The future of writing is already here. Every piece of writing, supposedly hermetically sealed, points to an Other: the draft or the edit, the before or the after, the notes or the Revision.

With the proliferation of celebrity iPhone-notes-app-ologies, community notes on “X,” newsletters as a serial literary form, edited Instagram captions, the corporate/NGO statement factory, and ChatGPT hysteria, we are deep in the thick of a precarious climate and/or reactionary political moment where writing is the Achilles’ heel. Everyone wants to get it right, whatever right means to them.

Famous literary advice, turned un-attributed writing coach truisms, have long prioritized the singularity of rewriting (“the only kind of writing is rewriting”) and ruthless editing (“kill your darlings”). For me, writing exists not to get things down or out in some mark of finality but to think through ideas.

For me, writing exists not to get things down or out in some mark of finality but to think through ideas.

When I think of an end, I get testy. Writing is like setting up a tent, knowing that you can and may take it down when it’s time to move on. But published writing is not presented to us as such, with editorial corrections, fact-checks, and reader letters, often like militaristic defenses positioning the writing, personified, as unwilling to back down. No. Writing’s only future is its ultimate openness, its radical ambivalence. Why are we so anxious to edit and revise, simply to set said writing back in stone again? Rewriting supposes the instability of not only the text but also social conditions. If there is going to be a future (and I’m not sure there is), let alone a future of writing, the transparency of revising, openness, ambivalence, and complicity might take center stage.

Writing’s only future is its ultimate openness, its radical ambivalence. Why are we so anxious to edit and revise, simply to set said writing back in stone again?

I have to believe that tomorrow, there will be more people who try, don’t like what they tried, and try again. If the future is something someone just came up with one day, it can be revised, ad infinitum.

Tiana Reid is an assistant professor in the Department of English at York University, Toronto. A former editor at The New Inquiry and Pinko, her writing has appeared in Bookforum, Dissent, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review and Teen Vogue, among other publications.

I have to hope that essay writing is going to get weirder, less professional, more full of bad feelings, less corporate, and can only do that away from the internet when these forms were once given free reign, in bloggy spaces known for their anarchy (there's no way I would ever have written essays if I didn't do it myself on a blog, no one wanted to publish me in "journals," and I still buy clothes on kill fees from establishment publications, thank you NYRB for the $300). Back to the zine, the chapbook, the manifesto, the micropress. One hopes. I just felt a pang of longing for Sarah McCarry's Guillotine chapbook press, that gave us Jenny Zhang's HAGS. As opposed to self-promotion, more readers and writers should be starting up tiny presses, because it's a really rough landscape to get published in, especially if you are writing anything seen as experimental or weird. It's like the essay has reached peak bleak sanitizing now, and although there's good, lively work being done on Substacks (like Jamie Hood's Proust project), with the dwindling of any venues to actually publish them, the essay on the internet seems to be dead. Or edited to death.

I still buy clothes on kill fees from establishment publications, thank you NYRB for the $300

The MFA programs have certainly killed it, with their emphasis on formula, and producing sages not thinkers, and catchphrases like lyric essay and hybridity. Now they're doing it with autofiction. The universities have killed the essay. Like, send it to Catapult, or send it to etc., but why? So what to do but go offline? I don't know. We can't be dependent on these spaces financed by tech companies and billionaires to publish urgent and strange first-persons. Like who would publish David Wojnarowicz now? Semiotext(e) still. There are others. But we need more. We need to go back to, somehow, publishing each other and ourselves. And sometimes publishing books, when we can, but knowing that's not where the community happens. Also someone needs to bring back into print all the amazing essay books Sternberg Press published in Arabic translation - Iman Mersal's How to Mend, Haytham el-Wardany's How to Disappear. Oh, also, for the future of the essay I'd like to decree that any creative non-fiction (ugh) professor using Montaigne to describe the essay immediately lose tenure.

We need to go back to, somehow, publishing each other and ourselves. And sometimes publishing books, when we can, but knowing that's not where the community happens.

Kate Zambreno is a writer, most recently of The Light Room and Tone, a collaborative study with Sofia Samatar. She lives in Brooklyn.

The prophecy is probably on some girl’s defunct Tumblr, accessible only through the Wayback Machine. Paywalls proliferate, archive.ph prevails, essays are eloquently summarized on TikTok. Genre is found dead in a ditch, defibrillated, and revived. We read antisocial novels about femcels radicalized while watching old episodes of Bridalplasty and America’s Next Top Model, and social novels about communes conceived over cocktail parties, which become cults and eventually investigative podcasts. Erotica about intellectual property fetishes, narrative nonfiction about anti-heroines with no trauma, southern gothics set in the cyberverse, scene reports from the ether. Thick novels by dead women and slim novellas by living girls. 

Literary resurrections, exorcisms, and baptisms. Finding our forebears and building a shrine, burning it up and lighting a cigarette in the flames. Finally: a poem. Find a crawl space beneath it. Read the abandoned book the last literary outlaw scrawled in and left there. Reprint it, give the dead girl her renaissance. Become a renaissance woman, head to Hollywood, hate it there too. 

Become a renaissance woman, head to Hollywood, hate it there too. 

