From Molly:

I first decided to start teaching how to write about trauma when, after Risk! put my story on their “Best of Risk! Podcast,” a stranger I’ll call Kit went to great lengths to find my email address and sent me this message:

Your story is so great. To be honest, I heard your story and was floored. I grew up in an alcoholic home. Now I’m looking at all the ways I turned wounds into armor, and how this armor both serves me and holds me back. Like being able to be really vulnerable. I’m learning in AA that there are a lot of people with these stories, and that the world won’t end if we share them with each other. In fact, hearing other people with similar stories is incredibly helpful, healing, and profound.

And then a few more people reached out and thanked me and started to tell me their stories about childhood trauma. I realized that there are a lot of folks out there who want to write about these hard experiences and don’t know where to start.

I thought about all the resistance I’d encountered when trying to tell the story of asking my dad for nine apologies when I was 22. The story of writing him a letter asking for these apologies is now the basis for my award-winning memoir Nine Grudges: The Spiteful Origins of the Happiest Dyke on Earth. But before I had these successes, I had to struggle with how to tell a story about childhood trauma and I learned some really important skills that I’ll teach for my FBC Creative Studio: Using Agency and Comedy to Write About Trauma on August 31st, 2026.

To find out a little more about my journey in understanding the process of telling a story about childhood trauma, please read my essay below, Y.A. Kafka. I hope after reading the essay, you’ll be on board for a lesson in using the techniques of narrative agency and comedy to tell a story of conflict, starting with an everyday conflict, what we’ll call the Garden Variety Aggravation Incident. I hope you’ll be inspired to join me for the workshop.

Register for the Creative Studio

Y.A. Kafka

Finding Agency in Childhood Trauma Narratives

In 2007, I attended a writers retreat with the specific goal of writing about my childhood trauma, but the creative process was too painful for me. I couldn’t write at all. I was unable to sleep or eat. With my own body growling at me like a cornered dog, I stopped working on the family memoir I wanted to write. I gave up.

Meanwhile, over the years, my students kept at it. Since Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) such as abuse and neglect impact up to 60% of American children, it didn’t surprise me that many of my college Creative Nonfiction students wanted to workshop memoir chapters about childhood trauma. What has surprised me is how much I have learned, and how much we can all learn, from these beginner efforts.

During one perplexing workshop, my class reviewed two students’ chapters, both of which contained scenes of parents physically abusing young children. My class and I tried to determine why one chapter engaged us as readers while the other left everyone stumped. In one student’s chapter, a father choked the narrator’s ten-year-old brother. In the other, a drunk father woke his grade-school children in the middle of the night and beat them. So, given the similar content, why did one piece find an interested audience while the other was impossible to read?

Consider this scene: the nine-year-old girl who watched her father choke her brother waits until she is alone in the house and phones Child Protective Services. As readers, my students and I suspected the system would fail this small-child narrator. We knew, in the best case scenario, the upheaval of foster care results in a negligible improvement of a child’s circumstances. We knew that interacting with the government is traumatic and often makes matters worse. We knew that foster parents themselves can be abusive. This phone-call scene broke our hearts.

The girl on the phone with CPS assumes that there is a rational order to this life that adults pretend to control. She is doing what the adults have told her to do and thinks that the adults will help her. We readers know what she doesn’t: she’s in for a long, hard road ahead. All of this complexity made the story engaging. We wanted to find out what happens next.

Yet the appeal of this scene is rooted in a more basic sensation. We, as readers, were simply relieved that the protagonist takes action. Any action at all.

The protagonist in the other student’s essay, the girl with the drunk father waking her in the middle of the night, doesn’t take action. Or, rather, the writer of the essay never allowed her protagonist to take action.

The writer didn’t locate her younger self’s agency in the memory and never wrote it into the story. I would argue that this protagonist’s action must be there somewhere in the memory. It might be a subtle action. A small action. It might occur after the violent scene. But I bet it’s there. I would argue that all victims take some kind of action, no matter how small.

The scenes of this drunk father waking his children in the middle of the night had sufficient sensory detail. There was plenty of show-don’t-tell. But it’s difficult for a reader to ingest eight pages of helpless suffering. The abuser took all the agency of the scene. The story followed a victim instead of a protagonist. It’s too painful to read a scene in which a child only endures violence. Or rather, let’s get to the active voice here: a parent inflicts violence on a child.

Many beginning writers addressing abuse get stuck in this glue trap of victim mode. The initial instinct makes sense. First, we record the experience because often we’ve been gaslit out of it. Someone has tried to convince us it hasn’t happened, and so we record the horrible details to confirm we are not crazy. For a moment, the only story we have is a set of horrible details.

The next step, finding agency, is a difficult one to take.

An active protagonist strategy for writing about abuse seems, at first, like advice we’ve heard before about traditional narrative structure. The protagonist must want something. The protagonist must take action. The reader wants to follow a story that asks the question, Will this narrator get what they want?

Now, try applying this strategy to your own childhood trauma. That’s when things get tricky.

As we all know, kids don’t have much power. Their lives are controlled by adult rules, and they are dependent upon adults for their survival. They don’t have as many choices as adults do. This disempowerment is one reason why we are warned against writing about childhood trauma.

No one wants to hear stories whose entire action is children being victimized. I’d say the only less popular topic is animals being hurt.

So, there is this cultural taboo against telling these all-too-common stories of childhood abuse and neglect, and then there are the many would-be writers hanging onto their horrible details, intimidated by both the taboo and the pain of the details themselves.

When I was writing my one-woman show in 2015, reviewing my horrible details was so painful for me that I almost chickened out. I felt like I was back at that writer’s retreat again. And then I remembered the phone call scene from my own student’s story. So, I mined my memories for agency.

Here’s the thing: agency can be a small act. It can be an act of imagination. (Think of the character Precious in Sapphire’s Push, enduring her abuse by imagining herself as a well-dressed celebrity posing for the paparazzi.) Agency can be as simple as getting back up. Or walking away. Agency can be a revenge fantasy. Try to find something!

Go back into the memory and ask, what did I want? What did I do to deal with this?

In one of my memories I was using for my show, my dad made my brothers and me maintain stress positions in our living room in the middle of the night. The director of my one-woman show, Christen Clifford, asked me, “How did you get out of the situation?”

I reviewed the memory repeatedly and realized it was my older brother who saved us. As an athletic ten-year-old, I’d meant to outlast my dad, physically. I’d wanted to keep my arms outstretched as Dad ordered until he was worn out. My older brother, asthmatic and unathletic, eventually dropped his arms … and walked away. Miraculously, this approach worked. My dad gave up on the whole thing and went back to bed.

My brother’s action seems passive at first. Pacifist. And it’s an appropriate one for my brother, who, as a recovering heroin addict and high school dropout, is one of the most well-read people I know. In our twenties, he’d talk about how two of his favorite literary characters were Candide and Bartleby.

My brother “preferred not to” hold a stress position.

Another moment of agency for my show was a revenge fantasy. One time, after my dad’s rage had ruined a family holiday, my brothers and I planned to kill him once he was old and feeble, to push him off a cliff in his wheelchair. When I realized that this children’s murder fantasy was darkly humorous, my one-woman show improved. Whenever my narrator was caught in a horrible situation, and her fantasy life reverted to the murder plot, my audience found some comic relief.

I’m not saying you should find your protagonist’s agency so that you’ll have a traditionally-structured story. I’m saying you should do it because once you find this seed of action in your memory, the memory might be less painful for you to look at. And once you can really look at it, you can write it. And when you write this action into your narrative, your story will be more rewarding for readers.

Once, a listener who heard my story on the “Best of Risk! Podcast” went to great lengths to dig up my personal email online and send me a “thank you” for going public with the taboo subject matter of childhood violence. She told me the details resonated with her own life. Soon afterward, several other strangers found me on social media to express similar sentiments. Agency is what made this connection with my audience possible, because it made the story less painful and more hopeful for those who had their own trauma backstories.

But what about readers who had sunnier childhoods and don’t carry trauma histories? The lucky 40%.

Well, let’s get back to the little girl on the phone to CPS. Her action expands the universality of the story. The reader is no longer witnessing a single figure suffering through an abusive dynamic. This is no longer the story of one little girl in one little family. Protagonist agency allowed this writer to emphasize an unsettling fact: our culture’s childhood trauma stories are not private anomalies but common societal failures that implicate all of us.

If we had merely witnessed scenes of this father abusing his kids, we wouldn’t want to read the story at all. This single phone call grants readers a direct line to our most serious doubts about our culture.

None of our truisms are true anymore.

Parents protect their children, we want to insist. Well, maybe that comforting world view is untrue too much of the time. We have systems in place to help abused kids. Well, maybe that’s not true either, folks.

Here we are, suddenly transported to Y.A. Kafka. Or rather, we find Kafka’s dystopian bureaucracies in a children’s story. Curious George Goes to Foster Care. The Bad News Bears with little Joseph K.’s loading the bases.

So, yes, finding agency in your childhood trauma story is good for the story’s universality. It’s healthy to disturb your reader with a rigorous yet bearable destruction of the status quo. It’s healing to turn a victim into a protagonist.

Agency is also good for you as a writer. And a human being. Finding my brother’s action in my stress-position story was a game changer for me. If I hadn’t found my brother’s agency in this piece, not only would I have been unable to tell a good story, I would have been unable to function well enough to make anything at all. And despite the resistance of those stubbornly upholding the taboo against childhood trauma narratives, we should make this art.

It’s been said that living well is the best revenge. I’d say that writing well is better yet.

This article was originally published Dec. 3, 2024 on Pipeline Artists and edited by the great Jeanne Veillette Bowerman. Thanks, Jeanne!

Click here to pre-order Nine Grudges!

Prompt: Think of a moment, an event, that you or your character regrets. Write about how that moment shaped you or your character. OR write about how you or your character would have done things differently and how that would have shaped your or your character differently.

Notes from the author: I had been thinking about writing this in a few weeks. I had some thoughts and a simple outline written on a Google doc, but something deeper was missing. During the writing time at the Cozy Morning Author Society, I (for the first time ever!) left the given writing prompt aside and went back to the piece that had been with me for a while. I shared what I had written with the group, and my amazingly brilliant fellow writers gave me such deep and meaningful feedback that I was able to write the concluding part of it right after the writing session. It felt easy and it felt right. Perfectly right. It was one of the most powerful moments that proved to me, yet again, what I had started witnessing: us writers – we need each other, we need to write with each other, and we need to read to each other. Thank you, Thursday crew.

