Honestly, I don’t know if I would be writing every day without this very simple analog tool, which has become one of my most treasured possessions because of what it helps me visualize and make tangible. One evening session, one missed day (and it was a day!), but overall a consistent routine during what has otherwise been a wild and crazy year.

Anyway, I’m really here to share that TWO dear friends of mine have books coming out in May. I have read multiple drafts of both books over the last several years, and now they will be in the world and I highly recommend preordering!

The first is ’s Hidden River. Sara is so, so, so good at (1) messy, complex human relationships (2) gutting scenes (3) dark, stark, often very funny prose, and this novel has all three. As a teenager, the narrator Cass had a sexual relationship with her best friend Sally’s father, who then unexpectedly died. Now she’s in her thirties and gets an invite to Sally’s wedding. Does Sally know? Does her family know? Was this relationship what Cass thought it was or something else entirely? It’s so good!

Sara is launching Hidden River with two events, one at Narberth Bookshop on May 6 (with !) and another at Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on May 7. I will be at the NYC event! Come hang with us!

The second book I think you should preorder is ’s How We See the Gray. Rachel and I originally bonded over the fact that we were both writing Rockford novels, and THIS IS HER ROCKFORD NOVEL! It’s about a foster care social worker named Meredith who makes a terrible mistake and loses custody of her own kid. I love a kaleidoscopic novel, and this one has lots of POVs, including a Greek chorus of seasoned social workers who have a lot of thoughts on Meredith’s choices. Just as the Rockford Anthology Rachel edited is a love letter to our city, this novel is a totally different kind of love letter to Rockford and the people who call it home.

Rachel is launching How We See the Gray at Maze Books on May 15 and has a bunch of other events coming up, including the Rally Reading Series in Brooklyn on June 4. Show up, NYC!

Okay, dipping back out for who knows how long, but I’m posting my writing times daily on Instagram if that is at all the kind of thing you are interested in.

Until next time,
Shayne

There are a lot of reasons to not make it to the desk right now, but I have found starting each day with focused attention on a creative project to be grounding, clarifying, and an antidote to the fruitless kinds of anxiety that lead to feelings of helplessness. There is a feeling of self-efficacy that comes with showing up, and now more than ever we all need to believe we can effect change.

I’m aiming for an hour and most days it happens. This month, I have spent that hour either working on the novel — mostly revising scenes that aren’t working — or reading for the novel. I have a thick stack of books I consider “novel research” and if I don’t know where to start in the morning, I’ll read until I feel pulled in a direction.

This month I read and loved American Modern: Architecture; Community; Columbus, Indiana. It tells the history of the architecture of Columbus, which has been a sideways inspiration for my glass house novel from the beginning. Now I am reading The Edith Farnsworth House, a newly published history of another of my glass house inspirations. A few years ago, during an astrology reading, Zoe Anderson told me to “dream into” the novel. I keep thinking about that phrase. Dream into it.

Creation and destruction are both choices. Nothing is giving me more hope right now than the people of Minneapolis singing to their neighbors.

Keep going, keep going, keep going,
Shayne

Practice every day.

It’s like learning the piano. If you practice every day, few of those sessions will feel transcendent, but they all add up to being able to play.

A few months back, I picked up this analog progress tracker made by Free Period Press. I’ve been saving it for January 1. My plan is simply to log the time I spend in my writing practice each day in 2026. By “in my writing practice” I mean:

• Working on the novel

• Reading for the novel

• Researching for the novel

• Journaling about the novel

• Writing short stories

• Writing essays

Ideally I can find an hour each day, but if it’s less, I’ll show up and I’ll log it and we’ll call it better than nothing.

Writing, lately

I tried the interior mapping technique I mentioned in my last letter, and it didn’t work for my project. Moving on.

I spent the month of December reworking my first chapter based on a very good note from my agent, and I am MUCH happier with it.

Reading, lately

The last novel I read was Liars by Sarah Manguso. Now I’m doing a very slow read of Women Who Run with the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés.

I need a good novel! What are we reading?

Leave news

My last event of this book pub year was at , which is a GEM of a reading series run by — I highly recommend checking it out if you are in Philadelphia. read from her essay in What My Father And I Don’t Talk About and Lauren Holguin read from two gorgeous works in progress. The Head and The Hand is such a great bookstore. Warm vibes all around.

And Leave made the Chicago Review of Books Best Debuts of 2025 list! I didn’t expect to make any year-end lists with a book that came out in February, so very grateful to be included. (Speaking of year-end lists, I was a reviewer for the 100 Notable Small Press Books of 2025 list published on Lit Hub and no one will be surprised that I recommended ’s Frontier. Read it!)

Finally, I recently had the absolute pleasure of talking to Ben Tanzer for his podcast, This Podcast Will Change Your Life. Ben is a joy and his podcast is a gift and this was another lovely way to end my book pub year.

I don’t have a good plan for achieving my 2026 writing goal, other than wake up really early and do the damn thing. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Trust that putting care and attention into a private art project is a good use of one’s life, no matter the outcome. (I do believe this.)

Do you have a goal, intention, or resolution for the new year? I would love to hear it so I can cheer you on.

Love,
Shayne

“It’s much easier to build amazing structures in Creative mode, as you’ll have access to unlimited resources, but if you want to push yourself, stick with Survival.”

— Minecraft Construction Handbook

My six-year-old is into Minecraft. Minecraft is apparently the best-selling video game of all time, but for the uninitiated (me, seven months ago), it involves building things out of cubes and there are two modes:

• Creative mode, in which you can build entire worlds using unlimited materials, completely unimpeded

• Survival mode, in which, if you want to build, you must battle obstacles: limited resources, hunger, declining health, monsters, and the fact that night falls every 20 minutes and brings with it hostile zombie mobs

Since A Minecraft Movie came out in April, my family has watched it at least thirty times. This is not a complaint. I genuinely love this movie, and one of the reasons I love it is its message about creativity.

A quick synopsis: A bright kid named Henry who’s struggling socially (Sebastian Hansen) and a washed-up gamer who goes by “Garbage Man” (Jason Momoa) get thrown into the world of Minecraft, where they meet an expert crafter named Steve (Jack Black) who left his boring real-world job as a doorknob salesman for a life of building (and fighting zombies). Along with Henry’s sister/guardian Natalie (Emma Myers) and their realtor-turned-friend Dawn (Danielle Brooks), they face challenges, trials, and villains as they try to get back home.

I’m leaving a out a ton of fun characters (Jennifer Coolidge has all the best one-liners) and, IMO, pretty satisfying plot work, but this line, delivered by Steve, sums up the idea of the movie:

It’s harder to create than to destroy. That’s why cowards tend to choose the deuce.

Here in the real world, we are making things. Our resources are limited, the monsters are many, and our own bodies sometimes work against us. It would be easier not to build. It would be easier to tear down what other people are building. But that’s not what we’re here for.

