Dear Flat: To Have Lived (And Suffered) Is Not Enough
From the Archives | Lit Salon on evoking emotion with our writing + the mysterious balance of inner, outer, and other mode + what writers know about broken swings + why music is more than music
Dear WITDers!
I’ve been waiting ALL DAY to send you a truly exciting Lit Salon post, then just found out that the thing I wanted to write about won’t be made public until next week because of the Fourth of July. I can’t believe it.
And no, it’s not news about my novel or me signing a book contract. My novel is still not finished, but getting closer!
No, this is a story of my friend, who did a writing thing so amazing and so inspiring that I honestly cannot wait to share it with you because we can all learn around the warmth of her great, generous fire.
Meanwhile, since I now cannot send you that story (soon! soon!) I’m revisiting this post about exteriority and emotion, which feels apropos since we just worked so hard on that in the Visceral Self and many of us took it further—or, at least, in a different direction—last week in The Feeling of What Happens: Advanced Techniques for Writing That Stirs Emotion.
So, here we are with this archival post from last July. I so dearly hope it’s valuable for you. And at the end of the post, you’ll find some info about Strange Containers: Flash, Hermits & Other Oddities.
Ed note: Since this piece was first published last July, a lot has changed! Including that Billie has now adopted Z, final on June 7. But I am leaving this archival post unchanged, so that it can read as it was, not as it is.
It’s almost August, the crickets are raising a marvelous racket (why are crickets so magical?), and my emotional world is, to say the least, brimming with a kind of wild aliveness.
For the many new readers of Writing in the Dark, a bit of context before I dive into this week’s Lit Salon, “Dear Flat,” which explores how we evoke emotion with our writing:
1. The youngest of my (all adult) children, Billie, is foster parent to a beloved two-year-old boy, Z, who is very likely going to become a permanent member of our family in the next year via adoption. This is beautiful and brutal in all the ways such things inherently are.
2. Billie became licensed to provide foster parent with the intent to take short-term placements of infants and babies under two. Z was their first placement almost exactly one year ago.
3. Right now, Billie and Z live with us (my husband, Jon and me), and they’ll remain here until sometime this fall, after they close on their new house, which is literally around the corner from ours.
4. The location of the new house was very strategic, as Billie is single and wasn’t fully prepared to take on full-time permanent parenthood. This is a group effort.
5. Side note: the new house is an absolute charmer. The current owners—a retired philosophy professor (who is about ninety years old) and his ethereal and lovely wife—have been there for many decades. The only pitfall is that the philosophy professor, perhaps true to form for his era, chain smokes Pall Malls. Much priming and painting will be required, along with possibly sanding and refinishing the wood floors. Also, our neighborhood is the hilliest in Minneapolis, and the house is—well, there’s no other way to say this, but it’s nestled into a bit of a cliff. Which is fantastic in terms of views and vibe; it’s the prettiest little treehouse in town! But, we’ve got some safety issues to address before a toddler can live there. Therefore, an inevitable delay will transpire between Billie’s end-of-August closing and the move in date.
6. Finally, for those who haven’t read much of my work, I was also a foster child (and later, for a few years, a foster parent), and my younger sister spent almost half of her childhood in foster care.
With those basic facts in place, here’s the truth: Z is rekindling the old embers of my own experiences of childhood trauma and parental abandonment. It’s not a terrible thing that this is happening. It is okay, and I am okay. This is just something that sometimes happens when you have these experiences in your body. You carry them, you work on them, you heal and heal and heal, but those cellular memories remain a little bit hot, just as we’ve recently learned that forest fires can remain active underground for long periods of time, even through winter, in a phenomenon called “zombie fires” as reported by Ohio State University:
New research on the exceptional Arctic fire seasons of 2019 and 2020 points to fires moving into the ground as well.
These underground fires are known as “zombie fires,” and there are a number of reasons to worry about the trend.
First, as the organic-rich Arctic soils dry up because of changing climate conditions, they can burn slowly and release vast amounts of smoke into the atmosphere.
Second, soil fires that spread underground are harder for firefighters to tame and extinguish, thus demanding more resources for longer periods of time. Firefighters in Alberta, Canada, where carbon-rich peatlands are common, have been dealing with fires smoldering to depths dozens of feet underground in 2023. Because peat fires can make the ground unstable, using heavy equipment to excavate the fire areas also becomes risky.
