Some of the upper level censors that normally filter what comes to my tongue are quiet now, and I am loving this space. Loving that I’m okay to stare at the trees and clouds out the mullioned windows. Loving that I am giving myself space to be . . . with myself. With my words.

My father is a stellar woodworker. His live-edge tables rival any in high-end stories and auctions. He has the kind of Davidic gift of seeing what the woods wants to be.

And he refuses to woodwork for money. Refuses to be put on a timeline. Refuses to take this thing he loves with so much joy and bend it to other people’s expectations.

I am jealous of him.

And I am incredibly grateful that I make money from my art. That I can take these skills I have - talents, education, sheer perseverance and stubbornness - and turn it into a living that supports my son and me.

Some days, I need to sit simply and let my mind wander the smoky edges, the shoulders of the fast-paced highway that is my writing business. Some days, I need to emulate my father and let the words show me what they want to say.

I often think of the idea of Sabbath, of the way I resonated, even as a little child, with God’s command to rest, still do even though I don’t have any real picture of God anymore. I think of how we have made a call to rest something driven by rules - what can be done and cannot, what we can turn on and what must remain resting with us, even if that resting isn’t what they need. (My smoky mind is conjuring sentient light switches, if you’re wondering.)

My sabbath, this Sunday afternoon, is full of words, full of the work I always do. But it’s not only that. It’s not the driving, hard rhythm of work that I expect of myself, or that some cultural expectation weighs onto my shoulders.

It’s the meandering wander of a mountain stream that turns around ancient trees and boulders dropped by glaciers. It’s the sliding shadow of story untamed. Shadows not pinned to stories entire. Stories rising up like fog that isn’t fog.

Everything left to be, as it will, without rules. With the rest of the meander.

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There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. - Maya Angelou

Right now, the back of my tongue is buried under words. Words I cannot share. Words that, should they be uttered, would unburden me . . . now, but harm others now and me later.

Years of stories that I have not yet worked into cogency, that live only in my body and tease my brain. Words that, unleashed, weigh me down, but that if I should set them free would free me only in this moment.

This is not me being cryptic. Or at least I’m not being cryptic with the hopes that someone, anyone, will parse out what I cannot say. I have journals and the ears of friends to do that.

This is me saying that we all carry stories we cannot tell, at least not yet. For some, our cannots are shaped like threat, the looming hand waiting to strike us down, metaphorically. Literally.

For some, cannot comes like trauma and grief and experiences that must move through to become words.

Others, carry cannot like the weight of too much to deal with later, a knapsack of backlash that we can’t pick up now and don’t know if we can carry later.

It is an agony to carry these stories, as Dr. Angelou said. It is unfair and unreasonable, and the world, if it was as it should be, as it could be, would be better to hear them. But the world is not.

They are not.

So we swallow the language that tries to creep out our lips. We hide it in journals tucked - metaphorically, literally - under mattresses. We hide the stories. We hide ourselves because it is not safe. Not yet.

Today, though, I am drinking sunshine down with my words because I know - I KNOW - that the day will come when I can speak it all, when my fingers will etch into black and white all the things left unsaid just now. When my anger and my rage will be allowed to burn free, to bring freedom to me . . . . and to them . . . because stories untold are agony for all of us . . . even when we think that’s untrue.

Take heart, dear wordsmith, wordworker, when the words cannot be come into light. Because one day, they will be dance by the firelight of your own passion, and we will be warmed by them, even if they burn us.

I am currently reading The River by Peter Heller, and I am dumbstruck by its beauty - the story and the way of telling it. Highly recommended.

Note, the links below are affiliate links that earn me a small commission if you make a purchase. Since they go to Bookshop, I recommend buying there to support your favorite indie bookstores.

A very specific, quiet kind of grief comes with turning the final page of a book. You have gotten to leave your life - with all its beauty and travail and enter into one where you must make no decisions and have no responsibility. . . and if that book is amazing and rich and complex and hard - then the grief sinks in another level.

I’ve been sitting with that feeling since finishing The Correspondent.

