Tessa Brown

Honestly, I love the gestalt of it. I love my laptop whom I joke is my best friend, I love having a huge dining table for myself and my dreams, I love all my sentimental objects and books that push me to keep dreaming and doing. I’ve always prioritized an indulgent desk area in my homespaces and my current setup is no exception.

I learned as a writer that the muse only comes if you wait for her at your desk every day. So even when I’m starting something new—especially then, actually—I just start doing it, 5 days a week. “Butt in chair,” “500 words a day,” “shitty first draft”… they all work. Creativity happens when you’re committed to your process and you don’t give up and you just keep creating—and you keep studying, absorbing, circulating your stuff, so you can develop your barometer for what’s good. The more practiced you are at your craft the better you know whether you’re done. But the way to start, and keep going, and then finish? You just get up every morning and do it again.

Some other books here I recommend to your readers are: Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s Undrowned, Peter Hessler’s Oracle Bones, N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels (also a trilogy), Tricia Rose’s Black Noise, adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, Studs Terkel’s Working, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism without Racists, Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, Ralph Cintron’s Angels Town, Adrienne Rich’s Lies, Secrets, and Silence, Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, Marc Bousquet’s How Universities Work, Silvia Federici’s Revolution at Point Zero, and Sara Ahmed’s On Being Included.