Somehow, August is coming to a close, the fall semester is upon us, and I, for the first time in my 12+ years of teaching, am not scrambling to prepare for classes.

Many of you know why—I’m preparing for a baby! I’ll be on leave this semester, and am very grateful for the support to be home with our little one until late January.

But first, a look back at the summer:

• In May, I spent 7 days at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA), where I got to work alongside brilliant visual artists, writers, and musicians. Being at this residency while pregnant was a really important experience for me: as I prepare to become a parent, I got to feel both like a writer and a mother at the same time. I felt very powerful! Let’s see how I feel in a month when baby is on the outside…

• After returning from VCCA, and after many, many revisions over the years, my essay, “Have You,” was published at The W(hole) (formerly the “Voices on Addiction” column at The Rumpus). I’m grateful to for giving this piece a home. I lived the experiences contained in the essay many, MANY years ago, and I finished writing it several years ago too. Publishing and finding the shape for our stories often take a long time. Content warnings: empty consent, sex, addiction. Family, you might not want to read this one (seriously!).

  • For those who wish to safely read… here it is:

• What else has been happening this summer? A ton of nesting—my brain is already changing as we prepare for this baby’s arrival.

• Been working on some short stories, enjoying the unconscious gifts that seem to arrive when I play with fiction.

• Letting myself say “I don’t know” when people ask what I’m writing.

• Letting myself not write when the body feels drawn to other things (including rest).

• Strategizing about the memoir: the market is particularly rough on us memoirists, when it comes to trying to break into “The Big 5”; I am still trying!

• Reading! Which takes me to these recommendations. Friends, if you haven’t yet, you must order your copy of these tremendous books:

  • What They Stole by Paige Towers - “explor[es] the deeper, often hidden complexities of intercountry adoption: the ethical gray zones, the influences of religion and race, and the global inequalities that made such large-scale child migration possible. Meticulously researched and sensitive with its storytelling, What They Stole examines how good intentions can coexist with systemic harm—and how the consequences of systems like the Holts’ can reverberate across generations.”

  • Tailbone by - “Set in Seoul in 2008, Tailbone follows the story of an unnamed teenage girl who, after years of struggling with her alcoholic father's abuse, and what she sees as her mother's cowardice, decides to run away. At a boarding house for single women, the narrator is pulled into the orbit of one of the other girls living there…”

  • Each Child a Disappearance & Mundus et Infans by - Don’t miss these collections of new & selected poems, which span decades of Richard’s tremendous writing career. His voice is important as ever!

  • The River Drowns the Able Swimmer by Xujun Eberlein (now available for pre-order, and remember, pre-orders help writers a LOT!) - I’ve had the gift of reading Xujun’s memoir over the years as she wrote and revised—trust me, you want to read this one, which “opens with [Eberlein’s] grandmother, born to a destitute peasant family on the precipice of a new era, of which her partially bound feet become a symbol. Decades later, a young woman, who will become Xujun’s mother, dedicates herself to the promises of the Communist Revolution, thus forming the world Xujun and her siblings grow up in…”

As my husband and I welcome this new life into the world this fall, I may be a little quiet here—but I will be back. No doubt, my writing will be changed by becoming a parent; no doubt I will have much to say, and will say it when I can.

Sending all the belief in you and your stories,

Caitlin (& my fur baby, Nietzsche)

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Today I want to tell you about an essay I began years ago, an essay I revised and rewrote again and again, searching for its final form, knowing something might be missing but insistent enough to keep trying.

The seed of the essay first appeared in grad school (over a decade ago!), as a couple scenes in a couple different pieces. For years, I couldn’t figure out where exactly those scenes belonged. I wasn’t sure why those vignettes kept showing up in different points of view and in different essays, but I trusted the unconscious; I let myself experiment; I trusted instinct more than clearly articulated logic.

Several years after grad school, those scenes grew into an essay of their own.

When I was at an artist residency in Taos in 2022, when I was re-working that essay into a chapter for my book, I had a breakthrough: I re-wrote it again.

Many of the original scenes (the gist of them at least) remained, but the central conceit was changing. I was also changing—I had stopped drinking a year earlier (even though I was “only” a “social” drinker, I’d been blacking out since I was fifteen, losing myself and unconsciously trying to repeat past traumas). These were the very topics of the essay. After a year without alcohol or weed or anything that would take my mind away from me, I could see a lot more clearly what the essay was about, what it was missing.

By December 2023, I felt the essay was finally DONE. It had found its form! Its perspective! It knew what it was saying. I knew.

I confidently sent the piece out to dream pubs, and when folks at The New Yorker Online and Harper’s and Paris Review gave it glowing reviews (albeit without saying yes to publishing it), I was pretty confident it would find a home quickly. It isn’t often I feel that way.

But friends, let me tell you, TWO WHOLE YEARS went by after that in which the essay DID NOT GET PICKED UP ELSEWHERE. This isn’t such a shocking timeline for many of us who publish in literary magazines, but man, for this essay that I’d grown to believe in so much, I was burned.

I sent it out and sent it out and sent it out.

I paused. I sent it to writer friend after writer friend. What was “wrong” with it? What was “the” problem? I tried cutting it down. 7,000 words to 6,000. Then 5,000. Then 4,000. I asked what would happen if I shifted it from second-person to first-, or from present tense to past.

And then at some point, the rejections still rolling in, I stopped believing in the essay.

I put the essay down and worked on other things, but—

I began to question my own barometer, my sensibilities: if I was so wrong about this essay’s success, what else was I wrong about?

I had not had a piece picked up for publication in a long time. Was I cursed?

I started to think, Maybe all my successes are behind me. Maybe what I have to say isn’t interesting anymore. I’m out of touch. Etc. etc.

Perhaps editors thought the essay “too much,” too direct about the dangers of alcohol and empty consent and the violences of girlhood and the ways they reverberate into adulthood. Would it be “too much” for readers too? Would editors accept the piece if I’d called it fiction? What would I be compromising if I did call it fiction, if I didn’t say, This really happened to me?

Maybe I was simply delusional and the writing just wasn’t good enough.

And yet I kept submitting.

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Finally, after those two years of doubt and upset and picking myself back up to try again, the essay was accepted for publication.

When I read the acceptance email it suddenly felt very simple. I was happy, yes, but I didn’t have the urge to jump up and down with joy. I thought, Well this is nice. This is good. This is what I’ve been hoping for. I guess it really was just a matter of (so much) time. I think I was more relieved than ecstatic: relieved to be done with the uncertainty, to stop trying to diagnose a problem in the piece that may never have existed. My confidence was largely restored.

I was also particularly happy with the reason this publication had taken the piece. The editor who accepted the essay said she did so because it aligned so meaningfully with their intentions, their value of the uncompromising nonfiction voice on the page. The essay was not “too much” for her and her readers; in fact, its candidness about these violent truths—the voice not afraid to tell the hard stories—is the reason they did accept it.

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Thank you to the many, many friends who read draft after draft over the years, for continuing to help me believe.

Will I feel differently if (when?) this happens again? If it again takes two years for an essay I believe in to find a home? I hope so. Maybe. Perhaps I can take from this experience a lesson I’ve heard again and again: it just takes one yes. Perhaps I can feel in my body what it means to believe this.

Perhaps I can steer clear (or a least a little clearer) of the need for validation to come from the outside. Still, when your goal is publication—to share your story with readers and hope it helps and moves them—when in order to be published you need someone who isn’t you to say yes, this can be very hard.