If you haven’t read it yet, the story centers around Sybil, a woman who is adopted and finds her biological family late in life. She has always been a letter writer to family and friends, to famous authors, so the story of her life that we get in this novel is an epistolary one with all its gaps and slanted angles of perspective.

Such a wonderful liberty exists in that premise—the act of casting your thoughts out to the creators of the stories that shaped you and were part of your own tale and the absolute thrill of having them actually respond. The book itself is a love letter to correspondence with all its honesty and its inherent distance. As someone who comes from a long line of people who find it harder to tell the truth in writing than in person, I get it.

But what really anchored the book for me wasn’t just the letters; it was Sybil herself.

Watching her evolution is a masterclass in character growth. She maintains an unwavering, almost fierce dedication to truthfulness. Through her correspondence and the discovery of her roots, she isn’t just seeking answers from her favorite authors and loved ones. She is meticulously excavating her own life, coming to understand herself with a clarity that feels entirely earned by the final chapters.

A moment near the end of the book made me put the pages down and just stare out the window for a minute. It captures the bittersweet reality of growing older, holding onto our hopes, and making peace with the bruises along the way:

“You are right about what you said--we are thirty in our hearts, before all the disappointment, all the ways it turned out to be so much more painful than we thought it would be, but then again, it has also been magic.”

We carry all the versions of ourselves at once—the lightly bruised thirty-year-old, the weary realist, and the hopeful observer holding the pen. The disappointment and the pain leave their marks, yet the magic persists, stubbornly weaving itself through the blank spaces of our own histories. Sybil’s journey reminded me to sift through those spaces and look for the magic a little more intentionally this week.

Should you find yourself longing for a story about the fragile distance of letters, the fierce pursuit of truth, and the beautiful, messy excavation of a life well-lived, I cannot recommend The Correspondent enough.

What was the last book that gave you that specific, quiet grief on the final page? I would love to hear about it in the comments below.

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I genuinely believed that if you just carved out the time, the words would naturally follow. But the longer I do this, the more I realize how incomplete that equation is. Time is only one fraction of the reality. Our capacities, our lived experiences, our fluctuating energy, and our depths of focus—they all differ wildly from person to person, and even from day to day. Just because someone has a free hour doesn’t mean they have the cognitive or emotional battery to draft a chapter.

The truth is, trying to shoehorn your creative process into someone else’s rigid framework is a recipe for burnout. Your writing life doesn’t need to look like a perfectly curated aesthetic; it just needs to work for you.

Sometimes, the best ideas don’t arrive in a silent, candlelit room. They show up while you are transferring laundry to the dryer, emptying the dishwasher, or finally getting around to making the bed. Real life is the soil where our stories grow, and our routines have to fit inside that reality, not fight against it.

We have to write however, whenever, and wherever we can. I have a friend who launched a highly successful romance writing career by tapping away on her phone at the gym, entirely because they offered free childcare. I have another friend who faithfully sets her alarm for 5:00 AM, getting her words down in the quiet dark before she heads off to her day job.

But discovering that authentic rhythm also requires us to look broader than a single twenty-four-hour window. We so often try to force our writing into the confines of a daily habit, but sometimes we need to zoom out and look at the shape of our weeks, our seasons, or even our years. We are not the exact same people from day to day, much less from year to year. A routine that served you perfectly in one season of life might feel impossible in the next. Our lives shift, our responsibilities swell and shrink, and our creative processes have to adapt right alongside us.

There is no moral superiority in writing at dawn versus writing in bursts on a treadmill, just as there is no failing in writing voraciously during the winter and resting during the summer. There is only the method that gets your words onto the page right now.

Finding your authentic routine is about paying attention to your own natural rhythms and giving yourself grace as they evolve. When we let go of the heavy, looming “shoulds” of the publishing world, we make room for the actual work. We stop performing the act of writing and finally give ourselves permission to just write.

So, ignore the gurus. Look at the shape of your current capacity, whether that is for today, this week, or this season. Where is the quietest corner right now? When does your brain feel most capable? Build your process there, adapt it when you need to, and guard it fiercely.

If you want to dig a little deeper into finding the rhythm that actually fits your life, I’ve put together a free book all about building an authentic writing routine. You can download it right now over at andilit.com. Maybe it will help you find what works for you?

