The Slowdown is supported by the Collective Trauma Summit.

You're invited to attend a free online event featuring in-depth interviews and poetry readings

by eight award-winning poets, including Ada Lemone, Natasha Trethway, Jericho Brown,

Carolyn Forshey, Andrea Gibson, Claudia Ranking, Jake Skeets, and Padricotuma.

They will all be appearing at the Collective Trauma Summit,

an online gathering of artists, activists, scientists, and visionaries

to explore the effects of trauma in our society, and to inspire a collective healing movement.

Go to CollectiveTraumaSummit.com slash poets to register for the free event which starts September

26. This show is sponsored by BetterHelp. Life can be overwhelming when my calendar is filled to

the broom is hard to concentrate on anything else. My thoughts are constantly racing with

a never-ending to-do list until I remember what therapy taught me to slow down and be present.

If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online and

suited for business schedules like mine. Get a break from your thoughts with BetterHelp.

Visit BetterHelp.com slash slowdown today and get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp.

H-E-L-P dot com slash slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown.

At a reading recently, a fiction writer friend publicly making the distinction between

herself and me stated, for novelists like myself, words are tools, but for Major and his ill,

words are jewels. That's facts. The litmus test to any writer's word is how much they cherish

language and how that love is told or jeweled in the very fabric of a phrase. And where do we

satiate this craving beyond our own deep reading? The dictionary, of course.

It's one thing to hear writers discuss their preferred writing utensils,

...