💐 Words matter, as Ta-Nehisi Coates explores in this beautiful essay on the word "homeland" for Vanity Fair. And story matters, as he shows in the various ways the stories of Renee Good and Alex Pretti are being portrayed by those who would prefer the rest of us see their murders as a justifiable cost of "homeland security."

I always appreciate Coates' work, but I especially appreciated the historical echo he shared in the murder of another woman back in 1965.

Viola Liuzzo—white woman, activist, and mother of five—joined Martin Luther King's march from Selma to Montgomery. On the way back, while helping ferry other marchers back to Selma, she was intercepted by a car full of Ku Klux Klan members and shot to death.

Then, as now (Coates points out), the national story shifts when the bodies left in the street by those defending the word "homeland" are those of white women and men. May these tragic deaths be a door of no return for people who may not have spoken up before.

🌎 Human-curated knowledge matters, which is why I'm delighted to learn that Wikipedia is celebrating their 25th anniversary. I was the kind of kid who used to thumb through my parents' set of encyclopedias out of pure insatiable curiosity, and discovering Wikipedia as a young adult was like pouring gasoline on a modest spark. I've spent countless hours of my life wandering through Wikipedia rabbit holes in pursuit of more knowledge of our world and the people and events that shaped it.

​Check out the documentary series Wikipedia put out highlighting its many volunteers, and next time you see that fundraising popup appear I encourage you to consider becoming a monthly subscriber.

🤖 AI has come for your Kindle, and the brilliant minds at Kindlepreneur are on the case. I personally don't have access to Amazon's "Ask this Book" feature, but Kevin J. Duncan tested it in a bunch of different scenarios in his write-up and I... am on the fence about this. On the one hand, it seems useful. On the other, Duncan points out that the AI answer-bot creates a layer of text and meaning over the author's original text, and that "when this stuff lives inside the book, people don’t really second-guess it. Instead, they treat it like it belongs there."

The most glaring problem is that currently, authors have no way of opting out. The Author's Guild is currently pushing back on the feature, but... Amazon be Amazon. I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

📺 Everything is TV part 2: Even Substack, now. As audiences increasingly fragment, every app seems determined to be the go-to place to consume every type of content. But are the audiences and the content creators even on the same platforms? In a conversation at my monthly writer's social last night, a friend lamented the difficulties of trying to promote your work as a comic book artist: "The artists are all on Bluesky," he said, "but the fans are all in private Discord servers."

I don't have a solution, but I feel like this Substack announcement is a sign that social media will get much more fragmented before it resolves.

How to Eat an Arepa

Hunger lured me out of the safety of the bus.

We were on hour two of a twenty-two hour bus ride, and I even though the driver hadn’t said a word when he pulled over on the side of the road and walked out the door, no one else seemed worried. Through the window I could see the word “baños,” and I was starting to smell the mouth-watering aromas from the roadside stand.

This must be a pitstop.

I was the one gringa on a bus full of Venezuelans. My Spanish was passable, but hardly fluent. I was reasonably sure I was on the correct bus from Caracas to Santa Elena de Uairén, but other than that I was completely lost.

I stepped cautiously out of the bus and studied my fellow passengers as they ordered their dinner.

I thought I understood: First you held up a finger to indicate how many arepas you wanted. The grilled corn cakes—imagine a half-inch thick corn tortilla—filled an entire paper plate. One would be plenty for me.

Then you choose a filling from the unlabeled pots on the stove. The one on the right seemed to be shredded chicken in some sort of red sauce. It was the most popular; I went for it.

I hit a snag when I tried to pay—turns out you paid after you ate, which seemed suspiciously trusting—but either way I had food in hand. I turned around, looking for a place to sit and eat.

All the little tables alongside the highway were full.

I stood awkwardly for a moment, plate in hand, until I noticed an older man beckoning for me to join him at his table.

I hesitated.

I hadn’t spoken to anyone in Venezuela yet, beyond transactional conversations with the hotel staff, the bus company, waiters—and it wasn’t just because of my shaky Spanish. I was visiting Venezuela from the US. It was 2006, and our presidents at the time (Bush and Chavez) were fanning flames with each other.

I’d been told Venezuelans hated US citizens. I’d been told I should sew a Canadian flag on my backpack, and not let anyone hear my accent.

This old Venezuelan man was being kind. But how would he react once he knew where this gringa was from?

I took a deep breath and sat.

I don’t remember his name. I vaguely recall him mentioning that he was on his way to visit his grandchildren. But I will never forget the very first exchange we had in that conversation.

