Some interesting writing about time, change and fear

In the absence of changes derived from time, how does a person find novelty in the horizontal changes of meaning and space? That seems to be one of the questions behind Solvej Balle’s series of books, On The Calculation of Volume, which explores a person’s experience of a date that perpetually repeats. I haven’t read the books yet, but on the strength of this review, I’m all in. If you have read these, let me know.

On writing about what frightens you, Josh Weil says: “But all of the dangers contained in writing what scares you pale compared to the greater one of doing anything else. For any of us to turn our gaze away, to waste our time on work that isn’t wrestling with what’s most urgent for us, to diminish the import our stories should hold, deny our characters the impact they deserve, to do anything other than put our most vulnerable selves out there as openly as we can: for an artist there’s nothing more terrifying than that. Sometimes my long-ago mentor would say it another way: if what you’re writing doesn’t scare you, it’s probably not worth writing.” That’s not always about fiction. Sometimes that is also about working through the little existential crises that a growing and learning human experiences as one changes through time.