Spoiler alert…

In the end, Steve decides to go back to the real world. He wants to go with his new friends, yes, but also he’s conquered the challenges of the Minecraft world. Making things in the real world in his next level.

Some news

On January 1, 2026, my business partner, Emilee Christianson, and I will officially become co-owners of Trekk, the creative agency our parents (her dad, my mom) started in 1995. (Yes, this is the quirky little agency I wrote about in Leave!)

I’ve been putting so much of my energy into this transition because I want to do a good job and do right by my coworkers. Running a company is a huge responsibility that I do not take lightly. I know it won’t be easy, but I’m excited about the future.

This means I’ll be in Rockford a lot more often. I love my hometown and investing in it in this way feels right, and well worth the rebalancing of my time and priorities that has been happening this year. Keeping my own projects going while taking on this new challenge is my next level.

Writing, lately

At the end of September, I sent the first 35,000 words of the novel to my agent. We had a call in October to talk about what’s working, what’s not working, and where to go from here. I already have the next 35,000 words, but the second half is a MESS and I was hoping our conversation would help unlock something for me.

It didn’t, but I do have some things I want to change about the first half that might help me figure out how to land the plane. My agent had this to say about the end: “It’s already written in there somewhere.” She’s probably right.

As a next step, I’m going to try this interior mapping technique from . I did something like this with my second novel manuscript years ago, but it was more of a mapping of emotional shifts — positive to negative, negative to positive, negative to even more negative — to make sure there wasn’t a chapter where the emotion just stayed the same. Lilly’s suggestion is more involved:

At the top of each scene’s index card, I wrote what the POV character for that scene knows/thinks/feels at the beginning of the scene, and under that I wrote what happens in the scene to change her perspective or emotional state, or reveal new information to her—what changes her and how, even if only by the smallest increment.

Let’s try it and see how it goes…

Reading, lately

When I’m stuck in a project, I use my morning writing time to read. Inevitably, I eventually read something that gives me an idea and sends me back to the page. Trust the process.

Some books I’ve read lately:

• Animal Stories by Kate Zambreno

• Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth by Nora Wendl (I LOVED this book)

• Office Politics by Wilfrid Sheed

• Strong Ground by Brené Brown

• Watching the Detective by Deborah Shapiro (highly recommend)

And, of course, The Rockford Anthology, edited by the great . I am honored to have an essay in this sweeping anthology, which includes so many stories and experiences and beautifully captures what a multi-faceted place Rockford is. <3

Come see me in Philly

My final Leave event of the year will be the reading series.

• When: Tuesday, December 16, 2025 at 6:30pm

• Where: The Head and The Hand, 2230 Frankford Ave., Philadelphia

I don’t know the full line-up yet but I know one of my fellow readers will be , so you know it’s going to be a good time. Hope to see Philly folks there!

I keep this newsletter going because it holds me accountable. To that end, I’ll be back in December with novel progress. Until then, I hope your own zombie mobs provide just the right amount of creative challenge.

Love,
Shayne

This summer, we left at 8am. He scooted and I walked .8 miles to the subway and then we rode the subway, five stops if we caught the local and two stops if we caught the express, to camp, and then I rolled his scooter home.

One day, the local and the express arrived at our station one right after the other. The local stayed and kept its doors open until the doors to the express were open and people streamed out of each train to switch to the other and one conductor leaned out the window and shouted to the other, “That’s how we get it done!” And for the rest of the summer, whenever two trains were in the station at the same time, my kid said, “That’s how we get it done.”

Not to be cryptic, but I’m working on some big things that I can’t talk about publicly yet. Waking up ridiculously early continues to be the only way I can get writing time right now, but that’s how we get it done!

Recently my best friend Bailey she mentioned something she and her wife Jess say sometimes: “Ways and ways.” I took this to mean there are so many ways to do things, or so many ways something might shake out. There doesn’t have to be one right way — ways and ways!

I told her I’ve been using it as a mantra and she laughed and said she and Jess actually mean something different when they say it. If I understand it correctly now, they use it when someone could have done something in a respectful way but chose it do it in a rude way, or could have done something the right way but chose to do it the wrong way. (I might still be off.)

She said the way I was using “ways and ways” reminded her of this quote from The Office we used as a mantra at our old job, where we met.

“I am here. I am part of this.” This is my circus. These are my monkeys.

My mantra for a while has been: "This is the fun part.” And it is! It might feel overwhelming now, but I will look back and think these were some of the best years of my life. (And I’ll take all the mantras I can get.)

These six weeks in writing

I thought I’d be done with a draft by the end of the summer, but I’m not. That’s okay! I have an abundance of creative energy — it’s just fueling a few different things right now.

We’re still chugging along with the novel and I have hope that things are about to get a little easier, with the return of the school year routine. Plus, the Ungodly Hour Writing Club is back in September and October.

The summer break from this Substack was necessary, and I’ve decided to keep check-ins here monthly until this draft is done.

These six weeks in reading

So many good books! I finished Light Years by James Salter. I listened to Chloe Caldwell’s Trying on the way home from camp dropoffs. I read The Anthropologists by Aysegül Savas in a weekend. I read Work Nights by Erica Peplin in another weekend. Now I’m nearly finished with All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews. I highly recommend all.

September event alert

I’ll be reading at Artmaggedon here in Brooklyn on September 28! I’m part of the Writing Co-Lab set, reading with Lynya Floyd, Nina Sharma, Amy Shearn, Jeanne Thornton, and Soraya Palmer and hosted by the one and only Brian Gresko. We’ll be at 1517 Ditmas Avenue from 2-2:45pm — swing by if you’re attending the festival!

Love to you.

Love,
Shayne

The biggest reason for the pause is that I felt like I wouldn’t be able to finish my manuscript this summer with just my early morning writing time, which right now is 5-6am every day. I had been getting up an hour earlier than that for 1000 Words of Summer, but I was tired! I needed to balance rest and writing time, so I decided to use my Sunday newsletter writing time for the novel, just for a season.

I have missed writing to you all here, and it also feels strange to not be documenting my novel process somewhere, not for you but for myself. The novel has come a long way over the last six weeks. So I’m here for a mid-summer check-in.

These six weeks in writing

At the end of 1000 Words of Summer, my project was at around 66,000 words, which all lived in 264 separate text documents in a Scrivener file, and those 264 documents were all out of order. Another 57,000 words had been cut and lived in a “Cut” file, in case I decided to drag anything back from the dead.

I have spent the last six weeks rearranging things.

This is truly the fun part for me. I feel like most of the story is there, I just need to bring it out by putting the pieces in the right order. As y’all know, I am not a “plot” person, more of a poetry person. I’m looking for the story that is made through juxtaposition and white space and a kind of narrative enjambment. I’m collaging, I’m quilting, I’m weaving, whatever crafty metaphor you want to use. And I LOVE it.