“¿De dónde eres?” he asked me; Where are you from?

I hesitated, considering a lie. “Soy americana,” I finally said. I’m American.

The old man shrugged. “Todos somos americanos,” he replied kindly. We’re all American. “Bienvenido a Venezuela.”

He meant it partly as a reminder that there are a lot more residents of the Americas than those of us with a US passport (technically I should have said “Soy estadounidense”)—but mostly he meant it as a welcome. He wanted me to know that I wasn’t as far from home as I thought I was.

He was reminding me of one of the great lessons of travel: We are all more alike than different.

I love travel. It helps us see the world from a different angle, through a different set of lenses. It helps us build empathy with other points of view, to realize that the way we’ve always done things isn’t the only way—or even the best way.

It builds our sense of empathy.

I grew up as a white kid on the Yakama Indian Reservation in Washington State. I was one of a handful of white kids in my elementary school, though in middle and high school I went to a district with a slightly larger percentage (maybe 10%). The rest were a blend of Hispanic (some first gen, many whose ancestors had arrived long before my own), Asian, and—of course—Natives.

My friends were from everywhere. They had traditions I didn't. They ate things I didn't. And it was an awesome way to grow up—sharing tables with people whose ideas and backgrounds and languages and cultures were different from mine. It made me curious about the possibilities in the world.

After experiencing the richness of a multi-faceted, multi-cultural world, I've never want to live in a place where everyone looked like me, talked like me, and thought like me.

Imagine being able to see in vivid technicolor and choosing to view the world in grayscale instead. Imagine listening to the most exquisite harmonies of a symphony and deciding you prefer listening to a child playing Hot Cross Buns on a recorder forever, into eternity.

Why would you turn down the dial on the full joy of humanity?

This week, I've been immersed in what's going on in my country, with ICE raids and federal officers murdering unarmed civilians. With detentions locally, and federal officers firing into vehicles in Portland. (Talk about retriggering the PTSD I've been working so hard on.)

Along with the news, I've been immersed in people's personal stories. An author friend from Texas posted that he started carrying his passport (he's Hispanic-American) in case he was asked; this week, agents stopped him and demanded to see his passport while he was only a few blocks from his house.

Of course, I'm also heartbroken for the aggression going on outside our borders. It might have been risky to travel to Venezuela back when I did, just out of college, but the country has destabilized quite a bit since then. And my country's commitment to helping Venezuela decline in order to access its oil didn't stop with Bush.*

Back in 1971, Eduardo Galeano wrote:

The old man on the bus had every right to view my presence in his country with suspicion, or to make assumptions about my prejudices and politics, given my nationality. He had every right to ignore me and enjoy a peaceful meal without trying to wade through my barely-conversational Spanish.

But I imagine he experienced his own moment of empathy, putting himself in the shoes of the nervous gringa who’d gotten a bit over her head.

So he invited me to his table.

I eventually made it to Santa Elena de Uairén, and although the old man didn't speak with me again, I noticed him watching out for me. He caught my eye when I was trying to find the bathroom at another pit stop, and pointed in the right direction. At a military checkpoint, he said a few words to the young men with automatic rifles, and they glanced my way then left me alone. He waved at me when he got off in one of the little no-name towns that came before our final stop.

I think about him a lot. I think about the many, many people who have shown me kindness on my travels—especially now, when my own country is becoming increasingly hostile to foreign visitors and immigrants.

Some days, sharing stories seems woefully ineffective (and indulgent) in a world that seems damaged beyond repair.

But.

I firmly believe that the root cause of that damage is a lack of basic empathy for our fellow humans.

More than that, empathy is what makes us human.

Stories develop our sense of empathy. They offer us glimpses into the lives of others, and give us the gift of being able to live (and learn from) hundreds—thousands—of lives. Honestly, sharing stories might be the only way to access that gift.

I have only a spark to offer in this dark time, and it's this:

Continue building your empathy by immersing yourself in the stories of people not like you. ​
​Continue sharing the hard stories that the world must hear. ​
​Continue telling your own story.

And continue sharing your table with those around you. We need community more than ever.

—> Read the article on the Story Rebel blog.​

(* This is a nice, succinct explainer video if you want a quick overview of Venezuelan political history.)

💃🏻 I was on the Indy Author Podcast last week, talking to host Matty Dalrymple about finding and creating community as a writer. I've been on this podcast a few times before, and I love the insightful questions and conversation that Matty provides. Go give it a listen!