The Letter Reimagined! Crack Open Your Writing With Lush New Takes On An Age-Old Form
Four Weeks of Highly Specific Epistolary Writing, Starts September! Join Us!
You have a touch in letter writing that is beyond me. Something unexpected, like coming round a corner in a rose garden and finding it still daylight. ~Virginia Woolf
The Letter Reimagined, the next WITD seasonal intensive, starts September! If you want to upgrade to join us and haven’t yet, now is a good time because our Labor Day flash sale for NEW1 subscribers goes through Monday.
🎆 FLASH SALE! Grab a 15% back-to-school discount on annual subscriptions just in time for our fall seasonal intensive: The Letter Re-Imagined.
What Will We Do In The Letter Reimagined?
We’ll read some excellent examples of the epistolary form, examples that challenge and expand staid notions of what a letter can actually do to unlock our work and magnify meaning.
As Evan Fallenberg writes about the epistolary form in Lit Hub:
[T] he writer … has the opportunity to tell a story from a single point of view, two contrasting viewpoints, or many; they can play with the reliability of the narrator(s) while deepening the reader’s reactions of sympathy (or antipathy) without moving to omniscience; and the writer … often wins over their readers more easily and wholly thanks to the nonfictional feel of letters….
To note, what Evan writes is equally applicable to CNF and fiction. In Letters Reimagined, you’ll discover how and why!
Oh, the fun we will have … such serious, impactful fun. I can’t wait to see what emerges via this elastic, surprising form reimagined.
To write a letter is to send a message to the future; to speak of the present with an addressee who is not there, knowing nothing about how that person is (in what spirits, with whom) while we write and, above all, later: while reading over what we have written. Correspondence is the utopian form of conversation because it annihilates the present and turns the future into the only possible place for dialogue. ~Ricardo Piglia, Respiración artificial
As with our recent (incredible) four weeks of Strange Containers, 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 time it was offered, and many terrific published pieces emerged from that workshop, some of which you can peruse on our big, beautiful list of published work born in WITD:
Born in WITD: A Big Beautiful & Growing Directory of Work Published by WITD Writers
The Letter Reimagined 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 and resources you always find at WITD—this time, specific to epistolary writing. Plus, inspiring resources (especially 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 Letter Reimagined is for all levels, and equally applicable to CNF and fiction.
This intensive will be very accessible yet oddly challenging and inspiring for all levels because it’s so inventive and off-map.
To note, The Letter Reimagined is not a writing class per se (no class meetings, no Zoom, no “assignments,” etc.). It’s a WITD intensive on Substack, for which we are now what
would call “medium famous.” An intensive is where all the material is delivered through four consecutive Wednesday posts, straight to your email inbox (Letters post will start mid-September).2 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 Letter Reimagined and all of the other WITD intensives (we run several a year!), everything happens right here on the posts, and as long as you are a paid or founding member of WITD, you’re all set!
If you’re not a member, you can upgrade at a sale price through Labor Day.
You can also give a gift subscription to a writer you love, or donate subscriptions to our scholarship fund, which we appreciate so much. It allows us to comp subscriptions without any questions, and provide a sliding-scale on all of our synchronous classes.
What’s Included in The Letter Reimagined?
Paid members:
Full access to all Letter Reimagined 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 cool interactive stuff, like:
Occasional 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).
If you love face-to-face stuff, voice stuff, and more interactivity, the founding membership is for you for $15 more annually.
All participants come away with:
A storehouse of valuable new ways to think about writing, and why we gain from stretching that way, 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 readings and writing exercises you can repeat as desired.
A deeper understanding of the ways epistolary writing or an “epistolary POV” can 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.3
What to Expect From The Letter Reimagined
Unusual craft essays on epistolary writing, 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 you can revise and consider. If we’re lucky, these new works will really surprise us.
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 write imperfectly, 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 from the experience of Strange Containers, 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.
I can’t wait to write with you!
Love,
Jeannine
*Substack sales on annual subscriptions apply to new members only, it’s a Substack thing, and there is nothing WITD can do to change that—we’d really appreciate it if existing paid members don’t email with requests to unsubscribe and resubscribe for the sale price. We love you and we do our very best to consistently provide the highest quality literature Substack imaginable for an extremely low price (“like getting an MFA for practically nothing,” says Sarah Fay), and we seek to over-deliver on that quality at every opportunity. We are eternally grateful for your generosity and your understanding, and we do believe it more than evens out in the end as long as we give more than we take and no one is getting less than they paid for. We’re just trying to grow. Thank you. ❤️
My dad died on Wednesday of last week. It’s complicated. I’m not ready to say much more about it now—but I do need a minute to pinpoint the exact start date of Letters. It will be one of the middle Wednesdays in September.
I’ve been using these same quotes for a while because I get overwhelmed sifting the comments for new ones. If you are a WITD-er and want to shower us with more about what we’re doing here, why it’s different, and how it has changed your writing, your teaching, or any other aspect of your life, please do. There couldn’t be a better time. You can post in the comments or email to writing@writinginthedark.org. We love you.
Oh Jeannine ❤️🩹❤️🩹❤️🩹 Footnote 2. I’m so sorry for your loss. I know this complex grief for a parent, the layers of it. I see you.
For me, it felt complicated to mourn the mother I always wanted but never had. Mourn how hard it was between us, how much she hurt me, how much I missed her my whole life. Mourn her loyalty binds. Mourn that standing up to her cracked her like I feared it would. Mourn the scapegoating and smear campaigns. Mourn the shitty freedom from our dreaded interactions after she passed.
One day, when I was washing dishes a few months after she died, these words floated to my mind: “It really did end badly.” I stopped washing and stared at the white wood blinds in front of the window above the kitchen sink. Dish soap bubbles crackled in the water. The square edge of the counter dug into my wrists as the words repeated themselves in my body.
It really did end badly.
I was stunned. In her last years, I’d fought so hard to accept she wouldn’t change. This acceptance was essential to purchase enough distance to survive her when she was alive. Still, that day, I discovered I’d held on to my great misbelief that someday, somehow, we’d fix it.
It’s been two years since my mom died, and I feel her finding her way back to me now. From this safer place, I’m finding my way towards her—even as I find my way towards my deeper, authentic self. Now I understand what people mean when they say they feel closer to their difficult parent after they died. I also have family members who need this time to feel the fullness of their anger. They have no desire to connect with her spirit this way. That makes sense to me, too.
If launching Letters and School in September feels noirishing to you, then do it. But if any part of you needs time and space to let this new wave of grief flow through, I’ll share these loving-bossy words from my therapist, who also has lived experience in this department.
“It’s going to fucking suck,” she said, “so prioritize self-care.”
She told me grief exhausts our bodies, more than we realize, and we may need to sleep 12-14 hours a day. I didn’t make the 12-14 hour range, but I did give myself permission to nap for the first time in my life. She also urged me to take more weeks off work than I thought I’d need, even though it was a busy time. I had the privilege to arrange a month. I’m grateful for her prescription to rest.
So if feels healing to move Letters and School to another month, and even pause your newsletter, then do it if you can take the time. We’ll be here, holding you in our hearts.
Sending so much love to you and Billie. 💞💞
"And where did you put all those letters
That you wrote to yourself
But could not address?"
~ Ani DiFranco
Jeannine, I hope the music and the poems and a community (of your own making) full of love and gratitude are offering you some of the healing you seek.