Is Pleasure Guilty?

A 6-week intentional journey to infuse your writing and your life with more pleasure. Yes, more pleasure.

I do not like the term, “guilty pleasure,” whether it’s about chocolate cake, Netflix, a too-expensive lotion, or sleeping late. Too many people, and most women, feel guilty for focusing on their own pleasure. As if our experience of pleasure is is stealing something from someone else.

But in reality, we need more than an oxygen mask to live a full life and share love and care with others. The oxygen is about survival. Pleasure is about thriving. Pleasure actually plays a crucial role in well-being and significantly affects mental and physical health.

This is why we are going to write our way toward pleasure for our next six-week Writing in the Dark seasonal intensive, starting April 16. We are going to first pay more attention to pleasure (which is harder than you think—we’re evolutionarily wired against doing so, which I wrote about here). So we will begin by seeking and noticing sensory beauty, wildness, depth, and, yes, pleasure.

You’ll find fuller description below of how WITD intensives work, but in short, this intensive will be delivered in six Wednesday posts with readings, craft discussion, and inventive 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.

Meanwhile, let’s define pleasure. Here’s what the Empower Your Mind Therapy Institute says about it:

The experience of pleasure is unique to each and every person. If you’re having a hard time finding activities that bring you pleasure, one way to figure it out is by paying attention to your sensory experiences (sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch). What brings you satisfaction and enjoyment? Sometimes it is the most common and simple experiences that bring us pleasure, like waking up to your partner in the morning, or sharing a meal with a friend.

Hmm. Paying attention to your sensory experiences. Does this sound familiar? Because it’s a foundation stone of how we learn to write (and live) better at Writing in the Dark.

The Purpose of Pleasure

Science underscores the mental and physical benefits of pleasure, which triggers neurotransmitters associated with happiness and relaxation, like dopamine and endorphins.

This feels obvious.

But pleasure can also improve our cognitive function and creativity, enhance our relationships, and reduce feelings of loneliness and isolation.

The key is showing up for pleasure and remaining present for it. Giving it our full attention. This is so much easier to do when we’re writing toward pleasure—deeply feeling and noticing pleasure in order to capture it on the page, and that’s how positive feedback loops work:

Seek pleasure — experience pleasure — really notice pleasure — record/depict pleasure in creative ways on the page, thus noticing it even more deeply — become more aware of pleasure all around us thus making it easier to find pleasure and experience it — notice the pleasure — record/depict pleasure …and so on.

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. ~Laure Jouteau, WITD member

What Does It Mean To Write Toward Pleasure?

Just like the Empower Your Mind Therapy Institute noted, it starts with sensation. All pleasure is grounded somewhere in our sensory body—that is, experiences grounded in the five major senses (or our memories of experiences grounded in the five major senses, because these experiences are stored permanently in our cells).

Writing toward pleasure involves paying close attention to sensory pleasures—the warmth of sun on my arms, the feeling of a baby sleeping on my chest, the stickiness of bread dough in my hands as I knead and pull, sitting next to my husband listening to “Chasing Cars” and getting lost in the sound, laying my head on his chest when he sings, running up a hill, feeling the burn in my thighs and lungs, the utter exhilaration and exhaustion that proves to me that I am alive, laughing with my adult kids about stupid and inappropriate things, laughing until my cheeks and ribs hurt, the feeling of Frannie snuggled up against my thigh as I write on my laptop, the sound of ocean waves, the rocking of those waves, the swell and fall of them, and the way that pulls me into all the other swells and falls inside of myself, or, for example, Ada Limon’s “obscene display of cherry limbs shoving their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate sky of Spring rains.”¹ To name only a few.

What about sex?

For most people, sexual experiences are a powerful form of sensory pleasure, but this is not an erotica intensive. And while I proposed and am now moderating an AWP panel (we’ll talk more about AWP soon!) called “Sex After Survivorship: Writing Real Sex from Traumatic to Titillating and Everything In Between,” with rockstar writers Natashia Deon, Gina Frangello, and Rebecca Woolf (I can’t wait!,), I’m not actually qualified or prepared to facilitate an erotica writing intensive on Substack (maybe someday, but not now).

So while sexuality is not censored here, I’d ask we be considerate that our writing not be graphic/explicit, and be mindful of restraint. As I have long taught (in the arena of trauma writing and the technique “writing hot cold”), what we do not say on the page can actually be more evocative than what we do say. So here, too, we’ll err toward less is more. If you’ve been at WITD for a while now in other intensives, you already know the vibe. If not, read other people’s comments and you’ll get the drift easily. And if in doubt, probably don’t.

Anyway, the range of sensory pleasure to be celebrated and reveled in is so wide and expansive, and has so much inextricable overlap with every system of our bodies, that there is rarely any full separation between one form of sensory pleasure and another. This, too, will be a rich and fascinating intersection to explore in language. Through attention, language, and articulation, we will awaken and energize our pleasure receptors and the writing that stems from those most alive places.

Ultimately, to write toward pleasure, we will need to engage in embodied writing, and engaging in embodied writing enlivens all the other writing (and living) we will do.

What is Embodied Writing?

We experience the world through our bodies. Each and every sensory impression forms our bank of experiences, experiences that help us know who we are in the world. And our cells hold these records of the past, awareness of the present, and imaginings of the future. These embodied sensations form the basis of writing that electrifies the primal exchange we continually experience with the world.

This is a visceral phenomenon. Visceral means “relating to the viscera,” or your internal organs. It also means “relating to deep inward feelings rather than to the intellect.” And research—especially that of James Pennebaker at University of Texas at Austin—shows that writing heals us, literally (meaning on a physical level).

If you are more curious about embodied writing, here are some posts I’ve shared in the past, around the time of our Visceral Self intensive, to give a sense of how I approach writing through the body, which begins with the senses:

1. “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final ... Nearby is the country they call life.” ―Rainer Maria Rilke

2. I Was A Child in A Child’s Body

3. Some Might Have Called the Roses Garish

4. This is My Body, Filling My Body

5. Sleeping Birds Are Vulnerable

6. Water, Stories, The Body

7. As soon as I notice feeling unmoored, I try to pull myself back into my body, like returning home

What’s Included In Toward Pleasure

Paid members of the Writing in the Dark community receive:

• Six Toward Pleasure posts starting April 16, with short readings (poems and excerpts), discussions, and sensory writing exercises

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

Founding members also receive:

• Voice Memos/Video posts (we’re planning more of these in 2025!)

• Live Salons on Zoom

All participants will gain:

• More ways of toward writing pleasure

• A keener awareness of the balance of pleasure and pain, positive and negative, in their work

• 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 

• A deeper understanding of the ways in which embodied writing techniques and attention to pleasure enliven our prose, and tools for engaging the sensory body in your writing practice.

Some Things People Have Said About Writing in the Dark Intensives

• 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 Toward Pleasure:

• You can expect, if you work every exercise, to complete the intensive with up to 12 original, interesting, and intriguing scene/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 structured prompts and meditations and a yin yoga pose via email every Wednesday, so that you have a full week to complete each exercise before the next one arrives.

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

• 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 a detailed 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 not just a collection of scenes/fragments, but also 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 toward pleasure with all of you in April—hearing your voices, celebrating this thing we do, this miraculous, infinite, exasperating, enlivening, and ultimately freeing thing called language.

Love,
Jeannine

1. https://poets.org/poem/instructions-not-giving