I’m up to 42,000 words put in order. It’s getting a little trickier now because I’ve reached the part where scenes are missing. The end still needs to be written. But I feel close to a full draft, something that felt very far away in May.

These six weeks in reading

Still slowly making my way through The Power Broker but I’ve taken breaks to read Catherine Lacey’s latest, The Möbius Book, and to finally read Outline by Rachel Cusk. Now I want to read the rest of that trilogy, but first I’m reading Light Years by James Salter.

There was a night in July when I couldn’t sleep and normally I am very good about not looking at my phone when this happens, but on this particular night I suddenly remembered I had a backlog of Libro.fm credits and went on a 1am audiobook shopping spree. I got Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li and preordered Chloe Caldwell’s Trying. I have three more credits still — any audio recs?

Other news!

I had the honor of being in conversation with for the New York launch of her book, Frontier. I also interviewed Erica over at Zona Motel, for anyone to read! I love love love this book and helping it to find more readers has been a joy.

CRAFT published a conversation between me and my friend about Leave, blurry fiction/nonfiction boundaries, and motherhood. (Randle writes beautifully about motherhood and writing; I recommend her essay How to Break a Sentence.)

And here’s some fun news: there’s now a second edition of Leave and it’s available on Bookshop.org!

This edition is available from Bookshop, and the first edition (which just went into its second printing!) is still available from Autofocus and Asterism.

It’s been gratifying to watch this book make its way into the world. I feel I have released it in every sense of the word.

I’ll be back at the end of the summer with another novel update. Hopefully I’ll be able to celebrate the completion of a first draft. In the meantime, I’d love to hear what you’re reading, listening to, working on.

With love,
Shayne

• I wrote over 14k words from May 31 to June 13.

• These words make up 93 new documents in my Scrivener novel file.

• The longest document is 661 words; most are much shorter.

• They took about 30 hours to write and would take about an hour to read.

My approach with this 1000 Words of Summer was to write toward each idea with abandon and, as soon as it lost its spark or I got stuck, open a new document and write toward a new idea. One thing 1000 Words of Summer has taught me over the years: there is always a new idea.

Next step is to read it all and see if anything is usable! I’d like to have a draft of this novel that I can send my agent sometime this summer. To do that, I’m going to have to make choices and say no to some things I’d hoped would be in the book. From the beginning, it’s been trying to be too much — two separate historical plot lines and a present day plot line; Brooklyn, Rockford, and Berlin; architecture and filmmaking and photography; depressions and recessions; philanthropy and conmen. I need to say no to some things so I can say yes to others. For what gets cut… there is always the next novel.

This project continues to be a refuge and an anchor. My family joined the No Kings protest in Manhattan yesterday, demonstrating with over 2,000 cities across the U.S. that we are not onboard with would-be dictators who throw ridiculous birthday parties with our tax dollars. (Recommend ’s latest post: Your Kid’s Art Class is Paying for This Parade.)

There are many reasons one might feel helpless, but we are not helpless, and showing up in the real world to protest reminds us of this, as does insisting on making our art and continuing to put it out in the world.

These two weeks were very busy in my work and personal life and not a great time to add 1000 words a day to the to-do list, but having done it anyway, I feel proud and energized and closer to the person I want to be. Generally, my experience has been that art (making it, witnessing it) improves a situation.

If you were also participating in 1000 Words, I hope it left you feeling energized as well.

Love,
Shayne

p.s. is publishing a novel on Substack! Read part 1.

p.p.s. RSVP for Erica Stern’s Frontier launch event at Lofty Pigeon on June 25, where I’ll be asking the questions!

I used to run long distances, and my favorite distance to run was ten miles because after the first seven, a lightness set in. No more heavy legs, no more slog. Almost effortless rotation, as if the body were a bicycle, as if it would take more force to stop than to keep going. After ten, it got harder again, but those three miles between seven and ten were my sweet spot for many years.

That’s how I feel about a thousand words. The first seven hundred are not easy and most of them will honestly probably be trashed. But something happens in those last three hundred, when I push myself beyond where I would have preferred to stop writing. The sentences get more surprising. The characters make unexpected decisions. The prose feels more like a poem.

This is why I love this time of year! I am physically tired but creatively energized!

I’ll do a full recap of what I’ve been working on next week, but in the meantime I’m here to check in with some updates.

Brooklyn event alert!

In less than three weeks, I’ll be in conversation with at Lofty Pigeon Books for the NYC launch of her gorgeous book, Frontier: A Memoir & A Ghost Story.

I love this book so much and Erica is so smart and thoughtful and I know this conversation is going to be a good one! If you’re in New York, come on out! RSVP, preorder the book, and we’ll see you there.

This week in Leave news

published a conversation between me and about Leave, cultural representations of birth and how they do or don’t prepare one for the real thing, seeking help for postpartum medical mysteries, and more. Thank you to Erin, and thank you to Zona Motel for publishing our discussion. <3

This week in reading

You know what goes well with 1000 Words of Summer? Finally deciding to read The Power Broker.

I will probably be reading this for the next year but that’s fine. I’m also reading Leila Taylor’s Sick Houses: Haunted Homes & the Architecture of Dread. Leila and I read together at Ditmas Lit the week before last, where she read an excellent essay about the Unabomber’s cabin. I finished Nicole Haroutunian’s Choose This Now and loved it. Still reading Brian Gresko’s You Must Go On, one entry per day. Brian also read at Ditmas Lit, as did Andrew Colarusso, who owns Taylor & Co. Books, another favorite local indie bookstore. Such a great event.

It’s also a GREAT moment for print lit mags. The latest issue of Grand: The Journal of One Grand Books is fantastic. It features a short story by Joanna Hershon that hit just right for me, previously unpublished fiction by J. G. Ballard (!!), and an excerpt from Yiyun Li’s new memoir. Most of this journal is also published online for free but the print issues are beautifully designed artifacts.

The latest issue of The Yale Review also just arrived and contains new fiction by Sigrid Nunez, Rachel Cusk, Bryan Washington, Jenny Erpenbeck, the list goes on. Feels like a magazine at the top of its game.

Finally, each day when I sit down to start my thousand words, I start by reading a page from Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test, because it’s the general vibe I’m going for with my narrator and it helps me slide into writing. It’s even better on re-read.

Nine days down, five to go. If you’re also doing your thousand words a day, good luck, good luck, good luck.

Love,
Shayne

This year’s 1000 Words runs May 31 to June 13. This will be my EIGHTH 1000 Words, and I have come to view these two weeks as a critical annual recalibration of my creative priorities. I use the weeks leading up to 1000 Words to clear out things I don’t need and make space for creative energy multipliers. Less social media, more music. Fewer people-pleasing obligations, more books.