Find Your Own Writing Rhythm

Yesterday, I was sitting on my couch, two cats on the blanket on my lap, one perched on the window sill watching the birds. We were watching YouTube videos, and this week’s video from Hey Wanderer came up. The two women, best friends who homestead, were in their gorgeous garden, and the sun was turning everythin…

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A very specific kind of meditation happens when I am staring down the barrel of 10,000 glass bottles.

Recently, I’ve been spending time on the bottling line over at Southwest Mountains Vineyards. I am learning a great deal about wine, the wine industry, and my lovely colleagues, and I am discovering the strange, rhythmic psychology of assembly-line work.

The environment itself demands surrender. The machinery generates a relentless, mechanical white noise that drowns out the usual mental chatter. For four straight hours, I cannot read. I cannot scroll. I cannot doodle in the margins of a notebook. My hands are occupied, my eyes are fixed, and my mind is suddenly left entirely to its own devices. It is a rare luxury disguised as manual labor.

The physical experience moves in distinct, predictable waves. First comes the initial shock of discomfort—the ache in my shoulders, the sudden awareness of exactly how I am standing. But eventually, the awkwardness smooths out into a hypnotic rhythm. It forces a return to the body. As I move, I find myself taking inventory of my own health and capability, especially when I watch the 18-year-old effortlessly hurling full bases of wine onto a pallet. My body simply does not move like that anymore, and the bottling line offers a blunt, physical reminder of the passage of time.

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Right now, two eight-year-old boys are wrestling in my living room. They’re putting each other in holds, checking in with each other, and giving compliments like “You are amazing” when the other breaks free. It’s really beautiful. . . and I”m grateful that they have each other, especially since my son’s friend is…

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In my head, I have visions of home-cooked meals every night, of taking our old t-shirts and turning them into rag rugs, of growing an elaborate balcony garden with herbs and flowers that hummingbird loves.

I want that traditionally slow life where I have time and capacity to do things with deep intention. I want to source all my fruits, veggies, and meats from local sources, and I want to have a standing flour order at the local mill. I want to drive down to Nelson County and get Trager Brothers coffee every time I need some. I want to make my own butter.

But the reality of my life at this moment is that to actually slow down, I have to make a lot of choices about ease and efficiency. I simply don’t have the time I need to do all I want to do the way I want to do it, and I simply can’t make the number of decisions that kind of life entails on the daily while I’m raising a wonderful, wild boy, running no less than three business streams, picking up extra work at a beautiful winery, and also purposefully trying to reduce my stress and overwhelm.

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I love stories. I love the kind of stories we tell each other when we first meet and the ones that we only part our lips for when we’ve known someone for years, decades maybe, and know they are always going to be there, no matter what. I love stories on podcasts and in audiobooks, and I especially love books of any sort that …

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Lately, a friend and I have been watching True Blood, that kitschy, wonderful early 2000s series based on the really great books by Charlaine Harris. I bristle sometimes at the way love is portrayed, and I am absolutely certain that adding fairies into the mix was a step too far. But mostly, I’m just loving it . . . and the social commentary it makes.

But there was one moment that has stayed with me for days now, a moment when Sam and his brother Tommy are facing off in the woods. Sam tells Tommy to get a job, and Tommy replies, “I can’t read.” Sam says, “That’s a you problem,” and then shoots him when Tommy runs away.

For the most part, I really love Sam’s character, but that sentence - “That’s a you problem.” - it broke my heart a little because, of course, it’s not actually Tommy’s fault that he can’t read. Sure, he needs to take responsibility as an adult, but if someone is illiterate (a term that is accurate but so polluted by judgment that it’s hard to use), it’s almost never because they want to be. It’s almost always because someone - parents, teachers, society - has failed them.

So no, Sam, that’s not a “Tommy” problem.

Years ago in my first semester teaching English at a community college, I had most of the new players for the college’s men’s basketball team placed in my class. (I was new, and thus, I was deemed gullible and easily manipulated.)

