About WITD

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✨ “Like Getting An MFA for practically nothing.” ~Sarah Fay, Writers at Work

✨ “As if Mary Oliver and Rilke had a brainchild.” ~Laura McKowen of Love Story

Hi, I’m Jeannine Ouellette.

Writing saved my life, so I teach writing as if it might save yours.

That’s what Writing in the Dark is really about—a place where we can “write ourselves into becoming.”

A place where attention, curiosity, playfulness, and surprise provide a portal to the profound on the path to discovering ourselves, the world, and each other more vividly through writing.

About me: I’ve been writing and publishing for 20 years. My memoir The Part That Burns was a Kirkus best 100 Indie of 2021. I’ve also written few nonfiction books and a children’s picture book called Mama Moon, plus many essays and short stories published in magazines and literary journals like Los Angeles Review of Books, Narrative, North American Review, Penn Review, Nowhere, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, december, and more. For years I edited magazines, but now I mostly write fiction and creative nonfiction, and I teach writing at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and Writing in the Dark: The School, an offshoot of the creative writing program I founded in 2012, long before I launched this newsletter by the same name.

I love building vibrant creative communities where writing becomes more than writing—where writing transform how we walk in the world and creates us anew.

Because talking about “how to write better” without that larger context is kind of boring.

If you’re here to become a better writer, grow your skills on the page, make your work more powerful, and get published, you’re in the right place. Check out this big, beautiful, and growing directory of work published by WITD writers in places from NYT to Brevity to Fourth Genre to Hippocampus and many, many more—all work born in WITD workshops or workshopped with the WITD methods or inspired by WITD intensives.

But wanting to publish is not required. You can participate fully in Writing in the Dark no matter where you are on your writing path. All you need is a curiosity about how language shapes and changes our lives.

That’s why I love this Toni Morrison quote so much—something she said in her Nobel Prize lecture in 1993:

Word-work is sublime … because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Writing in the Dark’s tagline—For people who do language—is pulled from Morrison’s words, because “doing language” is more than writing. To that end, I’ll tell you a little story about how all this came to be.

But first, the nuts and bolts.

How Does Writing in the Dark Work?

Writing in the Dark offers free, paid, and full access memberships. You can get a quick sense of our offerings by browsing the Writing in the Dark Index.

Free subscribers receive …

• Passionate writing and detailed teaching about writing and the creative live, delivered 5X/week. Laura McKowen of Love Story says it’s like Mary Oliver and Rilke had a brainchild. Sarah Fay of Writers at Work says it’s better than an MFA, and among the very best creative writing instruction you’ll find on Substack, or anywhere. Free subscribers get some full posts and other extensive previews of paywalled posts. Find more detailed descriptions of our posts under the Post Schedule a little ways down.

Paid subscribers receive …

All the free content plus …

• Weekly writing exercises unlike any you’ve seen. They’re weird, hard, fun & will transform your writing (and your life) for the better. We know because people tell us, again and again.

• Seasonal writing intensives. These are MFA-quality intensives delivered as scaffolded posts with structured exercises that supercharge your writing. The comments alone are +++. We don’t know of anything else like it.

• Participation in the comments & threads. Speaking of the comments. This is where all the action is. Comments and threads take the MFA-quality content so many levels up. The community is the backbone of Writing in the Dark.

• Full archive. More than 500 posts going back to the beginning. You might never leave.

Full-access founding members receive …

Special interactive content like salons, open mics, yoga nidra on Zoom & voice/video posts. If you value direct access, this is the best option for you.

The nominal additional cost is likely worth it, especially if you like to see people’s faces, hear their voices, and interact directly. See full descriptions of founding benefits and all the posts types in this Post Schedule.

Post Schedule

• Lit Salon: In this Monday feature, we publish YOUR work—essay, story, poem, or poem-ish thing, we’re hybrid here!—as long as it’s written to a WITD exercise. Please tell us the exercise (link please, or description, if it came from a Zoom or in-person class) and the genre as best you can. FULL SUBMISSION GUIDELINES HERE. Oh, and we pay you $50. Also in Lit Salon I share author interviews and an occasional advice column, an “ask-me-anything” kind of situation, with intimate craft essays to boot. I write Lit Salon in response to specific questions culled from post comments or emailed directly to me about writing, the writing life, and creativity in general, or whatever else. People love Lit Salon and say things like: “So engaged, inspiring and generous. Like everything you do, this is superlative.”