This year’s prep list:

• Print and read the novel project — done

• Make a list of scenes that are missing — in progress

• Choose books to read that vibe with the novel — to do

• Start going to bed earlier so I can wake earlier — to do

• Minimize phone-related distractions — in progress

I just got one of those brick devices to turn my phone into a “brick” during writing time. I haven’t figured out my flow with it yet — you can set up different modes, so I can have a “writing” mode that only allows Bear and Scrivener, a “work” mode that only allows email and Slack, a “family” mode that only allows photos and music, etc. I’m going to experiment with it this week, and in the meantime I also set my phone screen to grayscale. Going back to an old flip phone doesn’t seem feasible to me at this moment, but it does seem possible to create stronger boundaries around the thing to make it less parasitic.

This week in reading

I finished Us Fools by Nora Lange and it was so, so good. Now I’m reading Nicole Haroutunian’s Choose This Now and Brian Gresko’s You Must Go On. Next up might be… The Power Broker? Is it time? It might be time.

This week in Leave news

We were literally on the news! Brea Walters from WIFR interviewed me and on Friday afternoon and the segment aired that night with an accompanying article online. (Side note: the TV news turnaround time is wild!)

This was following our event at Maze Books last weekend, where Rachel and I got to gush at each other and talk about Leave and celebrate with all my Rockford friends and family. It was a dream come true, and Sean Burke took photos!

I have two events left on what I am thinking of as my “book tour,” and they are both this week:

• 05.27.2025 | 11:30am | Queens, NY | Storytime for Caregivers at Astoria Bookshop

• 05.28.2025 | 8pm | Brooklyn, NY | Ditmas Lit at The Urbane Arts Club

There will be more events later in the year, but I need this arbitrary demarcation so I can immerse myself fully in the novel. I am SO excited to cap things off at Ditmas Lit, where I last read back in 2017, when I only had one published story to my name.

And then: 1000 Words. At this moment, when hundreds of arts organizations have abruptly lost their NEA funding, it’s important to remember that continuing to make art is a radical act.

Are you doing 1000 Words of Summer? Let me know and we can cheer each other on.

Love,
Shayne

Ten and a half weeks ago, I published a book that is and is not about motherhood. It’s more about birth, which is one way a person can take on the label of mother, but I personally didn’t feel like a mother for a long time after that. I remember running into a neighbor (who is now a friend) six or so months after my kid was born and her asking, “So are you Mama, Mom, Mommy, something else?” And every fiber of my being was like SOMETHING ELSE.

Some moms out there can probably relate. Integrating this new identity can take a long time and is an ongoing process. It’s not a switch you flip and suddenly everything lights up “MOTHER.” For me at least, there were a lot of blown bulbs, a lot of faulty circuits that needed to be inspected.

This is a strange moment in history, when the federal government is tossing around ideas like paying people to have kids and allocating more transportation funds to areas with higher birth rates without, seemingly, considering the reasons behind falling birth rates. The Guardian’s coverage sums it up best:

But experts say $5,000 checks won’t lead to a baby boom. Between unaffordable healthcare, soaring housing costs, inaccessible childcare and a lack of federal parental leave mandates, Americans face a swath of expensive hurdles that disincentivize them from having large families – or families at all – and that will require a much larger government investment to overcome.

All I want for Mother’s Day is universal healthcare, universal childcare, and universal paid family leave. <3

On the other hand, the book is very much about motherhood in that it’s about my grandma and my mom and my sister and the things we pass down and the ways we love each other as generations of women. I’m grateful to my mother, who allowed me to make her a character in the book and who was the first person to show me there are many ways to be a mother.

I have three book events this month, and I would love to see you there so we can talk about all this stuff + writing and memory and art, face to face.

Next up: Rockford, with !

However you are spending this Mother’s Day, whatever your relationship is to motherhood, I’m sending you love.

Love,
Shayne

I don’t purposely use AI in my personal life, but I do use it in a limited way at work. I don’t use it to generate the texts that it is my job to write, but I do sometimes use it to research for those texts. I don’t trust the output until I have independently verified it; often it’s wrong. (Recently I googled “Are we in EST or EDT” and the AI overview gave me the wrong answer. This is a simple query. Yes, I could have structured it differently to get the right answer, but I thought the whole point was natural language processing?)

Because I’m using these tools not to write an email for me but to learn, I care a lot about what’s gone into them in the first place. I don’t want a tool that’s been trained on the entire Internet because I’ve seen the Internet — it’s not the best we can do. The most useful AI tool I have come across so far is Google’s NotebookLM, which allows you to upload a bunch of your own research documents and query them as a collection. I trust the output more when I have chosen the input.

This has me thinking about my own brain, and all the texts and images it’s trained on in my nearly four decades on this planet. Twenty years ago, it was easier to control what went in. You chose books to read, films to watch, friends with whom to have conversations. Algorithms and scrollable feeds changed the way we do input.

It’s not a matter of “garbage in, garbage out.” It’s more like a LLM. I have trained on a vast number of texts. On any given day my brain frequently returns ideas shaped by texts I consumed as a child or as a teenager. I generate new texts that contain traces of existing texts, some of them “garbage.” My writing is influenced by the poems of Frank O’Hara and trashy teen horror novels, by the films of Kogonada and reruns of Saved by the Bell.

Of course, I am not a machine and my brain is not engaging in machine learning. I have the benefit of human memory and the way it favors texts that made an impression, but I also have the liability of human memory and the way it constantly falters or leads us astray. (In a world of AI, perhaps this liability will more often be a benefit. I have a feeling we are about to see imperfect art, art that has the mark of a human, increase in value.)

But like an LLM, it matters what my brain has trained on, and I’ve been thinking lately about how to exert more influence. Give up the algorithms and the scrollable feeds is an obvious answer, but some of the most nourishing texts of this last decade have come from there. Tip the balance toward long, rich texts. Give the eyes over to art.

I’m back in the novel. I printed all 300ish pages of the current manuscript, read it, took notes on missing scenes, cut some stuff, reorganized a bunch. I have a better idea of the structure now. There are two timelines, and I had been trying to balance them in every chapter. Now I realize I need to separate them, make them more distinct, and alternate chapters, to avoid totally confusing the reader.

I have been reading (slowly, because I love it and so I am dragging it out) Us Fools by Nora Lange, and she does this. The chapter titles are the year in which the chapter is set. It’s grounding, in a text that jumps back and forth across time.

1000 Words of Summer begins May 31. I want to go into this year’s sprints with a list of at least 30 scenes to write/finish, so I have plenty of options to choose from each day and can follow the energy. If you are also doing 1000 Words, let me know so we can cheer each other on.

Love to you all.

Love,
Shayne

This week in writing

I did actually work on the novel a bit. I’m not in a daily groove with it right now, and that groove is not coming this week because NYC schools are on ~*~spring break~*~ but I trust the time is near! Living on faith, baby.

This week in reading

I’m reading Us Fools by Nora Lange and it is very good. I’ve started so many novels recently and this is the first in a while that gives me the can’t-wait-to-get-back-to-it feeling. I love that feeling!