Finally, these soil fires don’t die easily. Recent research finds that Arctic soil fires can smolder through the winter and reignite during early spring when temperatures rise, hence the nickname “zombie fires.”
So, yesterday, Z woke hard from an afternoon nap, and was in a state similar to a night terror, except it was daytime. It went on for almost a half an hour, I think—the soulful, hard crying from somewhere deep and wild and far away. A gut-wrenching, heartbreaking pain. Billie handled the whole thing so skillfully, so lovingly, so beautifully. Jon and I hovered nearby, offering a gentle hand or word, but ultimately the only thing to be done was simply for Billie to hold him until it passed, like a hard, drenching storm. And it did pass, eventually, one little hiccough at a time.
While he was crying, though—while Z was wherever he was, feeling it all with his whole being—I felt it, too. I felt the full weight of his experience. Yes, it was amplified because of my own early childhood experiences of abuse and, later, abandonment. These soil fires don’t die easily. But that’s just one piece of the picture. Something more fundamental is also at work, something that says you cannot be an empathic person in the presence of such pain and not feel it moving through you, through your skin and muscle, your bone, your blood. Eventually, with my hand stilling the heaving of Z’s little shoulder blades and back, I couldn’t blink back my own silent tears, either.
Isn’t the empathetic response part of what makes writers capable of doing what we do?
Robert Frost said, “No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." Someone else said (and if you can source this quote, please, please throw it in the comments!), that only writers see a broken swing as a symbol of a ruined childhood.
This, friends, is what I know of the feeling life of writers. This empathic response to the world makes our lives harder in many ways because, quite frankly, we feel more. However, it also allows us to write in a way that evokes emotion, to write in a way that is alive, filled with feeling, electrified and transforming. Note the verb allow. I emphasize this allowance because feeling for our story, our characters, and the events they suffer, is in itself not enough to automatically elicit emotion from readers. There is also craft involved. Evocative writing often requires technical understanding and skill (I say often because magic does happen, but I’m generally more interested in doing things the hard way, because that’s what applies to most of us). And that’s what this week’s Lit Salon explores: the hard work and alchemical art writing in a way that evokes emotion.
Lit Salon
Dear Flat: To Have Lived (And Suffered) Is Not Enough—You Must Also Craft the Story
Dear Jeannine,
Recently, a beta reader for my memoir-in-progress observed that my manuscript felt distant and unemotional. To note, my memoir is about losing my young husband, with whom I was madly in love, during our first year of marriage. He died in a tragic car accident that also left me with a dozen broken bones and a level of grief I didn’t think I’d survive.
It’s a very emotional story!
But. And this is a big but … the reader who made these observations is not only astute and kind, but she’s also a writer whose work I admire. And, yes, she said many other, much more positive things, including that my writing is sensitive, honest, and sophisticated at the sentence level, and that the story itself is important and full of potential. She said my voice is strong and confident. But her major note was that the narrative is often “flat,” especially for such a dramatic and grief-filled story.
Jeannine, I’ve been sitting on this feedback for a few weeks, kind of licking my wounds. But recently I picked up my manuscript, gave it a hard look, and realized, to my horror, that this feedback is accurate. The process of writing my story has been very healing for me. And yet, my manuscript is flatter than it should be.
I might eventually hire an editor, but right now I can’t afford it. And I know you can’t give me specific advice on what to do without reading my work, either. But could you maybe speak in a general way about the factors that might lead to an emotionally flat story versus one that is more affecting? Because I feel like I’ve included a lot of detail about how I felt during these experiences. I’m not sure what else I can add.
I would really appreciate your thoughts.
Signed,
Flat
Dear Flat,
I’m so sorry for your loss of your husband, however many years ago it may have been. I am glad you have been able to write about this particular grief and I hope that no matter what does or does not become of your manuscript, you continue to find healing and transformation through writing.
In the meantime, I want you to know that so many readers will find this a valuable discussion, thanks to your courage in sending this question to me. I will be teaching the art of evoking emotion in our writing this fall at Stillwater Prison, by my students’ request, so this topic is top of mind. And you are, of course, one hundred percent correct that I can’t adequately address your dilemma without seeing your work. That said, two aspects of your letter stand out to me and provide me just enough footing to speculate.
