On finding joy in a difficult journey

How would you describe the creative work that you do?

I wouldn’t even ascribe to myself the word writer because mostly I’m an organizer and political strategist, and I sit across the climate and trade union movements. But I have written one book, Warmth, and that book was a culmination of—and departure from—the professional work I just described. The art form that I’ve felt compelled to undertake is a sort of writing as midstream processing of the unprocessable.

I’d love to hear where you were in your life when the idea for Warmth emerged. You write about how it began as stream-of-consciousness processing in the Notes app.

I was 27, and I’d been basically pouring most of myself into my work in the climate movement since I was 20, when I first started doing fossil fuel divestment campaigning in undergrad. The way I usually describe it is that those seven years of work—work that looked like a particularly frenetic and emotionally freighted version of what lots of work looks like in the 21st century, which is emails and conference calls and meetings and an endless treadmill of those things—amidst that Zoom treadmill, I could feel this knot of inchoate thought and feeling constricting itself in my chest. Because even though I was ostensibly taking action on climate change every working day of my life in the political trenches, I actually just didn’t have a lot of brain space to feel the enormity of the problem I was trying to solve.

Despite the fact that I was a climate activist, I was in survival mode, engaging in what I assume a lot of people engage in, which is a kind of double consciousness that cleaved my quotidian life from the fact of what was happening to our planet and to ourselves. But eventually, that knot started becoming too tight. It was just emitting this low frequency of anxiety all the time. And that dissonance between my everyday life and the enormity of the problem, as I call it in the book, was too great. I felt like if I didn’t engender a genuine and emotional encounter for myself with that enormity, that dissonance was just going to rip me apart and I wouldn’t be able to keep doing the work. I started to write these little notes to myself on the subway to and from Lower Manhattan, where I was working. Those almost vomited themselves up out of me. It was almost involuntary.

And how did that transform into a full-fledged book?

I felt I was coming to the end of a cycle in my work. I’d been managing this campaign for several years. It was very exhausting and I knew that I wanted to do this processing. So I applied for a writer’s retreat in California and was lucky enough to get it. That was a real radical leap. I didn’t even tell myself at that point I was writing a book. It was more just like an experiment: could I switch back from a political to an artistic mode? I went out to California, which was a 10-day retreat, and the first day was utter panic. I was like, what have I done? I ended that job, and then the next weekend I was on a plane to California. My brain didn’t know how to occupy the non-teleological space that is needed—for me, anyway—to create art. There was no schedule, there was nothing. There was just me and the page and my head. And then slowly I got over that fear and started to flesh out some of these thoughts and feelings that had been rattling around in me for a year. And it turns out, when they rattle around in you for multiple years, you’ve actually gestated them to a large degree. So you just have to let it be quiet and allow them to speak, and they’re actually quite articulate already.

Yes. It feels like that gestation period is important for so many artists, but at the time, it can feel like wasting time.

Yeah. The gestation period just called living.

Was it on that retreat that you realized this is going to be a book, or were you still thinking, “I’m just going to write and see where it goes?”

By the end of the retreat, I was clear that I was writing a book. And it was some of the most productive writing time I’ve ever had, I think because there was so much water built up behind the dam. I wrote 60 pages in a week or something like that, which is not my usual rate.

What did the process look like when you got back from the retreat and had to engage with normal life again? Your ability to answer an enormous number of emails comes up a lot in this book. Were there specific boundaries or practices you put in place to keep that writing process going?

Yes, absolutely. Some funny ones. I applied for a Fulbright grant, just to give myself a year where I would not go broke and could just focus on writing. That’s actually the thing that first brought me out to Australia. I think that was the only way I could imagine finishing this book.

Before I left for Australia, I knew that working in movement politics had trained my brain in a certain way. It trained me to be incredibly responsive to stimulus and incredibly disciplined about completing tasks and scheduling my time. All things that are very useful for political work and, in my experience, not for the creative work I was doing.

So I was like, I have to be able to write without access to the internet. I remember sitting down for an afternoon and Googling, “Can I buy a laptop that is an electronic typewriter?” Because I didn’t want to use a typewriter. That just felt absolutely too ridiculous.

And there were two things I found. One was literally an electronic typewriter that was extremely expensive. I don’t know what sort of hipsters were buying stuff like that. It was not worth $1,500. And then the only other site I could find was a company out in Amish country in Pennsylvania that sold laptops without access to the internet, because of course they have certain religious restrictions around what they can access. But they didn’t even sell online. They had a storefront in Amish country, apparently.

So then I was just looking for a really old laptop so the internet would be so slow it’d be prohibitive. I ended up finding some sort of very sketchy, unmarked electronics store underneath a subway stop in Queens. I’d seen an ad they posted on Facebook. I walked in and there were literally stacks of laptops all around the place, and buckets of chargers. It looked like the shop had been set up yesterday. I was a little like, where did these things come from?

They told me somewhat believably that they had bought them in bulk from schools that were buying newer laptops. These were literally like Windows 95, and I was like, this is perfect. So I bought one for 75 bucks. It could technically reach the internet, but it took about 10 minutes of crunching and grinding to load a webpage. And I was like, that’s enough for me.

How did the process of writing the book change your relationship, if at all, to the climate crisis itself? When you described that knot that you were experiencing, how did it shift or fit differently for you?