I’m also listening to Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson. The ideas won’t be new to folks who follow one or both of these guys already, but I’m glad they put it all together into one cohesive argument for policies that will help build affordable housing and clean energy infrastructure because it feels like a political platform that someone could pick up and run on… which I hope they do.

This week in Leave news

We have more events coming up!

See some of you there!

Love,
Shayne

I am also interested in the idea of fictional autofiction, which seemed, as soon as she said it, like a way I could describe what I am trying to do in my novel-in-progress. Last summer, I wrote to you all:

I’m in a memoir/essay place right now, but I’ve been thinking a lot about essayistic fiction — not necessarily autofiction but fiction that feels like it from the tone, the point of view, the way it might backburner or forego plot in favor of meandering through the narrator’s mind. I’m zeroing in on what I like in a novel, why I loved Eliza Barry Callahan’s The Hearing Test so much, why I love a Sigrid Nunez novel. (What are other novels like these? Let’s make a list.)

Not necessarily autofiction but fiction that feels like it. Fictional autofiction.

After the panel, I met up with my agent and told her about this idea. She said, perhaps exasperatedly, “That’s just fiction!” I gathered from the ensuing conversation that calling something ‘autofiction’ diminishes its salability in the current publishing market. And she’s right, it is just fiction. I actually don’t love calling autofiction autofiction. It’s just fiction! All fiction scavenges from life! But fictional autofiction as a designation feels more useful to me, as a writer and a reader at least — it tells me something about what the book is going to feel like.

Later that day, I mentioned the idea to Mike Nagel and he said he understood what it was getting at, because autofiction has a certain ‘style.’ Yes, maybe part of it is a style thing. First-person narrator, obviously. Very, very close. This is a narrator who divulges. It doesn’t, of course, mean you’re getting the whole story — in fact, how could you, with a first-person narrator? It’s a novel more interested in consciousness than linear plot.

But the novel of consciousness is not a new thing. It’s a modernist thing, it’s Woolf. Is the only distinguishing mark of autofiction the fact that author and the narrator usually share the same name, pointing and laughing at the fact that it’s impossible to tell what’s “true” and what’s “made up”? It’s all made up! It’s just fiction!

At that 92nd Street Y panel on Tove Jansson back in March, Alexander Chee made a comment about how Jansson’s novels do not do the thing many contemporary novels do, the thing Brandon Taylor calls “character vapor,” and Kate Zambreno interjected, “I think he was talking about me.” And Alexander Chee apologized and Kate Zambreno said it was okay, that she is not offended by it, and it was a funny little moment and we all moved on.

But I can’t stop thinking about it because if the writers who have been called out for this are indeed writing character vapor (or what Taylor has also called “catalogue fiction” in Bobos in Ikea) then I love it. And Taylor criticizes it but also admits he loves it too: “What information does find its way into the self is portioned and held at arms length. See Kate Zambreno’s great and very vibey Drifts.”

But here’s the thing — Drifts is a novel of the body. Drifts is a novel of pregnancy. Drifts is a novel with not one but two ticking time bombs, countdowns to an external book deadline that inconveniently overlaps with an internal — and 100% unmovable — due date, at which point the narrator’s mind and body will be irrevocably changed, likely rendering her incapable of writing the same book she might write pre-baby. It is a novel of consciousness but it is also a novel of swollen fingers, blood draws, HORMONES, vomit, uncontrollable tears, spastic diarrhea, hemorrhoids, stitches — an undeniable physicality crashing into the self. “I don’t recognize myself in this uncomfortable and unbearable body,” the narrator says. The only way one could read this book and find only vibes, only vapor, would be to skate over all the pregnancy stuff, which I’m sure some readers did. Because it’s unfamiliar or uninteresting to them, because it’s gross (or as Zambreno says in the book “goth”), because it’s hard to parse looking at the other hidden behind one’s navel from navel gazing.

Or, more generously, maybe this book is just not their thing.

Back to autofiction, fictional or otherwise, I don’t think Zambreno embraces that designation anyway — in this conversation with Nate Lippens she speaks of “our interest less in what is often tabbed autofiction but more the novel of consciousness.” And really it doesn’t matter what we call what we are trying to do, except to the extent that is helps us do the thing, and maybe find other people who are also trying to do it. And definitely call it whatever if you’re trying to sell it, GODSPEED you agents who know how to sell things.

Going back to what Ananda said about the type of work she’s interested in, “fictional autofiction” or whatever you want to call it. She’s not just trying to do it; she’s actually doing it. In her book Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, she plays with form and frame narratives and seems to be having a whole lot of fun. And I guess this is my way of saying I’m still trying to figure out my own messy project, chasing the ideas that excite me and trying to ignore the rest.

This week in writing

I’m working on two interviews and trying to figure out a new writing schedule, a way to work Morning Writing Club back into my life despite this year’s non-conducive school dropoff schedule and work-work kind of being crazy. This coming week I want to print off the novel and mark it up on paper as a way of figuring out what needs to happen next…

This week in reading

Last week, I finished Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman. It’s an interesting project, and now I want to read all the contemporary reactions to it. But what I care more about are her sentences — I find her sentences to be incredibly compelling and I want to understand why. When I read her, I pick her apart.

This week in Leave news

I was part of this unconventional episode of The Lives of Writers that weaves together interviews with all the spring 2025 Autofocus Books authors — me, Erin Dorney, and Teresa Carmody — with commentary from Michael Wheaton. This was really fun and I’d love it if you gave it a listen.

Listen to the epsiode

Love you all, no matter what you think about autofiction, fictional or otherwise.

Love,
Shayne

I’m sure many of you can relate! I have no advice for this. Just telling it like it is.

But with everything going on in the world, it’s actually a great time to be doing book events. Full brain, but also full heart.

This week in writing

Scrivener tells me I wrote 129 words of the novel this week, but my mind has been working on it way more than that. I’m in the middle of a breakthrough on this project that I’m not quite ready to talk about yet… but I’m beginning to see a way to finish that doesn’t take another ten years.

This week in reading

I’m reading Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. Exquisitely beautiful.

My friend Anna and I went to a 92nd Street Y panel on Monday where Kate Zambreno, Alexander Chee, and Leanne Shapton discussed Jansson’s work and some Finnish and Swedish people in the audience schooled us all on how to say “Tove Jansson.”

This week in Leave news

Thursday was the Philly launch of Leave: A Postpartum Account at The Head & The Hand Books. I was in conversation with , who brings the very best energy.

We talked about unconventional memoir formats (Jiordan’s fantastic book Disappearing Act is a YA true-story-in-verse recounting the aftermath of her father's imprisonment), grief books, and intergenerational trauma, and you may not believe me based on that list of topics but the vibes were high and many laughs were had! H&H Books was a fantastic host — totally recommend for anyone book touring. Thank you to all who came out. 💞

Up next: more stops on this very spread-out mini-tour!