Was there really a curse on this essay? Of course not. Perhaps the curse was more what happened inside my head.

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I would title those lists “Character details” or “backstory might need” or “come back to this document, important!” and so on. Every few months, I’d open the document and see that I had “failed” to incorporate some of those oh-so-important images and memories (spoiler alert, they were not ALL essential as I’d thought) into the book, but most times, I’d discover that I’d already found homes for those fragments of memory, and that I hadn’t needed to pressure myself to write them in—my mind knew what to do; it just needed to find the right time, which is to say, it needed time. And trust.

In my office now hang three pin boards: one with notes of inspiration (quotes to remind me why I write, reminders to keep going), another of outlines and editorial letters and checklists all related to my memoir, and a third, with post-its and torn pieces of lined paper and backs of old envelopes, all full of new ideas—new, excruciatingly new and unwritten, ideas. Ideas that morph, some days, into a pressure: WHY HAVEN’T YOU WRITTEN ME YET? WILL YOU EVER BE ABLE TO WRITE ME? IS THIS IDEA WORTH ANYTHING? WILL ANYONE PUBLISH A THING YOU WRITE EVER AGAIN?

Yeah.

How to trust that those ideas will become more than a back-of-napkin scrawl? Do they need to become more than that? Maybe the issue isn’t whether or not they transcend their tiny homes on my pin board, but more that this fear and pressure and self-doubt are, some days, stopping me from writing. (That, and burnout). Maybe this is about trust: an act of faith I am sometimes low on.

Last year, a dear friend sent me a book called The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing. A couple weeks ago, I finally started reading it. When I reached this part of the introduction I felt something open in me:

“When artists speak, they generally focus on what their work means,” Adam Moss writes. “…I realized [that’s] not what I want to know. My curiosity is earthbound: Where do they begin, and what do they do next, and when do they know they are finished? And more crucially: What do they do when they lose faith? Do they lose faith?”

This book, Moss writes, is about “following associations—and about how they cohere into something tangible.”

And here I am, staring at my pin board of scrawled notes, wondering the same.

For me, one answer to Moss’s question (“What do [artists] do when they lose faith?”) is leaning on other artists: talking to them, reading about them, listening to their triumphs and “failures,” letting ourselves be inspired by their processes. You’ve likely heard this advice before, but I repeat it here anyway, because in my own artistic process I need to be reminded of this again and again.

Another answer I’ve written about before is taking breaks: a week or a month or even a year away from creating and ingesting sentences, to clear the mind and take the walk and let our thoughts and images take shape. We have to get away from the busy of the world, the teaching, the internet, the news, the frenetic mind. At least I do.

All of these breaks help me get back to myself and my art, but they don’t always solve the issue of trust. To trust my art again, to clear my mind of the loud doubt, I need to rediscover my obsession with the work, the pulse of it. I need to trust the spark of the idea as it becomes “something tangible,” and often, I struggle to do that when I haven’t felt that spark in a long time.

When did I last feel it?

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Maybe when I was writing in class with my students a few weeks ago. It was brief—five, ten minutes maybe—but it was there.

Before that it was the summer, when I woke with the jolt of a sentence in my head, and followed the fictional story that flowed from my fingers that morning.

And now, writing this, I am moving fast, I am in it, sensing that I have struck something true if not familiar for me and, perhaps, for some of you.

There is more to say on this topic, of course. One big hurdle to trust, for me and for many of us, has to do with external validation: If our work hasn’t been published in a while, do we start to lose trust in our writing? (I hate to admit that when enough time passes, I do.) On my worst days I think: I guess all my successes are behind me. I know this thought is illogical; I’m thankful for friends who talk me down from the spiral. And that’s important: that I say the illogical thought aloud, and then relinquish it.

The question I began writing with was this: What is happening to my ideas? When I scribble so many down, but do “nothing” with them, have I failed?

I think you know the answer. I think I knew the answer when I first wrote the question.

No, of course I have not failed, and the more we can get ourselves to trust our minds—the more we can take good care of our minds—the more likely it is that those ideas will find their way into our work, as long as they still feel alive to us (it’s okay if they don’t). The more we can turn down the noise of doubt and worry, the more likely we are to find our way back home, to language, to image, to story, to the extraordinary process of making art.

In the couple weeks since I initially drafted this, the semester ended, I immediately took a bath, and within a few days I had written a 3,000-word draft of a new short story, inspired by a couple ideas I’d jotted down long ago.

Writing about the struggle helped get me back to the magic.

Also, it snowed:

I feel so lucky to have an advanced reader copy of Whidbey, which has just completely captivated me. I’ve been trying to read it slowly, because I don’t want the book to end, because every page is full of knockout passages. I’m so excited to interview T Kira about the book. Pre-order your copy here!

Mare of Easttown: oof! There’s so much to say about this show, the flawed and gripping lead character, the acting, the accents, the women, the mothers, the storylines, the absolutely tough content and the way these storytellers kept me wanting to watch on. There’s more nuanced conversation to have about this story, of course, but man, I cried at the end. I just sat there awhile and thought about making art.

What else? I was super stoked to notice that HBO’s new show, The Task, was directed by Jeremiah Zagar, who has done many powerful projects, including We the Animals, the film adaptation of Justin Torres’s novel. I was pretty proud of myself for first noticing that the show’s cinematic style seemed a lot like We the Animals (I worried they were ripping Zagar off!), and then later seeing Zagar’s name on the credits.

One more exciting bit of movie news: In a couple weeks, I’m taking a day trip to DC to see the film adaptation of the amazing writer and friend Alysia Abbott’s memoir, Fairyland! Even more exciting is that many of you can go see it in theaters starting this week and next. Check out the cities and dates and get your tickets here!

I’ve also been thinking a lot about my own stories, some short fiction and possibly a novel I started over the summer. There is something very freeing right now about the possibility of invention, of pulling from life and creating new characters and discovering what might come from my unconscious, and our collective unconscious.

I hope you’re taking care, taking walks and breaks and holding your communities close, reading stories, maybe making some new ones.

And I have been daring to write.

In May, I professed that I would try to create differently. The act of writing that unlocked something for me. The Cardinal nest I mentioned last month? It’s now a 4,246-word essay, and I have been losing myself inside of it—in the best way. I found my way back into the writing trance, not only while writing about the Cardinals, which of course is not just an essay about Cardinals, but also while writing fiction.

2. For the last several months, as I’ve been waiting and waiting to hear back about my book (yep, still waiting! publishing is so slow!), I have been trying to figure out what I want to write next. I started to let myself explore fiction, though I kept thinking: I’m not as trained in fiction as I am in nonfiction; I’m not sure I can write a novel. But here we are: all these months later, I am realizing that perhaps my greatest accomplishment of the summer is that I now believe I can write fiction, and perhaps even do it well. I have been writing lots of it! And enjoying myself.

What are the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves? Where do these narratives come from? How can we change them? Persistence, perhaps. Therapy, for sure. Maybe even just the act of writing down the limiting sentence, moving it from our head to the page and then deciding how we might revise it.

My students know that one of my favorite parts of revision is printing pages, making an outline (only after lots of uncertain exploration and discovery), and then taping the pages to the wall or spreading them out on the desk or floor, shuffling sections and sentences, stepping back and seeing the work anew. That’s what I did recently with the Cardinals essay:

What are you working on, or trying not to work on? Where have you been stuck? How have you been trying—or not trying—to get unstuck? Where are you discovering something new and exciting? How are you letting yourself be okay with exactly where you are? Let me know in the comments, if you like.