Yeah. It’s a big question, and I think one I’m still thinking through even this many years after writing it. It was, in some ways, a shattering experience to write that book because the attempt was to look at the thing square in the face. And it’s like looking into the face of God, almost. It’s searing in a way. But something about having been through that crucible made me feel rejuvenated afterward—almost like I’d encountered the thing I most feared and came out the other end. And so I knew it was a deep, dark well, but I also knew it had a bottom.

You write about waking up with a feeling of immense grief in your chest some mornings. When would you force yourself to write and push through, and when would you say, “Enough, I’m going for a walk”? How did you find that balance in writing this book or in general, in your life?

I think in many ways, when it comes to this stuff, <span class=highlight”>I’m a very disciplined person, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Like this morning [after the passage of the so-called “big, beautiful bill”] I know I’m just going to go to work and do what I need to do, and all the while I’m going to be feeling this bottom-dropping-out feeling. But I think sometimes that does get me into trouble. The reason I had to write the book was because I was doing that too much.</span> It was almost like an emotional push-up. It was like: if I was sad, but I still felt energy, I would do what that sadness compelled me to do, whether it was writing or work. But if I felt like the words weren’t coming or I was just truly exhausted, I would stop. At this point in my life, I have a sense that if I “push through,” it’s just going to be diminishing returns. I’ll be absolutely sputtering and not doing much versus when there’s juice in the tank.

How did you deal, if at all, with feelings of selfishness and the idea that you took time off to write this book when you could have been answering one more email or coordinating one more action? Do you think of writing as different from or an extension of your organizing work?

This is a crass way of putting it, but I’m the right amount of selfish to be able to do political work sustainably. Because I am not capable of giving my all to it. I’m really not. I do reserve a zone of hedonism is too light, but a zone in myself and in my life where I’m just allowed to seek beauty rather than try to rearrange power. And where I’m allowed, in essence, to experience and delight in all the things that, in my organizing work, I’m trying to protect.

I’ve seen a lot of activists I love succumb to the dynamic implicit in this question. Anytime they’re enjoying themselves, they know somebody’s suffering, and so they feel guilty, and so they stop. They switch into work mode. And that always seems like a battle that’s not ultimately about maximizing good for multiple people. It’s an internal moral battle that has to do with their conception of themselves. I accepted a long time ago that I’m a fallible person. So I don’t struggle with that feeling of selfishness. But I also think I would if I didn’t spend the large bulk of my time doing that hard work, which I’ve been doing for my entire adult life now. I do think that’s a way to pay down my karmic debt or something. But then it comes to an end. And at the end of the week, because I’ve done that work, I allow myself to let go.

I guess in the sense of writing a book, I’d been doing that work for years. So it just felt like: if I take a year to rest and invest in myself and this work with meaning again, that won’t be an indulgent or wasted year. And I still have fantasies of it but I have not figured out how to write and organize simultaneously. It’s just so hard. I don’t have enough juice in the tank. Both are so hard and in such different ways. I think I can switch between them, but I haven’t yet found a way to live a life where I’m writing in the evenings after doing movement work all day, or doing a three-day week or something like that. I haven’t found that balance. Maybe I dream one day of finding that singularity, but I haven’t yet. I have fantasies of taking another break to write another installment of what is just one long project of making meaning from what is happening. I don’t know how or when that’s going to happen, but the intention is there.

What role does joy and hope play in your process? You clearly love to be alive.

This is why literature—a word I’m not necessarily subscribing to my own book, but to many books that I love—is so interesting. Because it’s doing two things at once: it is giving form to human meaning, but also the form itself can be beautiful, almost irrespective of the meaning it contains. It’s like you’re creating a vase that will hold water, and then the vase itself is something that can be admired. I find great joy in beautiful prose, in the reading or the writing of a sentence that I find beautiful. That was an inherently joyful element of writing Warmth, which is that as I was on this journey with myself of trying to render and feel a lot of extremely difficult feelings, but that path was sprinkled, in a way that often surprised me, with little flashes of beauty that just come from the arrangement of words. That is the form my joy took. I was digging this long tunnel, trying to get to sunlight on the other side, but occasionally my pickaxe would hit a little diamond. I didn’t feel like I put that diamond there. The joy is in the honor of using the medium of a language that is alive and contains many geologic layers. And through the happenstance of arrangement, you can tap into the world’s beauty.

Do you have any general advice you would give to younger writers starting on a long project—or to artists working on something that takes a long time to produce? What would you tell that younger version of yourself who’s maybe still click-clacking on his Notes app?

I have some very unsexy advice, which is very obvious, but not until somebody else tells you: The entirety of the project feels impossible and overwhelming and intimidating, so don’t engage too often with the entirety of the project. Just break it down until the pieces you’re dealing with feel manageable, and then focus just on one piece at a time.

I had a word count for myself. Every day that I was writing, I wanted to produce 600 words that I was happy with. Sometimes that took me two hours, and sometimes that took me 10 hours. That was me transposing the discipline of my political life into my writing life, which won’t work for everybody. But for me, it meant I never felt lost or buried in the project. I was never more than 600 words away from feeling like I’d taken the next step forward.

Occasionally, I would zoom out. I had days that weren’t writing days. Days that were mapping and ideating days, where I was scribbling in my notebook, putting Post-its on the wall, rearranging them, engaging with the whole project. But on those days, I didn’t have to write. It wasn’t about producing, it was just about experimenting with the whole. And once you feel satisfied with that, then you could go back to writing, step by step.