Munch, Despair, Delight, and What One Gets to See

I am standing in front of a pastel version of The Scream at the Munch Museum in Oslo, and what I first see is an oddly shaped human-like subject gasping with delight at a shifting landscape before dusk.

I look at the colors, the bold lines, the intriguing central figure, and the two others at the left corner behind. The whole piece captivates me in an unusual way. It brings forth some strange admiration, unusual beauty, peculiar oneness. I see this fuzzy figure, its open mouth holding back a voice, perhaps silenced or toned down, but surely not a scary shriek. It’s not that. It’s something else, something I can’t quite explain.

Perhaps its jaw drops at the sight of the colors stretching over the Oslofjord. Perhaps it notices the passers-by and through them the passing of time and with that the change of the day, and with that…What would a person carry within, with that face, at sunset, at such a place?

What an astounding stream of thoughts, I think. The piece of art itself is not what surprises me (how many times has one seen motifs of The Scream!) — it is my interpretation that is unexpected. It’s empty of the projections of angst and despair that surround every read of The Scream.

Perhaps it’s not despair, I think. What if it’s delight?

This ticklish thought stirs my curiosity and doesn’t let me leave. I continue to stare at The Scream in the dark museum room for some time. It is approximately 2 p.m. on a Thursday, a few hours before my scheduled flight from Torp Sandefjord to Skopje.

***

The Torp-Ekspressen bus pulls over at Oslo Sentralstasjon, and I see my friend waiting for me on a bench inside the building. I already feel her beautiful energy even on the other side of the glass door. Moni has this magnetic aura that leaves people who meet her wanting to be her friend. I felt that way when we first met in Cape Cod a decade ago and luckily for me, I am now one of her many many friends. Moni does have so many friends all over the world and here in Oslo where she has been living and hosting people like me for about two years.

As we ride the metro from the bus station to her apartment, we start talking about everything and beyond. Our conversations rarely take a pause in my week-long visit. We have so much to share — so much to cry about, to laugh about, so much to reflect on and so much to hope for. We both can start and extend talks that bring a geyser of emotions and then move on to venture and explore.

Moni introduces me to the city she loves. In Oslo, she shows me buildings, squares, nature bits, food spots, islands, beaches, viewpoints, forests, lakes. She introduces me to people, very cool people. I (finally) meet Moni’s sister. I meet her Oslo friends. I meet people that her friends bring to the gatherings we plan as we go. They all show me how they gather and how they have fun and I love it. I note that nothing we do has been preplanned ahead of (weeks-long!) time. I love that even more.

The summer is warm. The days are long. Oslo is laid-back, slow.

So much shared time! I am content and calm, and I once again realize that I have a treasure of people scattered around the world, living rich lives and inviting me in them, showing me around and letting me be part of something. I have had a heightened crave to be a part of something.

My time in Oslo is a delight.

I see stunning city sunsets at 10:20 p.m.

I walk, take the metro, take the bus, take the tram, swim, run, hike with my friend. We talk and we keep quiet. We are comfortable either way.

I participate in conversations about politics and culture, literature and education, countries and lifestyle, work and leisure. None of these conversations were scheduled or timed. None of this feels rushed.

I am invited to people’s homes. I am asked questions. People get curious about me. Tell us about this season of your life, they say. What’s life in the US like now? What do you write? Where are you going next? When are you going to come back? Their curiosity is genuine.

Then a few of us take the metro and take the bus and take the tram and sail on a boat, eat fruit, make a barbecue.

We make plans. We change plans. We romanticize the moments that are being lived, each of us gazing at the shifting landscapes, gasping as if seeing the sunset for the first time. Quiet or loud, either way.

Delight.

***

The dark museum room is almost empty of people now. I lean a little closer.

So much held in a painting. So much stored in a piece of art. So much carried in the heart of the creator, no less in the heart of the beholder.

Are you seeing through me, little odd figure? Are you trying to tell me how it must be nice to be seeing the same landscape as you, but with people instead of alone, to witness and be witnessed, to reciprocate curiosity, to start friendships and, for a while, to release anxiety?

Are you trying to tell me that one could scream from despair and another from delight, and that I may have been you and you may or may not have been me (I wonder what life you have lived!) and that what I notice in you, in this painting, may have more to do with me than to do with how it’s supposed to be read, how it’s supposed to be?

All I am trying to tell you is that from the other side there is more than one way to see.

Munch, Edvard. The Scream. 1893. Oil, tempera and pastel on cardboard. 91 x 73 cm.

Aleksandra Lazoroska has been rediscovering the joy and love in (and of) writing after years of not dedicating herself to one of the things she adores. She mostly writes personal essays and travelogues.

Prompt: What is in a palliative phase in your life or your character’s life? (The palliative care relieves symptoms without curing it.) Might be physical. Might not.

We are going forth to love and learn in the world, and we do this not from a place of refuge but from a place of wholly living, existence, experience, beingness.

It is a great stampede ahead of us, which is not to say we are running through life blindly, having been spurred on by fear, but we are amongst the masses, living their lives—day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute.

Each and every one of us choosing to act or not to act. To be or not to be. Choice abounds. And that is the point at which palliative care begins.

It is a choice to give or to receive. To allow or be allowed. To lean in or to lean away. To turn or to stay. Who takes care of whom or what? When? Who receives? Why or why not?

It is all a matter of choice, and there are no wrong or bad or good or right choices. Choices are like directional signs. Traffic signs. Instead of turn left or stop here. Yield. It is more accurately I am yielding here, I am merging here, I am turning left here. I am stopping here. Choice is the direction you choose to go in.

So many people think / feel / live the idea that if I choose to go here, do this, say that, it is a one-way street. The only way is that way. When any step can be back tracked, turned, re-traced, stopped, changed in infinite ways.

It is only in the choosing that you, each of you, know what you want to take care of in this moment or that. Or not at all.

There is no curing choice. Choice may or may not change the thing that prompted the choice. So often, what is really required, is to understand what is underneath the symptom. It’s not yesterday’s yes or no. Today’s agreement or conflict.

What lurks? What happened last month, last year, when you were a child, or when you entered relationship? What happened then? Days later? Where is that place that itches, burns, tugs, weighs? The place that is under the skin of the symptom?

Whatever it is, it is catalyzing the choice today, which you may or may not understand. So try, dear friends, to understand what’s beneath the skin of the symptom. Dig deep. Leave no cell unturned. Ravage yourself until you’ve looked at all the things you’ve been carrying around. That’s the choice to care about what you choose to do or not to do. That’s the way to understand the direction you’re choosing to explore next. You are the great frontier. Explore within.

Yes, friend, this is my note for today.

image by Magnific

Simone Gers is a writer and quantum shaman who lives on an island in the Pacific Northwest.

Prompt: There is a mercy of selfhood, and an ability to understand previous versions of the self.

Visual Prompt: Choose a single subject (not human) and draw different versions of it, imbuing them with some element of sameness through different incarnations of their lives.

This prompt transports me back to Tuesday’s Tarot Tuesday after the eclipse, a question/prompt was asked about abandonment and what leaped to mind is/was self-abandonment. And then I thought this is the most easily fixable type of abandonment because it’s under our own influence. On the other hand, sometimes people think this kind of thing is the hardest to change. It’s certainly easier to change our own abandonment of self than our perceived abandonment by others, isn’t it? Can we control another person at all in any way? We can change our perception of other’s behavior and our own. It’s not maybe easy, the first step requires recognizing that what we are doing is self-abandonment. The many ways our inner critics, dictators, demons talk to us and obscure the truth, the truth of love being the organizing force in the world which means yes it does, that it applies to us, to each of us (self-claiming.)

What is the opposite of self-abandonment? I asked- the answer came in clearly - self-claiming. Yes, let’s claim ourselves. If not us, who will? If no one else can claim us in the way we can claim ourselves then all our younger versions and past selves are truly abandoned – to the vultures of inner demons, critics, haters, nemesis and that is truly sad.

We can turn towards our selves, all of us, all our past selves, all 358 Cassandra’s ago and say yes I will claim you as a human on this earth. As such, you are divinely loved, comprised of stardust blessed by the sunshine and moon rising and falling, waxing and waning.

The power of even considering turning towards ourselves with kindness and compassion is so powerful. What if we had a claim check, for ourselves like when we used to check coats places and get a number. Or even bags and then we’d take it and get our coat or bag back. What if like going to a deli we picked a number in line and when it was our turn we embraced the younger selves that corresponded. Yes one dose of self forgiveness and love and a ham sandwich to go.

The Deli of Self-Acceptance founded on the concept of claiming every part of our self as the first step toward salvation. Not in the sense of organized religion. Salvation as part of the act in re-claiming our selves free of guilt, shame, criticism for our very existence.

We are brilliant by design, we are flooded with genius in every cell, in every pulsation, in every tear drop, bead of sweat, finger nail and drop of blood. Amen.

Dawn

I am fascinated when a word can be two things at once like when a puddle puddles. When I think of a puddle, I think of innocent curiosity – the splash, infinite tadpoles in the shape of question marks, and dawn’s beautiful, rippled reflection. We speak of the child inside us all the time, we tell ourselves that we need to advise the child, but when do we wait and allow the child to gift us wisdom? Think of what puddles your memory.

Day

Another of mine is the purpose of the “ancient” sundial. One afternoon, I was walking with the Arizona sun behind me, and I realized I forgot my hair tie. The wind swept like an ancestral bird flew over me and my hair caught flame. I remember how languid my hair’s shadow stamped the dirt. I swear I could hear light crackle. And then, I realized time is not a clock, it is light and the absence of.

Dusk

I novel over tornadoes. In the evenings beneath monsoon, I would stare at the horizon and imagine how one would dance on the sentence. I dream of the eye, the peace surrounded by chaos and pray. How the words translate emotion into air, so that I can breathe. Prayer and song as poetry to recenter when the horses graze and the moisture is siphoned by clouds until burst. Meditate on your position in the wind, the wind, the wind, the wind.

Night

Truck beds, canyon howls, and moonlit refraction from broken liquor bottles create an ethereal sacred space for me, personally. What awakens yourselves? This is the time we bring ourselves back to where we are before we dream and imagine again. We feel our feet dangle from Ford truck beds or small-town creek cliffsides. We return to the bed to wet it with piss, sweat, or new life so we can remember our physical selves. And then it will be dawn again.

