Three Songs At The End of Somewhere
The Power of Place | Week Four| What Magic When Place Conveys Emotion
Emotion is one of my favorite portals through which to explore the power of place writing, and the strategies we can use to tap into this powerful connection.
So, I’m extra excited about this week!
Before we jump in, though, a few announcements.
First, thanks for all your enthusiasm about my agent and book in progress. I am so excited and your enthusiasm is rocket fuel!
I will certainly keep you posted each step of the way. For those of you seeking an agent and/or book publication, I hope following my journey with this second book will be useful. And if you’re not seeking book publication, please know I’ll keep these updates brief.
Second, an update on Writing in the Dark | The CAMP, to say we have had a couple of late cancellations resulting in one coveted single/private room in the charming old hotel/bunkhouse (most of CAMP is not … camping), and one work study scholarship in the rustic and beautiful platform tent cluster. Additionally, we still have a few last double/shared options available in the old hotel, as well.
We genuinely hope to fill these spots for a full house (about 10 more campers), which will mean 40 campers total, divided into three groups for our main daily writing workshops taught by me (attention and the ability to see beyond what we know), (graphic fiction and memoir), and our resident musician, (the music in the words). Everyone ultimately participates in all three workshops consecutively, and the workshops are integrated with one another to catalyze not only new work, but entirely new ways to think about writing. Our featured writer, , will share her craft wisdom and writing journey with all of us. Morning meetings will include the whole group (maybe there will be a bugle call!) and these meetings will be devoted to both craft and creative inspiration in order to set the tone and theme for the day ahead.
We love that we get to have a big group summer camp feel while still maintaining small-group intimate writing circles for the primary curriculum! If you want to know more about this adventure, please reach out to Billie and me writing@writinginthedark.org. The closer we get to CAMP, and the more pieces of the creative puzzle we have in place, the more elated we are to bring this uniquely beautiful experience to you, and to all of us. We know it’s a bold and unusual writing experience we’re curating, and that’s because we believe in, and dearly love, bold and unusual writing. This is how we get there.
Lastly, we’ve been working on our vision for the 2025-’26 school year in terms of an adjacent, tuition-based, live and synchronous offering for writers committed to taking their practice and their work to the next level (in other words, what comes now, with our inaugural 9-month SCHOOL program having let out for summer?!). We will have more on that soon. In the shorter term, I will be announcing the re-opening of the original live-on-Zoom WITD workshop soon. If you are already on the SCHOOL waitlist, you’ll get first notice on that workshop, which is capped at 20 writers and will fill quickly. If you are not on the waitlist, you can join by emailing Writing@writinginthedark.org with “waitlist” in the subject line.
Now, let’s talk about place and emotion!
First of all, without necessarily meaning to, I wrote this week about a special place—our rustic cabin in the wilderness—and I did so at least in part through the lens of emotion. I’m not going to teach that essay or use it as inspiration for our exercise this week, but I do, nonetheless, think it hits on some of the points we’ll look at as we tease out the connection between emotion and place, and how best to marry the two on the page.
And what excites me so much about writing place well—and what I sought to do in Monday’s post—is that place can convey emotion by externalizing the internal without explanation.
This idea of externalizing the internal is possibly one of the most potent craft devices available to us. This one skill, more than any other, can transform your writing in ways you might never have even imagined. I think this is why I hear over and over and over again—from students and members of Writing in the Dark—that my teaching and exercises work over time to drastically revitalize their experience of writing and the work they make on the page.
And while I know I talk a lot about attention, and it’s true that attention is first, foremost, and paramount in our writing, attention in itself does not produce words. It, along with curiosity, is the precursor to everything that comes next. When we arrive at the junction of attention and drafting—that is, selecting words, images, sentences, and their arrangement on the page—it is this ability to externalize the internal that makes all of the difference in our writing.
Oh, and, over time, it makes all the difference in our lives, as well.
So how exactly do we do this?