3. While waiting to hear back about my book, my confidence has been tested (surprise surprise). I have found myself seeking reassurance—more than I care to admit and certainly more than serves me.

My wise therapist reminded me that it’s okay to need support, but sometimes I seek so much reassurance in other people that I lose some of my agency. I want someone to tell me, your book is gorgeous, your book is ready, your book will get picked up! And the people have been telling me this (thank you). And yet: the person I need to hear it most from is myself.

It was last month that I found the old letter. A two-page letter to myself, written on yellow legal pad paper, a prompt from a writing workshop in 2022, with the wise Melissa Febos. I had pinned the letter to a board full of complimentary notes I’ve received about my writing over the years, some from agents, some from contest judges. But the letter to myself was hidden in the stack. I re-read it, realized this note was the one that mattered most, and then I moved it to the front.

I am grateful, as ever, that you continue reading and sharing here. Recently, I realized that this newsletter has become a once-every-two-months thing, rather than monthly, so that’s what I’ll do for now. This pace feels less pressured, and give me more time for my ideas to percolate.

Sending belief, a big embrace (especially during these intense times), and a link to Gaza Soup Kitchen, an organization I recently donated to, and that you might consider contributing to if you can.

-Caitlin

Lately, I just can’t get myself to write. No—I can’t get myself to like what I write.

I’ve been trying. And then trying not to try. And then desperately missing that flow—that coveted writing brain, so obsessed with the thing we’re writing that we can’t help but think about it, and yet: we forget ourselves when we write (the most blissful forgetting!). You know the feeling.

I’m in a place of waiting. Waiting to hear back about my book. Waiting for the new sentences to spark. Waiting for this restless feeling to resolve. Waiting for the news to stop sucking (yeah, I know I’ll be waiting a long time for that!).

Last week, I was talking with my dear writing friend, Cari Oleskewicz, telling her, I just want to let myself get up in the morning and not go to the writing desk, go for a walk instead, or take a dance class, do anything else but wait for emails or stare at sentences I dislike.

But I have such a hard time letting go of my coveted coffee and writing time; I know I should try to change it up, since lately most of my writing time feels off, but I can’t seem to do it.

And then Cari said, “Sounds like a fantastic idea, to go out and create differently.”

She gifted me language—my new motto, I have since declared, for my summer: Creating differently.

I want to try.

What are some ways you create differently?

What are some ways you get yourself out of a writing slump?

Here’s my running list; please share some of yours with me!

• Take a walk

• Take a drawing class

• Talk to a friend

• Take screen/internet/social media breaks

• Volunteer

• Go swimming

• Go for a hike

• Go to a dance class

• Practice yoga

• Clean

• Organize

• Read!

• Read, read, read

• Re-read nice things people have said about your writing

• Remember: we all go through this; I have gone through this before; this will end (Will it? It will, right? It will!)

• Explore a new place, if you can

  

• Rest

• Go to a museum (Richmond’s VMFA is free 365 days/year!!)

• Watch the birds (there are two baby cardinals in a nest in my backyard as I type this, momma and papa birds guarding them from my cat, maybe there is an essay here)

• Lower your expectations

• Reframe your self-talk

• Journal

• Read interviews with other writers about their struggles and triumphs

I’m considering this month’s newsletter a win; I wrote a thing. I wrote a thing I hope might help one of you. I wrote a thing and the sentences flowed and I want to hear how you create differently. Please share below!

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Here for whoever needs a writing chat, and with you in this rollercoaster of artistic emotions,

Caitlin <3

P.S. One writer holding me up this month, via her vital piece for 100 Days of Creative Resistance: T Kira Māhealani Madden. Read this, friends. It’s so very good and necessary.

And two books I recently read, & highly recommend: Ghostroots by ‘Pemi Aguda, & Be Not Afraid of My Body by Darius Stewart.

I’m so pumped to be moderating and participating in this panel today at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in L.A.!

If you’re at the conference, please join us! And if you aren’t at AWP this year, I hope to publish part of my talk elsewhere and eventually share it here.

Toward the end of my brief talk, I’ll be reading “Through the Threads,” my flash essay about freedom from blackouts, published last year at Hunger Mountain Review.

I hope to see some of you today! More details below.

Lots of love and gratitude,

Caitlin

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Perspective & Perseverance in Writing Sobriety: Hemingway Is Not the Only Way

Friday, March 28th, from 12:10-1:25pm PST.

Location: Room 518, Level Two, Los Angeles Convention Center

Writing is better without alcohol for these award-winning, multigenre writers. A sober perspective has unlocked epiphanies in their work, but sobriety isn’t easy. In this conversation, panelists celebrate community and encourage perseverance by reading their work about sobriety. They also discuss questions like, How do we write about our drunken pasts with honesty and kindness? How do we have fun alcohol-free at conferences and residencies? What do we do when writing—and life—get hard?

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For anyone who doesn’t know of Lynda Barry, you can listen to her speak (for just a few minutes) about her work here, in this video made after she received a MacArthur Genius Grant several years ago.

I do not consider myself “good” at drawing, but Lynda’s work has helped me reframe that sentence. Lynda tells us—and I tell my students now—that we were all drawing shapes and images before we were making words and sentences; we had to! And at some point, we began to shut down the play and freedom of making images and stories and words. We started to ask, “Is this good? Does this suck?” Or we just stopped drawing/writing/playing altogether.

Lynda helps us turn down the volume on all that noise.

Here are some of the wonderfully playful comics from the faculty workshop with Lynda last week:

This was what came from my hand when we were prompted to draw a skeleton in 60 seconds with our eyes closed:

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This one came from the prompt to draw a giraffe in 60 seconds with our eyes closed:

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And this was a group activity—so fun! (The index card to the right is my response to the prompt, “Pick one of the 4 monsters and draw their parents.”)

I keep thinking about a phrase Lynda used in her talk later that day: something about borrowing a state of mind—specifically from four-year-olds.

I keep thinking of an evening last year, when my three-year-old niece and I were getting ready for what we call “Cozy Sleepy Story Time,” and suddenly she looked at me and asked, “Want some face paint?”

“Huh?” I said.

“Want some face paint!” she repeated, looking up at me, her hands ready.

"Face paint?” I asked. We had no face paint in the house, as far as I knew.

“Yeah! You want a star, or a dragon?” Her little hands dipped an invisible brush into invisible paint.

I smiled. Of course I smiled. “Oh! A star please!”

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I am trying to borrow this state of mind—play and imagination and belief. A sort of hope, maybe.

Last month, in Paris, my partner and I strolled through galleries in Le Marais and found ourselves standing before sculptures by the artist Denis Chetboune:

From Chetboune, on this work: “all these beings, this whole world without exception is torn apart.”

Borrowing a state of mind. Play and hope and belief. But also: witnessing how our world, our bodies, our minds, have been torn apart.

I am looking to Lynda Barry and kids and other artists as I try to discover what story I might be writing next—after and between rounds of editing my memoir, and also as we try to survive these uncertain times.

I am reading, too, and very grateful for this important essay on the essential role of reading—always, and especially now:

“Hope as a Reading Practice” by Massiel Torres Ulloa

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A few more books I’d like to recommend, gifts to keep us thinking and laughing and alive:

• All of Lynda Barry’s books (click the link, then scroll down!)