On writing:

I believe in the power of fragmented memories and curating them to create what will carry pulse and sweat. We will dial light and its absence to remember time or memory can always be sifted like finding your favorite line in your favorite book.

Who? What? When? Where? The answer is always yourselves. What would your title be?

What to bring:
You. You are your favorite book.

Only a fairytale will do for such a task.

Originally advertising her classes with a sandwich board at a farmer’s market, Frankie Rollins taught creative writing in import stores, living rooms, coffeeshops, a florist shop, K-12 classrooms, and college classrooms, traditional and online. Frankie published Do You Feel Like Writing? A Creative Guide to Artistic Confidence (2023), and two works of fiction, The Sin Eater & Other Stories (2013), and The Grief Manuscript (2020). In 2023, Frankie left academia to found the Fifth Brain Collective, an online space of radiant warmth, permission, and inspiration for writers at all levels of experience.

Once upon a time, a woman left a village. It was a very talky, very driven village. People loved to tell each other what they thought about what they should do about everything. You should find better shoes. You must boil that longer. You have to add this herb. Go speak to the man in a distant land and ask him what he thinks about your belly ache. You should. You must. You have to. Be this. Do that.

In this village, every household cast bells to sing the song of their living. They melted things down, added various found objects, shaped bells based on people they had known and experiences they had lived through or imagined. Bells might represent grief or joy or fury or confusion or tiny little revelations of existence. These bells were exquisite, lumpy, shapely, half-formed, broken, wonderful, biffed-up, unique, fascinating, with an unbelievable range of sounds or half-sounds or un-sounds.

There were Bell Councils that ruled the village and ranked the bells. No one knew exactly where these councils lived or met, not really, though there were rumors. The villagers could not see or name the members of these councils but they genuflected to them all the same. Everyone wanted the councils to approve of their bells. The villagers talked about the councils constantly. What the councils thought. What the councils might say or believe. What the councils had theoretically said. What the councils liked or wanted. What the councils prioritized. What the silence of the councils might mean. What was the highest order of bells that the councils would admire. What bells were too low brow. What bells should, must, be, and do. Villagers developed rituals and belief systems about the councils and the bells. They came up with strategies to please the councils. They scorned the bells that made them uncomfortable and sometimes they made a bell maker weep. The villagers labored away in their huts hoping to someday wow these councils, win awards from these councils, see themselves represented in accolades from these councils and maybe someday serve on these councils. The councils, meanwhile, remained both invisible and ever present.

The woman had different ideas in her own hut. She kept forgetting about the Bell Councils. She giggled while she made some of her bells. She sang while she made bells. She danced around the bell-making fire. She talked aloud to herself while she made bells. She made weird bells. She made beautiful bells. Some of her bells were sorry misshapen thuds. When that happened, she shrugged and melted them back down. Other villagers told her she was fucking up her bells. They told her what the council wanted in a bell. They told her that council members would certainly disapprove of her bells. They told her what other villagers were doing with their bells. She said, Okay. Okay. Okay. And then she went back into her hut and lined up her bells and loved on them.

One day, she asked some questions:

When she asked these questions aloud, the villagers told her, you should ask the Bell Councils.

She said, “Where are they? Which one do I ask? What should I hope they will say?”

The villagers were annoyed with her and left her to her own devices.

She thought about how bells were nothing without the villagers. How bells were just dead material without the manipulation of the villagers’ eyes and hands and minds and creativity and desires. She knew that bells could create structure inside a day. Open up an awareness. Break through a dull moment. Bring a whole way of thinking out of thin air. Rattle up a sudden memory. And she thought about how a bell’s sound wasn’t one single sound, but a cluster of reverberations that hung in the air after the first strike was made. And how who struck the bell and how hard depending on the shape of the bell and the intention of the striker would definitely shape the sound, a new sound, another sound, an additional sound, possibly a version of sound that had never been heard before.

This villager fell so madly in love with bells that she simply could not live within the confines of the Bell Councils any longer. She spoke of this to everyone and a few people were like, “You know what? I really like my bells, too. Just as they are. Without submitting them for review to any of the Bell Councils. Let’s go somewhere else.” Together, they decided it would be okay, and not even just okay, but totally possible and thrilling for them to go out and create a new village where bell makers made bells without comment from outside. Where people came to each other’s huts and celebrated the various and wondrous and inventive and stunning ways that the bell makers, especially freed up of the confines of an invisible and limiting bell council, stretched and spun and wove and threw and captured and decorated a myriad of bells.

They used the bells to create a new sense of time, one which worked more with long stretches, like years, and celebrated the longevity of each bell-maker’s learning arc. They acknowledged that there were things they had learned in the shadow of the council but they swore to share and teach each other what they knew, to relish creativity instead of competition. The ding ding ding of a freshly made bell made them all gasp and cry out, “Woo!” This new village, small at first, grew bigger as one by one other bell makers came to set up their huts and their own bell casting places and the village began to hum and tinkle and shine and toll and ring ring ring with joy and new developments were unfolded in the bell casting and these villagers found ways to make themselves and each other happy and they forgot, largely, that the Bell Councils even existed, and they made agreements about when to be quiet and think and when to ring the fuck out of their newest bells and it was really something to behold.

PROMPT: What is a scene or group that best illustrates/upholds some essence of you, your character, or a landscape?

Join us. We have three weekly memberships on different days. They each follow the same model of writing and sharing but each day represents a different group of writers (varied genres, always) and there is a lot of “Woo-ing” going on!

Frankie Rollins spent a sabbatical writing this book. Writing this book made her fierce about how writing could be encouraged. Being that fierce made her brave. She threw in her academic towel to coach and lead writers into their own power in the Fifth Brain Collective.

Join us as we celebrate three magical, inspirational years of the Fifth Brain Collective, where each writer learns to honor their own brain and ideas first, above all others.

Here’s the opening excerpt from Frankie’s book, Do You Feel Like Writing? A Creative Guide to Artistic Confidence. We hope it will remind you of your own beautiful capacities.

”Once I was getting ready to move and I found a box full of tiny notebooks from my purses over the years. The notebooks were desiccated from pages torn out, ink-smeared, ratty, and dusty. I almost took the box over to a trash bag without looking inside any of the notebooks. There were handfuls of them with curled edges, a hundred different colors and shapes. They were so light; how could they contain anything meaningful? I opened one and started reading. Sentences snatched from conversations, character sketches, illegible notes scribbled in dark movie theaters. Fervent wishes, lines of poems, epiphanies. Grocery lists. Scraps of real moments translated into fiction. Phone numbers floating without names. What I was going to throw away, this trash, was gathered evidence of my writing mind, my imagination. What I was going to throw away was essentially mine, essentially me.

What evidence will you leave of your imaginative life, of your own particular brain?

One of the reasons we don’t inherently know whether to trash or treasure our ideas is because movies and books often portray an artistic person accessing a muse from outside of their body. This implies that the most amazing gifts for a writer come from the outside, rather than the inside. The idea of an outside muse implies that we have no control over our writing, can’t access it when we want to, or that we could even lose it. This isn’t so. Every writer has a part of their brain working for them during conscious and unconscious hours, gathering, sifting, and sorting. I call this meaning-maker the fifth brain. Your fifth brain belongs to you. It translates the juices of your observations, churns the connections, isolates the truth of what you want to say. It’s working inside of you right now. You are the muse you seek.

You may not know, consciously, where to go with an idea, how to write it. But way back there in your fifth brain, there is a little animal part of you formulating the work you need to, want to, must make. In Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande says writers should “hitch your unconscious mind to your writing arm.” Trusting the fifth brain is a way to do that, to trust that what rises in your mind is where you should begin. There’s no other factor. You can start there, with your first idea.

The fifth brain is a metaphor for ease of accessing imagination, harnessing material, and trusting in each writer’s singularity. The fifth brain works in the unconscious, making connections. When I came up with this metaphor, years ago teaching a creative writing class, I mentioned that a student might trust her fifth brain and was met with half a class of blank stares and half a class nodding and scribbling down a note. I stopped and offered a definition that I only barely understood at the time. I said that it seemed to me that a writer’s mind has several components, like a cow’s four-part ruminant stomach, each to do a separate part of the writing. (Regarding the biologically unsavory nature of this metaphor, I would note that food transforms into energy just as our brain’s intake of information transforms into the energy of ideas, similarly without thought.) We exist in a constant sea of internal emotions, settings, relationships, memories, and associations. The most crucial part of the brain, the fifth brain, is the one that synthesizes all these streams of information. These streams make up your imagination and it’s up to you to trust that your imagination is singular to you and that if you want to write, you have what you need to do so.

Some writers are accomplished at blocking the fifth brain: over-intellectualizing, allowing real or imagined editors’ harsh critiques, dismissing fresh ideas as not-being-worthy, imagining your failure ahead of time. These struggles result in frustration for the writer. Instead of this fretting, you can trust that it’s important to write. You can get out of the way. There’s no work to reach the fifth brain. It’s already in there. All you have to do is start. Write a sentence about yearning. Write a sentence about something you see when you look up from this book. Write a sentence about one of your internal organs. . .

Writing takes some difficult skills, such as leaning in when you want to back away, confidence in the face of vulnerability, knowing how to experiment and trusting that you won’t die before you get a chance to revise. You’ll fail and in failing, develop a deeper intimacy with your writing. You can learn to love the writing more than a dream of success for the writing. You can learn that the act of writing is success. You can write a successful word, a sentence, an entire text. You can be proud of any part of your writing. Even one perfectly selected word can be successful. After all, this is all that writing is, one selected word after another. This pride can help you see where you want to take a text.

It can be embarrassing to be proud of something you’ve written. After all, what if later you decide it isn’t any good, or someone else says it isn’t any good? That’s okay. Love it in the moment. Just as you can’t love a friend or partner or a child based on their every action in every moment, you can let love for your writing build over time, in small moments and gestures. Writers must risk that love to finish writing something.”

Prompt:
What evidence will you leave of your imaginative life, of your own particular brain? Make of list of people you’ve affected. Things you’ve made. Writing. Dancing. Art. Moments you’ve shared. Anything that comes to mind. Keep going. Write more things. Let this list get broad and tall.

Trust that the ideas that come up are what you should pay attention to. Don’t question or belittle them. Write them down. We LOVE “humble brags” and don’t require them to be humble. Please put what you write in the chat. We’ll read every one and celebrate.

