Since the beginning of the year, temporarily deadline-free and under no reading obligations for the first time since 2023, I have been reading whatever I want. What I want, it turns out, has run quite the gamut: middle-grade fantasy with a mystery hook (Anne Ursu’s The Troubled Girls of Dragomir Academy); imtimate and powerful essays (Morgan Parker’s You Get What You Pay For); delightful series books I just hadn’t gotten to yet (from Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills and Malka Older’s Mossa and Pleiti).
I have yet to be disappointed in the results of this mood-selecting, this bouncing from one book to something almost completely different, but two books from my early-year list have been on my mind more than I expected. One, I’m still reading, going as slowly as I can make myself. Both are books about the writing life but also about much more: about moving through the world, about being an artist, about turning to the work of other artists for answers and guidance; about community and creativity and frustration and life.
Fiction is about these things, too. There is such good fiction about these things. But since December, or thereabouts, I’ve had this craving for books about books. It started with reading a Tolkien essay, and then wanting more; it continued with starting (but not yet finishing!) Brian Attebery’s Fantasy: How It Works and then wanting to know where the rest of these books were. The books about SFF, specifically; about how it works and the people who write it. I asked the internet, as one does, and I made a slightly overwhelming list of its replies. I want to read everything. But I limited myself to ordering only three or four books. Or maybe six or seven. Some of them were quite small.
Then, instead of reading the books I was so excited about thinking about, I picked up Sofia Samatar’s Opacities: On Writing and the Writing Life. Samatar is the author of fantasy novels and stories, and last year’s stellar The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain; she’s also a memoirist. Nothing of hers that I have read or even read about is like Opacities.
I can’t describe this book. It is a book about writing and also sometimes about not writing. It is about doing the work, and living, and reading, and writing letters, and friendship. The book is structured as a series of letters, but also notes on other writers’ work, explorations that build connections and ask questions and just seem to pile on top of each other in a way that feels like the most meticulously constructed thing and also like I simply can’t take it in all at once. I started marking sentences I loved with sticky notes, and then gave up and took photos of full pages. Anything I might say about it feels like not nearly enough; it’s a book to absorb, and then go back to, and find some portion of what I missed the first time.
A highlight:
“And so what I sought was not, as I’d written to you, a project of nothing but a project of everything. Or, rather, it was both at once. It was a night world that trembled with a vibrant morning. It was a close and friendly dissolution. It was a withdrawal that made one open to every passing current of air, touched by the gleam of every instant. It was the rhythm of heart and lungs, a strange and common language. It was music. It was contrapuntal writing.”
This series of gorgeous contradictions sings to me. It feels mundane and petty to describe the way it does, though, the way it describes a feeling of being pulled in competing directions and wanting to stay in that fraught and vibrating and possible place between them. For me it isn’t just about writing—though the project of nothing and the project of everything both resonate with corners of my brain—but about all the tugs, all the things, all the possibilities and attentions and horrors and necessities. I typed up those words and every thought that crossed my brain was something I could or should do or be thinking about: more writing, a reading I need to finish, senators to call or email, news to follow or step away from for a moment, how to start another project, how to entertain the cats and keep the house clean, who in my family needs worrying about, why I didn’t exercise today, what will be on fire tomorrow (literally or metaphorically), and what to do next.
Samatar’s book is loose, elegant, opaque as the title suggests; it’s also precise and vivid and sent me down a bunch of my own rabbit holes. It made me think about the way people talk about influence and the clarity that might come from being open about what inspires a writer, a person, a reader. Anyone. It made me think about the obsession with “originality” and what that even means and what we might focus on instead. It made me feel like there are other ways, ways I’ve never thought of or seen, to engage with and think about and make art, other voices that are not as loud as the ones yelling the same old writing rules or the people telling you what you should or shouldn’t read or spend your time on.
The other book, the one I’m not yet finished with, is more explicitly about making art: Stacey D’Erasmo’s The Long Run: A Creative Inquiry. The premise is that D’Erasmo is interested in how people keep making art, and so she goes and talks to eight artists in different fields who are older than she is. How do they do it? How do they keep doing it?
But this isn’t a book of profiles or Q&As. It is personal and lush and rich; in the first chapter, which has as its subject the dancer Valda Setterfield, D’Erasmo veers off to talk about her own young adulthood, her life as a queer woman in the late 70s and 80s, and she keeps veering back, making connections between herself, the artists she speaks to, and other artists as well. It becomes a tapestry of times and eras and the shapes of lives. She weaves in the author Colette while talking about landscape architect Darrel Morrison, and links her own life in New York City to that of Samuel R. Delany—one step removed, once upon a time, though they never met.
I told myself I was going to read this book at a stately pace of one chapter a day and a day later was four chapters deep. There are books about writing that are about craft, or technicalities, or themes or habits. These two books are about writing and living, making art and living, and they feel so expansive despite both being such slim little volumes. They reach across centuries to find how other people lived and wrote and thought about living and writing—and, of course, reading. Writers are readers, and part of the delight in these two books is experiencing how these writers read, how they make connections and bounce from idea to idea, author to author.
It’s surprising to me how invigorating I’m finding this reading, which is not biography, not memoir, not instruction, not easily categorizable. Not SFF, either—though related—but sometimes the reading brain craves a change in diet. Next I will read a big thick fantasy novel, or take myself back to space. I will trace connections in fictional and thematic inspiration, find the lines that reach from older books to newer, from foundational writers to those just beginning their careers.
But right now, somehow, what I need is the translucent, the vulnerable and straightforward, or the illusions of those things granted by some works of nonfiction. I need the reminder that artists always have and always will keep making art, and that they will connect to one another, consciously or not, feeding off inspiration and love and imagination and desire. The way Samatar leaps from writer to writer in her letters to her friend, in her notes to herself, and the way she grounds things in bodies and music; the way D’Erasmo draws links across genre and medium, across relationships to places and people and the way a community can hold such massive love and still come apart: the webs they create are buoyant and exhilarating. I’d read countless more volumes like this, if they existed. I hope they exist. I hope there are more to come.