• The new novel I got to celebrate last week at Fountain Bookstore in Richmond: Casualties of Truth by Lauren Francis-Sharma; it’s already received rave reviews from The New York Times, The Washington Post, & more! Order a copy from your local bookstore or local library!

• & Toni Morrison, always and especially as we celebrate Black History Month. Check out Paradise if you’ve never read it.

With great care and hope that you can bring some play into your day,

Caitlin

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Thank you for helping me begin this newsletter, nearly one year ago.

Some months, I find myself eager to share reading recommendations, or craft tips, or teaching resources; other months, I share about the rollercoaster process of revising, and editing, again and again, my book. I hope you’ve found at least one sentence from my 2024 musings helpful.

In 2025, I plan to continue this newsletter, though it might change shape, as things do! I hope you’ll stay tuned.

I’m so grateful for your readership and your support, and send you the warmest wishes for 2025.

With love, and one reading recommendation for the new year,

Caitlin

P.S. For any writers with connection to Virginia: you might consider applying for this: William & Mary Writer-in-Residence. A pretty sweet opportunity! $50K and lots of support for your work.

P.P.S. A highlight of my artistic year: seeing the choreography that my flash nonfiction piece “Not a Dream” (originally published in 2021) inspired. Such a gift. Thanks so much to Starr Foster Dance for including me in Page to Stage III, and to my amazing writing students who surprised me and attended one of the shows!

We need stories to survive.

We need stories to connect, to attempt to understand, to feel and to learn and to see.

In an attempt to help us all, this month I share:

6 things I learned from sending my manuscript to beta readers

1. Your instincts about what needs to be revised are probably right.

As I suspected some of my readers might prefer to do, one of them waited to look at my questions until after reading my manuscript. When she did eventually read my questions, they mostly aligned with her ideas for what I might revise.

Does this mean I should’ve spent even more time with my manuscript, my questions, before sending it to readers? I’m not sure. When I sent it to them, I really believed I’d taken the book as far as I could. But as soon as I got their notes back I felt embarrassed that I’d thought the book was closer to ready. And hey, it is still is close, I think it is, but anyway—after getting her notes back, I had new ideas for how to address those questions. And in the last several weeks of editing, I’ve addressed almost all of them.

2. You might be surprised by some of your readers’ observations.

I had done too much perhapsing?! I had let the wise narrator step in too much?! (This was, ironically, the thing my sharp workshop members had been asking me to do more of over the years, so I was at first quite confused).

Pretty quickly though, I was excited: I had long WANTED to stay mostly inside my 16-year-old character’s mind, to subtly using image and word choice to hint at the writer’s wisdom without breaking the spell of the young character’s naivety.

3. There’s a difference between getting feedback on 20 pages at once and getting feedback on 369 pages at once.

What might seem to be working in those 20 excerpted pages might not be working as well when sitting with the entire book.

4. Take time to feel your feelings.

As I wrote in September, I was devastated when my readers didn’t say, “This is pretty much ready, just a few things to consider, maybe a couple weeks of work, and send it out!” Yeah, they didn’t say that. And I’m grateful they didn’t—that’s why we have our readers. So I was sad, a little mad (not at them), and still attached to my old timeline, my desire to send it out by the end of 2024.

I wanted—so badly—to dig right back into my manuscript, to immediately solve all the problems my readers had identified, to stay attached to my previous timeline. I NEEDED to get this book out this year, I told myself. It took a couple weeks of feeling crushed to finally let that timeline go, and then dig back into edits.

Some friends suggested taking much more than a couple weeks—a longer break to work on something else, or to work on nothing (advice I also give friends and students). I really wanted to get back into the book, though, so I did. But if you can stomach a longer break, do it. You’ll find your way back to the work when you’re ready.

5. Try to be clear about your hopes—conscious and unconscious—of what you will hear from your readers.

Free-write or journal or talk aloud about this. Ask yourself what unconscious expectations or hopes might be hanging out in your head. I did some of this—I must have. But doing this even more consciously might help us feel less crushed when we get those notes back, and when our timeline almost inevitably changes (again).

6. Call on community.

I called writer friends. I sulked to my therapist. I cried against my partner and wallowed and tried not to infect my students with my pessimism—I still believed in their work, after all.

Two months later, I’m back to believing in mine again.

A few recommendations to close:

• A powerful memoir I read recently, and can’t believe I hadn’t read sooner: Speak, Okinawa by Elizabeth Miki Brina.

• An upcoming writing class, co-led by the fantastic writer and teacher, Liza Cochran, who I co-taught with at Harvard: Creative Nonfiction: An introduction to environmental writing from a personal perspective

• Awakeners: an exciting new podcast up at LitHub; a series of conversational interviews about mentorship in the literary arts, created by the talented Lena Crown, who I had the pleasure of meeting at Ragdale in 2023.

That’s it for this month. Thank you, as ever, for reading and sharing.

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With gratitude,

Caitlin

(and my ruthless editor, who’s helping me cut more of that stubborn backstory)

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Sharing writing—sharing the entire book I’ve been working on for years—has been…sort of awful? Not because the readers are awful (they are amazing, and I’m so grateful for them!), and not because I’ve never shared it before (I’ve shared almost all of it in installments over the years), but perhaps because the book is close but not yet ready (I knew this; it’s why I sent it to readers…); because I catastrophize; because, I am ready to be DONE!

Since sending my manuscript to a few wonderful readers, I’ve needed heaps of reassurance. I even emailed one reader (who has not had the chance to read it yet) to say I was embarrassed for having thought the book was even close to ready. And then she generously reminded me: I have been working on this for years. My project is powerful and clear. My sentences are very good. She was, of course, right. But—my racing brain. Those hefty moments of shame—Maybe it’s not as good as I thought. Not good enough.

When my reader said, I believe in you, I teared up a little, grateful, and then tried not to be embarrassed for sending that email (welcome to my brain!).

It is not lost on me that this newsletter is called, “Turning Down the Noise…”

Thank you to my friends: for reminding me what’s real and what’s my anxiety on overdrive, for reading—what a gift!—and for reminding me, You can do this. I am starting to see that this may be one of the hardest parts of the process: so close, maybe one revision away from sending it out, and now I need to get in there and do it. (I am.)

In the car on my way to teach, I’ve been listening to recordings from the 2024 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Last week, I listened to a fantastic lecture by Marie-Helene Bertino. It was exactly what I needed to hear.

I’m sorry to inform you, Bertino said, but as writers, we spend most of our time waiting: for reviews, for proofs, for blurbs, for edits, for agents’ replies...for inspiration. My advice to you, Bertino said, is to make friends with this waiting…fall in love with the meantime. Make out with it. Because books take a very, very long time to write. They take years. And most of it is waiting. Most of it is the meantime. And the secret is, eventually you find out there actually is no waiting. It is ALL your life. So the advice: cultivate other loves, cultivate new beginnings in the meantime.

I did start something new last month, during the waiting. Still not sure what it is—fiction? nonfiction?—and that new unknowing has been good.

In the waiting, I’m also taking too many pictures of my cat.

I’m also celebrating the incredible work other writers have done to get to the finish line.

