Here is a terrible secret: I wrote one of the two stories I submitted to Clarion in the 48 hours before the deadline, under the influence of gastrointestinal distress. My rationale was that it would provide a well-rounded picture of me as a writer if I shared one story that I’d been polishing the minutia of for three years, and one story that I spat out in a state of delirium: something raw, unpolished, and lacking such stale conventions as “plot” and “narrative momentum.” It made a lot of sense at the time. I remember clicking the submit button and immediately going to sleep. It was an overcast San Francisco day, I was jobless and aimless, and because I’d spent more time writing than showering I probably smelled pretty bad. For the past two months my brain had been a feedback loop of two sentiments: the sedate and self-defeating There’s No Way This Will Happen and the desperate animal-like But I Want It I Want It I Want It. To want something without knowing what it means makes for a heavy load. It felt good to put it down: to leave the wanting and the happening up to fate.

The thing is—the thing is. (And this is the miracle, the incommunicable, the creation myth.) The thing is, it did happen. The thing is, I got what I wanted. The thing is, fate looked at the collection of little stones and dried flowers I’d put at her feet and said, “Eh, you know what? Sure.” I never wake up early, but for reasons still unknown to me I woke up early on March 16. On my phone, there was an email. In the email, there was Congratulations on your admission. I thought my heart was going to come out my nose. I was really convinced that this was possible. I was the only one awake in the apartment. I can’t remember the first person I told. My friend Meg, maybe.

And the thing is. March 16 was also, coincidentally, the day that the San Francisco Department of Public Health had issued a shelter in place order due to concerns about the novel coronavirus. I remember two of my roommates rushed out to do laundry.

That was two years ago.

Only now that I’m putting it to paper, in a manner of speaking, am I realizing that in those two years I’ve aged lifetimes. I’ve read eulogies. Watched a friend get married. Started antidepressants. Grown out my hair (I cut it all off just before the early aughts of quarantine). Learned some Italian. Moved. Lost a friend. The elephant in the room: I’ve seen COVID-19 ravage my civilization, seen what it scrapes out of the world, seen the grief and terror that will in due time amount to a page in a history book—all of which is far too incalculable to try to fit into a series of invented letters in an invented place. It’s a little digital cry of incomprehension, and then it’s over. Better people than I will write about it. They will convey the unconveyable. At the end of the day, I’m still alive. I still have a paycheck, and a home, and health insurance. And now it’s 2022. Here I am. Dazed and confused and with working knowledge of elementary Italian. Presupposing that no further disaster will strike—which is a daring thing to presuppose, times being what they are—I will be attending Clarion this summer, from June 19 to July 30, 2022. In just a little over three months.

But I’m not even sure that the writer who got into Clarion is here anymore.

Is that a normal fear to have? Probably. I’m sure everyone in my class knows that what our Clarion experience might have been when we first wanted it, and won it, and held it in our hands, is gone—and a trembling unknown thing is taking shape in the space it left behind. We are taking form in a rare crack in time, a hairline fracture between the Clarions Before and the Clarions After. We’re the survivors of a tragedy that hasn’t even ended yet. Whatever we might have become in 2020, we’ve now become something else. I’ve been thinking about this so much. So often. I’m not remotely inclined to think of us as special—just a bunch of schmucks in the wrong place at the wrong time—or maybe the right place at the right time, for the stories we have yet to tell, or discover, or even think ourselves capable of telling or discovering. Or maybe that’s just me. Still—what pressure!

I couldn’t have written the stories that got me into Clarion now. Whatever part of me they came from has lived out its life and died back, pruned away by necessity. Who is the woman who will be driving her twenty-year-old car to San Diego on the solstice? Who is she to sit at that table? What words does she have left? Enough to wax existential on a WordPress site, apparently, and maybe that’s a start—a quick assertion of that old, selfish instinct that got her into Clarion in the first place: the instinct to tell.

I doubt that any of this will feel real until the last day of the workshop—the workshop, the workshop, it’s real, it’s REAL, could it be real?!—one day before my thirtieth birthday. I doubt that I’ll be able to trust my own happiness until it’s over. That’s normally my way of doing things anyway. But maybe, maybe, I can take some of it for myself now: today, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, through spring and into summer, down the Highway 1, along the Pacific, and to the thing that I have waited for.

To the writer I no longer am, but maybe, maybe, have waited to be.

I have an idea, I think. Something about a lighthouse and coastal scrub and a long journey, and a goat-herd, and a spell. The opening line came into my head but I could not remember the word for a storm reaching the shore and I absolutely needed it to be in the sentence. I asked Joe, my partner, and he didn’t let me down. Landfall, he said. Landfall.