• Writing Lab + Exercises: This Wednesday feature combines in-depth craft essays and close readings of published work with inventive, structured writing exercises. These essays and prompts are unlike most others you have seen before. Based on the theory of literary constraints, they’re designed to take you to entirely new places in your writing. Writing in the Dark is about moving beyond what we know and edging out of our comfort zone. It’s about how, through the rigorous observation of concrete specifics, we access the abstract and divine. It’s about discovering the story five degrees to the left of the one we think we know, and peering over the edge of doubt. Readers love Writing Lab + Exercises and say things like: “I'm learning about writing in the most inventive way and more deeply than I ever have before. For that, I thank you endless times” and “Your craft lessons pull me deeper and deeper into the writing pond of my life, where I put language, the beautiful and the terrible language, onto the page.”

• Seasonal Writing Intensives: These are almost like full-fledged writing classes delivered in a series of posts on a predetermined schedule. Recent examples from include The Visceral Self, Story Challenge, Essay in 12 Steps, & 30-Day Creativity Challenge. Intensives are thoughtful, thorough, clear, strange, and inspiring. Readers really love them. One participant said, “The Creativity Challenge fundamentally and permanently changed the way I think about writing.”

• Comments: WITD comments are amazing! Writing in the Dark is a bustling, friendly, smart, and highly engaged community where readers share craft questions, challenges, snippets of work, helpful advice, encouragement, inspiration, and friendship. I participate regularly in the comments by answering your questions and offering feedback. To keep the comments troll-free, participation is for paying subscribers only.

• Archive: Writing in the Dark has an archive full of gold. But seriously, our archive is gigantic and well organized, bursting with past posts and fully developed curricula—a vast playground for you to explore when you join.

Full Access/Founding-Only Posts

• Live Zoom Salons held during seasonal intensives are an incredible opportunity to get fast feedback and direct answers to questions while you’re making new work, while also interacting with other WITD community members and participating in open-mic readings. We also hold Write-Ins, candlelight yoga nidra sessions, and other great stuff we’re still inventing. Our Live Zooms are beautiful if you like seeing people’s faces and hearing their voices.

• Voice/Video Memos are recordings that I create in response to the questions, comments, and craft challenges that come up in response to seasonal challenges and Writing Lab + Exercises posts. I research in response to the question, then converse out loud, in-depth, and in direct response to your specific needs and interests, sometimes with another writer for added dimension. Voice & Video memos very in length and topic but they’ll always intersect directly with what’s coming up in our WITD intensives and/or your questions and comments and conversations on other posts here.

• More stuff like our Visceral Self audio and video content and playlists. We’re inventing as we go—like all art, this place is a mystery. We’re building this ship as we sail it.

Most of All

Paid subscriptions offer a way for you and others who appreciate my work to support the effort it takes to produce it—for which I am profoundly grateful. Your paid subscriptions make this Writing in the Dark community possible. I know not everyone can afford $7/month, and if that’s you, reach out and let us know. On the other hand, if you can afford to give a subscription to someone who needs it, or even donate a gift subscription, that keeps this community accessible to all. Thank you!

With love,

Jeannine

Now for that little story.

From the very beginning, my writing and teaching have been grounded in the mystery of uncertainty. I have always asked myself and my students to “peer over the edge of doubt,” where new things come from. In 2012, I founded my creative writing program, Writing in the Dark, on the power of “negative capability,” a term coined by the Romantic poet John Keats, who drew the concept from his admiration for Shakespeare. In a letter to his brothers in 1817, Keats described negative capability as “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” He also said befriending uncertainty was essential for artists.

I agree.

Then the pandemic struck, followed by escalating racial inequity and violence (including the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed in my home city of Minneapolis). Since then, we’ve endured relentless political upheaval, war, and the real-time unraveling of democracy. Not to mention the spiraling impacts of climate change. Let’s just say that sometimes, befriending uncertainty is easier said than done. To embrace mystery and leap into the unknown of creative risk during quieter, safer times is one thing … but to do so in times like ours is quite another.

And yet.

