It has been my experience that writing is work. Writing is seeking and searching and reading and desiring and questioning and learning and struggling and reflecting and becoming and un-becoming and re-searching and failing. Sometimes, for me, it is about being quiet for a long time and asking whether I should be writing at all.

To receive this very practical, very tangible support at a time when I have been asking this question is the kind of gesture that reframes everything. Writing becomes seeking again. Writing becomes dwelling.

This opportunity means I have the support to visit print archives that are crucial to my current project, archives in which stories about labor and gender and desire and our relationship to the nonhuman world have—until now—been left buried and hidden and unshared.

Thank you, National Endowment for the Arts, for seeing something in this strange work and its concerns and questions. Thank you for supporting writing that is more interested in what might be than what is, writing that critiques as it creates, writing that—because of these goals—sometimes risks failing.

Thank you for supporting this work—the verb, the noun.

Thank you, thank you, thank you in an ongoing, ever-widening, exponential way.