In the deep hibernation of December and January, I have been creating. I have been channeling all of these things around me into workshops and programs and talks and paintings and weavings and drawings and poems. My hands have been busy in communication with my heart with the knowledge that under the threat of an ethnostate, the mere act of creativity is political resistance.

Ultimately, this is a toast to my community. To your unbroken creative spirits. To the Bloomsbury of the new ‘20s. To the beatniks of Gen Z. Let us find ourselves inside the writing. Let us discover a new world in the quiet moments on the page, in the tough moments, in the grit of literary discourse and the way it builds you up, turns you out, makes you reshape yourself into who you truly are and want to be. Here’s to demanding better, to leading the charge of a new vision of publishing, and to demanding that the culture value it all the same. Because without art, without writers, without our ability to turn life inside out and pour it over the page; our ability to make you look up from a sentence and sit in a mindful moment where you can hear the buzz of time rotating around the idea you’ve been left to chew on, who will contextualize the times we live in? We are the interpreters of the present moment, and in such a time as this we are gravely needed.

So go track some mud on the carpet.

I’m at ground zero. Right where I meet many of you.

And I want to talk to you about the perceived pains of this stage—the stage that comes before the story begins to write itself; the stage you spend clawing at your own brain for the answers while you flip through the pages of a notebook filled with half-written scenes and character one-liners; the nebulous space of a white page that breaks the spirit of a lot of writers before they’ve had the chance to give their story a real voice.