Things shifted since 2023. My school—the imperfect place I loved building—shut down. I packed up and moved to New Orleans. Now I am a grad student there, taking creative writing workshops by day and teaching freshman comp by night. Cobretti Williams, my former fellowship editor, pushed me toward this path. It stuck.
Reflections on progress are annoying to write. I tried three times. All three were garbage. I cursed. I walked around brooding. I questioned my life choices. Why did I say yes?
Same energy went into designing my new syllabus. The pain of creating that document forced a pause. I wrote my students a letter instead.
Here is what you need to know: Writing is hard. Everyone hates it. I do it constantly, and I still resent it often. That friction is the point.
Everything you want sits behind things you refuse to do.
You sit. You write. The urge to quit hits like a wave. You ignore the voice whispering to do it tomorrow. You stay. You work. This ignores the comfortable you. It builds the you that gets stuff done. The more you suffer through it, the easier it becomes.
Our world sells comfort as a right. We get mad when life is difficult. Writing refuses that luxury. It demands effort in a marketplace that commodifies ease.
Students tell me they have nothing to write. This is a myth. They think writing is just typing out thoughts that already exist, fully formed. They aren’t ready to start because they believe the magic happens first, in the brain, then gets transcribed.
We see finished novels. We see final edits. We see Instagram posts showing only the destination, never the wrecked car ride. We assume other people have it figured out from minute one. They don’t. Drafting is the opposite of knowing. It is guessing. It is making a mess and finishing it even when it looks terrible. Revision teaches you to hold two versions in your head at once. The messy one and the potential one. Clarity comes after the mess, not before.
Feedback changes things too. When we judge our work against our vision, we articulate what we actually want. Teachers and students stumble together. That uncertainty is the work. Collaboration grows us both. It makes us better at building what we seek.
It feels odd to demand writing care right now. New Orleans schools are quietly using undisclosed AI to grade essays. An April 2025 study claimed 84% of high schoolers used generative AI for assignments.
I get the burnout. The relief of letting a bot think for you? Understandable. It quiets the noise.
But look at the long game. What do we lose when we skip the friction? When we avoid the awkward feedback loop? When revision is automated away? We outsource communication. We trade human connection for speed. The cost is too high for temporary comfort.
We need fewer assignments. More contact. Real curricula designed for teachers who actually read the work and know the student behind the words. Not metrics. People.
Does the world feel different than it did when I grew up? It certainly does. But these aren’t new problems. Black women writers have been warning us. Toni Morrison. Toni Cade Bambara. Audre Lorde. June Jordan.
Morrison saw a triad of political, corporate, and military interests eroding humane futures in 2004. The news doesn’t lie. Lorde offered the exit strategy: creative life is survival.
“In this way alone we can survive.”
Machines will try to automate us into irrelevance. Let them try. We write because it keeps us alive.
