Notes From Crew Quarters: What We Don't Write About

This week, Ethan Brightbill asked our staff what themes or subjects they actively avoid writing about.

Ashley Adams Associate Nonfiction Editor Emeritus

I mean, I try not to write about monster girls, but it keeps happening!

Krys Malcolm Belc, Associate Fiction Editor

Animals.

E. Flores, Associate Editor

People.

Tianli Kilpatrick, Associate Nonfiction Editor

Horses.

Brian Czyzyk, Intern

Anything existential. I have enough personal crises as is, I don't need them to infect my writing.

Jacqueline Boucher, Managing Editor

I want nothing to do with writing that even gestures toward co-opting the suffering involved in experiences that aren't mine. There are people who write those experiences whose voices deserved to be amplified more than mine. People's struggles aren't a metaphor for my life. Ever.

Also, place-based writing, I guess, being that I'm rootless trash and all.