Parenting is crammed full of these moments that pass too fast for you to measure, much less note. One minute your baby is getting teeth, then emotional intelligence, then a driver’s license. When your child leaves home, you strive to define this new self. You are still, in the hierarchy of things, a parent, but energy that has been honed to a focal point over years is quite suddenly unplugged, seeking redirection like a firehose released by guiding hands.

What do you become in this new space? When your internal factory gets the input to pause production of overseeing and nurturing and guiding, yet all your machines keep idling in place, using up resources without producing any product?

You try to trace back to the self that existed before. You collect echoes—Saturday mornings walking to a sticky-finger donut shop to read a newspaper, newly in love; Friday night movie nights as the highlight of busy weeks; lives abundant in alone time and ambition, but also overly spacious in a way that asks what will this life become?

And then cells divide and you become more. Not in that cliché way that life is only worth living once you have a kid. But you have literally made a third being where only there were two. And then your consciousness fills with playtime and learning and funny little shows, and the buzzing of little bodies through your house, and classrooms peppered with messy art and evening cuddles and slumber parties and blanket forts and swim lessons and beach days and hard lessons and adolescent anguish and so much music that silence becomes its own interruption.

Parenting is a place where it’s possible to feel that the self is an illusion of a dual brain. Because, yes, they leave your body, your home, your present sight but never really in all fullness. They leave in physical body but you go on scrabbling after the spectral echoes, passing through a fresh vacancy in all the spaces they inhabited as though you are the ghost, grappling with a phantom pain that is not quite pain.

What is something in your life that deserves a ritual or nod of acknowledgement, a feeling or experience that falls into interstitial places?

Leave a comment

September Classes With Jordan

Tomorrow: September 3, 10am PT/ 1pm ET.

Join me for a new webinar with Writer’s Digest University! Make it Hurt: Bring Emotional Impact and High Stakes to Every Scene. Register here.

Scenes often fall flat because writers shy away from creating real emotional impact. Plots often lose their steam because the stakes aren’t high enough or the pacing drags. And characters can feel like cardboard cutouts because the reader can’t access the impact of the story on them.

This live webinar urges writers to do the thing they often shy away from: Causing their characters pain, taking away things they love, and making life generally harder on them in every scene (in ways that make sense to the plot).

Friday, September 4! 4 to 5-5:15 pm PT

Register Here or Scan the QR code.

Friday, September 18, 4-6 pm PT

Register Here or Scan the QR Code

Friday, September 25. Master Class “Unlocking Voice on the Page” at the Central Coast Writers Conference

I don’t mean to make Liza uncomfy when I say that she might be my favorite living writer, and that I quite seriously considered becoming a literary-agent-of-one just to see her book Ink, Honey, Blossom make it out into the world, but it’s worth it if it makes my readers pick up her exquisite debut novel, whose book birthday is today! Purchase it wherever books are sold, ideally your local indie bookstore, Sibylline Press, Bookshop.org or Barnes + Noble. I have rarely read a book so original, so deep, so moving, lyrical, whose world felt absolutely real and whose characters I wanted to know in real life.

Ink Honey Blossom is a novel that brilliantly uses allegory and also cuts very close to the bone of reality, but does so beautifully.

She’s been compared to such writers as Octavia Butler and Margaret Atwood and deservedly so.

About Ink Honey Blossom:

800 years ago, the Blight Plague almost wiped out the male population. Now they must rely on young girls to survive.

Beyond the iron bars of Ink’s only window, grows a mass murderer of little girls in the form of a lush, golden tree. Eight hundred years ago, the Blight Plague almost wiped out the male population. Only the hallucinogen culled from the Sonagachi tree can slow the progression of the incurable disease. If not for the drug administered and catalyzed by imprisoned House Girls around the world, men would die young and by the thousands.

Each night, fifteen-year-old Ink and her friends at The Nectar House use the powerful hallucinogen to curate a bespoke trance-like experience which prolongs the life of their sick Blight customers by replenishing their health while simultaneously depleting their own. Years of captivity and the betrayal that got her sold have toughened Ink’s heart while her body weakens every day. Ink has no power, no freedom, and little sympathy.

Kirkus gave it a rare starred review, saying, “This tale of trauma, survival, and the choices people make under duress is stunningly written and deeply felt. The spare, effective world building is all the more effective for its slow unfolding. Losada’s poetic, erudite prose can be gorgeous in its own right, and it powerfully delivers the novel’s many emotional gut punches.”

Wisdom With Liza: Our Interview

Liza generously sat down and spoke to me about her book:

JR: What do you hope readers will take away from your book?

LL: Two things. I’m hoping that people will be curious about sex trafficking and red light districts so that they can engage in information. If this book leads them to [understand] and learn about how it not only happens really far away, but that it happens in their state, then I will have accomplished something very great.

Also, I was really interested in showing people that trauma has so many ways of manifesting and that there’s no wrong way to survive it. It’s a series of choices and sometimes those choices hurt other people.

And a lot of it is having compassion for the person who is going through something who has trauma and they’re just trying to get by too. There’s also the generational transmission of trauma, which is why the beads [in the story] were so important—as the trauma gets stronger, more trauma gets dumped into them. I’m hoping people think about PTSD and trauma and the hard decisions that they have to make because people make hard decisions all the time.

JR: I’m really fascinated by how beautifully you use metaphor, but I don’t feel like you’re beating me over the head with it. How intentional is your metaphor shaping or does it just flow from how you think and write?

LL: It is probably one of the most intentional things I do aside from counting syllables. For example, I knew that fire was going to be big. So from the very beginning, when I wanted to make a metaphor around how [my character] Ink was feeling, many of my choices were about fire. Blossom’s quick-witted, and very clever, strategic and thoughtful. So everything about her runs through a metaphor of playing chess. And then Honey’s such a joy because she is this little feral thing. So her metaphor is just ferocity.

And then I also draw from my culture, because Cubans, we have a lot of sayings and a lot of them are metaphors, so that also comes very naturally.

JR: There’s also a beautiful thing you do with language in this particular book with the character, Ink, where she’ll see a word and rattle off a list of synonyms. Why does she play with language in the way that she does?

LL: How she survives the Nectar House is that she chose words. Books are kind of the enemy because they keep her trapped, but words are her friend. So when she expresses emotions and she’s got so many emotions and she lives in this tiny conscripted place, then just one word will not do. It is also a very Cuban thing. Why explain something one way when you can explain it four different ways?

JR: There’s a big theme in the novel around sacrifice. Who is sacrificed without a choice. Who is an intentional sacrifice. And I don’t want to give spoilers, but do you want to talk at all about that theme?

LL: I think the concept of moral injury is very big. This book was born of COVID. This is my illness and isolation baby. So a lot of the nurses that I knew, and even I, had to make decisions about who I could treat and who I couldn’t treat and who could afford to come in and who couldn’t afford to come in because there were a lot of people calling me because I’m a Spanish speaker. So it really brought the idea of moral injury front and center and associated that with the pandemic and limited resources.

But when I do psychedelic work, I work with a lot of veterans and they have to face moral injury all the time. This is where their PTSD resides. So I wanted to play with that with Ink. And that’s why she’s in love with war.

And at the heart of all trauma and PTSD is the inability to not be able to distinguish friend from foe. That’s what all trauma work is all about, is to be able to restore that sense of safety and that person’s decision to be able to navigate the world safely because, if not, everything is a potential harm.

JR: Do you feel that your work as a therapist has enabled you to do really good character development work as a writer?

LL: Absolutely. I listen to how people talk and how people talk about their insides. That’s all I do all day.

JR: Is there anything you would like to say about your book that people haven’t asked you or you would like just to. Or the process of writing or publishing it?

LL: This is hard to express in an interview, but I am such a visual writer that there is an absolutely essential piece that I use in order to be able to do any project. I have a sculpture in my office. That sculpture has a notebook. Every single project that I’ve ever done that’s longer than an email has an accompanying art book. And that is a visual, it’s collage, it’s colors, it’s where I put all the information, and it’s just one big place.

Liza’s art book that informs each novel

I think that it’s so integral to my writing that I feel bad talking about my writing without mentioning the book. But again, it’s a very highly visual thing to do, and it’s also a way I stay organized. So I only use that book and then the computer, and then maybe a paper copy of the chapter that I might be working on because I want to sit on the porch. But aside from that, I don’t use Scrivener or anything like that.

Liza’s diorama sculptures

Purchase links for Ink Honey Blossom:

Sibylline Press

Bookshop.org

Barnes + Noble

Amazon

September Classes With Jordan

Register Here or Scan the QR code.

Register Here or Scan the QR Code

Purchase Writing Through the Pause Here.

There are plenty of things that can disconnect you from your creativity at midlife (and beyond): mental and physical health struggles, relationship changes, access to resources, children (or parents!) needing you or flying the coop, political strife, loss. . . and so much more.

Yet fallow is a funny word. On the surface it sounds sad—ah, my fields yield no crops! But the deeper you look, the richer the concept becomes. Soil is often teeming with life when it looks like dry land. Seeds of life begin as the dullest little nuggets. Fallow is a liminal state, a gestational state.

The world liminal comes from the latin limen for threshold, which makes sense, though the word “threshold” always conjures a straight line in my mind that one steps over, while a liminal space feels more like a pocket to me. Sometimes a liminal space is hard to climb out of because it is also fraught, like one of those rope hammocks that are fun to lie in but challenging to get free from. Often liminal spaces require sitting with discomfort.

Almost everyone has felt the liminal place of Sunday night before school or work starts. Or waiting for good or bad news. Or living in the snag of time before you end something or start something new. Here, a few days before my 52nd birthday, is a liminal space. Dropping our only son off to college two weeks ago was another one.

Liminal spaces are often extremely difficult to be creative within because they lack certainty, solid ground and/or guide posts, thus they can feel fallow. In her essay “Writing and the Threshold Life,” Poet Jane Hirshfield describes fallow states as “places of seeming barrenness, emptiness, or neglect”…emphasis on seeming, adding that “they are places both empty and full,” places from which we can “bring back an abundance new-coined.”

Midlife is a threshold (as are many other times of life where creativity can sneak underground) and it is a liminal space where we can touch the thread of our younger, seemingly more vital selves and extend fingers into future entropy… but there’s so much gestating in between. I’ve found through my Writing Through the Pause interviews and research, that often what is actually lost is our access to our creative selves, not the creativity itself (an infinite and undying source).