All of those young men were amazing people - I’m still in touch with some of them today. They were kind and funny, athletically gifted and, tragically, all at least functionally if not completely illiterate. They were also all black men.

It turned out that the expectation the college had for me was that I would simply pass them through, keep them eligible to play, and help maintain the college’s state championship record. I did not do that.

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I appreciate a new thing from time to time, but it’s the things that have endured for ages that I love most - a ramshackle farmhouse, a rusted but recoverable cast iron skillet, a piece of needlework from centuries back.

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I have become a full-on Kirsten Miller fan . . . first, The Change and then The Women Of Wild Hill and now, Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books . . . I love how Miller incorporates humor, questions of belonging and acceptance, and a slice of justified rage to tell incredibly compelling stories.

In Lula Dean, the premise is that a local contingent…

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(A quick note before we dive in: For my paid subscribers, I’ve included a little gift at the bottom of today's post—a downloadable, printable piece of art featuring the Weaver manifesto to hang above your desk.)

I retire the Hustler and welcome the Weaver.

That’s a line from the manifesto I wrote for myself this year after trying to figure out how to actually love all the things that I love without being overwhelmed by them.

I’m a very fortunate person. I do what I love all day every day. I research enslaved communities. I write books. I teach writers. I run a publishing business with a dear friend. I have friends I absolutely adore, and my son - well, he is the absolute darling of my life (most of the time. :) )

But because I do so many things, because every single one of my days pulls me in 200 different directions, I can very easily be overwhelmed. That used to be even more true before I realized that my unique brain (AuDHD for those of you who know) felt like I had to do everything all the way through every day. Those days, the urgency of all that was before me felt like a boulder on my chest when I woke up, and when it was time to sleep, I basically collapsed into bed, too exhausted to even actually wind down.

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The light outside is goldening, the hue turning everything on my desk just the lightest bit more yellow. There is nothing like the gloaming of a summer night.

Soon, I will stand from my desk and twist shut the blinds. I will fold the last of the laundry. I will make sure the dishwasher is loaded, the counters clean. I wil…

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I still remember the moment I decided to write The Boy Who Could See Secrets. I was sitting at my dining room table, the barn and the goats with their Great Pyrenees, Boone and Bella, before me. It was early morning, and my son was napping. (Oh, those infant days.)

The sky was a beautiful purple, and I found myself staring at the tree line and thinkin…

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Red clay cliffs. Etruscan tombs. Alabaster. . . . gelato! These are the things I think about when I remember my time in Italy many years ago. We saw Florence and Rome _ both gorgeous cities I’d like to revisit - and I went to Montepulciano and Assisi, again, lovely. But it was these four things in Volterra, where we stayed, that I remember most.

The people I travelled with for that month were quintessential “grab it all while you can” travelers. They wanted to see everything, travel everywhere, experience as much as they could, and who could blame them? It was Italy, after all.

I, however, wanted to stay in Volterra, to sit in our gorgeous villa and study the art, to rest on the balcony overlooking the red cliffs, to stroll up the hill past the Etruscan tombs and the medieval cemetery and relax in the plaza. I wanted to eat gelato from the same little shop every day.

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The other day, I saw a crocodile in the sky. Or was it a cobra, now that I think about it, it’s body lithe against the ground, it’s head raised to strike . . . or as I know it, to bend my upper spine backwards in yoga.

At the same time, my son saw a bear, well, a bear’s head to be precise, a fact I o…

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A dozen years or more ago, I abandoned my first mystery novel (my first novel of any sort actually) because it was summer and, as I said then, “I can’t write fiction in the summer.” It was an absolutely true statement when I made it.

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Did you know that the tops of the roller coasters at HersheyPark are lit up at night and that the lights go only until the death drop and then disappear? I do because for five hours on Saturday night, I stared at those lights and let my soul ease.

At first, I was annoyed that the lights didn’t go all the way around like I…

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Around the rural parts of Virginia where I live, the farmhouses are often rambling testaments to the way life accretes substance over time. The house may have begun with a small, two-over-two design - two bedrooms over a living room and kitchen. An outhouse. Then, a porch . . . that eventually gets closed in. Another bed…

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