Here are some very cool things my community is up to: some fantastic new books (which you can buy at the links below), an upcoming workshop you might be interested in…

1. Upcoming Class: WRITING TO HEAL with the talented author and teacher Laurie Edwards. Sign up here.

2. Forthcoming Book! Lauren Francis-Sharma’s CASUALTIES OF TRUTH. I just listened to her read an excerpt of this—I cannot WAIT to get my copy! Please consider pre-ordering (it REALLY helps writers if you pre-order! more on why in this informative piece by ).

3. A just-released memoir by my dear friend Jennifer Crystal: ONE TICK STOPPED THE CLOCK: a book I’ve had the pleasure of reading at various stages over the years, and which I just read again this week, in only three sittings. An important, powerful story. Grab your copy! Grab a second for a friend! Grab a third for your doctor (I’m serious).

Thank you for reading, for being in community.

With lots of gratitude,

Caitlin

Apologies for the late post. DISQUIET, in Lisbon, was wonderful. I came back full of inspiration, support, and motivation to get. this. book. out! I also came back with COVID. But it wasn’t awful and I have healthcare and I am feeling much better.

I’ve since printed my manuscript, made edits, and printed it again for beta readers. Now to wait…and to try not to tinker too much.

But before the waiting: Celebrating! How good it feels to hold this whole thing in my hands, to recognize this accomplishment. I’ve printed a whole book before, but this is a wildly different version, and I’m incredibly proud of these sentences, these chapters. I wrote the best book I could.

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Sometimes I forget to celebrate. Sometimes I despair: How many magazines have rejected that essay that I believed in so much? (So far, all of them, and a lot of them). Some days I lose confidence; I worry this book will not sell. On those days I turn to friends. I try to remember the joy and magic I often feel when I write, when I discover something new, when I transform myself on the page, when I move even just one reader; all of those things have nothing to do with sales.

What else helps with the despair? Doing things for other people: meeting old students for coffee or Zoom chats (hi! you know who you are!), reading submissions for publications like Best of the Net, hanging out with my partner and my cat, going to dance classes. Trying to remember that amidst the despair there is also good news, like: My memoir excerpt was longlisted for the 2024 First Pages Prize! And another piece from the book was a finalist for The Masters Review Featured Flash Contest.

And something I’m really, really excited about (and have probably mentioned once before): my flash nonfiction piece, “Not a Dream” (first published in 2022), inspired choreography that will be performed on stage in December. It’s been thrilling, and inspiring, and fulfilling, seeing video clips from rehearsals, talking about the tone of the costume, nerding out about how terms like “narrator” and “character” and point of view translate from writing to dance. I’m very grateful for this collaboration. Check out Starr Foster Dance’s website for more info/tix. If you're near Richmond or want to visit, mark your calendars!

Thanks for reading, and for being here, and for being patient—it’s been a long time coming, this book I keep telling you all about; getting closer.

With love and gratitude,

Caitlin

But here goes:

caitlinmcgill.com

The book is almost ready, too, though it will be a long journey before it’s actually out in the world. First, I’ve got to query agents. Then, editors. Then—the publication process often takes years. Some days, I’m confident and eager. Other days I’m full of doubt and despair.

I’m writing this from Lisbon, where I’ve been attending the DISQUIET International Literary Program. So grateful for this time to meet and engage with new writers from many parts of the world, and to hole away in my flat and get this manuscript ready to send out.

Anyway, I hope you’ll take a look at my new site.

And thanks, as always, for reading!

P.S. Kirstie Pallier was a wonderful website designer to work with—I mean, look how she captured that teal vibe I love! I definitely recommend her, if you’re looking for website help.

I’ve been struggling with this, off and on, for years. That’s partly why I asked these four award-winning authors to share their stories of how they found the openings of their books.

Please consider supporting these generous, talented writers by buying their books (linked below), sharing their books with your friends, and following them on Substack & social media.

1. BETH ALVARADO

I first encountered Beth’s work in 2012, when I was an undergrad and my professor Darlin’ Neal assigned us Beth’s first memoir, Anthropologies. A cool thing happened 11 years later, in 2023: Beth and I were in the same cohort as Associate Artists at The Atlantic Center for the Arts. Grateful to have connected with her work years ago, and to continue to connect with her now.

From Beth, about finding the beginning of an essay, “Santiago,” from her in-process memoir-in-essays:

Last April, I walked the Camino de Santiago in Spain with my son. I knew I would want to write about our trip for a memoir-in-essays I was working on. The thing is, so many people have written about the Camino. How was I going to make it new? I kept writing and discarding openings. And then one morning in October, about 3 a.m. I woke up and I had a paragraph in my head. I thought, I'm just going to get up and write this down without even turning on the light. And so I did.

"My bones wake me up at night. My doctor won't listen. Is it my pain? Or am I a tuning fork for the world? It's my hips at first, then those long bones above my knees. The ones that help me walk. They are screaming. The aspens did not do their golden shimmering this fall. They went straight to white branches. This morning the pain began in my right thumb, that one knuckle a burning knot. It woke me up and I thought of my friend who, when they picked her up off the bed, started crying and then turned to dust."

I can't tell you how much I loved that little paragraph. It was the closest thing I'd ever written to a prose poem. I loved the way it was full of images and jumped around from thought to thought. It felt true to the voice in my head. And by that, I mean the voice when you first wake up, when one thing occurs to you and then another, and you're still in a kind of dream-state. Not trying to make sense.

When I typed my paragraph up, it was exactly six-lines (at least on my screen) and I thought, OK, I'm going to adopt it as a constraint and try writing a series of six-line paragraphs to see where they lead me. Soon it was clear I had found the right way of approach, more oblique yet more grounded-in-the body. Edward Hoagland wrote that the "personal essay is like the human voice talking, its order the mind's natural flow."  That's what I wanted to capture, the mind's flow while you're walking over a long distance, a kind of cycling through uncensored thoughts — which, at least in my experience, is exactly what happened on the Camino.

Read more of Beth’s work and buy her books here.

2. LILLY DANCYGER

I took a super helpful class with Lilly during the summer of 2020. She taught me so much about book structure and narrative arc! She also visited my class at Emerson College a few years ago, to discuss her memoir, Negative Space. Super excited to read her most recent book, First Love, released just this month! It’s currently on my nightstand.

Lilly also writes an awesome Substack called The Word Cave, and recently wrote an incredibly insightful article about how pre-orders help writers.  

From Lilly, on finding the opening of Negative Space & First Love:

I had completely opposite experiences of finding the openings for my two books: For my memoir, Negative Space, I tried literally more than a dozen potential openings. It felt like somehow everything needed to come first, so I restructured the whole thing over and over again, moving one section earlier, and then another, and another, like an endless and maddening Jenga tower. Each potential opening changed the whole book’s focus and direction, so it felt like I was writing a dozen versions of the book at once, and couldn’t tell which was the right one. I wasn’t able to finally commit to the final opening until I shifted my thinking and realized that there wasn’t actually a single “right” place to start the story. It could start almost anywhere. I just had to pick one, and go with it. This is why that book doesn’t have chapter numbers—each new chapter opens with an “X” symbol, a little private nod to the fact that the order I ended up putting them in was just one of many possible shapes that story could have taken. 

Ultimately, I decided to start the book with the last time I saw my father, and his death when I was twelve. My grief over his loss is the main driving force in the book, so it ultimately made sense to start at the beginning of that experience. (The book also ends with his death—the story of my grief and growing up without him is braided with the story of his life and art; so it opens and closes with the same event, but at the beginning his death is the start of my grief story, and at the end his death is the end of his life story. …do you see why this structure was a tricky one?)

