This week, Longreads published a talk I gave in early January about the particular challenges and opportunities writers face over the next four years. I called the speech “Writing Our America.” It’s about politics, and it’s also what you might call political. The speech opens with a discussion of an essay I often teach at Lang, David Foster Wallace’s “Deciderization—2007,” and contains the wisdom of other writers I often turn to when, like Wallace, I’m feeling stupid. Here’s a snippet, but click the link above to read the rest:

Despite the headlines that came after the election calling this country ‘Trump’s America’—and there were many—I won’t call it that, or see it that way. And regardless of your politics I’ll ask you to join me. This is our America. It’s our America to write in, and our America to write.

Illustration, for Longreads, by Kjell Reigstad.