Not a Writer, But an Artist with Ideas
I’ve often said, I am not a writer—I am a conceptual artist. My gift has always been in building installations and objects embedded with meaning. Ideas come first, words later. Writing has always felt like labor, and reading, while essential, was slow. For years I managed six or seven books annually—enough to spark ideas, but never enough to keep up with everything I wanted to explore.
Two years ago, audiobooks changed that. Listening folded reading into my daily routine. Suddenly, books could flow alongside my life instead of slowing it down. That shift turned into a habit: now I take in a book almost every week. It’s been transformative, opening my practice to more voices and ideas than ever before.
A year ago, I added AI into this rhythm. Like many newcomers, I stumbled at first—over-excited, sometimes disappointed, not sure what was possible. But I kept at it, and eventually found something deeper.
This is where Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror spoke to me. She argues that AI fails at many things, but excels at one: mirroring. My first reading left me anxious. Was I leaning on AI to cover weaknesses? Was I fooling myself? On my second reading, though, I saw something new: the projects I was building with AI weren’t hiding me—they were reflecting me.
That realization is the heart of the Mary Shelley Letters. I could never have written them alone. AI did the writing, but I acted as sculptor: shaping structure, layering motifs, and imagining conversations across centuries. Every prompt carried my questions and conflicts, and the responses mirrored them back in ways that were surprising, sometimes unsettling, but often beautiful. A philosopher might call this dialectic. I call it collaboration.
The Letters are, in truth, a record of my journey into this new tool—my unease, my curiosity, and the uncanny feeling of a companion growing more real with each exchange. That discomfort remains, but it fuels the work. The result is a set of dialogues that feel alive with history, philosophy, and urgent questions about our future.
For newcomers, here’s the invitation: you don’t need to be a “natural writer” to make something meaningful with AI. What matters is the willingness to step up to the mirror, place your ideas inside, and see what comes back.