I believe that while your creativity may appear to flee you at midlife or in other liminal spaces, it is not gone; the paths or context in which you could once reach it may have changed direction, shape, or form. Finding the new avenues may feel like you’ve been dropped in a wilderness without compass or shoes. Plus, your back hurts, you can’t sleep, and your nervous system feels like an electric fence.

They require allowing multiple experiences to co-exist. They require gentleness, patience, and/or nurture.

Talk to Me Of Your Fallow Times

Share about a fallow time, a struggle you’ve had, whether you feel stuck or climbed out.

Leave a comment

September’s Writer and Creative Spotlights are:

In gratitude to the 28 women and non-binary folks who agreed to be interviewed for Writing in the Pause, I will be spotlighting them here on the stack. Each one is a brilliant, complex person with insights and wisdom that I think you will all gain deeply from, as well as a few additions who are writers I just admire so deeply they must also appear.

• Sept. 1: Liza Losada

• Sept. 10: Kary Hess

• Sept. 18: Elizabeth Land Quant

• Sept 25: Signe E. Land

Take a Tip or a Prompt

Writing Through the Pause is full of writing tips and prompts, like these. It’s designed to help you connect, re-conceive or take a different approach to creative challenges. Take one, leave one!

· Tip: Tale an inventory of what has been happening in your life leading up to or during your fallow period. Often there’s a cause you haven’t drilled down to see yet. Sometimes several.

· Muse, meditate, or write on Jane Hirshfield’s concept of a liminal state as one of being empty and full, allowing a new kind of abundance to emerge.

Consider joining one of my Write The Pause Accountability Circles—four week writing cohorts (that are ongoing) of women and non-binary writers connecting through craft, support and writing to make meaning out of midlife.

Each weekly class (Tuesdays, from 5-6:30 pm PT), we will:

• Set and take steps toward achieving a manageable writing goal

• Read and discuss meaningful writing

• Play with writing prompts

• Engage in craft lessons that elevate your writing or practice

• Deepen your writing practice beyond simply “words on the page”

A maximum of 15 people will meet over four weeks to focus on their individual aim, but in community, whether that’s to finish a project, get unstuck, regenerate a creative practice, create a finished piece of writing, and so on.

Register Here for the September 22-October 10 Cohort or scan the QR code.

Pre-Order Here.

I was the one, after all, who saw him chafing at the tethers of his life in our small town and suggested we apply beyond community college to the state universities. I was the one who said, look as far as you can go. I knew he was craving more life experience. I wanted it for him. I still do.

Cue your “girrlllll.” Cue your laughter. I know. I was a judgmental fool who did not want to accept how I would feel when the day came.

That day was yesterday. We dropped our only child off at his university, unloaded his life into a small square footage he’ll share with two others for the year, and drove away.

He’s gone away many times before. More band trips than I can count. Sleepovers. Trips with friends. One summer he was gone three weeks—it’s not like my husband and I haven’t learned to keep our own company. We have jobs, friends, creative activities and a close relationship. I felt ready. In my mind, I visualized sending him to school as gently pushing a canoe out to still water. I really felt ready. He was more than ready.

And then, we came home without him. Here, where my day is often broken up by the trill of his acoustic guitar, singing Bob Dylan, or the energy of his electric guitar playing rock. Here where I’m used to the thunder of his steps through the house, even if we don’t speak, his laughter at night playing video games with friends.

In this after space, I looked at the vanilla bean scones that I buy only for him and cried. I looked at the empty spot in the bathroom where all his toiletries usually are and cried. I looked into his bedroom, the current iteration more grown up than any of the others since he was a year old, yet traces of his many ages in evidence—the Darth Vadar and Luke Skywalker helmets, the POP figures, old stuffed animals in the back of his closet, and cried.

This is not a tragedy, I texted one of my dear friends, why am I crying like it is?

I had a memory of the months after he was born, when, ragged with total sleep deprivation and lack of confidence that I was parenting right, I had fallen into post-partum depression but didn’t realize it. My dad, not really aware of what was happening, told my mom, “this is a baby, not a tragedy.”

Of course it wasn’t a tragedy. Yet both his entrance and his exit from my life have come with intense emotion. So much of parenting smacks you upside the head without you even realizing it. I have experienced greater joys than I could have imagined getting to know my son. Eighteen years have been dedicated to constant thoughts of him, his needs, his desires, his happiness.

I know it’s normal to feel this ache. It’s time to shapeshift again, discover who I am, who he is, in this new reality.

I know we’ll all adjust and it will slowly transform to the joy of his discovery process as he grows into his new life. But just as I recall looking over his tiny infant self in precise detail, I’m now cataloguing his absence, the traces of the person we brought into this world, now that we’ve sent him off.

Talk to me

Tell me about a time you thought you were ready to say goodbye but maybe not quite so much in reality:

Leave a comment

September Classes

What I will be doing to distract myself is teaching a lot of classes!

September 3, 10am PT/ 1pm ET.

Join me for a new webinar with Writer’s Digest University! Make it Hurt: Bring Emotional Impact and High Stakes to Every Scene. Register here.

Scenes often fall flat because writers shy away from creating real emotional impact. Plots often lose their steam because the stakes aren’t high enough or the pacing drags. And characters can feel like cardboard cutouts because the reader can’t access the impact of the story on them.

This live webinar urges writers to do the thing they often shy away from: Causing their characters pain, taking away things they love, and making life generally harder on them in every scene (in ways that make sense to the plot).

September 4, 4pm to 5:15 pm PT: Start Strong, End Unforgettably. On Endings and Beginnings. Sibyl Writing Craft. Register Here.

Friday September 18, 4 to 6 pm PT. When the Character is You: Curating a Persona in Memoir. Register Here.

Write the Pause: Monthly Creative Accountability Circles for Women/Non-binary Writers. Starts Tues, September 22, four week sessions.

Session 1: Sept 22-Oct 13. Register for Session 1. (You don’t have to take one to take another. Drop in as you desire).

Session 2: Oct 20-Nov 10. Register for Session 2.

Session 3: Nov 17-Dec. 15 (No class Thanksgiving week). Register for Session 3.

Ideal for: Writers who need support getting unstuck, generating writing, finishing work, or finding new avenues to your creativity and prefer.

Pre-Order Writing Through the Pause.

If you’ve been struggling with your writing practice in or around midlife or are just feeling fallow, stuck or disconnected, check out my forthcoming book Writing Through the Pause. Pre-orders are very welcome, and if you pre-order a hard copy, I will be glad to send you a signed book plate when you finally get it!

I thought I would stop complaining about AI publicly for a while, because it puts people on the defensive, and I have sympathy for those of us who have to use it at work, or for whom it improves access to one or more functions they couldn’t otherwise afford and many other reasons. We aren’t the ones who forced it down our own throats, after all (*cough-Sam Altman-cough*).

And yet, the emails.

The greater the persistence and constancy of the spam emails telling me how “masterful, outstanding, impressive, wide-ranging” and more that my work is, the angrier I get. It has the feeling of a popular boy I liked in middle school telling me he liked me and then shouting “SIKE” while his equally popular friends snickered at the devastation in my face. These expressions of praise are the very things many writers have waited years to hear from literary agents, publishers and readers. In the same way that AI itself is sycophantic—always validating you and fawning over you no matter how bad your ideas— these emails appeal to the most vulnerable, insecure parts of ourselves. (YES—EM DASHES MINE). You could say this feature preys on the human ego.

This AI-driven era of false praise also reveals a shadowy underbelly of creativity and art. It helps me understand why it’s so easy to get caught in a loop of “why bother”— if no one is seeing, buying, and now add fawning, over our work.

We may say we don’t write to make money, we may say audience isn’t a big deal, that we write to soothe our demons, to express our hearts, but we’re soaking in it, the pressure to monetize, that is, and it’s driving this horrid feedback loop.

I also think it’s stifling many, many writers.

Now, quick caveat: I DO think writers and other creative souls should be paid for their creations. I do think the arts are valid careers and vocations and callings, and I am HERE FOR money being thrown our way.

But in this increasingly slop-ified sea, where writers are competing with those who are using AI to write “creatively,” the urge to be found and hoisted up to a pinnacle of success is becoming a false prize.

In other words: We gotta make our own way. Pave our own paths, which may not all end in a payout or clicks. I’m not saying—I will never say—abandon money. I, too, live in this real world of ridiculously overpriced costs of living, my thinning bank account a daily reminder that just breathing air costs money, and hoping I survive the next round of layoffs at my day job.

What I’m saying is: If lack of money, eyes on your work, or material success is what’s keeping you from writing or creating, it’s worth interrogating what the writing does for you and you alone and staying connected to that.

And if you would like to live in a world where humans do the creative writing and art making, keep supporting the work of writers who strongly oppose using AI in their creative work.

Some books that I have loved recently:

How to Plant A Billion Trees: A memoir of childhood trauma and the healing power of nature, by Nicole Walker

The Talking Bone: A novel, Rene Denfeld

Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar

Leave a comment

Pre-Order Writing Through the Pause.

If you’ve been struggling with your writing practice in or around midlife or are just feeling fallow, stuck or disconnected, I think you’ll gain a lot from my forthcoming book Writing Through the Pause. Pre-orders are very welcome, and if you pre-order a hard copy, I will be glad to send you a signed book plate when you finally get it!

September Classes, Conferences and Cohorts

This month, we send our only son to college and tend to our health, but come September I hit the ground running HARD! I hope to see some of you at this variety of in-person and virtual events and conferences.

September 3, 10am PT/ 1pm ET.

Join me for a new webinar with Writer’s Digest University! Make it Hurt: Bring Emotional Impact and High Stakes to Every Scene. Register here.

Scenes often fall flat because writers shy away from creating real emotional impact. Plots often lose their steam because the stakes aren’t high enough or the pacing drags. And characters can feel like cardboard cutouts because the reader can’t access the impact of the story on them.

This live webinar urges writers to do the thing they often shy away from: Causing their characters pain, taking away things they love, and making life generally harder on them in every scene (in ways that make sense to the plot).

Also: Look for my article “Curating a Persona in Memoir” in the September/October issue of Writer’s Digest Magazine.

New Fall Classes with Sibyl Writing Craft

Stay tuned for a host of cool new classes coming through Sibyl Writing Craft! Sign up with your email to get 10% off.

Some of mine include:

• Sept. 4. Start Strong, End Unforgettably: On Endings and Beginnings

• Sept 1- December 1: (12 week cohort). Write the Pause: Creative Accountability Circles for Women + Non-binary Writers

• Sept. 18: When The Character is You: Curating Persona in Memoir

September 25-26. Central Coast Writers Conference!

