What I Don’t Know

Every day I sit down and write about something—music, film, culture, whatever has lodged itself in my brain overnight. Some of it is researched; a lot of it is confidence dressed up as analysis, intuition held together with syntax. I write late, sleep badly, and come back the next morning to find out whether what seemed true at midnight actually holds up. Mostly it does. Sometimes it embarrassingly doesn’t.

But there are entire worlds I know nothing about. Passions and obsessions and experiences that pass me completely by—things that matter enormously to someone and haven’t crossed my radar once. The more this becomes my full-time occupation, the more I feel the edges of my own perspective. The subjects I never touch. The things I’m simply not qualified to explain.

Which is why I started thinking about opening it up. Inviting other writers—new ones, unknown ones, people who’ve never published anything but have something worth saying—to send in their work. The idea was to find out what I was missing. To let the map get bigger than one person’s obsessions.

There’s something about writing under constraint—a prompt, a deadline, a subject you didn’t choose—that produces strange and honest work. You stop managing your image and start just writing. The interesting stuff tends to live exactly there, in that slightly uncomfortable space where you can’t fall back on your usual moves. I wanted to see what came back when I asked for it.