Then with my second book, my [recently released] essay collection First Love, I knew from the very beginning not only which essay would come first, but how I would start that essay. That sounds so unbelievable even to me after my experience with Negative Space that I just now dug through years of emails and confirmed that the very first version of the title essay that I sent to my agent has the same opening paragraph as the finished book (with some polishing and tweaks, but the same in substance). The book is about friendship, and I always knew I wanted to start it with an essay about my “first love,” my cousin Sabina. And I guess it just always felt obvious that the story of our relationship should start with a love letter that I wrote to her when we were little kids. I do think this experience was an exception though, and I don’t expect it to ever go this smoothly for me again. 

Check out more of Lilly’s work, buy her books, and considering subscribing to her Substack.

3. GRACE TALUSAN

I met Grace at GrubStreet’s The Muse & the Marketplace Conference years ago—maybe 2018?—and am so lucky that she recently visited my class at William & Mary. What a gift it was to read and discuss, with students and with her, her powerful memoir, The Body Papers.

From Grace, on finding the opening of The Body Papers:

As a girl, I dreamed of publishing a book someday. I remember the wide-open feeling of possibility that I felt the day after the last day of the school year. I would buy a notebook at the pharmacy, sit outside in the sun with my friends to tan (this was the 80s after all and we doused ourselves in coconut oil with pieces of a Hershey bar melting inside the bottle), and try to write the opening of this dream book. I thought one wrote a book the way one read a book: cleanly, orderly. I would make several attempts at an opening and some summers, that was it for my attempt. I know there was at least one summer where I made it to writing chapter two of this dream book, but I never finished it. I was too distracted with summer and swimming, sunning, riding bikes around to the candy store, and playing Pilgrims in the forest.

By the time my first book, THE BODY PAPERS, was in production, decades after those girlhood summers, I was comfortable with the messiness of an actual book. I wanted to find the best opening to the book within the existing material in the manuscript. Different chapters auditioned for the opening and I thought about how an imaginary reader would experience the book and wondered which section might entice them to continue reading as opposed to deciding the book was not for them. I tried a chronological approach, which would make "My Father's Noose," the opening and decided that I didn't want to scare readers off by the violence of that piece. Ultimately, someone in my writing group made an astute observation and suggested the yogurt essay go first, which deviated from chronological order because that experience happened to me later. Moving this chapter from the end to the opening made moving other parts possible and everything fell into place after that. This is another way of saying, Don't be afraid to play with your work, even if you think it's finished. This is the way I got my cover, which I love. From what I heard, after showing me several attempts, the designers decided to play around with one more design and once I saw it, I knew that was it.    

Check out more of her work, and buy her book here!

4. JOSEPH EARL THOMAS

I met Joseph at Bread Loaf some years ago—in the before-pandemic times!—and am a huge fan of his memoir, Sink. He’s also got another book coming out this June: God Bless You, Otis Spunkmeyer, which I recently pre-ordered from Shelf Life, my local Richmond bookstore.

From Joseph, on the opening of his memoir:

With the opening of Sink I wanted to foreground as much as possible the constructedness of any given account, and poke fun at the genre. It's mediated by the voice of the child, to the point of excising the explanatory/essayistic power of the adult self, but, in doing so I wanted to also make clear that the consciousness the child has access to is also one constructed primarily by the external world, and especially traces left upon him by immediate family. It's kind of an experiment in thinking about how far one can take interpellation by power if you really hold on to it at the level of experience.

Check out more of Joseph’s work and buy his books here.

Please show these authors some love for sharing their insights with us (BUY THEIR BOOKS!) and stay tuned for next month’s email. I’m heading deep into memoir revision mode and will share more about the process soon. I think I finally found my opening last week! Thank you, Beth, Lilly, Joseph, & Grace! <3

Readers: I’d love to hear your story, too—how you found, or are trying to find, your opening. Tell me in the comments! Don’t be shy!

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And please considering subscribing to and sharing my free newsletter if you haven’t yet. It really helps us writers!

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Please feel free to share this article with your students and fellow writers; please credit me and my Substack if you do, and encourage readers to subscribe! :)

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To re-vise is to re-see, to re-write, not so much to line-edit for grammar. We’re talking big-picture stuff, the stuff of discovering your STORY, what this beautiful, messy thing you wrote is really ABOUT.

This month, I offer you the revision workshop steps I’ve been offering students as we near the end of the semester (summer so soon!).

These strategies are undoubtedly a combination of wisdom I’ve gained from other writers and teachers over the years (thank you so much, all of you!), as well as ideas that have occurred to me in the many years I’ve been writing, and re-writing, and re-writing.

The Revision Workshop 

Skip as many steps as you like! Take what works for you and leave what doesn’t.

Note that you can use this revision workshop for any genre you’re writing in: prose, poetry, graphic novel, etc.

1. Free-write: Write an associative, stream-of-consciousness list of words that come to mind when you think of “revision.” What does your revision process currently look like?

2. Make a revision plan by answering 3-5 (or as many as you find useful!) of the following questions. Be as specific as possible, but don’t get too attached to the plan; if you dig into the revision and find yourself moving away from the plan, that’s okay—that’s great!

   1. What’s my story about? Not the situation (plot) but the underlying meanings/themes (story)?

   2. How might I revise my opening now that I’m coming to understand what my story is? 

   3. How might I revise my ending to suggest and emphasize my story?

   4. Where do I need more reflection? Less?

   5. What dragon (scary, vulnerable, radically honest truth) do I still need to face?

   6. What is the backstory? Need more? Less? Where is the backstory? Why? Move elsewhere?

   7. What is the structure? Why? How might I reshuffle sections? How can the content (story) inform my structure?

   8. Where can a detail replace a generality?

   9. What can I add, delete, or condense? Are any sections/sentences doing the same work? 

   10. Where might I integrate research to widen the world of my story? Perhaps you can’t remember the names of specific foods you ate or songs you sang. Maybe you need to broaden your perspective to learn something about the cultural, historical moment you’re exploring. Maybe you need some information about your characters’ history, motivations, or habits because you weren’t around to understand or observe them. Perhaps there are some family stories or sayings to add. Might you consult archives? Interview people?

   Feel free to write your re-vision plan in list, bullet-point form.

3. On one sheet of paper, in a numbered list, write a one-sentence description of each section or stanza of your piece.

   For example: 

1. Aunt's backstory, Portland

2. break up, 1997

3. definition of word "break.”

And so on…

4. Hang the list (an outline of sorts) on the wall, or place it on the floor or table, or another place that works best for you and your body.

5. Now, cut your actual piece into sections based on your list/outline (first, be sure to number each in the top right corner).

6. Tape the sections to the wall or spread them on the floor/table/chosen space, in order.

7. Stand in front of the wall or hover over the spread-out pages, and re-read your piece! Again, please do this in the way that works for your body.

8. When looking at the sections on the wall/floor/table/chosen space, do you notice any relationships between them? For example, perhaps sections 1, 3, and 9 seem connected. 

9. Circle 5-10 words that seem important, even if you don’t know why. Perhaps some of these words represent the piece’s main themes, narrative strands, images, etc. Reflect on any overlapping themes and ideas you find in your selected words. What might they tell you about the central questions of your piece?