First, You say your story is a very emotional story about tragic events, and, second, you say that you’ve included a lot of detail about how you felt and aren’t sure what more you can add. These two tidbits suggest two things. One, that you might be putting too much stock on the ability of the story’s content to move readers, and two, that you might be telling the reader more than you are showing the reader (that is, you might need to convert some summary to scene).
And I’m frustrated with myself right now for the oversimplified way that must feel, those adages about showing instead of telling, or converting summary to scene. Because writers hear those adages all the time. And yet, how, very specifically, is a writer supposed to implement this guidance?
I will provide some actual nuts and bolts in just a moment.
But first…
I want you to imagine yourself with a ripe yellow lemon in your hand. Imagine this lemon is slightly sun-warmed, plucked straight from the tree. Feel its thick skin, smooth but also very slightly puckered. Wrap your fingers around the lemon; feel its weight. Smell the fruit—there’s a brightness to it, like the scent of sunlight.
Now set the lemon on a cutting board and slice into the skin and the flesh of the fruit. Cut the lemon clean in half. Some juice might escape. If you have a cut on any of your fingers, you may feel a sharp, stinging sensation and need to rinse the juice off before you continue. Do that if necessary.
Then, when you are ready, take one half of the cut lemon, its juicy fruit fully exposed, and raise it toward your mouth. Now touch it to your lips and squeeze the fruit. Let the juice run onto your tongue.
Is your mouth watering a bit?
No, for real—is your mouth watering?
If it is, this is an indication of the power of your imagination, and the link between imagined experience and literal physical sensation (which, by the way, includes emotions, which we feel physically as well as psychologically).
This thing that just happened with the lemon is what happens when our writing inspires readers to feel joy, grief, excitement, suspense, etc. This thing that just happened is what your beta reader was missing in your manuscript. And there are three specific ways in which you can ensure that your writing evokes this mind-body emotional reaction in your reader. The trick is that the balance of these techniques varies from manuscript to manuscript and from story to story, so there can never be a reliable formula or blueprint for how to apply them and in what ratio. That’s something each of us must discern for ourselves through trial and error and through carefully listening into the spirit of the story we are telling for its hungers and demands. Also, of course, listening to trusted first readers, as you have done and are doing. With all those caveats, here are the techniques to consider:
1. Writing hot cold, which means simply that the “hotter” (more painful) your material is, the more restraint you should use in writing about it. This may seem paradoxical, but in most cases, it proves true. Literary agent and craft writer Donald Maass puts it this way: “The painful emotional lives of … characters need to become tolerable for readers. Humor and objective showing create a safety zone. In that zone readers can process their own response to emotional conditions that are extreme. To put it simply, when character emotions are highly painful, pull back.”
2. Focus on what I call “the thing itself,” which means that very often, writers need to explain less about their experiences and focus instead on the exterior world in which those experiences took place and the straightforward actions that comprised the experiences.
3. Strike an appropriate balance between inner mode, outer mode, and other mode.
To note, I have written extensively about the first two items, some of which you can find here and here and here and here and, really, throughout the 30-Day Creativity Challenge and Writing Lab & Prompts sections of this Substack. As for the third point, that comes from a book called The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Maass, who also wrote about these techniques in a blog post for Jane Friedman in 2017. I studied with Maass in 2015, have several of his books on my craft shelf, and have revisited some of his wisdom repeatedly over the years, and appreciate the chance to share his thoughts with you.
Inner Mode
According to Maass (and I agree) inner mode is the same as telling. Maass says:
Writing out what characters feel ought to be a shortcut to getting readers to feel that stuff too, shouldn’t it? Actually, the truth is the opposite. Put on the page what a character feels and there’s a pretty good chance that, paradoxically, what the reader will feel is nothing.
If and when we do choose to use inner mode, and tell the reader about an emotion, it matters a lot that we do so skillfully. Maass warns against defaulting to the expected emotions (and the expected words to describe those expected emotions). He writes:
Skillful authors play against expected feelings. They go down several emotional layers in order to bring up emotions that will catch readers by surprise. There’s always a different emotion to use. A story situation is an emotional elephant. There are many ways of looking at and feeling about what’s happening at any given moment. Stop your story at any point, ask the point-of-view character what she is feeling, and it’s never just one answer. Ask two characters what they feel about what’s happening and neither will ever say the same thing.
Human beings are complex. We have emotions on the surface and emotions underneath. There are emotions that we minimize, hide, and deny. There are emotions that embarrass us, reveal too much, and make us vulnerable. Our emotions can be profoundly trivial or so elevated that they’re silly. What we feel is inescapably influenced by our history, morals, loyalties, and politics.