Thinking of attending one of my favorite writing conferences of all? The Central Coast Writers Conference takes place Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25 and 26 in beautiful San Luis Obispo, California. In addition to the very reasonably priced conference itself, you can also add on one of eight Master Classes! I’m teaching “Unlocking Voice on the Page: Level Up With Character and Style.”

Editing Services

Need an editor for book-length manuscripts (fiction, memoir and other non-fiction), short stories, essays, query letters or synopses? Message me (jordanwritelife (at) gmail (dot) com) that you saw this Substack post and I’ll extend a $100 off discount.

As someone who grew up with a lot of uncertainty, I have been a sucker for routines in my five+ decades life. One might even say I’ve clung to them…more tightly than necessary.

Enter the obstacle course of perimenopause and midlife blahs that started in my earlyish forties and hasn’t let up yet. Now, routines are harder. Ambitions appear brightly then melt into goo. Motivation emerges then crisps right up like my backyard grass in the drought. Fatigue and erratic moods have introduced chaos.

I recently went back to my gym, for example, after a 2.5 year break due to my “new” job. It felt so good to be pushed again, and to have new routines to look forward to. I found myself making, and thus attaching to, new routines, which is great.

Until it isn’t.

Last week I was overcome by an immense fatigue related to non-restful travel and processing my only child’s near-departure for college and, you know, midlife malaise. The morning I didn’t keep to my new routine and make it to my new exercise classes, my first instinct was to berate myself. Then I took a breath. I reached for a gentler voice that said: you’re allowed to rest. You took one class this week. You did some.

This is also a post about writing.

I used to be a rise-at-5am-before-work-and-write-for-two-hours-type-of- writer. I used to balance multiple projects. I used to be able to write 1,000 words on command. Today, after days of procrastination, I eked out 200 words, and rearranged a table of contents and damn, I claimed it. It was some.

There’s a kind of magic in some. When you allow yourself some instead of a cruel or inflexible target, energies unlock. Some might just be a start, a couple of words scribbled out on a napkin, or your notes app. Some might be finishing something you left off, even at the last minute. Some has a funny way of leading to more. Or at the very least, enough. And enough can be an antidote against self-flagellation, of feeling “behind” in an unrealistic standard you probably didn’t originate.

Let’s talk about some more concretely. I’ve been outlining a new novel for weeks now. It will be months before I begin writing it due to other obligations. That outline often expands by a single world or character detail. One day I only decided on my characters’ last names. Another day I wanted to know their obsessions. One day I spent a whole hour just looking at photos of the ocean floor for thematic resonance. Each of these acts is some. It’s the chipping away of some that eventually turns it into something more—in this case, a full outline, one that will also evolve as I go.

How about you? What’s your some this week?

Writing Prompts

Here are some prompts if you need a little nudge in a direction:

• Character micro-sketch: Write a micro-character sketch: Your character is sorting through their closet for something to wear to a function that is not their normal kind of event and where they don’t really want to go but must. (Fancy when they prefer casual. Outdoorsy when they prefer to wear dresses, etc). Write their inner monologue as they grapple with one thing they find. How do the clothes reflect their nature, their personality, conjure memories?

• Resurrect a sentence: Read through old notebooks, journals, or old documents. Find one sentence you like or love. Resurrect it as a prompt for a new piece of writing (possibly one of these other prompts). Remain unattached to the outcome of this writing. If you produce one more sentence you like or love, use that as yet another jumping off point for another “new” piece.

• Write only one: Pick up a work in progress (or an abandoned project). Give each character in a scene only one new line of dialogue. Put it down. Or: Write exactly one fresh image or description. Put it down. No more than one. Walk away. Do something else. If you feel called to do more, do another “just one thing.” Repeat only if called.

• Take a detour: Look at one plot or narrative direction that your story is taking or has taken and write, brainstorm/info-dump style, about what would happen if the story went in a totally other direction. You don’t have to write in scene, you don’t have to make it happen or keep it. Extra fun if you’re writing memoir.

Writing Through the Pause Has a Final Cover! Pre-Orders Welcome.

My labor of love has a final cover (though the old cover may still populate for a while at certain retailers), and it’s very different from the placeholder, but I love it. Especially since one of the originating conversations that played a big part in the book came from a conversation with my therapist, who described the very fallow and scary place I was in when I came to see her as “rooting.” Feeling fallow but putting down roots and waiting to see what might bloom. Pre-orders are very welcome, and if you pre-order a hard copy, I will be glad to send you a signed book plate when you finally get it!

I will not be teaching in August, but September hits the ground running HARD! I hope to see some of you at this variety of in-person and virtual events and conferences.

September 3, 10am PT/ 1pm ET.

Join me for a new webinar with Writer’s Digest University! Make it Hurt: Bring Emotional Impact and High Stakes to Every Scene. Register here.

Scenes often fall flat because writers shy away from creating real emotional impact. Plots often lose their steam because the stakes aren’t high enough or the pacing drags. And characters can feel like cardboard cutouts because the reader can’t access the impact of the story on them.

This live webinar urges writers to do the thing they often shy away from: Causing their characters pain, taking away things they love, and making life generally harder on them in every scene (in ways that make sense to the plot).

Also: Look for my article “Curating a Persona in Memoir” in the September/October issue of Writer’s Digest Magazine.

New Fall Classes with Sibyl Writing Craft

Stay tuned for a host of cool new classes coming through Sibyl Writing Craft! Sign up with your email to get 10% off.

Some of mine include:

• Sept. 4. Start Strong, End Unforgettably: On Endings and Beginnings

• Sept 1- December 1: (12 week cohort). Write the Pause: Creative Accountability Circles for Women + Non-binary Writers

• Sept. 18: When The Character is You: Curating Persona in Memoir

September 25-26. Central Coast Writers Conference!

Thinking of attending one of my favorite writing conferences of all? The Central Coast Writers Conference takes place Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25 and 26 in beautiful San Luis Obispo, California. In addition to the very reasonably priced conference itself, you can also add on one of eight Master Classes! I’m teaching “Unlocking Voice on the Page: Level Up With Character and Style.”

Editing Services

Need an editor for book-length manuscripts (fiction, memoir and other non-fiction), short stories, essays, query letters or synopses? Message me (jordanwritelife (at) gmail (dot) com).

PRE-ORDER THIS Amazing novel, which got a starred Kirkus review, by the fabulous Liza Losada Schor.

KIRKUS: “This tale of trauma, survival, and the choices people make under duress is stunningly written and deeply felt. The spare, effective worldbuilding is all the more effective for its slow unfolding. Losada’s poetic, erudite prose can be gorgeous in its own right, and it powerfully delivers the novel’s many emotional gut punches. Across the board, the characterization is masterful, with antiheroes and villains alike sketched with dexterity and depth. Impressively, even off-page characters become fully realized in others’ recollections. An original, dark, and finely wrought debut fantasy novel.”

Just as I’ve been hanging at the precipice of asking myself why should I continue writing novels when AI slop and climate change and war and ICE murders and unchecked corruption and unknown future… I went to hear writer Ocean Vuong speak in Santa Cruz. I joke that if I did not have a family and work obligations, I would follow him just to sit at his knee and soak up his genius like some cult devotee.

If this is what people feel when they go to church, color me religious.

My phone is full of notes I tapped out in a hurry before catching the next awe-inducing thing he said, but what stuck with me the most were his points about art/writing and honoring the traditions of those who came before him. And because I was too busy listening, and not note taking at this point, I don’t remember exactly what he said, but the essence still resonates this morning like thunder in my body, like so:

We wily, canny, silly, dangerous humans create both art and war, but it’s art that will survive. It’s art that allows us to survive. Art is psychic and psychological armor but also medicine, too. Innoculation and tolerance against what is indefatigably awful and celebration of the joys.

We use art to seek each other amidst the indescribable, the horrific, as well as the joyous. Art that is luminous and bright, art that is jagged and edged in pain, art that is goofy or bawdy, art that IS.

When survivors of this Anthropocene scrape through detritus looking for answers, Ocean suggested, they will not care about the influencer’s follow count or the billionaire’s bunker—they will wonder at what remains of the meaning we tried to make while we were here, the ways we buoyed each other up. The lengths we went to signal, “Hey, this sucks and also what marvelous, uncanny beauty that we are here at all.”

He didn’t say art will save us from the messes we’re in, or rewrite those behind us—it can’t undo what horrors we have wrought. Yet despite and amidst our nastiest tendencies, you always find art. And art doesn’t have to be a concrete object or product, either (he eschews likening art to a corporate profit model, hallelujah). Sometimes it’s community coming together (in protest, revelry, or shared beliefs). Sometimes it’s poor, hardworking, immigrant people storytelling in their tenement building (like the one where he grew up). Sometimes it’s dragging your teenager to New York to the work of famous painters even though the life he is about to make for himself is also art. Sometimes it’s you, sitting at your desk, chewing on a novel or story or essay because that impulse soothes the gathering storm inside you, too.

It further confirmed for me why I want less to do with AI in my creative writing life (Ocean’s words: “using AI to do creative work is to cede the ground of our humanity and give it away to billionaires). The grappling is part of the process of art making, which is essential to our survival.

If either the urge or justification for writing or other art has faltered for you of late, let Ocean-through-me act as a messenger, a doula, a spirit of the artistic/creative force itself here to say: go forward. Art makes the discordant realities of the human condition worth living.

That’s it, the whole post. This post will not try to sell you something. It invites you to comment or share something about your own reflections on art.

Leave a comment

I have chosen not to read any of those articles about the decline in reading, how our nation’s literacy is taking a dive so profound it could win an Olympic medal (thanks, I have plenty of other reasons to feel depressed!) I don’t easily subscribe to propaganda that I should hand over my creative process to AI because everyone else is doing it, or “it’s here to stay.” I’m not rushing to make too many aspects of my creative life easier, to be honest.

And I’m not saying any of this to make anyone feel bad who might be doing those things.

This is also not “burying my head in the sand.” There are real problems that need addressing, and in that way, I’m deeply interested. I will donate, call, support libraries and literacy programs and funding for education.

Today, I’m here to offer tips to put up your deflection shields against the increasingly louder noise about what is being lost when it comes to reading and writing.

1. Weave an intentional web. People aren’t reading. Sob. Writing will all be done by AI soon. Weep. But you know what? By following my own interests, I’ve curated such a specific set of people, groups and connections on my social media feed that it’s almost ALL people reading and writing. Whether you do this virtually or in person—weave a web you want to be caught in intentionally. (Also, see #4).

