The Gaps Become Gardens

On writing not to describe the world, but to become it

When I was a child, I wanted to be a tree.
Not like a tree. Not near a tree.
Just: tree.

I believed if I could stand still long enough, the world would grow up around me.

What is creative writing, if not the slow stitching of bark back to skin? The leafing out of our interior wilderness?
When I write, the membrane thins. I remember that moss has a memory. That lichen is not a thing but a relationship. That the words I reach for have already been whispered by wind.

They say “find your voice,” but the voice I find when I write is not mine. It’s the one that lives just below the tongue, in the dirt, in the body of a snake warming itself on a sunlit trail.
It hisses listen.
It says stop naming and start noticing.
It says become porous.

There’s a bird in the page.
Its wings beat whenever I get close to something true.
If I look directly at it, it vanishes.
If I write around it—
there it is again, ruffling the sentence.

Sometimes I forget the world is real.
The red eft curling beneath the log. The defiant strength of bird bones. The way rainwater gathers in papery layers of birch bark.

Writing returns me to these things. Not as metaphors. As fact.

The writing that heals is the writing that wrecks me first.
I am trying to say:
I was broken in the usual ways.
But also in the unspeakable ones.
And writing does not fix me.
It unfixes me from the idea that I was ever meant to be separate.

The eagle circling above the field is not watching me.
But I am watching it.
And the watching, the writing, the saying—
that is the bridge. That is the belonging.

We talk about “voice” and “structure” and “craft.”
But sometimes I think the most important thing is this:
Can you feel your hands?
Can you smell the soil?
Can you walk barefoot into a sentence and not flinch?

The pine needles on the forest floor do not care about your plot arc.
They care about the way you pause.
The way your breath catches.
The way you kneel.

I am trying to write myself back into the biosphere.
Not to describe the world.
To become it.
To let the syntax of the seasons enter my bones.

The beauty of becoming more whole is not that the pieces fit.
It’s that the gaps become gardens.
The fractures, mycelial.

I used to think I was writing to understand myself.
Now I write to remember the robin’s nest on the corner rafter of the cabin.
The knot in the oak.
The thistle in my heel.
The glinting edge of a world that is always, always trying to include me.

Write With Me In Person This August!

This very special, first of its kind (for Writing in the Dark!) experience is shaping up to be so beautiful, with writers from around the country and even the world (!!), all ages (20s to 80s) and varying experience levels joining us for this daring adventure.

And we have a few remaining indoor beds in the camp’s charming Old Hotel/Bunkhouse … hopefully one of them is for you.

Writing in the Dark | The CAMP (in person at Camp Wandawega!)

Join us at the beautiful, historic, one-of-a-kind Camp Wandawega.

CAMP will call to the fierce and wild in us to “peer over the edge of doubt,” leave our comfort zones, and see beyond what we think we know. We’ll get closer up to the world and to the words we use to convey the world. Closer to ourselves, each other, and the truth. We’ll generate and polish new work while taking up new approaches to the page that could never happen outside of an immersive environment tailored to tap the untamed within us.

Join us August 18 - 22, 2025, a 4-day immersive retreat at historic, beautiful, rustic Camp Wandawega, with featured writer Tia Levings, NYT bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy.

We’ll transform our writing together during this immersion in nature and creative community. CAMP is mornings of lakeside yoga and meeting under the trees for lively discussions of craft and generative writing exercises. CAMP is small group specialized workshop intensives (musical, visual, and sensory, led by Brianna Lane, Billie Oh, and Jeannine Ouellette), and Tia Levings, featured writer. CAMP is evening readings, campfires, talent shows, music, and camaraderie. And of course classic summer camp fun like swimming, boating, biking, archery, arts & crafts … and who knows, maybe even capture the flag.

Get details here and/or reach out to us at writing@writinginthedark.org with questions!