About this Event
Third Place Books welcomes poet, translator, and scholar Chloe Martinez to our Ravenna store for a conversation about her work as an editor of . Featuring fifteen essays by writers with ADHD, Chaos, Creativity, Completion explores ADHD-friendly writing practices and celebrates neurodiversity in creative work. Daniel Tam-Claiborne, author of , joins in conversation.
This event is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured books!
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This event is free to attend. Registration is recommended in advance.
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About Chaos, Creativity, Completion. . .
Fifteen essays that offer inspiration, encouragement, and advice from accomplished writers with ADHD.
A rising number of ADHD diagnoses, particularly among adults, is not only confirmed by medical studies and mainstream reporting but also borne out across social media and elsewhere among people who’d been privately coping with persistent, often inexpressible challenges. Many of the contributors to this collection can attest to how a later-in-life diagnosis radically demystified the patterns, impulses, and impasses that had affected their lives and their writing. The essays in Chaos, Creativity, Completion reflect the ways poets, novelists, memoirists, filmmakers, and others have come to understand and engage the relationship between their ADHD and their creative tool kits.
These essays consider how writers can embrace rather than mask their neurodifference, offering multiple ways of finding writing practices that work for ADHD brains—including techniques that often look quite different from traditional writing instruction. Some essays are analytical, some are reflective, and some are delightfully weird, employing humor, research, personal narrative, deep description, close reading, and experimental approaches to genre and form. Each essay also concludes with a writing prompt, providing readers with opportunities to expand their own creative toolkits. Finally, the book includes an interview with David Kessler, a licensed therapist and nationally recognized ADHD advocate, and an appendix with a glossary of helpful terms and a list of recommended resources, from books and organizations to apps and gadgets.
Just as the experience of ADHD varies from person to person, so, too, do the ways those experiences can be expressed. Chaos, Creativity, Completion is a kaleidoscopic, adventurous series of takes on what writing looks like today.
Chloe Martinez is the translator of Blue Like My Beloved: Poems of Mirabai (New Directions, October 2026); coeditor of Chaos, Creativity, Completion: New Approaches to Writing and ADHD (UChicago); and author of the poetry collection Ten Thousand Selves and the chapbook Corner Shrine. A 2026 NEA Translation Fellow, she is assistant editor at Beloit Poetry Journal and works at Claremont McKenna College.
Daniel Tam-Claiborne is a multiracial writer, multimedia producer, and nonprofit director. His debut novel, Transplants (Simon & Schuster, 2025), was a finalist for the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction and longlisted for the 2026 VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. He is the author of the short story collection What Never Leaves, and his writing has appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review, HuffPost, Catapult, Literary Hub, Off Assignment, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow, he has also received awards and fellowships from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Poets & Writers, Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, and others. Daniel holds degrees from Oberlin College, Yale University, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
About Third Place Books
Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Third Place Books Ravenna, 6504 20th Avenue Northeast, Seattle, United States
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