The sounds of a Sunday evening are unmistakable. The bubbly laughter of children playing outside, the cacophony of dinner parties, students enjoying their last free day before returning to school, and, for Austin Youth Poet Laureate Finalist Michelle Li ‘26, the sound of pen on paper as she diligently works on her newest poem.

A two-time finalist, Michelle was nominated for both her creative nonfiction and poetry pieces. Michelle’s work traverses a myriad of concepts, from parental expectations and career pressure to friendship and the beauty of human life.

“I write poetry as more of an abstract form to understand a singular moment, almost outside of the moment itself,” Michelle said. “[One of my favorite writers] said that nonfiction writers have a taste for littleness. [In my writing], I want to be able to genuinely appreciate what people do in their everyday lives. I want to be a writer of people, not just merely ideas. I think that’s what inspires me to write a lot. I think that [often], people are just going about their day and seemingly very small tasks, but I think there has to be a lot of courage just to wake up every day and do what you have to do, and I want to appreciate that in my writing.”

The beauty of what others dismiss as the mundane serves as a cornerstone of Michelle’s writing. In pieces like Ribs, Michelle focuses on the bittersweet nature of navigating friendships and how friends find comfort in each other in their moments of distress by analyzing a series of conversations the speaker of her poem has with her friend over the course of a year.

“[Since I last was a finalist], I would say that I’m tackling more things in my writing,” Michelle said. “[More recently], I’ve tended to write a lot about death because it’s something that I’m personally very afraid of. I hope that [since] I’ve gotten a year older, I can tackle more nuanced themes or different approaches [to concepts].”

Despite Michelle’s immense talent, writing in an environment that discourages the arts is difficult. The academic culture at Westwood is cutthroat, and many feel pressured to pursue fields such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) as opposed to less conventional career paths. This environment can make the life of those who wish to pursue less conventional paths difficult.

“[A lot of] my writing addresses what it is like to maintain the arts or humanity in a world that is increasingly materialistic, and [often] that’s correlated with heavy STEM focus,” Michelle said. “I think that my relationship with writing gave me a sense of confidence that let me do something that I was almost dissuaded from doing. But I was still able to continue with it and achieve things in this career aspect, and it’s something that when I think about it, I feel like it took a lot of courage that I didn’t know I really had.”

Michelle touches on this concept further in her piece Elegy, speaking about her relentless writing in the fact of external pressure to pursue other disciplines. Writing, “my father, who had wanted / me to be a physicist, had been right, that poetry / was turning me soft, that I would not live long / with this tenderness,” she illustrated the struggle writers face in breaking the notion that they should pursue more stable endeavors to find success. Michelle challenges this in her writing by showing younger writers that they can find the sweet spot between both the joy of the arts and more conventional pathways.

“I think that there’s definitely a balance you can achieve, which is something that I wish I were more privy to when I was younger,” Michelle said. “I do want to go into something that’s more disciplinary, but I think that as long as you really just keep your head down and keep working at it, [finding a balance] is not something that’s impossible.”

Yet, even the most disciplined writers struggle with balancing the time and work demanded by their craft with other commitments in their lives. As a student at an incredibly competitive school, as well as juggling the responsibility of being the editor-in-chief of numerous literary magazines such as The Incandescent Review and the Hominum Journal, Michelle has to make hard choices about what to prioritize.

“[Often], time management [gets] very difficult in the sense that [you have to ask yourself], ‘do I prioritize this more or that more?’” Michelle said. “There are times when I have to put something on the back burner for a while. Although people don’t like to do that, it’s a reality that you must grapple with.”

One factor that has contributed to Michelle’s stress is having to deal with the strain new artificial intelligence (AI) models have placed on writers. As an editor of several literary magazines, Michelle has dealt with a host of large language models that threaten to crowd out human expression.

“It’s pretty obvious to editors when people are using AI,” Michelle said. “If you do use AI for [submissions], you’re unfortunately eliminated automatically from the [submission] process, because the point of writing is not just to produce a beautiful work of writing, but to cultivate characters to experience an act of becoming. [That] is what I think is truly important about writing. You’re not really getting to that if you’re using AI to circumvent this process.”

With all these responsibilities and sources of stress building up, Michelle has a lot on her plate. In her eyes, the best way to counterbalance these issues is to simply take a step back.

“The other day, I was talking [to a friend] and was saying that I [sometimes] feel like writing isn’t something that’s meant for me because I feel that a lot of my writing lacks substance,” Michelle said. “The advice of some of my teachers was that you have to go out [into the world] and live more than you have — only then can you write about these experiences. I don’t think writers always ought to be on the lookout for something to write. I think that idea contributes to burnout.”

Even though these issues have the possibility to stunt writers’ careers, Michelle weathers them by constantly seeking to improve at her craft. Michelle has participated in several workshops and mentorship programs, including the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop and Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program, as a way to expand her skills and learn from experts. These workshops have taught her that the best way to deal with criticism is to turn it into improvement.

“The best thing for a writer is to cultivate extreme indifference to praise or to harsh criticism because that’s sometimes what you need to continue to go [on],” Michelle said. “If somebody says something I write is bad or if I don’t enjoy what I’m writing, sometimes I personally have to take a step back and then consider what about it do I do that they don’t like. All of these reactions from people and both external factors and internal factors, I would say, contribute to my sense of how to approach [my writing] more from [a perspective of] constructive criticism.”

Michelle and her five fellow finalists will meet on Zoom monthly to continue improving their craft and speak at various venues across Austin to address aspiring writers. In the long run, though, Michelle’s primary goal is to use the improvements gained from adjusting to criticism to transform her writing into something that she feels proud of. In the words of Michael Ian Black, a comedian and writer, “Your harshest critic is always going to be yourself. Don’t ignore that critic, but don’t give it more attention than it deserves.” For Michelle, this looks like working harder and outside of her comfort zone to write a piece she is satisfied with, while not letting her desire to improve consume her.

“I hope that one day, I can write something that I feel satisfied with,” Michelle said. “I feel like I’m very critical about my own work, and I think that that probably is true [of] a lot of writers and artists. [They] are their own worst critics. I hope to one day be able to have the mentality that I’m able to approach writing with more of an open mind and more acceptance, and to create something that I personally genuinely enjoy.”