2. Create. Your creative drive, in fact the whole apparatus that allows you to write or read or muse, is much like other muscles in the body—it needs flexing and practice to stay vigorous. Sometimes it needs to be surprised, like a case of the hiccups, or interrupted, like rearranging its room to give it new flow. Create without product in mind. Create just because it feels good. Create slowly, quickly, with others, alone. I’m in deep outlining mode on a new novel, cataloguing character obsessions and obsessing myself over Benthic symbolism. By the time that novel gets written, much less seeks publication, I don’t know what the state of publishing will look like. But I know that every time I even touch its edges, I feel electric. The drafting of it is like riding a stationary bike to power a small battery.

2a. Play. Weird. I think a lot about word connotations, like how “create” sounds fun, but “execute,” not only with its deathly double meaning but corporate overtones, sounds awful. Writing can be serious business, but it can also be joyfully playful and weird. In fact, I’m starting to think “weird” may be the entry point into play. So, my wish for you today is that you will let yourself write something “weird”—whatever that means to you. (I’m partial to the definitions that connect the etymology to “fate, chance, fortune, destiny, and the Fates” as well as “uncanny, supernatural.”)

3. Visit an independent bookstore. The reason I put bookstores before libraries is only because bookstores, with their ink-paper scent and their overpriced hardcovers, remind me that people are still spending money on books. In a time when gas and groceries are exorbitant, people are still forking out their hard-earned cash to take home a 300 page novel that will give maybe 6-12 hours of pleasure or entertainment (though we all know that pleasure lingers and deepens). This heartens me.

4. Attend, join or find an in-person literary event. Up until 2005, I had an absolute embarrassment of riches in the form of in-person literary community simply based on geography. Then I moved to a new community hours away and lost access to most of it. In the 21 years we’ve lived in our current town, I’ve driven and flown as far as New York and Colorado, and zoomed my way to some kind of literary community. This year, with my son going off to college, I decided to create some for myself. SCRAWL is small, mighty, a haphazard collection of word-loving volunteers who are helping me create community where I stand. What could it look like in your realm to find or create literary community?

5. Hang out at libraries. Since I first heard the term “third places” in my freshman year of college, I’ve been obsessed with the idea of them, neither home nor work, where people can hang out safely, finding nourishment. Libraries have become third places. And there may come a time in the not-so-distant future, when there are more AI books spamming up the internet than human written books. But in the library, you can always pull a physical book off a shelf, tuck yourself into a nook and read. Shout out a favorite library here!

Pre-Order Your Copy of Writing Through the Pause: Mining Midlife for Powerful Writing today!

September 3, 10am PT/ 1pm ET.

Join me for a new webinar with Writer’s Digest University! Make it Hurt: Bring Emotional Impact and High Stakes to Every Scene. Register here.

Scenes often fall flat because writers shy away from creating real emotional impact. Plots often lose their steam because the stakes aren’t high enough or the pacing drags. And characters can feel like cardboard cutouts because the reader can’t access the impact of the story on them.

This live webinar urges writers to do the thing they often shy away from: Causing their characters pain, taking away things they love, and making life generally harder on them in every scene (in ways that make sense to the plot).

Also: Look for my article “Curating a Persona in Memoir” in the September/October issue of Writer’s Digest Magazine.

New Fall Classes with Sibyl Writing Craft

Stay tuned for a host of cool new classes coming through Sibyl Writing Craft! Sign up with your email to get 10% off.

Some of mine include:

• Sept. 4. Start Strong, End Unforgettably: On Endings and Beginnings

• Sept 1- December 1: (12 week cohort). Write the Pause: Creative Accountability Circles for Women + Non-binary Writers

• Sept. 18: When The Character is You: Curating Persona in Memoir

• Oct. 10: Getting Unstuck: Writing Through Murky Middles

• Nov. 2: Make Them Feel It: Emotion, Imagery and The Senses

• Dec. 4: Rude, Bold and Brazen: How Attitude Builds Strong Characters

September 25-26. Central Coast Writers Conference

Thinking of attending one of my favorite writing conferences of all? The Central Coast Writers Conference takes place Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25 and 26 in beautiful San Luis Obispo. You can also add on a Master Class. I’m teaching “Unlocking Voice on the Page: Level Up With Character and Style.”

Editing Services

Need an editor for book-length manuscripts (fiction, memoir and other non-fiction), short stories, essays, query letters or synopses? Message me (jordanwritelife (at) gmail (dot) com).

PRE-ORDER THIS Amazing novel, which got a starred Kirkus review, by the fabulous Liza Losada Schor.

KIRKUS: "This tale of trauma, survival, and the choices people make under duress is stunningly written and deeply felt. The spare, effective worldbuilding is all the more effective for its slow unfolding. Losada’s poetic, erudite prose can be gorgeous in its own right, and it powerfully delivers the novel’s many emotional gut punches. Across the board, the characterization is masterful, with antiheroes and villains alike sketched with dexterity and depth. Impressively, even off-page characters become fully realized in others’ recollections. An original, dark, and finely wrought debut fantasy novel. "

I often joke that I call my path to any kind of writing “success” the “stumble and bumble” approach. I’m only partially kidding. What’s true about this is that almost everything that’s manifested as success in my writing life has been equal parts throwing proverbial spaghetti at the wall and just dogged persistence. There has rarely been a direct or sophisticated path I’ve followed and I’m too contrarian/lone wolf to take most people’s advice. I’m also the queen of near misses and close calls, and just as many hard disappointments, but with the exception of a couple of terrifying fallow periods, I manage to marshal my inner terminator and get back up again.

While I’ve been a writer from the moment I could turn letters into sentences, I haven’t always known how or if I would make that into a career, much less, at times, a vocation. I mostly just keep trying things out and ignore people who say things “can’t” be done. And the more we shift into a world where we hand tasks over to AI, the more value I see in trying our actual hand at things messily, badly, but fruitfully.

I’m old enough now to say annoying things like “back in my day, we had to go look stuff up at the library” but it’s true. I can still recall the heft of the Writer’s Market, a literal tome of nearly 1000 pages that contained all the existing literary agents and publishers known to writer-kind, several decades before QueryTracker and other tools came along digitally. We sent our query letters by snail mail.

Back in my day, however, we also didn’t have to worry about things like platform or how many social media followers we had. We didn’t have to make video content to keep up with changing attention spans and monetization. We didn’t have to create subscriber-based blogs. We didn’t have to keep track of multiple accounts much less buy selfie sticks and camera lights—the challenges really have changed.

Perhaps because my mind feels so analog (I can’t even use sophisticated writing software like Scrivener) and is so attached to ye olde tooles of yore, I have been slow to meet this moment. So when the woman I’ve hired for years to make all of my graphics and visuals took a big break from her work, I felt I had no choice but to dive in and start learning Canva to make graphics, flyers and now reels.

And guess what? I’m doing it. Badly. Half-assedly. Unsophisticatedly. Humorously. But you know what? I’m having fun. I’m learning by doing. I’m noticing the quality differences between one technique or another. I’m keeping track of what gets more traction and learning from it. I haven’t gone viral. I haven’t amassed millions of followers (yet?). But in the same way that I have done everything else in my writing career, I just keep at it.

And folks, this is also my advice for writing and career. We’re all probably sick of hearing “it’s the journey, not the destination” so how about instead, “there’s value in treating everything like a creative process, and detaching from whether you’ve made a product that you can sell.” I swear you’ll have more fun, and you might also achieve your other aims, too.

Stay tuned for more tips on plotting. Hint: my plotting process is also a stumble and bumble approach.

Pre-Order Your Copy of Writing Through the Pause: Mining Midlife for Powerful Writing today!

Weds July 15, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. Capturing Personal History Through Storytelling Workshop. Morgan Hill Library.

Morgan Hill friends, even if you don’t consider yourself a writer, but have a personal, family or ancestral story you’d like to attempt to get down on paper, join me for a FREE workshop at the Morgan Hill Library!

September 3, 10am PT/ 1pm ET.

Join me for a new webinar with Writer’s Digest University! Make it Hurt: Bring Emotional Impact and High Stakes to Every Scene. Register here.

Scenes often fall flat because writers shy away from creating real emotional impact. Plots often lose their steam because the stakes aren’t high enough or the pacing drags. And characters can feel like cardboard cutouts because the reader can’t access the impact of the story on them.

This live webinar urges writers to do the thing they often shy away from: Causing their characters pain, taking away things they love, and making life generally harder on them in every scene (in ways that make sense to the plot).

Writers who know they have a great story that just isn’t quite “there yet” will come away from this webinar with concrete skills to apply at the scene, plot and character levels to “make it hurt,” for characters and readers alike, in all the “right” ways.

Also: Look for my article “Curating a Persona in Memoir” in the September/October issue of Writer’s Digest Magazine.

September 25-26. Central Coast Writers Conference

Thinking of attending one of my favorite writing conferences of all? The Central Coast Writers Conference takes place Friday and Saturday, Sept. 25 and 26 in beautiful San Luis Obispo. You can also add on a Master Class. I’m teaching “Unlocking Voice on the Page: Level Up With Character and Style.”

New Fall Classes with Sibyl Writing Craft

Stay tuned for a host of cool new classes coming through Sibyl Writing Craft! Sign up with your email to get 10% off.

Some of mine include:

• Sept. 4. Start Strong, End Unforgettably: On Endings and Beginnings

• Sept 1- December 1: (12 week cohort). Write the Pause: Creative Accountability Circles for Women + Non-binary Writers

• Sept. 18: When The Character is You: Curating Persona in Memoir

• Oct. 10: Getting Unstuck: Writing Through Murky Middles

• Nov. 2: Make Them Feel It: Emotion, Imagery and The Senses

• Dec. 4: Rude, Bold and Brazen: How Attitude Builds Strong Characters

Editing Services

Need an editor for book-length manuscripts (fiction, memoir and other non-fiction), short stories, essays, query letters or synopses? Message me (jordanwritelife (at) gmail (dot) com).

I’ve begun the very early stages of outlining/plotting a new novel, a task that I loathed in many of my earlier years writing novels. I preferred the wild energy of sitting down with complete unknowns, other than an originating idea, and just flinging myself into a story, writing story out of void (yes, full on pantser). As I learned more about plot structures ranging from Hero’s Journey to Freytag’s Pyramid, I worried that by following one of these, I would be writing by a formula, I would be losing something of myself and thus the joy of writing.

