1000 Words of Summer

N 2018 my friend Anne Gisleson and I decided to write a thousand words a day, every day, for two weeks straight. We were enjoying a glass of wine early on a spring evening, talking about our work. Anne is a high school teacher and a writer who had recently published her first book, a memoir titled (Little, Brown, 2017), and she was trying to finish a new nonfiction proposal. She also has two children and was closing in on the end of another school year, with all the pressures and challenges that went along with it. I had my seventh book in thirteen years to complete. We were sixteen months into the Trump presidency and had been writing through all the chaos of that time. I don’t know if we were burned-out, but we tired. We both needed a push to the other side.