My family is heading to AWP early to see friends in San Diego and then bop around LA a bit on our own before the conference starts. No newsletter next week — see you on the other side!

Love,
Shayne

As I told the folks who registered for the class, I’m not an expert on writing from memory, but I am a student of it, someone with a serious interest in it. My interest revolves around specific texts and certain questions, some of which served as jumping off points during the workshop:

• Why begin with a memory?

• What is the difference between documenting a memory and, say, writing an essay?

• What makes a memory vivid?

• What if a memory is incomplete? (Of course a memory is incomplete.)

When I write — especially when I write fiction — I often begin with a memory because I find it a useful way to access the sensory details of a scene. The workshop attendees were working on everything from blog posts and essays to family histories and sermons. Beginning with a memory can lead many places.

I structured the workshop as four excerpts, each with a corresponding prompt. We read each excerpt and talked about what we noticed. Then we spent five minutes on the prompt.

Here are the excerpts and prompts, for those who would like to do a self-guided version of the workshop. You could do them with a friend or a group so that you can have a discussion about each excerpt that involves different perspectives. If you do them alone, spend a couple of minutes thinking about each excerpt before diving into the exercise.

Excerpt 1

My father always woke up at four o’clock in the morning. After getting out of bed, his first concern was to go and see if the mezzorado had turned out well. Mezzorado was a kind of sour milk he’d been taught how to make by shepherds in Sardinia. It was actually just yogurt. Yogurt wasn’t yet fashionable then. You couldn’t buy it in dairies and snack bars as you do nowadays. In making his own yogurt my father was, like in so many things, a pioneer. Winter sports weren’t fashionable at the time either, and my father might have been the only one in Turin to engage in them. As soon as snow fell, no matter how light, on Saturday evening he took off for Claviere with his skis on his shoulder. Neither Sestriere nor the hotels in Cervinia existed then. My father regularly slept in a mountain hut above Claviere called the Mautino Hut. He sometimes dragged along with him my siblings or a few of his assistants who shared his passion for the mountains. He used the English pronunciation “ski.” He had learned to ski as a youth while on a trip to Norway. On Sunday night when he came home he would always claim the snow had been terrible. Snow for him was always too wet or too dry, like the mezzorado, which never turned out just as it should. It always seemed to him either too watery or too thick.

— From Family Lexicon by Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee

Exercise 1: Document a memory of an adult who raised you.

Excerpt 2

The room where typing was taught at P.S. 96, the junior high school for girls I attended on Eighty-Second Street and York Avenue, was like a nineteenth-century factory floor. Identical Underwood office typewriters sat in rows on tables with stools in front of them. An intoxicating smell of ink filled the room. We sat at these machines as a large, dark woman named Mrs. Schroeder—our foreman, so to speak—moved among us and unhurriedly (the course went on for two years) turned us into expert, fast-as-hell touch typists. I also learned to cook and sew at P.S. 96. The original idea of the school in what was then a working-class neighborhood was to prepare its girl students for the real life they would enter when they graduated from ninth grade. They would get secretarial jobs or marry. By the time I attended, most of the students were going on to high school, but the curriculum remained largely unchanged. The cooking course was preceded by the sewing course: we made aprons and hats out of white cotton fabric trimmed with red binding to wear while we prepared parsleyed potatoes.

— From Still Pictures by Janet Malcolm

Exercise 2: Document a memory by beginning with a simile or metaphor. Return to your comparison two or three times to locate more similarities.

Excerpt 3

The year is 1990. The place is San Francisco, the Castro. It is Halloween night. I am in my friend John’s bathroom, alone in front of the mirror, wearing a black turtleneck and leggings. My face glows back at me from the light of twelve 100-watt bulbs.

In high school I learned to do makeup for theater. I did fake mustaches and eyelashes then, bruises, wounds, tattoos. I remember always being tempted then to do what I have just done now, and always stopping, always thinking I would do it later.

This is that day.

My face, in the makeup I have just applied, is a success. My high cheekbones, large slanting eyes, wide mouth, small chin, and rounded jaw have been restrung in base, powder, eyeliner, lipstick, eyebrow pencil. With these tools I have built another face on top of my own, unrecognizable, and yet I am already adjusting to it; somehow I have always known how to put this face together. My hands do not shake, but move with the slow assurance of routine.

I am smiling.

— From the essay “Girl” in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

Exercise 3: Document a memory in the present tense.

Excerpt 4

I didn’t keep a journal then—or if I did, it has long since vanished—so I can’t say for sure exactly how many times I went to help Susan with her letters, but I think it was only three or four. And I believe it was the second time I went that I met her mother, who was visiting from out of town: a small, delicate-looking woman (her daughter looked hulking beside her) with chin-length hair dyed hard black. She looked like an aged flapper—like an old Louise Brooks. Red lipstick, and long red fingernails. I remember some kind of jewelry—I think rings. Do I remember or do I invent a cigarette holder?

— From Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez

Exercise 4: Document the parts of a memory you remember while questioning the parts you don’t.

You’ll notice the direction is to “document” a memory. Once the memory is documented, then, if you want, comes the art — what will you do with it? Your documented memory may be the beginning of an essay. Perhaps you want to fictionalize it and turn it into a short story. Maybe it’s just what it is, a memory you’ve taken out of your brain and frozen in time using language — a form quite different from the actual experience of memory. (In fact, you might find this process changes your experience of the memory going forward.)

If you try these exercises, let me know how they go.

Love,
Shayne

p.s. If you are in PHILADELPHIA, please join me and the illustrious at The Head & The Hand this Thursday, March 13, for the Philly launch of Leave: A Postpartum Account!

On the last day, I attended a session led by one of the conference judges. I don’t remember what the session was supposed to be about, but I do remember that she started by telling us we should all be proud because the fact that we were there meant our writing samples were very strong. And then she asked us to close our eyes and envision what writing “success” looked like to us.

Today, I would probably envision gobs of time to write, but back then I envisioned the launch party for my first book. It was in a bookstore in Brooklyn. There were ten or fifteen people there drinking wine out of plastic cups. I sat on a stool at the front of the store, talking about my book with a writer friend. A vision and a dream!

On Tuesday, my dream came true when we launched Leave: A Postpartum Account.

It’s so easy with publishing (and everything else in life) to achieve a goal and then immediately look to the next “milestone,” nothing ever enough. I am actively rejecting that mindset by soaking in this whole week.

I am so grateful to everyone who came out (WAY more than ten or fifteen people!) and to Briana and Davi at Lofty Pigeon Books for hosting the absolute best launch.

I’m grateful for all the pub week press!

• This joy of a conversation with Jiordan Castle in The Rumpus!

• This beautifully written review by Jenessa Abrams in LA Review of Books!

• This Brooklyn Rail conversation with Rachel León coming out in print!