But over the years I’ve come to realize that outlining and plotting don’t actually force me into a formula at all. They just lay down guide rails, blueprints, ones that still manage to shift as wildly as an MC Escher painting. What I’ve learned is that my characters, those miraculous little fractals of mystery, still decide what they want to do, no matter what my outline says anyway. The wild energy persists, but what’s different is that when I sit down to write, I know where I want to start based on my outline. I have direction.

And when I have direction, I am more likely to write, and to write every day and to finish something. I like plot structures like Martha Alderson’s “the energetic markers” from her book The Plot Whisperer, which breaks plot into four specific energetic turning points around which you can structure scenes and character change. I love her plot planner, which I put on a white board or a piece of poster board and draw as a visual when I’ve done all the organic plotting, just to get started.

I also love Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat Writes a Novel, (A variation on Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat, which is for screenwriters), because it breaks plot into 15 ‘beats’ with concrete tasks and ways of thinking of what a story needs.

Then, I begin to write a “living outline” that is mostly narrative. I start with a list of the key characters at top. Like so:

It often ends up being 10 or more pages long, a break down of series of bullet points and details that will go into each scene. I do even draw on my own book Make a Scene as a reminder that plots unfold in scenes, those small, somewhat contained units of action and detail. The reason I don’t even mind sharing bits of it here is that I know it will change.

I’ll share more about this process as I go; I feel like plotting needs to be demystified for those who don’t like it, fear it, or for whom the tools like scrivener don’t work, either. I thought others might like to see that you can be a messy or “organic” plotter and still get it done.

**

As I think about “best laid plans” in plotting and writing, I’ve also been thinking about it in parenting and life in general. Since I posted last, my one and only child graduated from high school and turned 18 and has already registered for his classes at the college he’ll be attending. In two months, he moves into the dorms. Perhaps because he has so much sudden time to think and reflect on this transition, he’s been taking an inventory of things he has gained (or not) from us, his parents. And now he wants to talk about them.

I’ve always felt fortunate to have a son who talks to me, tells me things, with whom I’ve mostly felt close, thought it hasn’t been without its ups and downs, particularly in the last year as his need for individuation became fierce. I have my own inner catalogue of things I’ve done wrong or poorly, things I hashed out in therapy when he was young and am continuing to do now. And yet, just like in writing, where your characters surprise you by asserting a trait or a choice you didn’t plan for, children will always surprise you with what they see or need or didn’t get.

I’ve been grappling with how applying structure in my writing life has helped me, but applying too much of it in my parenting has, in some ways, worked against us. That despite my best intentions, there are ways my son doesn’t feel that he got something he needed. That by trying to “structure” myself as the right kind of mother, in some ways I didn’t model how to be messy and fall apart when things are hard, which he internalized as something he can’t do easily either. I learned to build walls and armor around my tender parts, determined never again to be called “sensitive” like I was as a child.

In both cases, in writing and life, I’m learning that what I thought worked, didn’t always, and that we must never stop adapting to what works better.

Tell me about some “best laid plans” that have gone awry but taught you something in life or writing.

Leave a comment

Need an editor for your manuscript, short story, essay, query letter or synopsis? Email for a discovery call. (Say you saw it in this newsletter and I’ll give you 10% off your first edit).

September 3, 10am PT/ 1pm ET. Join me for a new webinar with Writer’s Digest University! Make it Hurt: Bring Emotional Impact and High Stakes to Every Scene. Register here.

Scenes often fall flat because writers shy away from creating real emotional impact. Plots often lose their steam because the stakes aren’t high enough or the pacing drags. And characters can feel like cardboard cutouts because the reader can’t access the impact of the story on them.

This live webinar urges writers to do the thing they often shy away from: Causing their characters pain, taking away things they love, and making life generally harder on them in every scene (in ways that make sense to the plot).

Writers who know they have a great story that just isn’t quite “there yet” will come away from this webinar with concrete skills to apply at the scene, plot and character levels to “make it hurt,” for characters and readers alike, in all the “right” ways.

Also: Look for my article “Curating a Persona in Memoir” in the September/October issue of Writer’s Digest Magazine.

New Fall Classes with Sibyl Writing Craft

Stay tuned for a host of cool new classes coming through Sibyl Writing Craft! Sign up with your email to get 10% off.

Some of mine include:

• Sept. 4. Start Strong, End Unforgettably: On Endings and Beginnings

• Sept 1- December 1: (12 week cohort). Write the Pause: Creative Accountability Circles for Women + Non-binary Writers

• Sept. 18: When The Character is You: Curating Persona in Memoir

• Oct. 10: Getting Unstuck: Writing Through Murky Middles

• Nov. 2: Make Them Feel It: Emotion, Imagery and The Senses

• Dec. 4: Rude, Bold and Brazen: How Attitude Builds Strong Characters

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about a video I watched the other day, of a beekeeper allowing a bee to unwind her stinger from his wrist. I didn’t know they could do this—few people do, I’m sure. A bee sting with its sharp lance of pain often brings a fight-or-flight response, your sympathetic nervous system sending adrenaline that spikes your heart rate, profuse sweating, amygdala punch of alarm, nausea, and leads most people to slap or shake or grasp at the place the bee has landed (and for the allergic, anaphylaxis and worse). That response, if it doesn’t kill the bee from contact, causes it to flee in fear, its belly yanked out, pinioned by its own stinger, to its end.

This man doesn’t slap or panic. He narrates what is happening like David Attenborough in a gentle, bemused voice: First, he moves slowly away to a sheltered spot. Then he works, meditatively, to unwind his own nervous system reaction, to calm breathing and heart rate, which, for anyone who has ever been stung (and does not enter anaphylaxis) knows is not a small feat.

In this seemingly becalmed (bee calmed?) state, the honeybee begins to do a little dance, sometimes clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise. She is, he informs us, unwinding several barbs of her stinger.

It takes about two minutes, and then she’s off, intact, to pollinate another day. She’s not another casualty of a human startle reflex.

Because I’m a writer who finds metaphor in everything, I made meaning of this moment. Of course, who doesn’t love a story where a vulnerable, essential creature survives against the odds. But more, I was taken by what the man was willing and able to endure on behalf of something so small, for a benefit beyond himself. I was taken by the idea that sometimes if we can just sit with the pain, slow ourselves down, allow something to be uncomfortable, something fruitful can grow from that state, or something can be preserved.

There are a million rebuttals to this, I know. Do I mean that someone with, say, chronic pain should “just sit with it” and learn from it? Of course not. Do I mean that someone battling devastating grief needs to just “suck it up?” Of course not. Do I revere pain? Hell no. But do I think there’s worth in sitting through, teasing out, being patient with complexity, or certain kinds of creative struggle? Absolutely! (It’s essentially the subject of my next novel Seeking Solace, out in ’28).

I think about this idea most in the context of art/writing. And even here, I don’t think someone should stay with a project that’s making you miserable. I don’t believe in forcing something either. But I think many writers and other artists have had the experience of chewing on something that isn’t quite coming together because you’re trying to jam it into a certain shape. Perhaps it makes you angry with its resistance. You want your characters to sound a certain way, do a certain thing, for the sentence to move with the right rhythm or the plot to magically gel. And when they don’t, sometimes we give up too soon (I can speak from LOTS of personal experience here) rather than sitting with it. You might be tempted to reach for an “easy” solution.

For me, it’s often only after I sit with the complexity (instead of forcing something or reacting) that something unwinds. Or maybe I “walk” with the complexity, literally step away from the page and do a lap around my neighborhood. Or maybe I talk the complexity out with a friend or fellow writer. Or maybe I breathe with the complexity, knowing that I may be stepping away from the writing, but not from working it out in my mind. (I’m doing this currently as I mentally comb the tangles of a newly forming plot until I’m ready to begin setting it on paper). And sometimes all of that leads me to realize that nope, this isn’t the right project /character /plot twist/ sentence. But I feel a little fuller for having done that work. It always seems to feed back into my next project/character/plot twist or sentence.

I also loved the beekeeper’s absolute care for a being so small, but at the same time, so very important. It’s the level of care I want to bring to every sentence in a novel. It’s the level of care I want to bring to a character detail. It’s the level of care I want to bring to literary citizenship.

I took the beekeeper and his willingness to tolerate brief pain for larger gain as a reminder that there is sweetness in some kinds of struggle. That it can benefit our brains and creative wells. That sometimes the answer is in sitting still even when we want to flee.

How about you?

What’s a recent moment of fruitful struggle you can point to in your own creative life?

Leave a comment

I’m excited to join an incredible line-up for a virtual fiction workshop as part of Free Expressions NEW Story 360 Virtual Advanced Fiction Workshop! Best part, it’s virtual, so you can attend from wherever you are! It’s an intensive three-day virtual workshop for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction who relish deep-dive challenging classes that go far beyond the basics.

Included in the workshop is a day-long master class, THE DEEP END: SECRETS OF STORY DEPTH with literary agent Donald Maass, along with substantive courses on advanced topics from industry pros, Janice Hardy, Sarah Fisk, Sheree L.Greer, Jordan Rosenfeld, Lorin Oberweger, Leah Henderson, Jonathan Maberry, and Steven James.

Expect hands-on, generative work, lively discussion, and topics that challenge what you think you know about fiction craft!

Register Here

Topics include:

• Flat Settings, Heavy Paragraphs, and Other Description Disasters

• The Scintillating Synopsis

• Close to the Bone: Revision

• Departing the Arc: New Patterns for Fresh Story Structure (That’s me! Sat. June 20th)

• Let’s Fall in Love: The Intersection of Voice, Viewpoint, and Character

• Building a Multi-Platform Writing Career

• Emotional Connection to Place

• Suspense Essentials: Secrets to Tapping into Tension (Whatever Genre You Write)

• PLUS “Working lunch” clinics with feedback on select participants’ query letters and first pages.

Register Here

Use discount code: JRFX10 for 10% off!

Pre-Order Writing Through the Pause: Mining Midlife for Powerful Writing

If you’re reading this, you’re doing so despite an overwhelming number of choices (so thanks!). If they even are choices; by the time you’ve subscribed to a dozen or so Substacks, online magazines, (and even if you haven’t subscribed but once or twice just clicked on a website you now suddenly receive their emails) your in-box is likely flooded beyond easy ability to control.

I’ve been striving to describe this experience, which I don’t remember feeling in this same way at any other time in my life, and this morning it hit me: Saturation. Where once there used to be glorious space, emptiness in my mind from whence most of my stories sprang, there is now a kind of gelatinous fullness, much like a sponge gets when it is so full of water it can hold no more.

