I vehemently disagree with what you’re saying. But I will fight for you to speak, even other people who stand in your way to speak what you have to say.”

Every time I meet a person who uses AI and supports the use of AI in a creative act, and I’m meeting an alarming number of creators, I tell them I disagree with them. Not just disagree, I vehemently disagree with them. But I don’t shout at them to stop talking about the benefits of using AI. I let them talk, trying to convince me to use AI in my writing. I let them say what they want to say. Then I explain my side, why I stand where I stand. It doesn’t matter, if at the end of my explanation, they agree with me or not. What matters is I firmly stand where I stand, and I have a compelling reason to do so.

When I talked about this, the man on my side was concerned and alarmed that the other side will convince us to use AI.

I disagreed. It’s good to listen to the other side. Life is too short to be threatened by every person who uses AI to write. If I believe in what I say, if I believe in my convictions, and I do—that to ask a machine to write for you is not really writing—no one will be able to convince me to turn to the other side.

This way, the disagreement is still there, like a wall standing between two sides, but people are not tearing at each other trying to bring the wall down. They are standing on their sides, calmly explaining the benefits of standing on their sides.

When I started talking about the writing process for my debut story collection forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky in spring 2027, the group who supports the use of AI asked me in which part of my writing process AI helped me.

I answered them, “In nothing.”

The shock on their faces was disturbing and alarming. Writers have been writing using their minds and hearts for thousands of years and before the invention of AI writers have been writing using their minds and hearts and now when a writer says that she used her mind and heart to write a book there’s a collective gasp in the room as if they could not comprehend this thing, this thing that has been part of the writing process for thousands of years.

I’m proud I didn’t outsource any part of the writing of my first book to AI. Writing a book is a hard work. It’s a work I love to do but it’s a hard work. Thinking of ideas. Following story ideas and characters to wherever they take you, for weeks and months and years. Patience. Sometimes sitting for hours writing and rewriting a sentence. Sometimes reading the mess in your drafts for hours, trying to find a clear picture you can start building your story on. Rewriting.

Rewriting.

Rewriting.

Revising.

Revising.

Revising.

So many revisions. I’ve dozens of revisions for my stories in my story collection. One of my stories has 21 drafts. The relentless interrogation of my characters and the story made me write several drafts for the same story. Each time I wrote another draft for the same story the story grew deeper and had layers and dimensions.

When I talked about these things in the conference, the group who uses AI to write said, “We can see that you love writing.”

“Of course I love writing.” I said.

They sounded surprised. I wondered, they were writers. Where did their love for writing go? Did the constant use of AI to write everything they write erased their love of writing?

“What about your next project?” one man from the group asked.

Before the conference I’d told the group that I’d started writing the first draft of my first novel.

When I looked at the man, “Are you going to use the loooooong process to write your novel?”

“I am.”

He stared at me. He and I were on opposite sides of the conference room when the conference began. Now, at the end of the conference, we were still on opposite sides of the conference room. But I felt elated, the same way I feel every time I talk about my writing.

Then the man approached me. “There’s this essay I asked AI to write for me and I want you to read it.”

Before I said I don’t read any AI generated content he said, “I guarantee you will be moved by the first page.”

The word he used startled me.

Moved by AI writing?

“I’ll read it but I’ll not be moved by it.”

“You don’t know that.” He said.

I do. Maybe it’s naïve of me to think, with the advancement of AI, with the machine learning getting smarter and smarter every day, that an AI writing will not move me. But I do believe it. And I believe the work of writers who write using their minds and hearts and love of literature will always triumph over the work of writers who use AI to write.

I started reading two novels this week.

One is Light Years by James Salter. So far I only read the first chapter. I don’t know which I love the most, the moving story I know a little so far or the prose that sparkles on every paragraph. While I was reading I was wondering how Salter wrote the lovely prose. Only a writer who wrote with his mind and heart can make another writer wonder how this mastery of creativity and craft is rendered on the page.

