Save the Em Dash

About my NPR interview — or, how I realized one piece of punctuation embodies my life philosophy

Listen to the short episode here.

I was on a call with a young producer for All Things Considered on NPR/WNYC recently (!!!) when she asked me a question I didn’t expect. She’d recently graduated from Boston University and said: “My generation is calling the em dash the ChatGPT dash and it seems as though they’re steering away from it completely. What do you think about that?”

I had to pause. Here I was, several “generations” older, sitting in my home office with Ben’s grandfather’s vintage microphone in view and a vintage bicycle behind me that’s been part of every video call for years, being asked to defend a piece of punctuation. But of course it wasn’t really about punctuation at all.

The role of each new generation is to evolve and respond, I told her. I celebrate that. But these machines are only regurgitating what previous generations have handed down — so why let them dictate whether you write it off? (Write it off. Ha ha ha.) I think the wariness comes from a good place: wanting to be authentic, to retain the truth of who you are and not be seen as something fake. I get that. I am not an anti-technology person. I utilize AI, but I want to be discerning. Leave the em dash or embrace it — I just hope we don’t give into living in a reactive state based on what a tech company puts in front of our screens.

The em dash to me has always been this kind of anarchist, very Gen X punctuation. Definitely not something that I was taught in Catholic school where grammar was emphasized. I see the em dash as a tool that allows us to have non-linear thoughts and add on different ideas in one container.

As a person, I see myself as the embodiment of a person split, as if by an em dash. I’m a poet, I am a journalist, I’m a creative, I’m analytical, I am a curlicue thinker able to go off on tangents and rein them into a strategic arrow. The em dash in my writing allows me to express all of that, at once, often in one sentence.

The em dash grants me permission to not have to be rigid, to be freed of the rules, to veer off course, to be tangential, to allow each of these moments and thoughts to build upon one another and remind us that they - and we - are all connected.

By the end of the interview, the producer said: “This is what I needed. I needed a poet to put it this way, so we can understand.”

In some ways this newsletter is a sort of em dash itself. Next month marks the six year anniversary of its launch. On December 23, 2019, I hit publish from Soho House in the Meatpacking District, sitting in front of a fireplace, sipping tea, feeling a little glamorous. The idea: Build an audience, form a sense of community, and yes, prove to a publisher that I was “marketable.” Short essays, light and breezy, link to things I was reading, or things I’d bought and loved. Very influencer-y. Fun.

And then my brother died – a record scratch moment. I didn’t write again for three months. Having started with one intention, my sentence ended on a completely separate emphasis.

All of these years later, I have learned that this is life.

I had this a-ha moment in that first year of grieving. I was missing him so much while quietly looking at the sky, contemplating the Earth’s atmosphere – how a rocket ship needs to burst out of the atmosphere to leave, while here we are in this globe, contained. We are part of the universe, but physics means that everything that has been birthed on this earth remains contained on this earth. Imagine them all: the dinosaurs, Oscar, my loved ones, your loved ones, Earnestine, and soon, my beloved Gertrude.

We are shopping at the supermarket, we are commuting to work, we are having an argument, we are holding that profundity alongside our lives. We breathe them in and we breathe them out – they are here and they are not here, both before and after the elongated dash.

I want to make space for that kind of ambiguity and hazy truth, hold the beauty and the darkness and the grief and the joy — even in my chosen punctuation.

So, I say Save the Em Dash. Keep things a little weird, a little confusing, a little tangential. Maybe you will start writing a sentence and an em dash will take you in a direction you never expected. What if we make space for that journey?

Don’t let a machine - regurgitating everything that came before - tell you how to write the rest of your sentence.

Take a deep breath and let it flow out of you – one elongated dash at a time.