Free Concert + Reading Tomorrow w/Tia Levings, Brianna Lane, Billie Oh, & Me!

Plus our upcoming Power of Place writing intensive for paid members

Join us tomorrow night for a free READING + CONCERT, May 21, 7 PM Central, in celebration of our upcoming Writing in the Dark | CAMP. This event is to all, and all are welcome. Music by Brianna Lane (have a listen, here!) and readings by Tia Levings, author of A Well-Trained Wife, Billie Oh, and me. Zoom link is below & we will send it again tomorrow, but if you want to be sure not to miss it, register here to receive the Zoom link via email. We hope to see you!

And now, I invite you to write with us during our Power of Place writing intensive for paid members, and the enlivened writing we’ll be leaning on to make our work leap off the page. If you’ve never written with us yet, this is the one not to miss, truly—even if it scares you. You’ll never find a safer space to take risks with your writing, move your work toward publication if you seek to do so, and to expand your repertoire of tools for beautifully embodied place writing.

“I Effen Love WITD”

WITD is the only Substack I (can afford to) subscribe to because it feeds me, nourishes my soul, tells me it’s okay to rewrite that sentence 20 times, I am, after all, at play. And that’s before I even mention the wealth of literary knowledge and consistently stunning essays. I read all the posts and sometimes I post some work. I love reading the work of other writers at work here because of the sense we’re all playing together and that lends a rare vitality. What makes this group unique is the permission to play, to make mistakes, to upend language and make it our own …. I effin love WITD.

Starting June 11, we’ll intentionally write toward the power of place beginning with paying more attention to the textures and complexities of the places that first formed us.

You’ll find a fuller description below of how WITD intensives work, but in short, this intensive will be delivered in six Wednesday posts with gorgeous published readings, lively, in-depth craft discussion, and inventive structured writing exercises. As always, we’ll have a vibrant exploration of our experience in the comments section, where we post snippets of our writing, talk about it, and share our lives as writers. We also cheer each other on and shepherd each other through these shared creative adventures.

What Does It Mean To Write The Power of Place?

Place is forceful because we are born into geography even before we are born into language. The places of our lives, long before we can name them, shape us. Through soil, water, light, scent, and feel, through the streets we walked as children, the kitchens where adults cooked or played cards or drank or raged or told stories or bandaged our cuts or cut our hair or held us when we wept, through the landscapes that framed our first griefs or joys, the places in our lives become sources of identity, belonging, and creative possibility.

Understanding the places we come from is not nostalgia; it is necessary. We transform in the light of this understanding, both as individuals and as artists.

And when we embody place in our writing, we reshape our relationship to the world.

What’s Included In The Power of Place

Paid members of the Writing in the Dark community receive:

• Six weekly Power of Place posts starting June 11, with beautiful short readings (poems and excerpts), discussions, and place-based writing exercises

• The invitation to post your work in our bustling comments section where, each week, participants share questions, insights, and snippets of work in progress, and where Jeannine and Billie also participate.

• Feedback and encouragement from the WITD community

• Access to Voice Memos/Video posts

• Group Write-Ins on Zoom

• A Live Open-Mic Celebratory Salon

All participants will gain:

• More tools and strategies for bringing place vividly to life on the page

• A keener awareness of the way place operates on the page as something far beyond setting, but instead as a force and even a character

• Powerful embodied craft principles and specific tools to apply long after the the intensive is over

• A collection of new work in progress (scenes, fragments, poems, flash) that you can continue to develop on your own (many, many of our writers publish work that starts in our intensives!)

• A deeper understanding of the ways in which vivid, meaningful place writing enlivens our prose, and tools for engaging the sensory body in your writing practice.

Wonderful Things People Have Said About Writing in the Dark Intensives

• The only reason I could write it like I did was because of Writing in the Dark—the lessons and the generous and beautiful support from you and Billie and in the comments and the small writing groups. I did not know much about the craft of writing before I started writing with WITD: containers, prompts that led me nowhere I'd ever been before, white space, earning a line, devastating, hot/cold, I didn't know how to do any of that. And then the support, love, holding, being seen--the container of this space—I didn't have any of that before either. I am not just a better writer for having spent time in this gorgeous and beautiful space, I am a better human.

• I just realized that your teaching is like that: raw, disobedient, feral and also meditative and open. This is such a great space from which to teach. Made me fall in love with what's happening here.

• 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 The Power of Place

• You can expect, if you work every exercise, to complete the intensive with several original, interesting, and intriguing scenes/fragments that you can either work into a complete story or expand or revise into separate pieces or use as scenes in some other work in progress. And you can expect these scenes/fragments to differ greatly from anything you might have written otherwise.

• You can expect every exercise to invite you to engage your body and to revel in language and expand your understanding of how place writing techniques supercharge our prose and advance our narratives.

• You can expect to be encouraged to participate each week—which is a very lively experience—or work at your own pace, or start the intensive later or repeat it, or whatever works best for you, because all of the posts will be tagged and permanently archived in order.

• You can expect (to the point above) to be encouraged to embrace zero-waste writing, where everything interesting can become something more than itself now or later.

• You can expect to be invited and encouraged to record your experiences as part of the process—and you can, if you share your thoughts in the chat or comments, expect to bump into me and Billie Oh there, participating in the conversation.

• You can expect each exercise to be accompanied by craft writing and resources.

• You can expect the exercises to be clear, doable, and scaffolded over the 6 weeks in a way that allows you, if you like, to “arranges the bits” toward an interesting suggestion of wholeness.

• You can expect to amass an array of highly usable craft tools you can apply forever.

•  You can expect to be introduced to several specific, potent literary approaches to deepen and illuminate your relationship with language.

• You can expect to make discoveries about yourself and your life.

• You can expect to be introduced to some less familiar readings as well as some crowd favorites.

• You can expect 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.”

• You can expect to be imperfect, and for that to be perfectly okay.

• You can expect to come out of this challenge with new ideas about what writing can be, and how it can feel.

• You can expect with new ideas of who you are, who you are becoming, and what is possible for you as a writer.

These are the main points—but of course these things evolve and change along the way. But I’m happy to answer questions if you have them! Share thoughts into the comments or respond via email to this post. I can’t wait to start writing into the power of place with all of you in June—hearing your voices, celebrating this thing we do, this miraculous, infinite, exasperating, enlivening, and ultimately freeing thing called language.

Love,
Jeannine