• This pub day interview over at Pub Cheerleaders!

I’m grateful to Sara Lippmann for agreeing to be in public conversation with me. It all feels so full-circle — back in 2016, I read my turtle story at a reading Sara was hosting at Kettle & Thread, a now-long-closed cafe just three blocks away from where Lofty Pigeon is today. I didn’t know Sara, but she approached me after the reading and said, “I have a turtle story too.” That night, I stayed up late reading her turtle story and loved it and immediately signed up for a writing class with her, and the rest is history.

I’m especially grateful to everyone who’s already read the book, and to all the people who have reached out via email and text and DM to me to tell me what Leave has meant to them. Several people have told me they read it and then immediately passed it on to their mom, aunt, friend, etc. Now this is the stuff of dreams — a project of your heart, making its way in the world, finding its readers.

Finally, I am grateful to you, yes YOU, for being along for this ride.

Love,
Shayne

On Friday, that writer was me. I signed preorders in the back room at Lofty Pigeon, and it was magical. Davi, one of the co-owners of LP, agreed to pose with me for this photo after the fact so I can remember it forever. We took fifteen photos and my kid photobombed the other fourteen. What a night.

This week in reading

I’m almost done with In the Freud Archives. I keep stopping to read around it, about the libel suit Jeffrey Masson brought against Janet Malcolm because of the book and about her experience of the trial, for which she hired a speech coach. The book is interesting, but the larger story is fascinating, especially in our current context of media lawsuits.

My ancillary reading then brought me to Malcolm’s collages, which make me want to collage.

Yesterday, I began my annual reread of Sempre Susan by Sigrid Nunez. A perfect book. Comfort reading, really.

This week in writing

I was all over the place!

First, I finished my letter for 100 Days of Creative Resistance, which I think will be tomorrow’s letter? Sign up to find out…

Then, I continued working on Writing from Memory. Developing this class has been such a fun process for me. If it goes well on March 8, I might offer a virtual option this summer…

Also, I did a written interview and a podcast interview, which both involved trying to articulate my writing process. Much easier to do in writing than to do out loud!

And I submitted one essay to a literary magazine, pitched another essay to a newsier magazine, and pitched a book review. All writing-adjacent work that is not writing but that needs to get done.

Finally, I did a lot of thinking around the novel and wrote zero words. Noted my ideas for future me, who will have more time when it is not the week before her book launch.

This week in Leave news

Leave is out there in the world! Preorders started arriving this weekend, although technically if you order today or tomorrow it still counts as a preorder. ;) (I’ve added a list of stockists to the end of this page. If you don’t see your favorite local bookstore there, feel free to request it from them.)

Yesterday brought many text messages and DMs from friends and acquaintances and a few strangers, either with photos of their copies or with a note saying they sat down to read a little and ended up finishing the whole thing. This was my hope for Leave, that it would be a read-in-one-sitting kind of book, so these early responses are gratifying and affirming. I’m excited to see what happens next, and I’m REALLY excited to celebrate the official launch on Tuesday. (RSVP here.)

Next week’s newsletter will probably just be a bunch of photos from the launch with my dreamy/hazy impressions, and then I’ll go back to using this space to mostly write about my novel. The novel has been neglected during this season of book promo, but I know it’s there waiting for me, and I can’t wait to return to it.

Last time I can use this fun little banner!

See you on the other side,
Shayne

On Friday, while watching Octonauts and the Great Barrier Reef with my kid, I looked up crown-of-thorns starfish to see what one looks like in real life and got this:

I have been trying to stay out of panic mode. Panic mode doesn’t accomplish anything for anyone. I have been trying to protect my brain and have kept up with the phone boundaries I set for myself with the new year. (I can’t imagine the anxiety spiral I would be in if I hadn’t done this.)

But even if you only read the news once a day, you can tell it’s not great for people who like democracy.

, someone I admire not only for her artistry but for her moral clarity and courage, wrote about how it is right now in the U.S. and included this link to a Project 2025 tracker that shows how many of the Project 2025 objectives are either done or in progress. It’s not fun to realize that 81 out of 293 objectives have already been completed in just 24 days, but it is helpful to see the list laid bare — more helpful than trying to keep tabs on the onslaught of headlines.

I highly recommend reading Sarah’s whole post, which includes things we can do instead of giving in to despair along with wise gems like this:

You need a reserve of psychic strength to weather this time, and crucially, to act in it. So build it up. Protect and nourish your body and your mind. Find ways to connect to other people, to good art, to some form of political practice, and to the earth. Talk about how you feel, but not endlessly. Turn outwards, from your phone and from yourself, towards other people. Have something or someone to care for. Help someone, and preferably not just one person, to care for you. Leave the house reasonably often, see and watch and read real art, have a fitness or health practice, do things that make you happy and feel present in your body.

Well said. Really, read the whole thing.

So, yeah, it’s a weird time to have a book coming out. When people ask me how I am, my immediate natural response is, “Amazing! Wonderful! Great!” And then I see the look on the person’s face and realize they didn’t mean to ask how I am personally, they meant to ask how I am dealing with all this. But I refuse to let Donald Trump and Elon Musk ruin the personal joy I feel seeing my book, a project on which I worked very hard for years, finally make its way into the world. No, just no. And it feels even more important to me now to make space for people to tell their birth stories, to identify how the things that happen to us during and after birth are often dictated by the larger systems we’re living in that affect us all. To share our honest experiences and find points of connection with other human beings. To clarify together just what we’re fighting for and then fight for it.

This week in reading

I finished Erica Stern’s Frontier and wow wow wow I loved this book. I have never read anything like it. I immediately began writing about it. I don’t know what that writing will turn into yet, but I love it when a book does this.

Then I got pulled back toward Janet Malcolm’s In the Freud Archives. Just as I was getting back into it, Rachel Aviv published this piece that provides some eyebrow-raising context on Malcolm’s project and Katie Roiphe published this piece on Malcolm’s journalistic reputation and the more complicated realities. A very interesting time to be reading Malcolm, one of my all-time favorite stylists. Makes me think we might be getting a Janet Malcolm biography soon.

This week in writing

I wrote one sentence of the novel, but it was a good one.

Mostly I have been writing about what I’m reading, prepping for a review and an interview and this class on writing from memory, and working on my letter for 100 Days of Creative Resistance. (It’s not too late to sign up! These brief daily letters have been helpful for me!)

This past week was the final week of this round of the Ungodly Hour Writing Club, and it was bittersweet to say farewell in the Zoom on Friday. I’ll still be doing my work at an ungodly hour, but it’s always nice to have company.

This week in Leave news

Preorders have shipped!

If you preordered directly from Autofocus, you should have received an email like this:

And if you preordered from Lofty Pigeon Books, they just received their shipment and I’m going in this week to sign books!

Next up: we celebrate.

