"Language was beautiful exposed; it was like a live wire set loose, a hot wire, burning, leaving trace. If you looked into language this way, you saw where it burned, the map it made. The wire was a line, but because it was electrified it wouldn‘t lie still: it thrashed, it burned, it curled and uncurled around itself."
"Since it had yet to be determined what writing actually was, how it formed, and where it went once it was made, you didn‘t know what you had to do in order to write."
"One of my favorite words was in my mouth, and I was torn between chewing and swallowing it, so that it could become a part of me, another organ that processed or eliminated some material of my being, or spitting it out immediately, without doing any damage to its form, so that I could study the word in all its glory."
"They didn‘t remember the 90s in the way I did and didn‘t have fourteen bridges built over one piece of water and didn‘t have water."
"She missed this decade where we just couldn‘t burn our bridges, where we built bridges on top of ruined bridges, and lived in an elaborate architecture of trying and failing to try then at the last minute trying, escorting some broken love into what looked like a better love, until that love broke and that old love became an even older love who moved on, perhaps to someone you roomed with or someone a person you roomed with once loved."
"I began the day having just uttered the words, “I am not looning up on claw,” and feeling angry as a result of my disposition. It was as if I knew indisputably that I would never loon up “on claw” or any other substance that would threaten whatever in that dream was the opposite of looning up—I knew this, but it seemed I had to make my stance clear anyway."
pickEssays about writing anxiety? Essays about not particularly wanting to write? Gladman turns the unfortunate angst of making art into art that is both readable and enjoyable; although it does tend to get repetitive.
"At some point I began working on the beginning and the end of something at once."
Calamities | 