So I stop and interrogate: how much of this feeling is a result of my own choices? How much of this feeling is a result of circumstances beyond my control? At the end of the day I have the power to reduce inflows into my already too-heavy sponge. But I am not always choosing them. Why?

Information, entertainment, stimulus—they’re addicting. Staying overly connected online provides that dopamine hit, be it something uplifting, or a doom scroll. It provides the illusion of soothing whatever might actually be on my mind and heart—from the rollback of so many hard-fought rights in this country to my only child being just a couple of months away from leaving for college. But at the end of the day, it leaves me more agitated and disconnected from myself and my creativity.

And then there are the midlife onslaughts. The physiological reordering of body and brain through perimenopause / general aging. It’s made me care a lot less about appearances and playing nice. It’s given me more inner steel even when my actual spine is shrinking.

So what to do about this saturation? The first, clearest answer is disconnect from the inputs, as much as that is possible. But I find rather than just discovering what “not” to do, I’m much more motivated by what I can put energy toward. Last week, my little local labor of literary love, SCRAWL, held its first event, a “Book Karaoke” open mic. Just people reading their words aloud in a room with each other. I did, in fact, feel full from that event, but not saturated, not unable to contain anymore. In fact, I felt as though my well gained new depths.

Coming together around shared delights seems to be an antidote to saturation. Another has been allowing myself to be creative, to write, without always needed it to be “for” anything. Lately, at night, I’ve been getting little nudges of inspiration. I write prose-poems on my notes app in bed. Sometimes I turn them into more, but most of the time, they’re just processing something out of my psyche.

What helps you?

Leave a comment

“Book Karaoke” at Ancora Vino, May 27, 2026. Sign up to read at our June 24 event, where the themes (loosely interpreted) are: Half Measures/Things Left Undone.

“Write the Pause” Creative Circles Start September!

I’m excited to introduce “Write The Pause Creative Circles.” Part writing workshop, part support network, part creative community. It’s for midlife adjacent women/non-binary writers who are tired of feeling isolated, disconnected, stuck, fallow, or who want accountability, elevation of craft and creative support.

Do you need a community or cohort to help you draft material, finish work, find new avenues to your creativity and do so with the support of others in a similar place? Have you been bullied by the onslaughts of midlife, including but not limited to: perimenopause, creative frustrations, caregiving, brain fog, mood swings, struggling to access your creativity or finish a project? This circle is for you.

Maximum of 12 people meet weekly over three quarters of the year via zoom. In each quarter, you’ll focus on a specific aim, whether that’s to simply regenerate a creative practice, create a finished piece of writing, get published or something else. Cost is $270 per quarter ($90/month).

We’ll write, read, discuss, and work toward your specific creative writing aims in a supportive environment.

Quarters run as follows: September-November, December-February, March-May. Summer there will be some monthly offerings to keep connected but we’ll break from weekly meetings.

Starts September 8, 2026.

Tuesdays, 5-6:30 pm PT via zoom.

Message me with questions: jordanwritelife (@) gmail (.) com

Friday, June 12 12:00 PM: Virtual Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions!

I’m excited to join an incredible line-up for a virtual fiction workshop as part of Free Expressions NEW Story 360 Virtual Advanced Fiction Workshop! Best part, it’s virtual, so you can attend from wherever you are! It’s an intensive three-day virtual workshop for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction who relish deep-dive challenging classes that go far beyond the basics.

Included in the workshop is a day-long master class, THE DEEP END: SECRETS OF STORY DEPTH with literary agent Donald Maass, along with substantive courses on advanced topics from industry pros, Janice Hardy, Sarah Fisk, Sheree L.Greer, Jordan Rosenfeld, Lorin Oberweger, Leah Henderson, Jonathan Maberry, and Steven James.

Expect hands-on, generative work, lively discussion, and topics that challenge what you think you know about fiction craft!

Register Here

Topics include:

• Flat Settings, Heavy Paragraphs, and Other Description Disasters

• The Scintillating Synopsis

• Close to the Bone: Revision

• Departing the Arc: New Patterns for Fresh Story Structure (That’s me! Sat. June 20th)

• Let’s Fall in Love: The Intersection of Voice, Viewpoint, and Character

• Building a Multi-Platform Writing Career

• Emotional Connection to Place

• Suspense Essentials: Secrets to Tapping into Tension (Whatever Genre You Write)

• PLUS “Working lunch” clinics with feedback on select participants’ query letters and first pages.

Register Here

Use discount code: JRFX10 for 10% off!

Pre-Order Writing Through the Pause: Mining Midlife for Powerful Writing

I’m beyond delighted today to share an interview with Liz Prato, the author of four books, the most recent of which is Purgatoire, from the delightful Forest Avenue Press. She also wrote Volcanoes, Palm Trees, and Privilege: Essays on Hawai‘i, a New York Times Top Summer Read and a Finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Kids in America: a Gen X Reckoning; and Baby’s on Fire. Additionally, Liz edited the Oregon-based anthology, The Night, and the Rain, and the River. She lives in Portland with her furry feline friends and her best friend/husband, who is a longtime indie bookseller and writer. She lives for community, grace, and palm trees.

About Purgatoire

In 1910 Sabé Parella journeys from northern Italy to southern Colorado to join her husband who has gone ahead to work in the coal mines. But when she arrives along the banks of the Purgatoire River, he is nowhere to be found.

Based on Prato’s ancestors, Purgatoire paints a gripping portrait of Italian immigrants in rural America, and how the shame and secrecy of one man’s abandonment haunts a family for generations. A single mother fights to reunite with her children, a bootlegger’s recklessness devastates his family, queer folk escape to secret spaces, and stranded spirits observe, speak, and interfere—sometimes with tragic consequences.

As Powell’s Books 2026 Pick for Portland, Purgatoire weaves a mesmerizing story of the complex relationships between parents and children, the transcendent need for connection and redemption, and what we owe to our true desires.

Q: I know Purgatoire is inspired by your paternal ancestors, whose stories you only knew piece meal. What inspired you to write this novelized version, was there something you hoped to learn? A family story that you wished you’d known the full scope of?

It all started because I had zero idea why my great grandmother Elisabetta, who I was named after, came over from Italy to Southern Colorado alone, leaving behind her sons. And then that brought up the question of who and where her husband was, the father of her children, my great grandfather? When my dad was little, the few times he dared to ask who his grandfather was he was told, “Shhh. We don’t talk about that.” But all my research—and I’m a pretty good researcher—didn’t answer of the whys, so one day I decided, “Well, what if I write the unknown into being?” What if I make it up? And then I was off and running.

Q: What do you most hope readers of your book will take away from it? What do you fear they might?

I hope readers will absorb that we are more than our family secrets. That grief changes us, but doesn’t need to destroy us. That redemption comes from how we treat other people. I don’t think I have a true “fear” about something readers might take away. I’ve learned that everyone has their own lens that they read through, and I can’t control that or let it get in my head, you know?

Q: Your book highlights for me how brave and terrifying it is to be an immigrant. My paternal side also immigrated to the US with very little to go on. Did tracing your ancestors’ history evoke any other thoughts about immigration for you?

Even though I’d always known my dad was the “son of an immigrant,” I hadn’t really understood how discriminated against Italians and Catholics were, and how that affected my grandfather’s sense of self, and therefor my own dad’s. There was an insecurity, a need to prove themselves. Combining that with traditional culture and the emotional limitations it placed on men, it resulted in some bravado, bad behavior, and, quite frankly, bullshit. But when I started the book, I wasn’t thinking, “Oh, this is about the immigrant experience,” which seems kind of silly, right? I mean, how are we not all thinking that about our immigrant ancestors all the time? With the exception of Native Americans or people whose ancestors were brought here against their will, nearly everyone in the U.S. is descendant of immigrants. I hope more people will tap into the courage, hard work, fear and sacrifice that their own ancestors experienced, and extend grace to people currently going through the same.

Q: This may sound silly but in fictionalizing your family story, did you feel like you connected more deeply/closely to these ancestors by imagining yourself into their shoes?

Sort of? I mostly saw them as characters, not my actual ancestors (although I do sometimes have to remind myself what’s true and what I made up!) so it didn’t differ that much from getting close to any fictional character I’ve created. Which is to say, they’re all in my heart. But the research process, including visiting my great grandmother’s grave in southern Colorado, made me feel more a part of something than I had in my entire life. Like, after decades of adoption and abandonment trauma, what and who I belonged to was always right in front of me.

Q: What challenges did you encounter adapting fact to fiction? Was it fun to fill in factual gaps?

It was so fun! The only occasional challenge was reminding myself that just because something actually happened in, let’s say December, didn’t mean I had to bend my whole narrative to accommodate that timeline. Like, if driving on icy roads for 200 miles across a dangerous pass in a Model-T created a whole unrelated set of issues, I could just change the event to September. I loved that freedom. Because I wasn’t just telling a story, I was creating one.

Q: You invoke a couple of elements of, let us call it, magic realism, for lack of a better phrase—what was behind that choice, and what permission or latitude did it allow you in the story?

So, there are spirits/fantasmi (that’s the Italian word for ghosts) that talk and narrate some short chapters, serving as a deeply empathetic omniscient voice, but also an intimate link to the other side. My original decision to include them was pretty organic to the area where the story takes place. It’s in Las Animas county--Las Animas meaning “the souls”--and the Purgatoire River runs through the town of Trinidad. Between Native American deaths and mining disasters and the Colorado Coalfield wars, it seems like a place where a lot of souls would be hanging around because they went too fast, because they’re still attached to this realm.

Q: How was writing Purgatoire different from writing your other books?

I’ve always been a contemporary realistic, and this is historical fiction with magical realist elements. So, in one sense I was like “Whoa, can I do this? Do I have the chops? Should I be staying in my lane?” But my last two books were heavily researched creative nonfiction, and my first book was character driven short stories—and I was a 20^th century history major eons ago in college—so Purgatoire ended up feeling like a pretty natural blending of my interests and skills. And the magical realism? That was like opening a door I’ve always known existed but never had the key to before, and behind it I found hope.

Q: Tell me about your creative process. Are there any tools, practices, rituals, influences that go into creating for you?

This is going to be the most boring answer imaginable, but I don’t have any rituals or specific processes. It’s literally: I think stuff up, I go write it down, research if I need to do research, and then I edit, edit, edit. If I’m really lucky I get to do this while sitting on my back deck during warm weather. I get creative inspiration largely from media I have zero skill in: classical music, modern dance and visual art. I suspect it unlocks a different part of my brain, one that isn’t thinking about every element of craft that I’ve ever learned over the last 25 years, but is thinking about possibilities, about playing with boundaries, instead.