RSVP to the Brooklyn Launch

RSVP to the Philly Launch

Alright, you all. Love your people. Be kind to your brain. Take care of your body. Call a friend. We’re all in this together.

Love,
Shayne

On Saturday, March 8, I’m teaching a class at Mud University, a series of pop-up workshops in Cambridge, New York. The class is called “Writing from Memory,” and here’s the description:

In this hands-on personal writing class, we will use a series of guided exercises to excavate and examine our most vivid memories. Together, we will read and discuss several short excerpts from both classic and contemporary literature where the writer begins with a memory and analyzes, questions, or even explodes it. Along the way, we will talk about techniques for handling the limits of memory when writing a personal essay or other piece of creative nonfiction. Participants will walk away with multiple "beginnings" and ideas for further development or revision.

Damn! I would take that class. (Now I just have to create it.)

This morning I pulled some favorites down from the favorites shelf. (Yes, I have a special bookshelf for my favorite books.) My plan is to create a compilation of excerpts and build from there. Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures. Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900. Sigrid Nunez’s Sempre Susan. Vivian Gornick’s Fierce Attachments.

These are my “classics.” I paged through, rereading passages underlined by a past me. Back then, I underlined what struck me; now I am looking for how the memory functions on the page and where the craft comes in, the intentionality that takes a memory and turns it into art.

What better project could I ask for right now? I gave myself this assignment on purpose, because I knew I would need it.

If you will be in the Cambridge, NY area in early March, join me for Writing from Memory.

This week in writing

We had our last A Write at the Museum session and I miss this class already. I’m going to keep using visual art prompts to fuel my novel writing. More visual art in all our lives! Art can be an antidote. Art can be a suit of armor.

Speaking of art, look at this gorgeous painting my father-in-law made for us. He named it after the kid because “it has a lot going on.”

This week in reading

This week has contained only snatched minutes here and there for reading but every second I could I was inhaling my ARC of ’s Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story. This book is SO good and so unexpected. It’s part NICU memoir and part wild west ghost story, which sounds incongruent but as you read you’re like, YES, EXACTLY. I am not quite finished but I can already confidently recommend this book to my own readers. If you like Leave, you’ll love Frontier.

This week in Leave news

The book tour is officially kicked off!

I could not imagine a better first event than The Rally Reading Series, which features overtly political literature and involves a call to action at every reading.

The audience was amazing. Generous, supportive, welcoming, responsive. Truly a dream crowd. Our host (and hilarious emcee), Ryan D. Matthews, passed the bucket at intermission and raised a bunch of cash for Floyd Bennett Field Neighbors, which has recently transitioned from supporting migrant families living in the tent shelters at Floyd Bennett Field to supporting these families as they are rehoused following the January 15 closure of that shelter.

I read a few short pieces from Leave, including the financial breakdown of our birth, which, spoiler alert, cost WAY more than we expected. The crowd audibly gasped when I read that my newborn baby had his own individual deductible to meet and had to pay his own “room and board” at the hospital, which was deemed by the insurance company to be “not a covered service.” Welcome to for-profit healthcare in the United States of America! I have grown used to these facts, so it was good for me to see people’s surprise and be reminded that we need to keep talking about these issues and telling our stories as part of the fight for universal healthcare.

There is so much to fight for right now, I know. I don’t have great advice for these times. I can say I have been heartened by 100 Days of Creative Resistance and its daily reminders to keep going, keep going. Also, being together in real life with other writers and reading from our work and cheering each other on — that’s powerful, too.

Upcoming Leave events:

• Brooklyn, NY | 02.25.2025 | 6:30pm

  Official launch + conversation with Sara Lippmann at Lofty Pigeon Books — RSVP

• Cambridge, NY | 03.08.2025 | 12:30pm

  Mud U class Writing From Memory — RSVP

• Philadelphia, PA | 03.13.2025 | 6:30pm

  Philly launch + conversation with Jiordan Castle at The Head & The Hand — RSVP

• Los Angeles, CA | 03.26-03.29.2025
  AWP

• Brooklyn, NY | 05.25.2025 | 8pm

  Ditmas Lit at The Urbane Arts Club

The book comes out two weeks from Tuesday, and after Thursday’s reading I am even more excited about the launch party. Hope to see some of you there/on the road. Until then, go look at some art, read a book, log off, take care of yourself.

Love,
Shayne

NYC folks! Now is the time for solidarity and community! I’ll be reading with Emily J. Smith and Jen Lue at the Rally Reading Series on Thursday, February 6 at Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg. This series combines art and activism — “the heart of a march in the body of a reading series” — and we’ll be taking donations to support local mutual aid efforts. Would love to see you there!

Hi friends,

Let’s start with books this week, shall we?

This week in reading

I finished Horse Girl Fever by Kevin Maloney. I’m still gathering my thoughts about it, but generally I really enjoyed it. Frenetic in style, poignant in content. It reminded me of the best stories in my favorite online lit mags from the late 2010s, like Paper Darts. Remember Paper Darts?

Then I started an ARC of Erica Stern’s Frontier: A Memoir and a Ghost Story, which is coming out from Barrelhouse in June. I love this book already. It starts with a long, gorgeously written birth story. I think I might need to write about this one…

I’m also listening to Radical Candor by Kim Scott. I don’t do a lot of “business books” and this one is definitely dated, but now is a wild time to be managing human beings at work and I’m trying to do a better job with that massive responsibility.

And I resumed reading In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcolm. It slipped between the bed and the wall a few weeks ago and I honestly forgot about it for a while but it’s back in rotation now.

This week in writing

It’s the last week of A Write at the Museum. This class has flown by and I’m going to miss it. (David is also running a virtual version starting February 16 if writing prompts based on art sound fun to you but you are not in NYC!)

I’ve continued using the prompts to work on the glass house novel, and I am loving the direction it’s going. I think the piece I wrote this week will actually make it into the manuscript, as opposed to remaining an exercise to get to know the character. This book is also morphing in interesting ways, showing me what it is and what it’s not. More on that in the coming weeks.

This week in Leave news

It was my HONOR to be interviewed by for The Brooklyn Rail. This conversation was intimate and open and true to the spirit of my work, and I’m incredibly grateful for the care and thought Rachel put into it.

My dear friend Heather has been working so hard for years on a documentary project about death, and her team just found out that their feature-length documentary Other Side was accepted to the South by Southwest Film Festival. She and I agreed this week that this time right before a big project goes public is exciting, exhausting, all of the emotions all at once, and generally A LOT, but the thing keeping us both grounded is gratitude. Gratitude for all the people who have helped and supported along the way, and also gratitude for the chance to do it at all. This is the fun part.

Postcards drop tomorrow for all my snail mail subscribers. (Also, I have a ton of postcards, so if you want a stack, let me know! Drop them at your local bookstore or coffee shop, send them to your friends, revive an old pen pal relationship…)

Take care of yourself and each other.

Sending love from Brooklyn,
Shayne