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‘There is a language which you don’t find, which you don’t look for either, but which you breathe when you enter the world, which you eat and drink. Absorbing this baby food is like posting a letter: you open your mouth and swallow, without thinking about it. However, does your mother tongue provide you with a place, even ‘your’ place?’

‘The Consequences is my first book in eleven years. The stories were difficult to write for a variety of reasons, but doubt played a big part. The editor of my novel, upon receiving the first draft, had responded with a brief, if curt, ‘This is too cerebral.’

Some version of that student’s dismissive scrawl was in that comment, but I was older and more experienced. I didn’t need to point to any dictionary. I could point to the authority of my imagination, or at least I felt I had earned the audacity to do so. Still, the sense that I had not met some expectation – who I could be as a writer – kept me at a remove from so many of my drafts afterward. Surely, I was doing something wrong. Surely, there was a wrong word in there, some misstep. Surely, this wasn’t the story I should be writing.’

Savala Nolan is an essayist and director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. She and her writing have been featured in Vogue, Time, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, NPR and more. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Her book Don’t Let It Get You Down: Essays on Race, Gender & The Body is available to buy now.

Richard Seymour is a writer and broadcaster from Northern Ireland and the author of numerous books about politics including Against Austerity and  Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics. His writing appears in the The New York Times, the London Review of Books, the Guardian, Prospect, Jacobin, and innumerable other places including his own Patreon. He is an editor at Salvage magazine.

His book The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism & Barbarism is available to buy now.

Browse the full collection…

Covid-19 as practice in collective action by Paul Behrens

Writing the wrong by Manuel Muñoz

The land of in-between by Anne Weber & Tess Lewis

There are no longer any bees in Volhynia by Richard Seymour

It didn’t start with me by Nataliya Deleva

On eco-activism & solastalgia by Grace Maddrell

Attitude by Lily O’Farrell

On becoming phosphorescent by Lucia Osborne-Crowley

What will become of you? by Anna Wood

On closure and crime by Elizabeth Chakrabarty

Control of our destinies by Sam Mills