A list of other miscellaneous media that I’ve stumbled across and enjoyed, namely short stories and poetry.

• Diary Entry #28: Ars Poetica, Diannely Antigua. This is one of my all-time favorite poems, and how much it gives with its tone and piercing images and all in such a quick, quaint stanza. It has certainly influenced my writing style.
• This is Water, David Foster Wallace. This is a really nice speech that touches on the mundaneness of life and pushes towards active thinking and gentleness and sonder and such. I wish more people listened to this and took it to heart–this sincerity, this is the kind of world I wish to live in.
• Sonny’s Blues, Baldwin. One of my favorite short stories–the way Baldwin paints the musical conversation is beautiful and sticks with me. Would really recommend.
• Lost in the Funhouse, Barth. This is just a really interestingly done short story with inflections about writing itself. There’s a lot to unpack here and I’m still a bit baffled, frankly, but certainly a unique piece.
• My God, It’s Full of Stars, Smith. A nice poem I came across in high school that grapples with extreme largeness and smallness and how we, and science, fit in and try to cope.
• Hills Like White Elephants, Hemingway. Despite the bleak nature of the topic at hand, I love the way Hemingway delivers it, in that special yearning but deadpan way of his.
• Leap, Doyle. Matthew passed this piece along to me a while back, and while it’s indelibly depressing, I very much appreciate the writing style and overtone of love in the face of incomprehensibility.