Manjula Martin on Why She Writes—and Why It Still Matters

Because I wasn’t good enough at guitar.
Because one night when I was about 11 years old, my mom was grading student papers in the living room, and the stack was too big for what they paid adjuncts, even then. I asked her about the topic she’d assigned (Novel into Film, Slaughterhouse-Five), and the fire was crackling and the fog was in on the bay, and she handed me a paper and said, See if you can find the mistakes, and if you do, put a dot in red pencil, then I’ll go back and write the comments, and so I did.
Across town, in the bookshelf of a cabin in the garden where my dad worked, more than half the books were poetry, not horticulture.
Because somehow, a bit later, maybe junior high, I ended up owning an LP of Nikki Giovanni reading her work, and it exploded my tiny white mind.
That scene in the film adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View where George Emerson climbs into an olive tree and shouts Beauty! into the Italian countryside.
Because too often I’ve found that there is not yet language for what I need to say, and I’m guessing I’m not the only one who feels that way.
Hot writing tip: Usually the last part needs to be moved up to the beginning, and the other way around. Once I figured this out, it got easier.
When I was a teenage dirtbag working at the used books and records store, one afternoon someone put Patti Smith on the stereo. I realized all those men—the cool and scruffy men, the writers and rockers whose names I invoked in admiration—were not gods.
Because dudes do it, and I, too, am a dude.
As I write this, I’m sitting in a small rooftop apartment in a large city in Mexico. I’m looking at a vine of bougainvillea climbing a piece of rebar. Below, an incantation blares from a pickup truck: A woman’s voice, prerecorded, nasal in tone and not un-annoying but also not un-harsh, is saying, Se compran colchones, tambores, refrigeradores, estufas, lavadoras, microondas. Every day I’m still realizing how fucking beautiful words are.
Because when authoritarian regimes come to power, they are coming for the writers and artists, too.
In the San Francisco of my late-dirtbag years, on a Mission district rooftop, there was a sign larger than a billboard that asked/told me: 17 Reasons Why! Its neon letters would blur in the fog, and sometimes, when you had been out all night, it felt like the words were leading you home. A lighthouse beam on the urban ocean. Even now, when I picture 17 Reasons—it’s long gone, replaced by a beer ad—the sign’s neon characters flicker and pulse in my memory, tumbling themselves into a mixed-up graphic array of letters as framework, words as schema, every story a sentinel. Later, when the technologist boy kings sacked the city, they took all the vowels from the language. I write to rescue the vowels, to make them glow.
In the obligatory New York City era, my roommate and I typed sentences out on paper, pasted them to Polaroids, blew them up on the copier at Kinko’s, and decorated our tenement apartment with them. My body always smelled like Scotch tape and glue sticks. One night, the heir to a European beverage empire ended up at our place—long story, it was the ’90s—and he read every typewritten sentence on the walls. In the kitchen, bumming a cigarette, he asked if he could buy some of the “pieces” in my “collection,” and I said: No.
How to Make Money from Writing, Top 10 Reasons Why I Write, Most Anticipated Written Words of 2025, 700 Words You Won’t Believe I Wrote, Is It Boring You Yet because it’s absolutely killing me. I want to ask questions, not find answers.
When I moved to the forest, the redwoods showed me this: Every landscape is a city, and every city a landscape.
Because we need new metaphors.
Because I wasn’t good enough at guitar.•