The Nineteenth Century English painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, once said, “It is vain for painters to endeavor to invent without materials with which the mind may work.”

Easy for a painter to say, painters have hundreds of tools: brushes, paints, canvases, knives, colors in the millions, papers; any old board.

But writers? What do we have? a measly pen? A computer? A typewriter?, a lined, A paper tablet? Nothing like painters, right?

Measly? Not.

Our tools are manifest in every book we read, in every conversation we overhear, every blade of grass we see, every cloud, every character, phrase or scene. We writers’ tools are, I think, unlimited.

But that unlimitedness can trip us with our profoundest dilemma: we have to choose. But how? What do we limit? How do we cull and focus in order to start filling the blank screen or the empty page?

I think that blank page gives us our greatest tool of all: the first word. The first word is huge because it gives us our next tool: the second word. And that word gives us the next until our overflowing toolkit provides everything we need to carve out a story, a poem, a manual, or even a letter. It’s amazing what we’ve got.

I have a question: who likes, actually likes, having a photo taken? Raise your hands. I suspect the younger you are the more likely you are to be holding your hand up now.

And if your hand is happily raised, what about having your picture taken fills you? What about it makes you happy to have someone (or yourself) snapping away?

I have never liked my photo taken. I don’t feel ugly, really, just not enough, though I don’t know what “enough” is. Prettier? Thinner? More perfect? Younger? I don’t know. I only know I don’t like it. A little time does my picture ever deign to maybe, perhaps, perchance seem acceptable.

Is this true with anybody else, or is it just me?

I just came aware of one of the most stunning reads in my life: The 1619 Project, a treatise on the history and effect of 240 years of slavery in America. The title of the work comes from the date, August 1619, the month and year a ship carried the first slaves to be sold in the British colony of Virginia.

Organized by the New York Times magazine and published August 14 this year, The 1619 Project is a collection of poems and fiction by an couple dozen incredible writers, most all of them black. It is at times an excruciating read, at times philosophical, but most of all illuminating. And it poses a fundamental question: would America ever have become America were it not built on the backs of people who had no say in their lives or their futures?

The magazine sold out almost immediately, but a PDF of it can be downloaded free at http://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf.

The writings reached the core of me.

To say The Song of Achilles is a master’s work is an understatement. I got a copy somewhere, can’t really remember where, so I had no idea what I was in for in the reading of it. I was consumed by the writing and the story. Madeline Miller nailed it

I know nothing about the ancient Greeks, even less about their gods. Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Achilles, none of them. I suspect I might not have opened it, if I’d had an inking about what what inside. Ignorance can sometimes yield reward; it did for me with this book.

When young Patroclus kills another boy, he is disowned by his royal family and sent away to a life of servitude without status. He meets Achilles and the two become lovers, accepted only because Achilles is a prince whose mother was a goddess.

Their arduous, loving, bloody, cruel lives lead them smack into the Trojan war and author Madeline Miller’s deft telling makes you live right there with them. The Song of Achilles is a masterful book. Masterful.