10. See if you notice anything about your section lengths, and your sentence lengths.

11. Are any of your sections doing the same work? Is this repetition intentional? If so, what’s the purpose of the repetition? If not, can you possibly condense, combine, or cut some of those repetitive sections?

12. See if you notice anything else you hadn’t noticed before. In the margins, make any notes that occur to you as you read.

13. On the wall/floor/table/chosen space, start moving the sections out of order. What do you notice? Make note. Do this as long as it’s useful to you!

15. Take another look at your revision plan. See what you might try to achieve now, after doing these cutting and shuffling exercises.

16. You might also consider re-typing or handwriting your essay to see what you notice. 

17. You might find a partner and a quiet space, and read your pieces out loud to each other.

An essay I finished last fall, after YEARS of re-writing (with many breaks between drafts).

Stay tuned for next month’s mini-interview with a few of my favorite writers, who will be sharing their fascinating stories of how they found the openings of their books!

Please feel free to share this article with your students and fellow writers; please credit me and my Substack if you do, and encourage readers to subscribe! :)

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I don’t like publishing writing that’s “imperfect.” Writing that I haven’t been writing and rewriting, sculpting and re-sculpting, for months or years. Writing that isn’t poetic. Writing that isn’t full of metaphors and imagery and song and scene. And yet, I think I’ve tasked myself with doing that in these newsletters.

That kind of perfectionism turns up the noise.

So does feeling a bit burnt out at this point in the academic year.

I love writing. I love teaching. I am also very tired. How to manage? How to let myself be imperfect?

Last week was spring break. I had a ton of work to do, but:

• I spent an afternoon with my dear friend, Susanna Sonnenberg, who is a writer in residence at VCCA this month, and who was my mentor at Atlantic Center for the Arts last year.

• I went to my two favorite dance classes in Richmond.

• I ate dark chocolate. (Okay, I do that every day anyway.)

• I’ve been on Twitter/X more than usual, which generally turns UP the noise, but it’s because there’s been a big controversy about an essay retracted from a literary magazine called Guernica, and I found myself incredibly concerned by and invested in the topic.

This issue requires an entire post (or book?) of its own, but I’d like to share one thing it prompted me to Tweet, before I’d found and read a copy of the Guernica essay that had been pulled: “Personally, I'd like the chance to read a piece that's getting cancelled, not to forward or reinforce any dangers it contains, but to understand it, to unpack and disarm it; I think this is what Toni Morrison does so brilliantly in PLAYING IN THE DARK.”

Google “Guernica essay” and you will likely find a rabbit hole…perhaps I will write more on this later…

SOME THINGS I RECENTLY READ/WATCHED & RECOMMEND

Storytelling is necessary and urgent, now and always. I am deeply grateful to all the writers risking their lives to report from around the world, especially from Gaza. If you haven’t read it yet: “A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza” by Mosab Abu Toha is essential reading. You can also listen to it at the link above.

Grace Talusan, author of The Body Papers (highly recommend!) generously visited one of my classes last month. She was amazing. She is amazing! She reminded us of our power and importance as writers; she reminded us that it’s the writers, the storytellers, who are often silenced first.

Also last month: I got to watch these short films with some of my wonderful students:

Mass Ave by Omar Kamara, + Cadence Theatre Company's Sitelines BLM ACTION short films: Bleach by Brittany Fisher, Break by dl Hopkins, & Still Fighting by Margarette Joyner.

These films taught me more about Richmond, VA, where I’ve lived for eight months, a beautiful place with a long, painful history of enslavement and racism.

Sitelines BLM’s Project Manager, Omiyẹmi (Artisia) Green, is a Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies at William & Mary, and brought these films to campus for our Inclusive Inquiry Speaker Series. Very grateful for the work everyone did to make this happen.

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NEWS-Y STUFF:

1. One of my essays was longlisted for the Disquiet Literary Prize in Nonfiction!

So grateful to the staff for this generous read, which they gave me permission to share:

“Our readers thought it was a raw, honest portrayal of the narrator's teenage years and the abusive patterns with substances and with men that have followed her into adulthood. You masterfully deploy the detachment of the second person in excavating these painful memories. Your probing investigation...[and] the line [redacted] will stay etched in our hearts."

What a gift for them to have shared this response with me, and to have chosen my essay to be in the longlist of 35, out of 1200 submissions. I will find this essay a home eventually!

2. A flash piece (an excerpt from my memoir) was a finalist in another contest: The Pinch Journal’s Page Prize. Thankful for these reminders that my work is reaching readers, reminders to keep going.

3. “Through the Threads” was featured on Memoir Monday!

4. And, my memoir: I’ve cut twenty thousand words from the manuscript since January. TWENTY THOUSAND! More to go (I write long!) but I can really see the shape of this story. I enjoy writing most days, and I hope I never stop being grateful for that.

from last month’s reading at AWP: John Miguel Shakespear, Maria Isabelle Carlos, Caitlin McGill (me!), Caitlin Thorn, Kenyatta Rogers, Maurice Carlos Ruffin (), &

SARA DANIELE RIVERA’S THE BLUE MIMES

I got to catch up with Sara at AWP last month, and she’s just an awesome person, kind and thoughtful, and a beautiful writer. I can’t wait to read The Blue Mimes, which won the 2023 Academy of American Poets’ First Book Award, and was published by Graywolf Press!

Pre-ordering books is incredibly helpful to us writers. It tells retailers and publishers (people with the money and power to keep printing and selling our work) that our book is in demand, that people are going to buy it, that they should keep investing in our work. It’s SO helpful to pre-order books and to also order, if you can, from independent bookstores. Local independent bookstores are great, and there’s also the independent online stores: Bookshop.org and, for audiobooks, Libro!

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APRIL WRITING CLASS RECOMMENDATIONS

With the fantastic writer and teacher, Susanna Sonnenberg, three classes you can register for today (on Zoom):

from Susanna: “three classes starting April 1 -- the Monday night Prompts class on the loose theme of Money, the Tuesday night Memoir Masterclass and the Wednesday night Revision Intensive class.  You can write utterly spontaneously on the spot on Mondays, you can turn in new memoir work each week for Masterclass or (and!) you can revise the hell out of a long piece on Wednesdays. All classes are open to writers at any level, all of them are quite intimate. This makes them dynamic, fun, unpredictable. I love them all.  See my website for the dates and details.”

She is also taking new clients starting the week of March 24th, for editing, consultation and guidance.

A WRITING PROMPT

I offered this one to my students a few weeks ago:

Write a letter to someone you want to know more about, but who you cannot contact. Perhaps they are no longer alive, or no longer safe to speak to, or no longer reachable for whatever reason.

This is inspired by a book I occasionally teach: Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief by Victoria Chang.

A couple other nonfiction works written in the letter form, which you might like to read: James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Nephew,” & Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World & Me.

ONE LAST OFFERING

If you’ve read or seen a piece of art recently that really moved you, I encourage you to reach out to the artist, tell them how much it meant to you. Sometimes, they won’t have the capacity to reply, but often, these messages mean the world to us—knowing our art, which is often such a solitary act and sometimes scary to share, reached someone in a meaningful way. Just this week, I emailed three people to tell them how their work moved me. Who will you write to?

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Happy Sunday, Dear Readers!

Deep gratitude to everyone who subscribed to this newsletter!

