Sitting on the edge of a shady parking lot sidewalk, I read the last words of Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Sad but glad, I put the book away and went along with my day. This week I opened up my podcasts app and searched his name. I came across two interviews, one of which was at the Los Angeles Public Library in 1997. His book Indian Killer had recently been published, and it was in this episode that I learned how much of Arnold Spirit’s life in True Diary reflected his own.

I searched for another podcast, this time for something with Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within, a copy of which I have back in Boston. In a 2008 interview, Goldberg mentions Julia Cameron’s “morning pages” method of writing—Cameron sits down each morning and writes three pages of longhand stream of consciousness writing as a way of clearing the mind and preparing it for the day ahead.

Surrounded by the voices of writers, I wanted to read from one more—Jane Yolen in Take Joy: A Book for Writers. In explaining how most writers may never get published, Yolen writes,

Know this about being published: it is out of your hands. Even if you do everything you can think of to affect that outcome, you cannot make an editor take your work. You can go to conferences…You can set a work schedule on your computer and make a special place and space for your writing…It does not—alas—guarantee a thing (Yolen 17-18).

Her words were reassuring—not in a comforting sense but in a relinquishing sense, like that of giving up a fight with the air and the fact that I will never be able to punch it. Some things are really out of my control.