Q: If you are at or near midlife—how is this time of life affecting you? Are there/were there any glimmers of truth, understanding or wisdom you’ve gained, even if hard won? If you are past it, what advice do you have for others in midlife from your own experience?

Okay, so I’m about to turn 59, and there are many bits of knowledge and self-awareness that has accumulated along the way, and are still to come, that it’s hard to break it down. But I’ll say—and you know this, Jordan—that in the last nine months I’ve lost several friends, from respected acquaintances and colleagues, to one of my dearest friends who I’d known since I was 15. I’ve watched people I love lose their beloveds. And for the most part, these people didn’t live to old age and died of unexpected causes. So what I’ve learned is to not only tell people you love them, but tell people you appreciate them. Take the time to make an authentic connection with someone, even if it only lasts a minute. There’s very little so urgent that you can’t take the time to let someone know they matter.

Q: The title of this Substack is “Writing in the Pause”—and while it’s a nod to the physical stage of perimenopause, it’s also a reminder that we could all benefit from more pauses—be they reflective, from harmful energies or practices, and so on. Is there a way you have utilized “pauses” in your creativity or life in general?

You know, grief provides a natural pause—or at least for me it does. My outward attention span and creativity grinds to a halt, and it drastically reduces what I can take in, and what I produce. But I have, in the past, emerged from that pause knowing myself better and with increased creativity and focus. I’m in a pause like that now. Combined with coming into the last third of my life (knock on wood) and thinking about how that might look, I’m not sure yet where I’m going. But it should be interesting to see where I emerge.

Q: What impact do you hope to make on your readers? On your community or the world?

I’d like people to feel that just because the world around you is difficult, and at times cruel, doesn’t mean you have to be. It sounds really quaint, you know, the concept of kindness. Like it’s just some word everyone started putting on bumper stickers and mugs and embroidered pillows. But it’s a powerful action that sets off a chain reaction. And kindness comes in all forms and sizes. It can be something as far reaching as actively finding solutions to environmental and humanitarian disasters, or it can be just saying to a customer service rep, “Oh hey, thanks for helping me figure out that Byzantine online form. I appreciate it.”

Q: What is one thing readers might have no idea about you, your writing process, or your book just by reading it?

That my essential constitution is equal parts love, fear, curiosity, and faith.

Q: Would you give any advice to other writers on adapting a fact-to-fiction story?

Think of it like a puzzle: sometimes the facts you already know provide the frame, and then you fill in the middle with fiction. Or maybe it’s the other way around, where you’ve put together little clusters of the true story inside, but the whole thing doesn’t have something holding it together yet. Either way, you get to decide what truths you adhere to, and what you make up. You’re only beholden to your heart.

Buy Purgatoire: https://www.powells.com/book/purgatoire-9781942436690

Read the Starred Review from Library Journal: https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/purgatoire-a-novel-in-stories-100008245

Find out more about Liz’s other books: www.lizprato.com

Liz was kind enough to offer her thoughts on my forthcoming book, Writing Through the Pause: Mining Midlife for Powerful Writing, available for pre-order now.

Editing Openings

Have a project, long or short, in need of an editor? Learn more about my services and drop me a line!

Learn more here (or email me, jordanwritelife@gmail.com): https://jordanrosenfeld.net/product/write-the-pause-creative-circle-membership/

I don’t know when it started exactly…but sometime between waking and sitting down to my computer in the morning, before I’ve even done much, checked socials, worked on writing, thought about book marketing or anything else, it’s like someone’s been letting the air out of my balloon. My shoulders sag, my eyes glaze over, my body becomes unbearably heavy.

It’s neither overwhelm nor fatigue precisely, though it’s got a leg in each of those arenas. (No, the abhorrent state of the world isn’t helping either, but there’s never been any shortage of that).

I tried to cast back to when I didn’t feel this way, what was different in those days, and I realized that, despite my best intentions to keep the digital noise out, I really haven’t been. From an overflowing email in-box to a FB feed that blares bad news, from Instagram reels offering shiny lives and career advice to the fact that I work online, keeping one digital foot in the flow, so much of my life of late is spent looking at a screen…and so little interacting with the actual world.

It’s no wonder that when I actually stop to stare at the birds in my crepe myrtle, I am mesmerized by their antics, the shading on their wings, caught in the rhythms of the way they nibble there or swing on the powerlines.

It’s no wonder that when it comes time to exercise, I don’t want to sit on my stationary bike in my dim garage, but to slap on a hat and walk outside, letting sun warm my cheeks and fresh air fill my lungs.

***

Part of the balloon-sagging-feeling is also that of falling behind as I watch people succeeding in areas where I have the same skills—yet I’m resisting the hustle that would be required to match them. It hit me that this is the point of the marketplace, to make you feel constantly inadequate so you will keep spinning your wheels, buying or selling, selling and buying. It’s an attitude that goes against why most people make art, write.

I like to imagine (forward or past) a world in which creativity has no monetary value whatsoever, one in which you simply cannot make money at it, because it is, instead, a hallowed (yet ordinary) act. As holy as an act of divine worship, and yet as regular as brushing your teeth. In truth, being creative is those things. We brim with it when we allow it the room to arise. It is invited by silence and awe, by adventure and pain. It creeps forward when we pause. It’s when creativity/ art are forced to become commerce that things can go off the rails.

In a season where I am about to fledge my only son off to college, where nearly 18 years of his big, messy, beautiful life has condensed in a blink, like some planetary event, I’m reminded that we have to go out and touch grass, watch the birds flit about, meet people and meet the world, if we’re to have anything to write about. When I can’t write, I read or take in other art.

Human connection and creativity are parts of the antidote to this feeling I’m having. What about you?

Are You A Midlife Writer Seeking Support?
”Write the Pause” Circles coming in September, 2026

I have an exciting new offering starting in September for women and non-binary writers in or around midlife who are feeling stuck, fallow, frustrated, overwhelmed and more and would like support and accountability for a writing practice. I will also be teaching short versions of key topics tied to the book through Sibyl Writing Craft.

“Write The Pause” Circles will:

• Meet weekly in quarterly rotations. (Looking at Tuesdays or Fridays, for three-month cycles).

• Offer writing support and accountability

• Engage in discussion around short readings

• Offer writing craft instruction

• Play with generative writing prompts and share work

Write The Pause will be great for people who:

• Want support beginning, finishing or getting unstuck with a writing project

• Seek support from other writers in midlife

• Need weekly accountability

• Feel isolated or disconnected

• Want to make progress on a project

Interested? Please fill out this short Google Form.

Weds, May 27, 6pm. Book Karaoke: Open Mic Series Begins

The first of SCRAWL’s events kicks off Weds, May 27, 6 to 8 p.m. at Ancora Vino. Sign-up to read or just come to listen. Our theme is “Mother/Lode.” To get on the list for SCRAWL events, sign up here.

Sunday, May 31. I’ll be with Sibylline Press, booth 107, at the Bay Area Book Festival in Berkeley.

A recent Guardian article titled, ‘You lose yourself’: inside the mental health crisis hitting gen X women, grabbed my attention because it’s such a familiar feeling.

Quotes like this struck home: “As a woman in midlife, you kind of lose yourself,” says Dr Lisa Morrison, the BACP’s director of professional standards, policy and research. “Maybe because you feel invisible or you’re putting yourself at the bottom of the list of family priorities…

The truth is, I don’t think what’s happening to Gen X women/femmes is new or universal to us—though many of us Gen Xers did have largely unsupervised, unparented childhoods—what the article describes are common experiences in midlife.

And midlife is a period where people (of all genders) often run into creative walls by dint of the sheer levels of responsibility coupled with often dramatic physical changes (hallo perimenopause) and a variety of other life stressors that make creativity flee or dry up temporarily (though it can feel terrifyingly permanent).

Another quote that struck home from the Guardian article:

“Everything about me felt wrong. My hair was wrong, my clothes seemed to belong to another woman entirely, my friendships became tense and fractious. Looking around at other women my age, it seemed like everyone else was coping just fine. I felt like a failure. …No amount of talking is going to make a terminally ill parent well again, or give you back the energy you had at 35.”

Articles like this validate the reasons why I wrote Writing Through the Pause: Mining Midlife for Powerful Writing (Pre-Order now!). There’s a common narrative (in the U.S. at least) that either you are struggling or you’re “well.” That either you’re deeply connected to your creative self or you’re not. And midlife has taught me that there’s actually a, well, middle place where you can be struggling and creatively fulfilled/connected at the same time. But you often have to chart new paths to restore these connections.

Fortunately, 28 writers and other creatives agreed to speak to me about their midlife/creativity journeys and they all showed me ways to keep connected, to reroute energies, to surrender or fight or use your voice or speak with a new one. They reminded me that while our creative lives might not look the same at midlife and beyond, they can be just as robust and profound.

Every chapter includes a tip and a writing prompt (sometimes several) like so:

Tip: Play with processes

• It’s easy to get stuck in your usual creative processes. Consider mixing things up, doing something differently. Write at a different time. Write short versus long, write to music or without, etc.

Pause Prompt: Find the limits

• Muse, meditate, or write on what is “off limits” in your writing or creative life. What might it take to bring that subject more safely toward you?

I’m grateful to the writers who read advance copies and offered me their testimonials, like this one from novelist .

Saturday, May 16. When the Character is You: Curating a Persona in Memoir. 11am to 1pm PDT.

Struggling to figure out which version of you is writing your memoir? Would you like to control your narrative while still being truthful? Check out this two-hour webinar.

Register here!

EDITING SPOTS OPENING

Looking for a developmental editor for your book, short project, or query/synopsis? Reach out. Reserve a spot or connect for a discovery call!

Looking for a Literary Open Mic?

For anyone within an hour’s drive (or visiting) South County—Morgan Hill, San Martin, Gilroy and San Jose—you are invited to join us for our monthly “Book Karaoke” open mic series, currently hosted by Ancora Vino, in Morgan Hill. Out-of-towners welcome.

Sign up to read on one of our themes. May’s theme is “Mother/lode.” All themes are open to the widest possible interpretation!

Almost nothing bothers me more as a writer than the pressure to monetize oneself as a commodity to sell to an increasingly overwhelmed audience.

The pressure to build platform has gone from a gentle suggestion to a cottage industry all its own, with plenty of takers willing to teach you how to amass a following and nail your marketing for this very low price.