With so much rich human material to work with, it’s disappointing that so many manuscripts offer a limited menu of emotions. The feelings that writers first choose to write are often obvious, easy, and safe. These are the feelings writers believe they ought to use if their stories are going to sell. They work only with primary emotions because that is what everyone feels, which is true, but this is also a limited view.
I’ve written before about how, in a scene about witnessing my childhood dog, Pete, get hit by a car (he survived), I focused on the narrator’s defiance and pride rather than her fear. In this way, I could allow the narrator to “tell” the reader how she felt, and still expect that “telling” to create an emotional response that was truthful for the reader, who would most likely fear for this little girl. I explain this in more detail in my essay, “The Cost,” which recently came out in Ilanot Review.
Outer Mode
Outer mode is, not surprisingly, about showing. It’s about exteriority, but not just any exteriority. It’s about intentional and precise exteriority. It’s about selecting the exact right exterior details to carry the emotional weight of the story, and, therefore, its meaning and aboutness.
I attempt this in a scene in The Part That Burns where the ten-year-old narrator’s stepfather, Mafia, molests her one last time before abandoning their family, when I focus on the brush and comb and figurines on the dresser. In this scene, I also attempt to “write hot cold’” in order to respect the reader, not inundate or overwhelm them, and, therefore, allow them to feel for this narrator without being bowled over by their emotions (and therefore feel the need to throw up emotional blocks against the writing):
One morning before school, Mafia takes me to Mama’s bedroom. He pulls down my corduroys and rubs his hands between my legs like he does. He doesn’t do the chasing and tickling part. Mama’s dresser faces the foot of her bed. It has two white doilies on it. On one doily, a fancy brush and comb and mirror. On the other, two figurines with their arms outstretched. The bases of both figurines say, “I love you this much.” Mafia finishes. I listen to his footsteps going down the carpeted stairs into the hall. Next, the closet door opening and closing. Then, the front door. I do not know, as I watch from Mama’s bedroom window, that when Mafia drives away in his red truck, he will keep driving all the way to Duluth.
“Good riddance,” Mama says later. Still, she cries.
Mafia and Charlie are both gone.
But we still have Pete.
Other Mode
Of Maass’s triad of modes, this one is the most mysterious to me, and yet I recognize it as powerful. Maass writes:
None of readers’ emotional experience of a story actually comes from the emotional lives of characters. It comes from readers themselves. Yes, showing and telling are part of what provokes readers to feel, but they are only a part. Other things on the page also provoke readers, and these things are the greater part of the equation.
What are these things, these things that add up to a greater part of the equation? First, Maass acknowledges a central truth about the emotive nature of literature, which is that readers do not feel what our characters feel, but, rather, they feel their own feelings. This may seem obvious, but it’s very important. When you imagine slicing the lemon, your mouth waters only because of your previous experience with lemons. Other emotional responses work the same way: they arise from readers’ lived experiences. Does this mean readers must have experienced what we or our characters have experienced in order to respond emotionally to the passages? No, not at all. But they must have experienced the same emotions we or our characters have experienced, and our prose must be precise and real enough to tap into those soil fires.
Here’s Maass again:
What all that means is that readers fundamentally want to feel something, not about your story, but about themselves. They want to feel like they’ve been through something. They want to connect with your characters and live their fictional experience, or believe that they have.
Creating that type of experience for readers requires more than just walking them through the plot. Characters’ emotional states also, by themselves, are limited in their impact. Other mode is not a single technique or principle. It is a vast array of elements tuned like the instruments in an orchestra to create a soaring emotional effect. When all the instruments work together, they lift our hearts. They transport us to a realm of wonder. We are open.
Do you hope that your fiction can change people or maybe even history? Your hope is not in vain. It actually can. That power, however, cannot exist unless and until a story has a strong emotional impact.
I actually respect that Maass does not try, falsely, to outline, detail, or prescribe what this “vast array of elements tuned like the instruments in an orchestra to create a soaring emotional effect.” If he did, the implication would be troubling to me, for he would be suggesting the existence of a sort of “paint-by-number” approach to evocative writing, which I absolutely do not believe in.
It's like Mary Oliver says—I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. But I do know how to pay attention.