Prompt: There is a hovering uncertainty on multiple horizons. What words or phrases do you or your character use about uncertainty? What is the mood that uncertainty provokes?

Notes from the author: Most of my writing is for live storytelling performances, so I write as if I am speaking to everyone in the Zoom. I don’t think about craft or clarity. I transcribe thoughts as quickly as I can. FYI: Hope is my therapist and the other characters are Fifth Brain Collective members.

Distress tolerance.

Resilience.

Or worst of all, grit. (The most American and most fucked up aspiratory trait as ross gay would say, or something along those lines)

Lean into the not knowing

Practice radical acceptance (Charles, did either of us settle on whether we could read that, Radical Acceptance, on paper or audiobook ... is there a way to be less annoyed by tara brach?)

Hope (therapist, not thing) knows I don’t buy radical acceptance.

Even though people try to get all teach-y and semantical: “acceptance is not approval.” Acceptance is not approval.

I call bullshit.

Do I observe that these are my surroundings? This is my current body temperature give/take? Do I know that I cannot eat very much during daylight hours? Can I track my lack of sleep? Note how often I’ve taken the uncontrolled substances that do nothing (I pill-pop out of hope (thing, not therapist).

Do I observe those things?

Yes.

Do I approve of them, no. and also not the question.

Do I accept them, radically or otherwise?

No.

Because what I observe is not what I expected.

My favorite statistic, remember, chi-square (χ²)

A statistical test to determine if what you have measured (people of a certain height, dead fish, children with birth defects, humans with long covid) if the quantity of what you have measured differs from what you expected to observe.

So if everybody’s 6’2” or if all the fish are dead or if only 2 children have birth defects or if everyone and/or no one has long covid….the chi-square (χ²) is statistically significant.

It means something is amiss.

Something is wrong.

So we have a statistically significant chi-square on my hands.

I’m not gonna grass-is-always-greener or I-couldda-been-a-contender (I dunno what movie that’s from but you get the gist. I do, at least) or ….I-had-so-much-potential.

Except maybe I am, a little.

I didn’t expect any of this. Except for being an aunt, which I never really truly actually thought about until dad came around the corner and said SEAN’S HERE!

And my heart exploded. I mean we’re talking fireworks. It didn’t beat faster or weirder, it actually grew two or 20 sizes. Just like the Grinch’s (his grew two sizes at the end, right? When he got the spirit of Christmas even though he couldn’t be what the Whos in Whoville needed him to be?).

My heart exploded because I was not expecting what I observed (see, it can go both ways. Pleasant surprise. Novelty.).

But this was not the plan.

And also

And also

I am so content joyful even happy right now

And I do mean happy, which I have argued to various audiences, captive or not, is a dumb thing to aim for. I mean really pointless. Happy is a flash a commercial for a product. Happy is unsustainable untenable and if known for too long, unbelievable.

Joy, on the other hand (why are we always trying to hold and divide so much shit in our hands? Get a purse! Backpack! Knapsack!)

Joy hums. Joy widens the window of tolerance.

I’m joyful because I wrote for two hours with strangers before I came to you, here.

Two hours with people up-front and honest about how goddamn hard it all is.

And the most beautiful words came out (they were beautiful, I’m owning that)

And I had this huge relevation which is that I never open the fucking blinds. Never pull back the curtains.

Why not?

And, Sandra, I need to automate a thank you text. Every Sunday at 4pm, does that work for you? A thank you for bringing ross gay into my life. This is shape-shifting-shit. The words, the arrangement, the things noticed, the looking to nature for okayness in spite of it all.

So I’m nervous about going to write with strangers (props to all of us for doing that here).

I’m nervous and they say we’re going to write poems because I guess it was a poetry workshop and I am brave and courageous and say, “Um. Poems? The thing says poems. I don’t write poems. Am I in the wrong room?”

And they said no, and the first prompt was a ross gay poem and I wrote the beautiful words.

And I’m just now remembering that my very first AA meeting was yeeeeaaarrs before I actually really truly seriously entertained sobriety.

It was at a trailer thingy in a church in Burbank. Because the only reason to go to Burbank is for an audition and those aren’t typically held at churches. I’m sure there are execept….oh wait, the whole goddamn thing is an audition for admittance. Lol. I’ll chew on that later.

Anyway, I walk into the trailer and I peek my head inside the interior door, and I say “Um, I’m not sure I’m in the right place. I like pills” and they laughed and said ‘come on in. You’re in the right place.’

And for a good long while they may have been right.

But that walking in and not being sure if you belong or not, I mean that’s the whole gist of it down here, the uncertainty of not knowing if you’re supposed to be there…at that table in the cafeteria, in that line to get emissions tested, at the party you were only generally invited to “you should stop by.” In your family “why isn’t Amy like us” or…on the planet…because that is occasionally unclear.

We should really drop whatever is in our hands and give some high fives. To ourselves, I mean.

Because that takes guts. The walking in. The uncertainty. The distress tolerance.

I guess the only thing I’m really going to accept, radically or otherwise, is that there are only a few things that can be pinned down. And those things don’t ever stay the way they were on the day they were pinned, the memories change, are misremembered, misfiled, distorted by age and alcohol.

But the real moment will always be certain.

I will always be certain that when Sean got here, my heart exploded. And when J and Violet and Ginny got here, same thing.

And I am certain that it is better to be with them, near them, in the same town as them, than it would be to be 500 miles away.

Sometimes I think about what I would be missing, what they would miss of me. If I lived in LA or if I Back-to-the-Futured myself out of the polaroid.

So I know that’s true. I’m certain of that. That it happened.

The rest stresses me out, keeps me up at night, drives me to scroll and ruminate and fear and cry (wake up crying in the middle of the night) and get angry, so angry always angry, which I now know is not actually what’s happening. The certainty that I was angry was ripped from me two Wednesdays ago.

alexithymia.

It’s a word I skipped over in all my reading about autism.

I skipped over it like I would have skipped over a formula in a statistics book for any statistical test I didn’t need. And I only needed three, Chi-square being my one true love.

I skipped over alexithymia because it refers to a situation in which a person’s brain has difficulty translating and distinguishing physical sensations from emotions. Two degrees in communication, one in psychology, twenty whatever years training as an actor.

Of course I know my emotions. I’m angry! Or grateful! And sometimes angry and grateful!

Right? I was certain.

But no. I’m not certain about the anger because my brain isn’t…not not certain, but not correct when body says RAGE brain believes it. Doesn’t have speed bumps to slow it down.

So of course I’m angry.

Except when I hear Diana read. Then I understand that anger and grief are also sometimes smoke and dirt and incense braided with pain. She seems certain of that and I choose to believe her.

I’m the FBC Outreach Coordinator, and I lead our in-person workshops in Tucson. Please reach out if you have any questions about what it’s like to write with us! ames@fifthbraincollective.com

Prompt: Where appears the “coiled charge” of possibility for you or your character? Does this possibility quiet you/them or motivate you/them into motion?

Notes from the author: When Frankie gave us this prompt, the image that appeared in my chest was a coiled snake, which immediately connected to Tantric imagery of the serpent as dormant embodied energy waiting to unfurl. I believe very strongly that the ordinary and overlooked are where the truths of life actually live and I followed my instinct toward the rat snake in an overlooked, untended place. My inner landscape is deeply American pastoral and comes tangled up with wildflowers, weeds, and skeletons and it felt right to place this sacred creature right in the middle of it all.

To me, writing poetry is akin to scrying. It feels like gazing into a reflective surface to discern the emerging images and symbols. While the images I evoke are distinctly mine, they also feel inherited from instinct, memory, myth, and the slow decay woven through both the concept and reality of America. The piece is lightly edited for brevity and clarity but appears largely as it was first written.

White Belly

A gilded black rat snake coiled and dozing in
the pelvis bone of a Jersey heifer, left to disintegrate
long after breaking its ankle in a gopher hole,

lying in green hedgerow filled with
day lily’s orange burst, purple spray of aster,
goldenrod’s nodding, heavy head.

Oil slick scales flash and catch late sunlight,
pale pink, refracting the sun’s descent on
the horizon. Long body expanding and

contracting with breath,
forked tongue active,
searching even in rest.

She does not care that we mere mortals
click-clack on keyboards, vroom-vroom about in cars
for she is patient, and listens only for

the flickering of a house wren’s dusky wing,
the skittering of mouse feet,
her unfurling calculated and ancient.

Let her white belly slide over the ground and
let her take what she needs and
let her squeeze until dinner is ready.

About the author: Shelby Skumanich (she/they) is an artist, poet, and queer femme living in Northern Colorado. Her interdisciplinary practice explores place, memory, identity, and transformation through writing, image, textiles, and other material forms. In addition to poetry, they write creative nonfiction, take photographs of small seasonal changes, and are learning to play the drums.

You can find out more about her at: https://www.shelbyskumanich.com/ and on Substack: https://smskumanich.substack.com/.

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Definitely icy. Definitely cold. Arctic. But also? A little bit like Terry Gilliam’s setting for Brazil. That 1940’s everything-is-made-of-dark-green-metal look. I can see the tents, the mythical equipment, the landscape, and I seek the language to describe it for the reader.

Writing a novel is a quest of mythical proportions, mostly internal, and I am on that quest again. Because modern society loves to view everything as work, everything as product, many writers fall into the trap of becoming embattled with their writing project. Positioning it as a fight. A torment. I prefer to be in love with it. To marvel at the audacity of it. To allow the magic of my brain to unfold and show itself to me. To trust that it will. To accept the fact of an imagination so loud and so insistent about transcribing images into black and white squiggles on a page. I devote myself to this quiet, solitary dream. A traveling inward. As you write, though, it starts to take shape in the world, making itself known to others, changing you, too.

A quest requires a great deal of uncertainty. It’s not a trip with a packing list and an agenda and a suitcase and plane tickets. It’s not a civilized act. It’s more like a knife at the hip, canteen, jerky, plus a vague-idea-of-heading-somewhere situation.

The book I’m writing takes place in a slant* version of Antarctica. No penguins or seals. The creatures who roam the ice are definitely “other.” Nooks. A massive white wolf. Snow worms. I’m learning about the characters, the relationships, the histories, the plot as I write this book. I let the worldbuilding tell me when I’m ready to actually build. In the early months of the quest, if I’m following a scene and don’t have the details, I simply draw lines into the text, blanks I’ll fill in later, for stuff like place names, human names, invented foods, etc.

