Typically, a book can only provide readers with an obscured vantage of its text’s origin. By the time that book reaches bookshelves, the ideas that had first enticed its author have already passed through countless rounds of revisions. While the outcome may provide a more refined, readily palatable book for readers, it nevertheless buries the text’s origins under smudged hauntological layers of edits, rewrites, and omissions.

But might there exist value in excavating and examining such origins, in actually encountering writing ideas in their initial expressions, regardless of how unpolished they might be? It seems one can already observe and benefit from such vantages in other creative disciplines, whether learning from a fine artist’s sketchbook or appreciating the intimacy of a musician’s early, rough demos. So what might the creative writing version of such archives look like, and could it similarly enrich readers’ perspectives?

For his second book, Matt Brand has published his Free Writing note from the Notes app on his phone, where he would capture creative writing lines and fragments as they arrived to him between the dates of 9/4/18 and 12/08/20. Some entries are only a few words in length, whereas others are entire poems and paragraphs of thought. Yet they all provide vantage into creative ideas at their initial point of reception, before they could get molded or compromised over time. Here, bits of text are just as likely to stimulate one’s inspiration as they are to spur reflection on the nature and lifespan of creative ideas themselves.