As writers, we must practice paying attention: to the world, to the texture and peculiarities of our memories, to the unexpected details, to the broken swings, to the meanings under the surfaces of things. We must practice paying attention to our manuscripts, too; a kind of rigorous, unrelenting, microscopic attention to tuning that orchestra.
An example: I have a book client right now who grew up very religious and is still devout, while also wrangling with many questions about his connection to place, class, family, and self. One constant in his life has been hymns and choral music, and in early drafts of his manuscript, references to such were sporadic and random. In this round of revision, he is, he says, “… making a table of wherever I mention hymns, choral music, and psalms. This content still feels haphazard, and may be better integrated into the emotional arc of the book.”
Ah, yes. This is what I mean. This story, his story, is not about the music. That’s not the dramatic question his story is asking or answering. But nor should the music be haphazard. Instead, it can and should be part of a soaring emotional effect.
I think if you return to your manuscript with these layered approaches in mind, you will find there is much opportunity to amplify its emotional impact. But, I must also caution you: working with our material in this way is an emotional journey for us as writers, too. It does require a depth of feeling for our characters, including our past selves if the writing is, as in your case, personal. Be gentle with yourself, and take care (and as much time and as many breaks as you need) when you enter into this work. I have written about this—the way can sometimes feel as if we are reliving our painful experiences in order to write them vividly—in a post linked below.
I offer all of this, every bit of it, with compassion, respect, and love. Please let me know if it is useful to you.
Love,
Jeannine
Strange Containers: Flash, Hermits & Other Oddities
Four Weeks of Highly Specific Flash Writing Starts August 7! Join Us!
“I often painted fragments of things because it seemed to make my statement as well as or better than the whole could.” ~ Georgia O’Keeffe
There are millions of ways to tell stories, and sometimes, a straight line from start to finish is not the best or most beautiful option. Sometimes, we can tell our stories in pieces. Fragmented, nonlinear, and other inventive forms can be both powerful and artful. Plus, it’s fun!
Strange Containers, the next WITD seasonal intensive, starts August 7, and we’ll read some outstanding flash—short, fragmented and broken things in strange containers—and study the techniques behind these nontraditional forms.
Then we’ll gather bits and pieces of our own stories and begin to list, braid, collage, erase, and rearrange these items into... something else. We’ll examine how to combine multiple subjects, images, and motifs within a single piece, and we’ll look at how fragmented structures can add complexity and amplify meaning without confusing the reader.
This intensive is based on the most popular Writing in the Dark live workshop of all time, The Art of the Fractured, which I also taught through Catapult back when Catapult still had writing classes. Art of the Fractured sold out every single time it was offered, and many terrific published pieces were born in that workshop, some of which you can peruse on this big, beautiful list of published work born in WITD:
Born in WITD: A Big Beautiful & Growing Directory of Work Published by WITD Writers
Strange Containers will be fast, playful & inventive, meant to help writers break out of the same old, same old and try some new ways into their own work.
Participants can expect the kinds of craft essays you usually find from me here at WITD, plus inspiring resources (especially the readings of published work you might not stumble across otherwise), detailed writing exercises, and lots of opportunities to share and read each other’s work, which is a beautiful facet of this community.
The Strange Containers intensive will be very accessible yet also oddly challenging and inspiring for all levels because … it’s just so weird.
To note, Strange Containers is not a writing class per se (there are no class meetings, no Zoom, no “assignments,” etc.), it’s an intensive on Substack, where all the material is delivered through four consecutive Wednesday posts in August. I draw this distinction because I do ALSO teach writing classes! Which are different, which are tuition-based, and which are adjacent to and supported by but separate from the WITD newsletter on Substack.
Anyway, for Strange Containers and all of the other WITD intensives (we run several a year!), everything happens right here on the posts, and all you need to do is be a paid or founding member of WITD—so if you already are, you’re all set for this adventure! Your subscription is all you need to participate.
Subscribed
What’s Included in “Strange Containers”
Paid members:
Full access to all Strange Container posts, sent via email on Wednesdays, and rich with readings, writing exercises, direct instruction and inspiration for trying your hand at some unusual new short work.
Access to our incredible comments—WITD comments sections are what makes this place so damn beautiful, because of the amazingness of the Writing in the Dark community. Each week, participants share questions, insights, and snippets of work in progress—and your guides, Jeannine and Billie, actively participate, as well.
Founding members also receive extra cool stuff that’s interactive, like:
Voice Memos and Video Notes.