But I’ve come to a moment in this quest where I need to fill in those blanks. The reward of devoting yourself to quests of uncertainty is learning what tools to use.

When I wrote my first novel (set in a slant* version of the Outer Banks), I went to a little library in my town and found the biggest photographic books I could find on coastal landscapes, fish, fishing, and the lives of humans living on coastal banks. I printed the photos that spoke to me (in black and white on the dilapidated library copier) and hung them with clothespins from strings I strung across my study. This was a way to immediately place myself in the setting. A way to cut through the noise of the external life and shortcut into the quest.

You never know, on a quest, where the next lead will come from. One of my many jobs at the time was assisting an elderly woman in the sorting of her memorabilia. As I slid old photos from a bin, I found the faces (the expressions, more to the point) of characters in my novel. She exclaimed, “I don’t even know who those people are,” but I absolutely did. She gave the photos to me, and I added them to my strings.

On my current quest, the lines blank of information crowded me. I needed to nail down details, to understand where I was, to bring the next incarnation of my text into focus, but I’d forgotten how to get there. Then my friend and fellow writer, Tim Dyke, met me in Denver and we found ourselves in the library, as we always do. Before I even thought about what I was doing, I found myself pulling massive photo books of Antarctica off the shelf, along with collections of images from Lewis & Clark, Scott, and Shackleton’s expedition maps, photos, and notes.

This time, because there is such a particular blue to the ice, I think I will print them out in color. I will string them all the way across the room. This is an act of devotion to the slant. To make my inner quest tangible, I build a shrine to the dream in my head. My Antartikash, the mythical apparatus I dream up, lives in these photographs. Not as research, but as permission. With them, I stay inside the love.

By the time I’ve strung those photographs across the room, learned the particular blue of glacial ice, named the creatures who roam that impossible landscape, I am not the same woman who first put pen to page. The book demands that I become someone who can contain it, and then I give it away.

*(Emily Dickinson’s “Tell all the truth but tell it slant -” is at the heart of my magical realism)

Prompt: It’s corrective – the thing you or your character or the landscape needed to happen just happens. No fanfare. Just easy, successful. The thing that was wanted is achieved.

Notes from the Author: When we received this prompt during the Cozy Morning Authors Society, I immediately thought of a poem I had written, “The Mountain Weeps,” about driving by a large strip mine outside Silver City. I decided to write a corrective to that poem.

I make the trip again past Silver City and the smell of silver. I do not want to drive by the weeping mountain again, but it’s the only way to my destination. I make the last curve and drive into a brilliant sky. My windows are open, and the sound of boulders syncopating against their rounded shoulders is almost deafening. The sun turns green, and a million birds sing in tune with the embracing rocks. I keep driving so slowly, just like I did the first time I saw the strip mine. But this time, on this reluctant pass-by, I slow down on a path of wonder. The green sunlight piles copper into the mountain’s belly until she is full. The boulders knit their rich dirt into one full body—veined in emerald, and soon, the mountain is whole.

Taller than greed, fuller than any human gluttony. Healed in more ways than the galaxy offers.

I drive too close and the mountain clangs and whistles and chimes a warning. The natural cacophony of raw metal and dirt rebirthing pushes me further away, and I know that this mountain will never weep again.

Reflections: Using this prompt helped me to imagine otherwise—that is, to imagine the mountain’s own healing power, to imagine the mountain as the center of being rather than focusing on the human desecration of that central sacredness. My writing to this prompt did not disappear the mountain’s weeping but added a sense of agency absent from the initial poem. That agency invites me to explore the work that environmental activists engage in every day. Where and how do humans and mountains unite?

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Was there a favorite moment in the retreat?

Sandra: I was one of the day-pass folks, so I missed the shenanigans from the evening. When I came in one morning and heard that folks had stayed up past 1:00AM and that one participant dressed up as a ghost and came out to scare everyone, I loved hearing the story. I didn't feel left out but was tickled that folks were acting as if they were in a dorm or just enjoying sleepovers. That's community!

Frankie: Some of my favorite moments were moments that I wasn’t even there!

• There were people who gathered at night to talk and laugh, even putting on a performance.

• People who got up early to write in a quiet space together.

Also, some glimpses -

• I walked by the pool where two writers were sharing a double lounge chair with their computers on their laps.

• The caterers coming inside, grinning from feeding the cows watermelon rinds.

Because energy was the theme of the event, I was thrilled to watch the invisible and tangible passages of energy ripple through the humans.

What surprised you in your writing?

Frankie: I didn’t work on fiction as much as I usually do. I had some more memoir writing show up and it was interesting to find out what my mind wanted me to focus on in the moments I wasn’t teaching. The grounding of a lived life.

Sandra: I was surprised at how easily I shifted from interior stuff to working on my novel - all my writing seemed to coalesce in one big linguistic embrace.

ames: (her Fifth Brain dictated that she combine this answer with her favorite moment) Frankie’s last prompt was to read the pages of Octavia Butler’s notebook where she declared the kind of writing life she wanted and draft our own. I’m writing a memoir that revisits extremely difficult experiences, with the hope that someone will pick up my book at a Little Free Library, turn to page 42, and say “Holy shit. I thought I was the only one. What a relief.”

Here is part of my response to the last prompt: I am a writer who lets herself tell the goddamn truth about what’s inside. I write about injustice, injustice sensitivity, autism, rage, trauma, gendered harm. The evils of systems. complicity (....I also wrote about the beauty and community and joy I’m building into this future).

Two days ago, I learned that my story, pinned., will be published in an anthology in October. Guess what it’s about? Yes. Everything I wrote into being.

Did anything happen for you in terms of community?

ames: My friendships with some Fifth Brain Collective members have been exclusively on Zoom. From the first minute of the retreat, it was clear that our relationships are exactly as authentic/supportive/joyful on Zoom as they are in person.

Sandra: Seeing folks I've been writing with online for almost three years for the first time in person - that's not easy to put into words. Maybe a cosmic 3D-ness that filled out these beloved people - and just giving and getting hugs - community grew richer and more multi-faceted.

Frankie: Oh yes. I was reminded of how easily, beautifully it could be created. How space and time and food and prompts and focused thinking makes a place of magic.

What is one word you would use to describe your experience? (*Feel free to say a couple sentences about that word.)

Frankie: Golden - I kept having an image of golden lines weaving from one brain to another, making a cloth of community.

ames: Sovereignty - Absolute full power and authority to govern my own life.

Sandra: Transformative - This sense that the Fifth Brain Collective has grown exponentially just in those four days, and that we've all helped to shape that growth within ourselves and with each other.

What are you carrying away from this retreat experience? (Mental and emotional souvenirs?)

Sandra: A sense of joy - yes, we wrote about hard stuff. Yes, we cried. And we laughed a lot and shared meals. A new sense of how writing together is sacred space, how it links all of us heart-wise, soul-wise.

ames: Hope. Hope. Hope.

Frankie: My life was altered, in no uncertain terms. The study of one theme, energy, the whole weekend taught/reminded me that A) Energy is everything and B) Sharing the alchemy of an idea with a room full of people will always deepen your understanding of that idea. Emotionally, I found comfort in the gathering of community despite the threats against humanity and humaneness that so many people are facing down every day. There was a lot of work to make it happen AND it happened effortlessly because our values are strong and allow people to feel safe in a creative space.

Testimonials video by Damian from Obsidian Lens Media

If all of this sounds good to you (and oh, it was so, so good!) we hope you will join us next year! Sign up for our waitlist to stay informed as plans are made and information becomes available. www.fifthbraincollective.com/writing-retreat

If you were able to attend this year, we hope you will add your personal takeaways in the comments below.

Notes from the author: To be honest, I ignored the prompt and instead worked on a piece I created at the Di Luna event*. It’s a guide to American Muscle Cars where I use each car to examine an aspect of masculinity. I used the 20 minutes as my free writing time for the day. These are the parts I wrote during Tuesday’s meeting.

*The “DiLuna event” was an FBC, in-person writing workshop held in April at DiLuna Candles in Tucson, Arizona. It was so popular, it’s now a regular offering - 5:30pm on the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of every month, starting in June. More info: fifthbraincollective.com/fbc-workshop.

American Muscle Cars: A Man’s Guide

Ford Mustang:

The Mustang was developed by Ford Motor Co. in 1964. The name Mustang was chosen because it suggested an image of freedom, of running free and never stopping until you desire. Is the freedom a freedom from all restrictions, a freedom of the open highway that lets you go anywhere and do anything? Or does it also suggest a freedom of responsibilities, of men abandoning their families and obligations to move on and find another temporary amusement? What kind of freedom does the Mustang allow you to have? What kind of freedom do you choose? How far will you go to be free? Or to put it simply, what kind of man are you?

Pontiac GTO:

The Pontiac GTO is widely considered the first true muscle car. First manufactured in 1964, the letters GTO stand for “Gran Turismo Omologato,” which is Italian for “Homologated Grand Touring Car.” “Homologation” is a term meaning “sanctioned” or approved, meaning that the car was approved for competing in Italian road racing. Homologation is a specific form of sanctioning, one that involves meeting a complex list of conditions for approval. Approval represents what one can do, and by consequence what one cannot do. You are sanctioned for participating in society according to a complex set of rules, but those rules change and are fluid, unlike the rules for car racing. What men can do today, they may not be able to do tomorrow. This is what change means. But some changes never take effect for some men, and people who know them. A very famous and powerful man once said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it” and he spoke from experience. Who sanctions you? What are you allowed to do? And why? And what will the punishment be? “When “Homologation” is only for some men, what does that mean for all of us?

Chevy Camaro:

The Chevy Camaro was first produced in 1966, as Chevy’s response to the Ford Mustang. It was created to serve as direct competition in the muscle car market. It would prove to be a success, and the competition was a benefit for both companies. But is competition always healthy? A man’s ego finds being challenged one of the greatest offenses ever. How does a man respond? Learning to respond is one of the hardest lessons in life. Some men tie their ego into everything they do and everything they own, and cannot help lashing out when challenged. This is frequently encouraged, and even applauded. Learning to separate yourself from what you own and what you do, to accept someone else’s efforts as more successful, is a lesson some men never learn. Men who cannot accept that ultimately become what they once were—children.