Unsurprisingly, keeping the noise turned down while also getting this up and running has been challenging. It was so exciting that so many of you signed up; I also found myself online waaaay more than usual. Tight jaw, tense forehead, tired eyes. You know.

So how to balance desired solitude and silence with sharing and connecting online?

We’ve been talking about this in my writing classes. Here are some of the quick tips my students and I discussed, for focusing and thinking deeply without interruption:

·      leave your phone in another room; if you don’t have the privilege of extra space, leave it somewhere you can’t reach

·      don’t go to your phone first thing in the morning; try doing your writing (or other coveted activity, like meditating or walking) first; I’m a morning writer and this is key for me!

·      turn off Wi-Fi on your computer the night before

·      dance! listen to music! move your body if you can! do something other than the creative work, especially when you feel stuck

·      watch a dog roll around in the grass; watch your cat take the stairs two back feet at a time (my favorite morning activity, on my way to the kitchen for coffee)

·      really use that do not disturb option on your phone, if you have it

What are your strategies for turning down the noise and cultivating deep, creative thinking? Share yours in the comments!

For more than a year, my answer was: no social media + literally moved away from the city. In future posts, I’ll write more about what that time away gifted me, and how it was financially feasible, but for today I’ll share a few of those gifts: slower thoughts, longer focus on my creative work, and less concern with how I was perceived.

During my time away from social media and cities, I was working solely on rewriting my book. I’d had a breakthrough with my memoir and decided to turn down the noise more than I ever had, which meant hunkering down to do that work (in Fairfield, IA, and at fully-funded artist residencies like The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, NM). This was the first time in ten years that I stopped submitting my writing for publication, stopped seeing my words through the lens of others (well, as much as that’s ever possible). It was scary. I’d relied on that feeling of accomplishment, completion, and external validation for many years. But stepping away allowed me to deepen my authentic sense of self. It was really good for me to decrease the number of people validating (or not validating) my work. That validation had to come from me.

I take this wisdom with me now as I return to connecting online . (What I definitely don’t have is up-to-date social media skills; thank you to the friend who showed me how to post a link in Instagram stories! LOL).

 A New Essay

Late last fall, I returned to submitting my work. I’m excited to share an essay that was published this week, but first—

I was a guest speaker in Kat Gonso’s creative writing class at Northeastern University last week (thanks so much for inviting me!), where students asked fantastic questions. One of those questions reminded me why I’m emerging from my writing cave:

·      To help other people by sharing my work

·      To connect, especially now that I live in a new state, away from old friends

·      To allow readers to bear witness to my stories (thank you to my dear friend Jennifer Funk, author of this gorgeous poetry collection, for reminding me about the role of witness, when I was unsure if I’d ever submit my writing again).

So, with a renewed sense of purpose, here’s the first essay I’ve published in three years. Three!

You can read it here: “Through the Threads”

Shout out to my writing group, “The Nonfiction Narwhals,” for your wise suggestions on an early draft! And to Hunger Mountain Review for publishing it.

And thanks to @SarahHepola for writing Blackout, which I briefly mention in my essay.

Warning: mention of sexual trauma toward the end of the short piece.

Please feel free to share the essay & this post, and to respond in the comments. I look forward to responding to your thoughts!

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Upcoming Event: AWP Off-Site Reading, 2/10 @ 3pm

I’ll be connecting with friends old and new, and working to turn down the noise, at AWP next week—a VERY big writing conference, loud and overwhelming, but also instructive and inspiring.

I’ll be reading my work on Saturday, 2/10, at 3pm. If you’re headed to AWP, join us!

Okay, one last set of quick tips! If you’ll be at the conference (any conference really) and aren’t drinking alcohol (like me), here are some tips for having fun and learning a lot at while staying clear:

• Just because you’re not drinking doesn’t mean you can’t go to parties! Parties can be extra fun (and fascinating) when you’re not drinking; have a backup alcohol-free drink of choice on hand in case you get antsy. Real talk: you will probably, eventually, be less anxious without the alcohol!

• Phone a friend or skip the party if it’s just feeling like too much. Comment below when in doubt! I’ll happily reply when I can.

• JOMO. The joy of missing out! It’s incredibly empowering to say no, rather than fear you’re missing out. Imagine your bed, your cozy cup of tea, your cat cuddled beside you…or perhaps your favorite book or TV show.

• REMEMBER HOW GOOD THE MORNING IS GONNA FEEL!!! Nothing like it. Truly. Thank your body; your body thanks you.

Thank you for reading this far, friends! I wish you a quiet morning if you’re relishing some solitude, and an energizing one if you’ve already ventured out into the world.

Please post any questions you have in the comments and I’ll answer them (and this applies not just to my students reading this!).

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A dopamine hit for the road:

With gratitude,

Caitlin

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Hello, Dear Readers!

Welcome to Turning Down the Noise, a space for quieting external voices and turning up the volume on our authentic selves.

Turning down the noise has been key to finding my story, my voice, my art, and my most authentic, healthy self.

My plan for Turning Down the Noise is to send a free, monthly(ish) newsletter about these sorts of topics:

• Tips for building and sustaining an artistic practice, and turning down the noise

• New essays I’m publishing

• News about my in-progress memoir

• Insights from my year and a half away from “the noise” of social media, submitting, & teaching

• Writing prompts

• Craft techniques I learned from writing my memoir, from teaching, and from other artists

• Insights from authors visiting my writing classes

• Occasional writing class offerings

• What I’m reading

• Dreams as sources of writing inspiration and self-knowledge

• Submitting your work for publication

• Wading through the rejections and celebrating the acceptances

• How to take care of ourselves when writing the hard stuff (expect cat photos; see above)

• How, for me, being free of alcohol & other drugs is central to turning down the noise

• How writing conferences & residencies can be even more productive & fun without the alcohol

• Reducing shame and increase authenticity

• Finding community and joy

If you’re already subscribed to Turning Down the Noise, thank you! If not, you can subscribe for free, and get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.

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If you are so inclined, you can also support my work by upgrading to a paid subscription, and by sharing my newsletter.

I hope you’ll leave comments and start conversations and build community. I hope you’ll ask questions and offer wisdom. Please be sure to respect and honor each other’s opinions and identities, if you do choose to engage (again, I hope you will!). I love building community, sharing my work with readers, and paying it forward. Thank you for being here!

About Me:

For nearly a decade, I’ve been teaching creative writing and literature: at Emerson College, GrubStreet, Harvard University, and several other Boston-area colleges, as well as at shelters, addiction recovery and post-incarceration centers, and libraries, for a non-profit very close to my heart, Writers Without Margins. In Fall 2023, I began a full-time position at William & Mary in Virginia, as an Associate Teaching Professor of Creative Writing. Dream job!

During that decade of teaching, I’ve also been publishing essays and working on a Miami-based, coming-of-age memoir: about being abused, starting when I was sixteen, by a man with a tenuous tether to reality. For six years, he controlled me, and I hid the truth from my family. This book is about losing and reclaiming myself and my family, and finally resisting silences; it’s about the human desire to believe in the unseen.

I believe that writing has the power to help us heal (and I believe in the neuroscience that supports this). I believe in vulnerability and authenticity as a route to freedom and joy. I believe in resisting silences.

Stay tuned for my latest essay, which will be published in Hunger Mountain Review in February 2024.

Thank you again for being here! I look forward to sharing more soon.

With gratitude,

Caitlin (and Nietzsche, the cat who feeds me dopamine)

—

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