Live Write-Ins and Live Salons on Zoom w/open mic readings to celebrate the intensive when we’re done (these are so fun).
All participants come away with:
A storehouse of valuable new ways to think about approaching short work, and why we might want to, plus specific tools to apply long after the the intensive is over.
A collection of new work in progress that you can continue to develop on your own.
An archive of flash and hermit crab readings and writing exercises that you can repeat as desired.
A deeper understanding of the ways these forms can work to enliven your writing practice.
Join now to start poking around our giant archive and maybe even dip your toe into our thriving Thursday Threads, or explore the full archive of past WITD intensives.
What People Say About Writing in the Dark Intensives
I can’t believe what I’m getting out of this intensive. It’s changing my writing in the most unexpected ways, and I am beyond grateful. You are the most generous teacher.
You are magic. Pure magic.
I have learned much from you in the last year, through your weekly posts and seasonal intensives. The depth and quality of your content is unmatched on Substack (IMHO). That, plus the network of subscribers you have garnered is why I look forward to Wednesdays! (And Mondays for Lit Salon and Thursdays for the new Threads!) I have been involved in workshops that cost more but provide less. Thanks for all you are producing and the community you have created in an effort to bring the out our best writing selves.
As always, there's more to these exercises than I first anticipate.
I’m thoroughly enjoying this challenge and truly appreciate all the ways you’re helping each of us become more thoughtful and evocative writers.
It's actually been super helpful to work through the exercises in quick succession, like a little writing course... But so much more inspiring and thoughtful and generous and fun than any I've taken before. THANK YOU Jeannine, you are brilliant.
These assignments are like magic.
Your post gave me a giant AHA moment. You’ve unlocked my understanding of tension and storytelling in memoir.
This post was wonderful. Love the first quote especially. I had a couple of deeper realizations with this exercise.
Reading all the comments on my writing today, so full of enthusiasm and encouragement, really made my day! One of the things I will treasure most about this challenge is learning to trust myself and others with my writing.
What to Expect From Strange Containers:
Unusual craft essays on flash, fragmentation, hermit crabs, and the space between that explore inventive approaches to short work, along with structured writing exercises to get you started on some of your own!
Inventive writing exercises that invite you to try some really unexpected new approaches on the page.
Encouragement to participate each week—which is a very lively experience—or work at your own pace, or start the challenge later or repeat it, or whatever works best for you, because all of the posts will be tagged and permanently archived in order.
At the end, you’ll have up to 4 original, interesting, and intriguing new pieces of flash or hermits (or something in between!) that you can revise and consider. If we’re lucky, these new works will really surprise you.
An immersion in the concept of “zero-waste” writing, where everything interesting can become something more than itself now or later.
Encouragement to record your experiences as part of the process—and you can expect to find me and Billie Oh in the comments, too, participating in the conversation.
Links to resources for further reading.
Exercises that are clear, doable, and scaffolded over the 4 weeks in a way that allows you, if you like, to “arranges the bits” toward an interesting suggestion of wholeness later.
Highly usable craft tools you can apply forever.
Specific, potent literary approaches to deepen and illuminate your relationship with language.
New discoveries about yourself and your life.
Less familiar readings as well as some crowd favorites.
Exercises that are specific and directive and clear, but also a bit feral and unpredictable. You can expect (as always in WITD) exercises that honor the truth of living in bodies that breathe and move and laugh and cry, while also living in a world that breathes and moves and laughs and cries, while also having unruly minds that are constantly escaping to the past and the future even when what we most need is to attend to this exact moment in order to live lives that are, as Mary Oliver said, “particular and real.”
To be imperfect, and for that to be perfectly okay.
To come out of this intensive with new ideas about what writing can be, and how it can feel.
To come out of this intensive with new ideas of who you are, who you are becoming, and what is possible for you as a writer.
I know now from the experience of the Lyric Essay Challenge and Story Challenge and The Visceral Self that these things evolve and change along the way, but these are the main points as far as we can see, and I’m happy to answer questions if you have them! Just throw your thoughts into the comments or respond via email to this post.
I cannot wait to write with you!
( popping in to say I will miss you all this week— I am in Wyoming for a quick trip. But thinking of you all.💜)
There's so much here, as always! Trauma as zombie embers, wow. (and the existence of zombie embers, yikes) I'm inspired by the way you hold space for yourself in the midst of a triggering situation.