Victor Valdivia has always written things. Song lyrics when he was little, plays and scripts in school, articles for college publications, reviews for music and film websites as an adult. But he never considered himself a writer until he worked with Frankie Rollins and the Fifth Brain Collective. When he joined a community of other writers who made him feel like one of them, like a peer, he realized his creativity is just as valid as anyone else’s. Now he calls himself a writer because, while he can always learn more about craft and technique, his talent with words is his and no one can take it away from him.

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Listen, it’s time to be your whole self. By this I mean: more authentic. It’s time to be your most wild, most animated, most true self. Why? In this country, human rights are shrinking by the day, regardless of who people are, how they’ve lived, what love they have created, what ideas they have shared, what service they have provided, what beauty they’ve wrought. There is a bleak disregard for the essence of living beings. In this moment, we need to make sure we are awake and alive and paying attention.

When we live in a world that doesn’t prioritize the humanity and inevitability of differences between people, the only answer is to double down on your own and encourage your beloveds to do the same.

It’s harder to subjugate an aware, awake, alive people.

People think it’s selfish to work on your own self in times of distress, but it’s a powerful tool of activism. If you open yourself to change, to feeling, to understanding the world/yourself in new ways, you will be more tender. You will not numb out. You will feel the precious fire of living and fight for it.

I made a massive leap in my life this year and organized a first writing retreat for my writing community. I let the responsibility settle into me. I planned for months. I gathered a team of folks to help. I searched for the location, counted rooms (20 times and still made mistakes), budgeted (added this up 20 times, still made mistakes), hit up friends for the caterers (still missing their food), found the documenters, planned and ordered swag. Then I pulled books off my shelves, read and thought and wrote a curriculum meant to wake the writers up, or wake something up in their writing. Honestly, I never thought about how much all of this would change me, too.

On the last night of the post-retreat events we held, I was out with some friends for a late-night snack. I glanced down, caught sight of my feet, and said, “Whose shoes are these?” We laughed because it was a funny thing to say. But the shoes really didn’t look at all familiar. It took me a couple of minutes to remember where I’d gotten them and why I had them and it was distinctly uncomfortable (because it’s weird to forget your own shoes).

The truth was, I’d just had an experience so massive, so life-altering that I couldn’t even recognize my own shoes. I had stepped into my next self’s shoes. It is disorienting to change, to morph, to grow. But also, I would argue it is the highest order of living and the only answer to a global movement of genocidal violence and a national movement to remove the basic human rights of BIPOC, Immigrants, LGBTQIA folx. What do we/you/I need to become?

What can we change? How can we get bigger and more authentic in our own lives? What is a big dream for yourself or others that you could make happen? What unhappiness do we live with that could change? How can we shine harder and brighter in our own corner of the world so we can draw community closer and be better humans for ourselves and for each other?

PROMPT:

We can make choices that bring ourselves more awake and alive. You have not been the same person your whole life, so think about which of these catalysts have changed you in the past, shifted the prism of your understanding, shot a portal of light through an otherwise obscured sky? Take a few moments and think about it. Make some notes. Remind yourself that you are living proof that change is possible.

Relationships

Books

Music

Movies

Art

Physical Complications or Healings

Education

Events/Retreats/Conferences/Trainings

Dance

Theatre

Here’s a video from the FBC’s Writing Retreat, showing people willing to accept the unknown that change requires. Video by Damian from Obsidian Lens Media.

Diana Corrales Jaramillo is a Mexican American writer born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, with roots in Turichachi, Sonora, Mexico. She holds a BA in Creative Writing and an MS in Clinical Mental Health Counseling with an emphasis in trauma, which shapes how she understands and writes about people and their stories.

Her work spans poetry and prose, including her first published piece, “Joy in the Wrong Language Can Make You a Target” (Click linked title or visit Wildscape Literary Journal). Her debut novel, Barrio Viejo, is forthcoming.

She lives with her two cats, Angelou and Borrero.

1. How long have you been involved with FBC? How did you find FBC, and how are you involved now?

I’ve been part of the Fifth Brain Collective for about two years now, though in many ways, it feels like I’ve been growing alongside it for much longer.

I first found FBC through Frankie Rollins during a time in my life when I was carrying an almost unbearable amount of grief. We met, and she told me there was a place for me—a place where I could bring all of it. And somehow, she was right. I found the magic she spoke about.

Before that, she had been my instructor at Pima. What started as a classroom connection slowly became something much deeper—a creative home I didn’t know I was searching for. So in many ways, I feel like I’ve been with FBC far longer than two years.

Since then, I’ve immersed myself in the collective in every way I can. I’m part of multiple memberships, I join Fruit Cup whenever life allows, and I participate in the studio spaces when I can. I also had the chance to attend the retreat—which truly changed me. Not just as a writer, but as a person. There’s something that happens when you’re surrounded by people who speak the same language of vulnerability, story, and survival—you begin to hear yourself more clearly.

Now, I’m working toward helping Frankie and ames build an in-person membership in Tucson—something that feels deeply needed. I’ve also had the honor of creating and holding spaces like Fruit Cup and Throat Full of Wildflowers—spaces where people can arrive exactly as they are, and leave having said something they didn’t think they could.

2. Have you participated in other writing groups? If so, what makes FBC different? What is your favorite part of the FBC experience?

Outside of my undergraduate years studying creative writing, I hadn’t been part of other writing groups.

And I think that’s why I can say this so clearly: this is different.

At FBC, people don’t just listen to your work—they care about it. They hold it gently. They recognize that what you’re sharing isn’t just words on a page, it’s something lived, something carried.

There’s no hierarchy here. No posturing. No need to prove yourself.

You create a kind of found family—one rooted in honesty, curiosity, and deep respect for the act of creation.

My favorite part will always be the people. The way we witness each other. The way someone’s words can crack something open in you, and instead of feeling alone in it, you feel understood.

And of course—the writing. The permission to write wildly, honestly, imperfectly.

3. What changes have you noticed in your writing or your writing methods since participating in FBC?

My writing has expanded in ways I didn’t think were possible.

It’s not just that I write more—it’s that I write differently.

There’s less fear now. Less filtering. Less of that quiet voice asking, Is this good enough? Will someone approve of this?

FBC taught me something essential: not everything I write needs to be shared.

And that realization gave me back my autonomy.

Some pieces are just for me. Some are meant to live quietly. Some are meant to be raw and unfinished—and still worthy.

That permission has changed everything.

It’s allowed me to access deeper truths, to write from places I used to avoid, and in many ways, it has been part of my healing.

4. What genre(s) and/or form(s) do you most enjoy writing?

I don’t like to stay in one place for too long.

I write fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—often weaving between them, sometimes blending them together. I’m drawn to work that feels sensory, immersive, and emotionally honest. I want the writing to feel like something in the body, not just something you read.

I tend to go deep. I’m interested in what lives underneath—the quiet griefs, the inherited silences, the moments that shape us without asking permission.

Right now, I’m preparing to self-publish a novel, Barrio Viejo, that has been about eight years in the making. It’s a literary fiction work rooted in Arizona, centered on a neighborhood and the lives that unfold within it—grief, love, survival, and the ways we hold each other together even as things fall apart.

This book began during my time as a student, sitting in Frankie’s classroom. And now, years later, it feels like I’m finally ready to share it—with the support and courage I found through this collective.

5. Who do you think would benefit from FBC membership? (Who belongs here?)

Anyone who has something to say—even if they don’t know how to say it yet.

Anyone who has been quiet for too long.

Anyone who has felt like their story didn’t matter, or wasn’t “enough,” or didn’t belong anywhere.

Writers who are seasoned. Writers who are just beginning. Writers who don’t even call themselves writers yet.

If you are curious, if you are carrying something, if you are searching for a space where you can be both held and challenged—you belong here.

6. Writing Sample

The first time I understood music could carry grief, it was the sound of a trumpet splitting the air open.

Not soft.
Not gentle.
Not meant to comfort.

Mariachi doesn’t ask you to feel—it insists.

The takatakas of the guitar, relentless, like something knocking from inside the chest. The violins pulling something thin, stretching it past mercy. And the trumpet—God, the trumpet—crying in a way that feels too human, too close, like it knows exactly who we lost and refuses to let us pretend otherwise.

That is how I learned death.

Not in silence.
Not in prayer.
But in sound that would not let the body stay still.

I remember the sun—too bright for something so final—
the way it touched the wood of the casket as it lowered, inch by inch,
like even light didn’t know where to go.

The music didn’t stop for it.

It swelled.

It rose as if trying to follow,
as if sound itself could climb down into the earth
and keep someone company.

And I thought—
this is what love sounds like when it has nowhere to go.

7. Is there anything else you’d like to share about being part of FBC?

FBC didn’t just make me a stronger writer—it helped me become a more honest one.

It gave me spaces where I didn’t have to perform, where I didn’t have to shrink, where I could try, fail, rewrite, and try again.

It reminded me that writing isn’t just about producing something beautiful—it’s about telling the truth, even when it’s difficult. Especially when it’s difficult.

And maybe most importantly, it showed me that I don’t have to do that alone.

Thank you for reading! Please post your questions and comments below. Be on the lookout for our next installment of Meet Our Members! in June.

For more information about FBC workshops, memberships, and offerings, visit

https://www.fifthbraincollective.com/

As a teaser for what to expect from this interactive workshop, Fowler-Chapman writes:

“We often think we’re writing about a moment or even a memory, but more often we’re writing toward something that keeps returning, something even deeper. A feeling, an image, a question, or a lesson that hasn’t quite let us go. There’s a poem in everyday moments if we slow down and look closely enough. In this workshop, we’ll slow down and pay attention to the daily repetitions. The small, everyday moments that might seem insignificant at first, and explore what lives underneath them. In our time together, we’ll explore a couple of published poems and, through generative writing, follow what keeps showing up until we begin to name the pattern beneath the pattern in ourselves. This space is open to all levels and genres. Bring your notebook and pen and come as you are, with whatever is on your mind. Let the writing take it from there.”

If you are not yet familiar with Fowler-Chapman’s stunning poetry, The World Never Ends Like It’s Supposed To is a good place to start. He is also the author of MOONSHiNE and a new chapbook, Becoming [Free].

Join us for a guided evening of wonder and inspiration, finding patterns in our writing that are hidden in plain sight and exploring what they might be trying to tell us.

To learn more about our host, Teré Fowler-Chapman, visit www.terefc.com.

To register for this workshop and see what’s coming up next for Fifth Brain Creative Studio, visit www.fifthbraincollective.com/studio.

