Sitemap - 2024 - Writing in the Dark with Jeannine Ouellette

"I mean, the world is so magnificent. I feel like we’re surrounded by gates and portals that are portals into—I don’t know—into more life." ~Marie Howe

I Want Your Wingless Body, Your Solid Bones

🧵Thursday Thread: How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?

"Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard." ~Helene Cixous

Can't Find What You're Looking For?

For Most of My Life, I Wrote Alone. But Not Anymore.

But we can’t just pretend, making a big display of disrobing, then putting everything back on when no one’s looking. Our surrender has to be genuine. ~Pema Chodron

🧵Thursday Thread: When They Fight & When They Sing

"Tear apart everything above ground—everything—and most plants can still grow rebelliously back from just one intact root. More than once. More than twice." ~Hope Jehren

“Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do.”― Toni Morrison

RELEASE/RESET/RECENTER

“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

Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things I Have Learned About Writing From Reading Thousands of Manuscripts

🧵Thursday Thread: "It's complicated!" ... how would you describe your relationship with your body right now?

Join Us! Live Yoga Nidra Tonight @ 8PM CDT

Welcome to the world in which some people very gently brush the soft white bellies of squirrels.

The Visceral Self

Write Like A Child Running Down A Hill

From Playful to Profound: How Tapping into Joy Brought My Hardest Stories Alive on the Page

How To Be A Writer

Community Love Note Archive

🧵Thursday Thread: Quick, quick! Name a film (or two) that left a deep impression on you recently, and why?

Water, Stories, the Body ... All Things That Hide and Show What's Hidden ~Rumi

Welcome to my heart! Let me open the door.

There, hanging weightless in the void, I saw it: our pale blue world under its papery blanket of light.

Injured Beavers See Each Other For The First Time and Fall Instantly In Love

🧵Thursday Thread: What Makes You YOU?

I want the word death. I want the word God. I also want peonies and the color blue. The words are growing in the field ... like flowers, and I pick the ones I like. ~Mary Ruefle

Later This Girl Will Drive With Windows Down And Sing. But First She Will Tremble on The Cliff Above Her Terrible Divorce.

Lit Salon on the epidemic of the shrinking attention span & a simple exercise for writing when you feel like a butterfly in a hurricane

Howling Under A Smooth Surface

I wonder whether with a slight adjustment ... [desire] could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? ~Rebecca Solnit

🧵Thursday Thread: Which Book or Piece of Writing Changed Your Life?

Winning is the Second Step

“The Core of Beauty is Simplicity.” - Paulo Coelho

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

🧵Thursday Thread: What is your earliest childhood memory, and how does it influence who you are today?

Memory undergirds a sense of continuity around who we have been, who we are, and who we will become.

“Creativity is our most powerful tool to shape the world we want to live in.” — Isra Hirsi

Replay! Story Challenge Live Salon Recording

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

"Odd How the Creative Power At Once Brings the Whole Universe To Order" ~ Virginia Woolf

From the Archive | How To Be A Writer

🧵Thursday Thread: “The useless days will add up to something" ~Cheryl Strayed

Capturing an Untamed Thing, How Thrilling It Is

🎧 Finish Better: The Transformative Power of Finishing Things & How to Actually Do It

Let’s see ourselves as fragile daisies in an iron chain, strung painstakingly by children at a green painted picnic table behind a Victorian house by a lake that we loved but can never find again.

Join Us for A Live Story Salon on Zoom

Story Challenge Reading Link

The Myth of the Lone Creative

🧵Thursday Thread: "Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all" ~Helen Keller

The writer has done their job when the reader’s reaction to the ending is “Oh my God,” followed by “Of course.” ~David Leavitt

To inhabit someone else’s body in prose is to be a kind of foreigner—an outsider with an insider’s access. And isn’t that why we read? ~Lidia Yuknavitch

I Want Your Wingless Body, Your Solid Bones

Sleeping Birds Are Vulnerable

🧵Thursday Thread: Writing Truer Truths

Then there is the other kind of aboutness. There’s this question of what is the story About with a capital A ~ Michael Chabon

The Day I Stop Wanting to Look Out Over Open Water

Hungering For A Home That Could Hold Her

This Is My Body, Filling My Body

🧵Thursday Thread: Naming Our Dream

The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life. The work ... this false life that is even less than the seeming of this lived life, is more than the lived life too. ~ Joy Williams

Some Might Have Called The Roses Garish

I Had Not Nearly Grasped the Wreck

Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via ... thousands of incremental adjustments ~George Saunders on the art of revision

I Was a Child in a Child's Body.

From the Archives | What My Skittish Puppy Teaches Me About Writing

🧵Thursday Thread | What’s ONE thing you could do (or stop doing) to make writing so much easier?

The heart of dialogue is simple. The profoundness is to listen. — Lolly Daskal

I never told you this, but the day after my mother died, I ate her unfinished red velvet birthday cake. The whole of it. ~ Evelyn Krieger

“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

When I Think About The End of the World

Happening Now, The Visceral Self: Writing Through the Body

From the Archives | How I Finally Learned To Write What Hurt—A Surprising Method.

🧵 Thursday Thread: What Makes You Feel Like A Writer?

Hell is story friendly. But ... Paradise is not a story. Paradise is about what happens when the stories are over. ~Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House

Dear Impatient: A True Metaphor is a Swift & Violent Twisting of Language, A Renaming of the Already Named ~ Verylyn Klinkenborg

From the Archives | Dear Curious: Is That Fucked Up?

Writing in the Dark Curriculum Index

🧵 Thursday Thread: Share Something You're Happy About!

The Narrator's Promise

A Surprising Tool For Finding Your Story's Core Aboutness

From the Archives | Dear Lizard Brain: Whatever It Is That Scares You, Write That

Voices impel the telling, and the braiding and melody of their resonance and dissonance are what creates an urgency in the tale ~Sonya Huber

Dear Poetry & Death: Maybe a true image lets us touch that holy space between two worlds, that elusive opening between the world you and I now share, and whatever else exists beyond it

From The Archives | Dear As Long As I Live: When you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself ~Bessel van der Kolk

[T]here is something so unspeakably thrilling in uncovering the other version of our life that given a few days, a few weeks, a few years, this version will be the only one worth writing ~Andre Aciman

I wonder whether with a slight adjustment ... [desire] could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? ~Rebecca Solnit

🎧 Voice Memo 5: Life is Short, But Desire, Desire is Long ~ Jane Hirshfield

Ordinary Magic for the First Week of the New Year