The other novel I’m reading is Somewhere Beyond the Sea by TJ Klune. I’m a fan of TJ Klune’s novels. The fantasy worlds he creates are so evocative they feel like the real world we’re living. I’m only five pages into reading this novel and the emotional beats in these pages are so moving that I cursed to the life that called out to me that forced me to stop reading the novel. Only a writer who writes with his mind and heart and curiosity can create a compelling reason in the minds of readers, to want to continue reading, to want to curse their real lives when they stand in the way of continuing to read the novel.

At the end of the conference I was asked for final thoughts. I talked about a writing practice that makes me wonder how much time it’s going to take me and also makes me weak in the knees.

In ’s Refuse to Be Done craft book there’s a chapter dedicated to rewriting the first draft you wrote. And no, he doesn’t mean for you to cut and paste the whole thing into your second draft. He means for you to rewrite everything from your first draft, every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every chapter, everything. This is dedication to writing at its finest.

The idea of rewriting everything is overwhelming and it takes so much time, and it’s also where you find the depth in your story and characters.

There’s no shortcut here. There’s only work and more work and the willingness to want to spend more time with your story and your characters. Only writers who write using their minds and hearts are willing to rewrite everything from their first drafts. Those who want to spend time with the mess of first drafts. Who love being free to add new ideas into the second draft and take off, perhaps in a new direction. Who are willing to get lost in this process. Who know, if they stick with the process, they will find themselves and their characters in the most unexpected places.

Recently I read something Lauren Groff said, which made me love rewriting even more. She said when she starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a box and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. That’s love of writing, and wanting to spend more time with your characters and your story, at its finest.

“It’s not even the words on the page that accumulate, because I never look at them again, really, but the ideas and the characters start to take on gravity and density. Nothing matters except for these lightning bolts that I’ve discovered. The images that are happening, the sounds that are happening, that feel alive. Those are the only things that really matter from draft to draft.” —Lauren Groff

When I started publishing on This Precious Dark Skin I had 200 subscribers. Slowly the number increased to 300, then 400, then 500. Now it’s 600 and counting. On the days I’m honest with myself it hits me that this number is small compared to other writers I read on substack, writers who have thousands and thousands of subscribers. In these moments I’m jealous of these writers, I want my work, a work I spend time and energy to be read by thousands and thousands of subscribers.

And I’m disappointed.

Every time disappointment crushes me that more people are not reading my work there’s a moment when I think I will stop writing and publishing. But this moment passes and gives space to another moment when I run to my workspace and type words on my laptop like my life depends on it. A sense of calm and joy washes over me. Even if only one reader reads my work I am okay. No, I am more than okay. I am thrilled and honored. This doesn’t mean that moment of disappointment doesn’t come again, it does, but every time it does I find that love of words trumps over the disappointment that more people are not reading my work.

These moments of disappointments come only sometimes. I work past these moments reminding myself why I write.

Love of words and love of literature.

I pick a WIP short story or essay and the words take me.

When I write I don’t think about the number of subscribers I have, how many of my readers will like it, how many of my readers will hate it. I think only about the work, what the work needs from me, my complete presence in it.

I write essays. I write craft essays. I write short stories. I write flash fiction. I write curated reads.

I write to my 600 email subscribers the way I prepare an Ethiopian traditional coffee for a dear friend—with dedication, concentration, care, and love.

Preparing a good Ethiopian coffee the traditional way requires dedication and concentration and care and love.

It takes time to prepare Ethiopian coffee and I love every minute of it.

“Take the shortcut, buy the prepared coffee or use a machine to shorten the time.” Some people tell me.

I don’t want a shortcut. I want to spend time with the whole process. The smell of coffee being roasted. The smell of incense on the fire. The smell of fresh cut grasses. Company of friends while I prepare the coffee. What I get in the process of preparing Ethiopian coffee—love and honor for something I love to do—for those I love, is why I come back to it, why I prepare Ethiopian coffee the traditional way in my home.

I feel the same way about writing—love and honor for the act of putting words on the page or the screen. This is why I write to my 600 subscribers the way I would write if I had thousands and thousands of subscribers, with the same dedication and care and love.