Okay. OKAY. It turns out, it’s already April.

This is my bed right now. Those are the books I’ve been snuggling, and I swap them out with other books every morning. That laptop should rightly be on fire. The magical fort lights are doing their best to keep up with me. The energy of creation.

For years, I wanted to join writing retreats (but always had too many jobs!) and this time, I get to lead one. It occurred to me recently that this retreat has a similar feel to the Curiosity Symposiums I led in New Jersey and Arizona. A group of gathered people who don’t necessarily know each other, all placing their unique minds on the same subject to see what burns forth. This time, the subject is ENERGY. I don’t think there is a sexier topic in the world.

People tell me I’m very calm about this, and I am, but also, on the inside, I’m a flock of a thousand little birds crossing a bright blue sky. I’m making lists and fielding emails and approving our cool new t-shirt design (!) and reviewing the menu and writing the workshops, and sometimes I fall into a stunned reverie, staring out the window at the energy of squirrels, leaves, bark, bees, breezes, robins, bunnies. (The energetic world of the massive willow tree in my yard.)

Writing is the transference of one person’s voluminous personal energy into language, for themselves and for a reader. That’s the whole thing. That’s the engine we will take apart, examine, study, discuss, kick the tires of, admire, feel the heaviness of, feel the lightness about, reverberate in, sing to.

That ames chose to pose Do You Feel Like Writing? right there (I didn’t tell her to do that) is because she likes that book and she does feel like writing. She does. She needs to write. It’s an energy source that feeds her and nourishes her in ways that other things don’t. Same.

But what I’ve been writing about in that bed is new. The philosophy and approach to writing that I am dreaming up specifically for this experience fascinates me. It didn’t exist before. It exists now because a bunch of writers are coming to a ranch in Tucson and I wanted to make something just for them. The energy of a desire to share.

Once I held a Curiosity Symposium on Energy in 2006 and a friend brought a vintage suitcase full of blank paper that had belonged to his deceased artist father. Before we opened it, everyone passed the suitcase around, shaking it, wondering what was inside. The energy of curiosity, the energy of time, the energy of death, the energy of love, the energy of potential, the energy of art. An eloquent symbol that I will never get over and have cited for 20 years. What will happen this time? The energy of anticipation.

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The desert at dusk is an unreasonable place to try to stay calm. The light going gold and time sifting into dust! I can’t wait to get there. My ferocious belief is that in this moment of fascist authoritarianism, more than ever, writers must to be liberated into their own voices, styles, and cultural nuances. Writers should be emboldened in developing our writing habits and beliefs and dialects, rather than trained into someone else’s. The collective grows from that belief. And this inaugural retreat is the next expression of it. The first of many, because we are absolutely doing this again and again and again.

We’ll apprise you of what happens, and we’ll report on what magical suitcase arises in these discussions.

There’s a waitlist for next year’s retreat. Feel free to sign up.

1. How long have you been involved with FBC? How did you find FBC, and how are you involved now?

I have been involved with FBC since August of 2024. I currently serve on the board of F*ST! Female* StoryTellers and one of the tellers for our August show mentioned she was part of a writing group that met online every Thursday evening. She invited folks to see her after, for more information. I absolutely saw her after and attended my first Fruit Cup two days later. I have been hopelessly, wondrously HOOKED ever since. I now write with FBC several times a week and I hung around so much that FBC Founder (visionary and provoker of revolutions), Frankie Rollins hired me to help with operations. Meet Our Members was one of my first project suggestions that Frankie let me run with. Yet another best part of my FBC experience is that my friend, that fateful storyteller, was none other than the phenomenal ames granados. ames brought me here and we recently co-presented a workshop for FBC’s Creative Studio that was all about writing for performance. This will not be our last collaboration.

2. Have you participated in other writing groups? If so, what makes FBC different? What is your favorite part of the FBC experience?

I have participated in other writing groups. None of them lasted. Sometimes, members were just non-committal or inconsistent and I would often sit alone or with one other person around a big table. Other groups were all about ego, lots of talking over each other and dispensing advice like there was only one way to write - theirs. It was not welcoming to new or less confident writers and left no room for growth through life-giving experimentation. I have never experienced anything like FBC. This is a group of immensely talented folks who are equally kind and supportive. We genuinely want to hear and share each other’s work, we celebrate successes, we have impassioned discussions of craft and process. It’s a safe, fun, and magical space and quite often the best parts of my week. My favorite thing about FBC is feeling completely at home in a community of very different and diverse WRITERS (all of us) who embrace the joy and limitless possibilities of the word.

3. What changes have you noticed in your writing or your writing methods since participating in FBC?

I write so much more now. And I feel okay making it a priority. Writing is not a silly hobby that I can’t justify making time for - it’s a lifeline. I’m still a busy human, but I’ve come to learn how fabulous much you can do with a prompt and 20 minutes of dedicated writing time. Speaking of prompts, Frankie’s have taken me to places that I didn’t even know I wanted to explore (thank you for cordially introducing me to my Fifth Brain!). Some of the meanderings led me to realize how much I enjoy memoir-ish writing, sometimes with fiction and wild internal dialogue thrown in. I started writing in a totally new way, that defied a clear style, AND I LET MYSELF DO IT. Before FBC, I would have struggled to identify and categorize what exactly I was writing and, if I couldn’t name it, I would have assumed it didn’t exist and wasn’t worth pursuing. Fuck off, gods of permission and all those sad, tiny rules! I made them, so of course they exist. Now, I call these pieces “memoir-ish vignettes” and I flow with wherever they take me. Did you know, if you collect enough memoir-ish vignettes and put them together, they can still be a book?

4. What genre(s) and/or form(s) do you most enjoy writing? (Are you a poet, essayist, novelist, short story enthusiast, documentarian? Do you write science fiction, horror, action, comedy, mystery, romance, historical fiction, creative non-fiction, screen plays? A little of everything or something else entirely?)

I write a little bit of everything. I started with poetry (in the beginning, it all rhymed, even!). It was my personal independence day when I discovered and fell in love with free verse. I have dabbled with short stories and have an ongoing love of storytelling and personal narratives. Because of my new FBC-fueled bravado, I am revisiting a novel project (hooray for vampire mermaids!). For works that long and comprehensive, I am thrilled to have a patient and prolific writing partner, John “J.C.” Hewitt. J.C. and I have written one novel together (that desperately needs to be revised and edited) and are in progress on a second one (mentioned above) that I have recently picked up again after several years’ hiatus.

5. Who do you think would benefit from FBC membership? (Who belongs here?)

Anyone who writes. Because they love it. Because it’s like oxygen. Because they have no choice. FBC will give you support, confidence, community, (so damn much) laughter, tears, and PROOF that you are indeed a writer. I have contributed to five books in this world - as a sole author, co-author, or editor and contributor. I never felt comfortable calling myself a writer out loud until I started writing with FBC.

6. Do you have a short sample of your FBC inspired writing that you would like to share here? (4-6 sentences)

Part One - Breakfast

It’s 5:32AM and I am standing barefoot in my kitchen, wearing a stained t-shirt and my workout pants from two days ago. I just called one of our dogs an asshole. Because she is. She spit her pill out of two different treats – a stick of string cheese and a whole fucking slice of ham – forcing me to make her a peanut butter sandwich, all within 6 minutes of opening my damn eyes. When she can separate the pill from the middle of peanut butter mountain, the Valley Fever can take her.

Thank you for reading! Please post your questions and comments below. Be on the lookout for our next installment of Meet Our Members! in May.

For more information about FBC workshops, memberships, and offerings, visit

https://www.fifthbraincollective.com/

But we’re not necessarily conscious of this study since it often occurs at the cellular level. As we’re reading, we might have an ongoing inner commentary, maybe like this:

“Wow—I really love this character.”

“OK, so why do we have to read about every piece of furniture in the living room?”

“That ending was such a surprise, and I loved it.”

What do we do with these observations? Maybe we remember them as we’re writing our own work and then avoid over-describing a setting. But where we can really explore these insights is through discussing with other writers.

I just experienced a powerful example of such a discussion. As a member of a Fifth Brain membership, I participate in a monthly two-hour Front Porch gathering, where we bring any questions about our writing to a group discussion. The discussion focused on the use of speech tags and punctuation with dialog.

One member brought up a short passage from All the Pretty Horses, in which Cormac McCarthy uses no quotation marks for speech but nevertheless offers enough description to capture the reader fully and clearly. Another member mentioned Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” as an effective example of few speech tags. We talked about problem spots in our own writing and referred to examples from our own reading that illustrated what we want to emulate or avoid in our writing.

The thing is, no matter the genre, writers need to read—profusely—in that genre. When I was writing what I thought was a young adult novel, I had read a lot of young adult literature. Then, after consulting with an editor, who read the first ten pages, that young adult novel turned into a middle grade novel.

The editor’s advice made sense to me because the market had plenty of young adult novels but not many middle grade novels that focused on supporting girls in technology. I hadn’t read middle grade fiction since I was…a middle-grade student. But when I knew I was shifting my audience’s age range, I began reading middle grade novels. And I found a whole new bunch of books to love—like Jennifer Torres’ Stef Soto, Taco Queen and Jamie Sumner’s Roll With It and Jason Reynolds’ As Brave as You. These culturally diverse works supported my own desire to attend to cultural richness.

As I read these novels, I looked for a crucial component of middle grade novels, which is that the kids rely on themselves (rather than adults) to solve their own problems. I looked at the quirks of main characters and how the secondary characters figured in the plot. And since my middle grade novel deals with technology, I’ve also read more recent novels to see how those authors address issues in technology. While J. E. Thomas’s The AI Incident focuses on AI, The STEAM Chasers: We Made That by Dr. Dorothea A. Jennings focuses on inventions by African Americans, and both rely on a strong group of characters solving their middle grade challenges.

Reading books with others is also a fantastic way to expand our analytical skills and our appreciation of the craft. I’m in a book group with alumni from my undergraduate college, including my literature professor from classes that took place 50 years ago. We’ve read a wide range of mostly novels, and we recently discussed Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, a choice prompted by the new film version by Emerald Fennell.

I think most readers of the works by the Brontë sisters identify either as a Jane Eyre fan or as a Wuthering Heights fan, and as a tween reader, I fell into the first camp. I was drawn to Jane’s spunky character and found Emily’s novel too pessimistic. In letters with one of my younger sisters, who wanted to be a writer, we tended to sign our epistles with “Charlotte” and “Emily.”