Artists have always faced steep challenges head on. It is our calling and our mandate.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”—Margaret Mead

I had to remind myself of that when, in March 2020, almost immediately after I signed a contract for my debut memoir, The Part That Burns, COVID-19 locked the world down. On top of all of the other reasons that was terrifying, I was also faced with the sinking feeling of launching a book, one that took my whole life to write, in the middle of a tragedy during which people could not leave their homes safely. How would this work? I was also used to earning my living as a teacher and leader of group workshops and retreats.

Not knowing what else to do, I opened up an online space for people like me: people who were afraid, who were losing their livelihoods, who were struggling imagining what the future would look like, and who were flailing in their creativity, but determined to somehow create anyway, on however small a scale, even as the world burned. I called that workshop Writing in the Dark, and I offered it on a sliding fee scale down to zero with no questions asked so that it would be accessible to anyone with a computer or phone. I intentionally structured Writing in the Dark as a low-pressure but high-rigor space, where we could be serious about art but gentle with ourselves and each other. The first session of Writing in the Dark kicked off in April 2020, and it flourished beyond my wildest imagination.

Since the birth of this Substack, my Writing in the Dark workshop has morphed into thematic craft workshops on Zoom and in person (you’ll always receive first notice here), and Writing in the Dark: THE SCHOOL, a nine-month program offered on Zoom with a weekly (private, and separate from this newsletter) Substack component. Registration for SCHOOL is closed now, and will re-open in the spring (you can join that waitlist by emailing here). So, all this to say, that first panicked idea for a workshop grew itself over the past few years into a beautiful and mighty creative community of many hundreds of writers making work in spite of the chaos that continues around us. I could never have predicted when I started Writing in the Dark that those would be the very people who rallied to make the launch of The Part That Burns a great and celebratory success in 2021, even in the midst of an ongoing lockdown.

Community, it turns out, is everything.

And that, that everything, led to this newsletter. Because, given the wild and gorgeous experience of the Writing in the Dark community (and the limited space in the actual workshop), I decided to start offering a similar kind of conversation and community here on Substack, where it would be accessible to all.

In Writing in the Dark, we don’t deny that art is messy. We need, as Franz Kafka says, art to the be axe that “breaks open the frozen sea inside us.” Perhaps most of all, we need creative writing, because creative writers are guardians not only of deep truth, but of language itself, and the ability of language to retain enough meaning to tell truth in the first place. This is the role of the writer. And this is the light in which I take Kafka’s full quote: “But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves … A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.”

That is also the premise of this Writing in the Dark newsletter. But you don’t to make a book in order to thrive here. I think of it this way, as my mentor—the poet and teacher Paul Matthews—writes about the “writing circle”:

“Maybe when we meet there seems to be nothing at all between us; yet if you give me your word I can reply with the next, collaborative, responding to questions asked, needs recognized, testing each other’s immediate joys and fears in the writing. That is how I started my work as a poet-teacher—with nothing, almost, with simple acts of human language—till gradually I became aware that through a word or a sentence shared in writing we could move into the presence of a communion greater than anything I had intended. At such moments it was no longer a classroom with me, as teacher, at the center. It became a “circle of truth, poetry, and love” in which we were all servants of the Word … that is beyond any skill or genius that we might have in language.”

Through this seemingly quiet but actually radical practice, in the strength and light of community, we can—just as Margaret Mead said—change ourselves, each other, and our world. We’re doing it already, one word at a time.

Please join us!

About Writing in the Dark’s Design

Writing in the Dark’s illustration work is done by

Billie Oh

. Billie is my youngest adult child, and single adoptive parent to our youngest grandchild, Z. Billie is my right-hand person here at WITD. Like me, they’re a writer and trained yoga teacher. Unlike me, they’re young and hip. They’re also sober, queer, nonbinary, radical, and, honestly, one of the best people I’ve ever known. They occasionally share their own work on trust fall on Substack and publish things other places, but right now that is pretty infrequent given the whole full-time parent full-time working thing.

It took us a while to roll out an illustrated design, but we’re happy to have finally done it because illustration more fully captures the spirit of the work we do here than the (beautiful) stock photography otherwise available to us.

• First, because Billie’s illustrations are personal and made in direct response to the words they illustrate, and in collaboration with my ideas about those words.

• Second, because the illustrations are imperfect, ever-evolving, and subject to ongoing revision, just like good writing.

• Third, because we can plant Easter eggs for you as the seasons change and various happennings unfold in our lives and in the world of WITD.

So, we hope you enjoy the visual journey. Thanks for being here.