Vape brands as time stamps, period pieces set between pandemics, period blood in an inkjet printer. Party girls becoming theory women through psychoanalytic short forms. Oral histories sourced from Reddit, violently gamified attention economies, tender fistfights, truth or dare. A lot of lying. More fact checking. Kindness that cuts to the bone, bones whittled into penknives, irony earnest enough to bleed. An epistolary novel in abusive DMs, a lyric essay in screenshots, someone finally fed up with fragments, starving for a full sentence. Robin Hood takes back the white space.  

Style will save us: Elle Nash’s bug-eyed noirs, Harmony Holiday’s critical fandom, Virginie Despentes’ memoiristic manifestos, Sam Kriss’ mythic register, Christina Riviera Garza’s elegiac investigations across languages, Ashleigh Bryant Phillips’ slumber party poetics, Sophie Hughes’ sweaty translations of Fernanda Melchor’s panting prose, Philippa Snow’s laser-cut wordplay, Natasha Stagg’s collages of copy, Alissa Bennett’s memoir in fan mail in zines, Mila Tequila’s wine-stained, vocal fried, utterly ingenious revisionist pop histories told via video essays, Nathalie Leger’s biographical, memoiristic criticism.

Vape brands as time stamps, period pieces set between pandemics, period blood in an inkjet printer. Party girls becoming theory women through psychoanalytic short forms.

What I mean is: the future of writing is in shards, but maybe we can make a mosaic. Broken mirrors mean bad luck, and might draw blood. But also: they sparkle, reveal our features untethered from our faces, slash and sever the identities that weren’t serving us anyway, serve us cake instead and reflect our oily skin like it’s body glitter. Glass gets stuck in the soles of our feet and reminds us we have souls in these bent, bloodied bodies. Publishing is a trick mirror, posting is a two-way mirror, writing is waking up trapped in a hall ofmirrors and finding the only window, sticking your head out and screaming until someone hears you and you find the most fugitive forms of all: friendship, a reader, connection (sorry, the future is cringe). 

Emmeline Clein is the writer of the forthcoming book Dead Weight (2024). Her chapbook Toxic was produced by Choo Choo Press in 2022. Her criticism, reporting, and essays have been published in Mother Jones, The Yale Review, The Nation, VICE, and Hobart Pulp, among other outlets.

It's been almost two years since I pretty much stopped engaging with Literary Twitter, so I feel that I don't even know where the present of writing is, much less the future: I miss book announcements by friends I don't keep in regular touch with, I rarely see the essays that go viral, and I only hear about the discourse when my husband tells me. (Oh, yes, I'm married now!) Basically, I had to leave not because it made me miserable—it did, but that never drove me to log off—but because I had started writing a new book and knew that I needed to live in the kind of ambiguity the discourse routinely swarms around and crushes.

A few years ago, I began to see a dramatic increase in students' anxieties that I believe stemmed from the prevalence of bad faith readings, out-of-context screenshotting, and ruinous pile-on takedowns like that inflicted upon Isabel Fall for her story "I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter." I saw writers who were negatively impacted by various forms of oppression getting hyperfocused on the wording of explicit condemnations of that oppression, making sure their stance was crystal-clear by stating it in the clearest possible language, even though the entire essay in question already did that work through the power ofthe writer's craft in powerfully conveying implicit messages without needing a thesis statement.

The discourse is probably only partly at fault. Part of this is surely the overemphasis of "self-implication" in creative nonfiction, of examining our "complicity." (Isn't there value in implicating those who won't implicate themselves?) The result has been too much energy spent on unambiguously stating one's position, energy that might otherwise be devoted to the essayist's work of sitting with ambiguity, methodically untangling knots of meaning, and traveling from points of limited understanding to insight.

When we over-clarify the essay's implicit position, we are taking power away from our readers because we fear the few who might use that power in bad faith.

Sometimes ugly representations are okay, you know. We are not going to dismantle oppression by pretending it doesn't exist, in the name of not giving it a platform. We do not have the same responsibilities or methods of the editorial board of the New York Times. Besides: meaning-making in an essay happens between the text and the reader. When we over-clarify the essay's implicit position, we are taking power away from our readers because we fear the few who might use that power in bad faith. We're not letting our readers experience realizations on their own that they'll be more likely to keep with them than a sanitized statement condemning the thing we've already spent thousands of words condemning.

So, while I don't really know what's going on in a general way, I do spend a good amount of my time with my brilliant MFA students, who are the future ofwriting, and I am happy to report that the outlook is excellent. I see students increasingly erring on the side of ambiguity, which tells me nature is healing; this is possible because they read each other's work in good faith, leading to insightful analyses that identify hurtful language and troubling representations within an understanding of how the essay in question actually works. There is no one-size-fits-all way to condemn oppression in a personal essay, and when we include clear disclaimers where they don't really fit, we risk undermining the power of an essay that's already speaking the truth. There is a place for pithy, unambiguous statements of where we stand (it's called X now), but for lovers of subtext, I'm happy to report that we are so back.

Elissa Washuta is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe and a nonfiction writer. She is the author of White Magic (2021), My Body Is a Book of Rules (2014), and Starvation Mode (2016), and co-editor of Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers (2019).