Later, as an eighteen-year-old living in Berlin, I borrowed Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises from a local library. After reading it, I decided I had to become a novelist. I hadn’t known that a novel, which relied so heavily on characters and plot, could also teach me so much about the effects of war. I also wanted to teach through fiction.

Many years later, with a doctorate in comparative literature and a career in teaching writing and literature, I still remember the magic in the classroom when a group of readers share their reactions to a work. Our collective perspectives travel through all of us to shift or enforce our readings, to teach each other different ways of seeing.

Often enough, I’ve heard a new reading from a student for a work that I had taught again and again, and I delighted in those moments. In an introductory literature class, one student made a cross-textual point about characters in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” something I had never considered but which delighted me and enriched my reading.

If you want a vibrant space to discuss how reading affects our writing, please join us in the Fifth Brain Creative Studio on The Writer As Reader: Sharing Our Writing-Reading Synergies on Monday, 30 March, 6-7:30pm MST.

After a 40-year career teaching writing and literature in higher ed, Sandra is grateful that her retired life is anchored by the community of writers in the Fifth Brain Collective. A few highlights of her career include teaching contemporary Jamaican literature in Jamaica, working with the National Writing Project to develop a national summer institute for teachers on writing and technology, and co-directing the NEH-funded Border Culture Studies program at Pima Community College. She is currently working on the sequel to The Electric Life of Lilah Browne, her middle grade novel on a girls' computer science club.

Time Travel. I travel back to late September, 2018. I enter the Polis Camping Centre, Cyprus. Cafe area. A middle-aged blond woman sits alone at a wooden table, working on her laptop, a wet towel draped over the back of her chair. There’s a calendar next to her coffee. She’s typing intently. Her hair is damp from swimming in the sea and she is freckled from the sun. She’s the one I’m looking for. I sit across from her, in the way of her ocean view. She startles at the interruption, then startles harder at the sight of me.

I am an older version of her, by 7 years and six months.

She’s been officially divorced for a month and a week. She’s on sabbatical, writing our book, Do You Feel Like Writing? (She is still calling it by a working title, the Fifth Brain Theory.) Every day, she comes to this campground cafe to save the day’s writing to the cloud, to mail it to herself, to write an ongoing series of notes to friends.

Me: Hey.

Her: What the fuck?

Me: This is what you’ll look like in 7 years.

Her: Jesus. That’s weird.

Me: I came from the future to tell you something. Something amazing.

Her: Am I hallucinating? I mean, this coffee is strong and I’ve been writing all day. Also, you know “7 years” is meaningless to me. What year are coming from?

Me: 2025. March 2025.

Her: What day in March?

Me: Irrelevant.

Her: March is not an irrelevant month for us.

Me: Okay, it’s the 18th. The day after your wedding anniversary, also the day after you left your marriage.

Her: Why are you calling it “my marriage”?

Me: It feels like it has nothing to do with me now.

Her: Wow. That sounds great. How long does that take?

Me: Well, good news and bad news. I don’t think about that marriage anymore. But there is going to be a horrific global pandemic and the felon/human-hating/pedophile weasels his way into the White House a second time, and you are definitely going to get broken and right now you are practicing hyper-independence, which you are going to need during the pandemic and, yeah, it will definitely break you, but in the breaking, you will change radically! Then something really, really great will happen.

(I wave over the young server, who I remember for his band t-shirts and kindness, and I order a Keo.)

Her: You came across seven years to tell me all this shitty news and get a beer?

Me: (I laugh.) I’m at the beach! And besides, it’s always 5:00 somewhere.

Her: (Digesting the terrible news, distracted.) Hilarious. A cliché Jimmy Buffet joke brought all the way from 2025.

Me: You look so familiar, it’s kind of freaking me out.

Her: Same. (Pauses.) Shit. I’m really scared of plagues. A pandemic? Really?

Me: I know. That story we wrote, “The New Plague”? There is some prophetic shit in there.

Her: (Staring at me.) I knew we were going to have that wrinkle between our eyes.

Me: It’s from laughing all our lives. Fuck it.

Her: (Looks out at some distant point above the ocean as we do when we want a moment of privacy of thought.) The good news?

Me: Yeah. Okay. So I’m going to summarize because I don’t actually know how long this time travel thing will last. I want you to know, you are doing great.

Her: I am? I cried all day today. I think this book sucks, I have no idea what I’m doing here. I’m so extreme! Who comes alone to an island across the world right after divorce? I’m a maniac.

Me: (I take her hand, not sure if it will work and it does. Our fingers are so bony. I want to tell her my sister and I call it “The Claw” when we hold hands, but she doesn’t even know that I’m going to move to live near my sister yet.) Have you ever heard of the fifth brain?

(We both laugh.)

Me: Yeah. Well, you are following your fifth brain and even though you go over the edge of hyper-independence into a kind of hyper-hyper independence, it is worth it because you are going to launch a really incredible thing for writers.

Also, I remember this time on Cyprus as one of the most romantic experiences of my life. You’re doing a GREAT job. Did you meet the donkeys get?

Her: Yeah.

Me: Pretty great.

Her: Really great. One of them bit a hole in my shirt! (Looks at me, confused.) But you already know that.

Me: And the thing was the grass stains her lips left around the hole. I know. It was amazing.

I know it’s a weird moment in your life, and you are pouring a book out and you are living like a monk, and it’s incredibly silent and hard and exciting and strange and beautiful. The book is really good. But what happens inside you as you write this book? You are altering yourself forever.

Her: I’m still waiting for the good news?

Me: (Beer arrives, I take a sip, smack my lips.)

Her: (Raises her eyebrows) That beer’s not as great as you remember.

Me: No. I knew it wasn’t great already. It’s not like we forget how a thing tastes.

Her: Right. News?

Me: Okay. Here’s the thing. You’re writing this book, right? You’ve been writing it, but now you’re really writing it, like every day, with a timeline breathing down your neck, alone-in-Cyprus kind of writing. Right?

Her: Right.

Me: You will get a solid draft of this book done. Then you will spend a couple of years clarifying, really making sure it says what it should, along with all that teaching. And you know, then there’s a pandemic, things go really dark in a lot of ways. But! It renders you. Like it strips away a lot of bullshit.

Her: (Looking frightened) Okayyyyy.

Me: Okay. I want to get to my point! You’re going to start your own writing coaching business. With weekly writing memberships. And the things you are learning RIGHT now in the writing, they are changing you forever. You are learning how to talk about what you understand about writers.

Her: (Scoffs.) I know nothing about business.

Me: I know! I know! But you learn. God. You get batshit obsessed and study everything and dude, you find so many parallels between being a writer and being an entrepreneur, but that’s not what I want to tell you.

Her: (Pressing a hand to her chest.) I am terrified.

Me: Okay. Too much back story, but really there is no way to tell this story without these bits. But here’s my point. Last night there was an event. The Collective Speaks.

Her: An Event?

Me: On Zoom! Most of what we do is on Zoom!

Her: What the fuck is Zoom?

Me: Right. Dude. Time Travel is a mess. I didn’t think this through.

Her: (Gentling, seeing my distress) Cut to the chase?

Me: I mean, I don’t know how to cut to the chase because it’s just like not something you foresaw. So mostly our business is online. It’s called the Fifth Brain Collective. There’s a tool called Zoom, which you hate at first until you realize there is a strange intimacy in it.

Her: The Fifth Brain Collective! That’s a fun name.

Me: Yeah, well, you asked lots of people to help you with names and somehow this sifted up. But that’s the thing! You created a collective! To help writers! To free writers! In your brokenness, you realize the only thing that belongs to you in the world forever, until you die, is your writing. And this empowers you so much that you realize that writers spend too much time letting other people tell us what to do! So you start a whole business focused on teaching people how to own their own voices, content, experimentation, etc. You are birthing these ideas right now.

Her: That sounds amazing.

Me: It is amazing! And the writers! The writers are doing so well. You’re right. What you learn and realize and understand and articulate in this book. We all learn so much from each other! We had a reading on Zoom the other night, The Collective Speaks. The writers read with different voices, different approaches, heartbreakingly unique content. The theme was “Breaking the Silence.” Your Diana created this event! Who once was that shy, smart, incredible writer person sitting in the farthest corner of a classroom, that Diana. She’s still with you! Who once whispered her secrets to you, and who doesn’t have secrets anymore! She writes freely! SHE chose the reading’s theme about breaking the silence. Can you believe it? Her writing is on fire and she says what she wants to, how she wants to.

She’s the whole reason I’m here! Diana asked the readers at the end of the reading: If your piece could speak to you, what would it say? And I thought of you, here on this island doing this hard thing and I wanted you to know: this piece that you are writing will make a difference in writers’ lives.

Her: (Tears in eyes.) Diana!

Me: So good. This collective that you will build. It helps a lot of writers. “Helps” isn’t entirely the word. “Transforms.” It allows them to transform themselves. And the brokenness I was talking about? That is how you get good at this. You let go of worrying what others will think. You become devoted to your own boundaries and needs.

Her: I don’t care if my ideas are scorned by those who believe in models of workshopping-shame, and Mother English loyalists, and all of that?

Me: Oh, we don’t care about them. We never give them a thought anymore, except for hoping for their freedom someday.

Her: (Shaking her head at me and laughing) Holy shit. What do I need to do to make this happen?

Me: Oh, you are doing it. You’re already doing it. You already know what to do and you’re doing it. But I wanted you to know that this is coming. That it’s going to be a difficult time but you are going to create such a shining thing that there is no way you can regret anything that is to come. This surprise, honey, is one that you will wring from the thin air of disappointment and despair.

Her: Will you coming here mess with the fabric of what is to come?

Me: No. I’m going to erase this conversation from your memory. But you’ll have a dream tonight that will embolden you and fill you with hope for years. Also, you know that corner of the terrace in the flat where the pink Bougainvillea leaves circle and lift?

Her: (confused) Yes. I’m obsessed with them.

Me: Let that be your mantra. That kind of bright color, that lightness, that randomness of weather and spaciousness, that lifting, that falling, that circling, that playfulness, that seemingly-pointless-but-also-timeless kind of organic meeting of things. Let that be at the heart of what you do, and always. You’ll be fine.

Ask a piece you have written: If your piece could speak to you, what would it say?

Feel free to post your writing’s answers here. Old Frankie, New Frankie, and the whole collective would love to know what your piece says.

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