What Kind of Place Makes Writers?

Here is what I have learned about the desert so far: it does not care about you. It is the most honest landscape I have ever seen.

We’ve been in Palm Springs for a week now, staying with our dear friends Tyler and Grant, and I keep thinking about our drive to Joshua Tree and the three days we spent there—how we followed the road east into the high desert while Frannie pressed against my chest, her small warm body in its comfort place, almost as if the strangeness of it all had quieted even her anxiety. Joshua trees don’t look real. You know this if you’ve seen them—those arms thrown up in every direction, the silhouette of a thing that seems to be reaching and shrugging at the same time.

Joshua trees are theatrical—they’re simultaneously alien and completely themselves. I kept thinking: what kind of place makes trees like this? And then I kept thinking: what kind of place makes writers?

Because I’ve been a writer long enough to know that the answer to both questions is the same. The kind of place that doesn’t give you what you expected. The kind of place that offers something else entirely, something stranger and more sustaining, if you’re willing to receive it.

Jon and I left Minneapolis in February, which is a fantastic time to get the hell out of our legendary brutal winters. But I won’t pretend the timing felt uncomplicated. Minneapolis right now is a place where neighbors are suffering in ways that make leaving feel like a betrayal. Most of our closest family members live in Minneapolis. Our community is there. And there’s something that happens, in times of collective difficulty, where the impulse to band together becomes almost physical—a gravitational pull toward the people you love, the place you know. Leaving against that gravity is its own kind of muscle