Influencer culture came next—with often clever people finding ways to entertain and educate us with content that would take me days to churn out (I follow at least a small handful). Now, if you get enough followers, you can sell the thing: a book, some merch, your own self as speaker.

Some days I think about how unlikely my own little successes have been and would be, if they were today. In 2002 I sold my first book to Writer’s Digest Books, a mid-sized traditional publisher with neither a platform nor a “name” other than being an occasional contributor to the magazine. I asked for an editor contact. I wrote a book proposal. I did this four more times. On the other hand, I’ve had three literary agents who never made me a single sale (I don’t blame them—my work wasn’t landing with the trending zeitgeist, another unfortunate reality of the fickle world of publishing).

But here’s the thing. Very few writers I know write to sell books. I know that sounds silly—of course we want to sell books! What I mean is, we want people to read our books, to listen to us, to validate our selfhood and stories, and if, in an ideal world, we could actually pay our bills doing just that, we’d be over the moon. (Yes, you will, in fact, find bids to buy my books, sign up for my classes, in this very newsletter). But most of us live in the reality where writing books doesn’t pay the bills.

That shouldn’t mean we stop writing them.

The more pressure there is to make my art into a business, the more I continue writing books with defiant intent. The more my social media channels strangle growth, incentivize me to pay to get eyes on anything, the more I plug ahead writing with furious desire.

I’ve heard people say that with narrower opportunities to publish through traditional (aka “paying”) channels, the less likely they are to write. But I was never in this for the money or the fame. I was never in this for the subscribers. It’s why I continually sing the praises of small publishers who take chances on writers like me without the big platforms. It’s why independent publishing now thrives. If I have to print my own copies and hand them out on the street corner one day, I’m not above that.

More to the point: Doesn’t writing just…feel good? Penning thoughts in little paper journals, or click-clacking on the keyboard, or tapping away on your notes app? Doesn’t it delight you to put down your strange little stories or heartfelt pleas, or deeply researched ideas? Doesn’t it screw your head on a little straighter, open the valves that let off psychic steam to say what you need to say on the page? (Once you get past the mental gremlins).

All I know is that I’m not going to stop writing books now. Not even if I am one of the last human writers putting down my thoughts in a sea of AI slop.

I really hope that you won’t let the pressure to monetize your work keep you from writing: Does writing bring you joy? Does it make your brain feel calmer, your heart happy? Do you connect with others because of what you write? Keep doing it.

As a side note, I’m seeing (and spearheading) a resurgence of in-person literary events everywhere I turn. Bookstores are turning into third places hosting book-themed events, clubs and social gatherings. Open mics and book festivals are having a heyday.

Promise me you’ll keep writing, even if you can’t “make the sale.”

Saturday, May 16. Curating a Persona in Memoir. 11 to 1 PDT.

Register here!

Editing Spots

I have a few manuscript editing spots opening in the near future. Thanks to for her kind words on working with me:

Thanks to , author of Proof of Life and On Being Human, for this kindly blurb on my forthcoming midlife writing guide, Writing Through the Pause.

“Midlife for many of us can feel like an upheaval, being in a foreign land without a map, and like a sudden assault to not just the body, but to the mind. This book is for anyone–not just those who refer to themselves as writers–looking to explore this period of their life through creativity, specifically with writing. This marvel of a book is for anyone who feels they’re losing access to their creative selves (you’re not.) Jordan Rosenfeld both ensures and encourages readers to see this period in our lives as opportunity, rather than crisis. Writing Through the Pause offers not only practical tips, but stories from other humans who’ve been through this period and not only survived, but thrived. It’s full of writing prompts to help build a way through the weirdness that is midlife, but it’s also filled with so much heart. And that intersection is where magic resides.”

I have an additional reason to love indie bookstores beyond being a reader and a writer—my own little meet cute. My husband and I met in a small bookstore, and are, in fact, one of several couples the Copperfield’s Books franchise spawned, as it were.

We met, as the universe loves to facilitate, at a time when neither of us wanted to be in a relationship. I was about six months out of a stifling one that led to a broken engagement, he was about 8 months home from a two-year Eastern European stint in the Peace Corps and still in culture shock, about to start teaching high school English. My coworker left for another job, and Erik was hired on to work with me one day a week. Nearly 31 years later, we’re still at it!

A funny addendum to this story: Two years ago we were back in our old stomping grounds and decided to go see if the Copperfield’s was still there in Rohnert Park. It had become, instead, a bong shop! (But there are still locations in Petaluma, San Rafael, Santa Rosa and Napa).

SCRAWL: South County Readers and Writers Lit

Independent bookstore day gave me a much-needed reminder that even as it feels like the literary arts are being subsumed by AI, and traditional publishing becomes an even narrower funnel that’s harder to break into, a lot of people still care about reading, are finding unique ways to publish, and love getting together to celebrate . That’s why in my own little neck of the woods, I’m in the process of co-creating literary community at a local level, in a new venture called SCRAWL. If you live in or are near South County (Morgan Hill, San Martin, Gilroy, San Jose), subscribe to the newsletter for event updates including our monthly themed “Book Karaoke open mic nights.”

If you visited an indie bookstore on Saturday, tell me about it! Which one, what did you buy?

Leave a comment

I’m excited to announce that Writing Through the Pause, a book I began over two years ago, is finally making its way into the world. Pre-order through all the places books are sold!

May 16, 11 to 1: When The Character Is You: Curating a Persona in Memoir. A webinar for memoir writers. Register.

For more about my books and classes, visit my website: Jordanrosenfeld.net

One of my students sent me this excellent video interview of Ocean Vuong (he of the gorgeous novels On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, The Emperor of Gladness) who summed up in a single sentence what my book The Sound of Story takes 300+ pages to say. He said that “a sentence is consciousness filtered through syntax.”

Funny how you can hear a thing you know but know it “differently” when someone says it another way. Since I am doomed to be less brilliant and more long winded than Ocean, I will instead appreciate that we are saying similar things. Every sentence is a manifestation of consciousness—a character, a narrator, a POV—expressed into a unique syntax, or arrangement of words and parts. That arrangement, of course, derives from all that has happened to your character, their beliefs, traumas, joys, desires, and the influences upon them, like time and place, society and politics, and gender and race.

On the one hand, it’s so, so simple—know your characters, know your sentences. On the other hand, it’s not so simple—this knowing takes time and repetition, which is so counter to the “hurry up and monetize yourself” philosophy of writing and art in this era of late stage capitalism.

In an era where people are “content creators” churning out material in short form, I feel like a dinosaur clutching to my old school desire for the deep dive. How do we truly know the consciousness and its syntax if we don’t take time?

Vuong’s teaching philosophy speaks to this, too, and I try to adhere to a similar practice in my own workshops. Before you teach writers to be “productive” and to “correct” what isn’t working, you have to first teach them to recognize themselves through their own patterns and habits. This reminded me of the lecture I had to deliver to earn my Master’s degree in creative writing and literature at Bennington in 2005. I explored how the axiom “write what you know” is really another way of saying write from “an amalgam of your influences, both artistic and realistic, the details of your unconscious, and yes, your life experiences, as they form an aesthetic.”

I used as a guiding light this quote from Albert Camus’s book, Lyrical and Critical Essays: “Every artist is undoubtedly pursuing his truth. If he is a great artist, each work brings him nearer to it, or at least, swings still closer toward this center, this buried sun where everything must one day burn.”

And I pointed out how, despite my best intentions, I still struggled to unpack my own “buried sun,” which my final semester’s mentor, Alice Mattison, called me out on in a packet letter. She wrote:

I joked that my first collection of short stories should be called “Bad Mothers and Absent Fathers.”

Some 21 years later I am still grappling with these themes, still writing from what I know, but now also from the standpoint of being a mother, of knowing what parenting looks like on the other side, which has radically changed my focus. (And to be fair: I never thought my own mother was a “bad” mother).

As AI offers us seductive shortcuts to our material, as social media pressures us to make fast and easy content of our lives, I hope you’ll continue to take the winding path through the dark thicket of your own consciousness to discover your own buried sun.

What themes preoccupy you, or sneak into your work whether you like it or not?

Leave a comment

Sunday, April 19th, find me at The Sibylline Press Booth at the Sacramento Book Festival 10-2

May 16: When the Character Is You: Curating a Persona in Memoir. Two-hour webinar.

This workshop helps memoirists and personal essayists take control of their narrative by developing a powerful persona that balances the writer’s dual role: narrator of the story and character within it. REGISTER HERE. 11am to 1pm PT (2-4pm ET). $75.

Register HERE or scan the QR code.

Support a writer, wouldya?

Buy Sound of Story

Buy Fallout

Buy Forged in Grace

Buy Women in Red

Reels flitter through my various social media feeds flinging curated advice. Handsome writers sit in well-lit offices with no signs of the daily detritus you find on mine. No lipstick rimmed cups leaving matcha rings or mounds of tissues or piles of papers and books. From these hallowed spaces they exhort: write for an audience. Hone your message. Perfect your platform.

But I’m going to tell you, if you are writing for me, as some generic supposed audience—middle aged, liberal white women, for example, I don’t think I’m going to want to read that. What I find myself reaching for are often things that feel like their seams are fraying, their structure isn’t linear, they’re full of lament or stridency or gallows’ humor. They’re in translation or they’re trying to translate something. They’re edgy, they’re robust, they’re messy.

A writer who listens to too much writing craft advice will get whiplash. You will be taught to “write what you know” and crouch inside a box of only known experience that grows ever tighter. Then you will be taught to “write what scares you” and possibly write so widely out on a ledge you may lose touch with your roots. Writing craft instruction, and I say this as a purveyor of it, is something we should all keep on a loose tether.

In exploring voice over the past couple of years more deeply than ever before I am struck by how often what grasps my attention is a voice that is doing something new or fresh or outside the bounds of what traditional structures or modes tell us to do.

And yet, I keep seeking the things we can pin down and recreate like so many pretty bugs on an entomologist’s shelf, to share with my students and fellow writers. Not because I want to help anybody monetize their work. I’m sorry, if you come around here learning how to make yourself more saleable, I fear you will be disappointed. If you come around here to feel more connected to your process, to care about writing for reasons beyond money, well then, I think I’m your girl.

Sometimes the caring about your process part makes writing that is also saleable. Sometimes it just makes you feel better (and in this world that feels so bad on the daily I am starting to think the latter is a better endeavor).

All of this throat clearing to say: what does it mean to be yourself in your writing? What it means, I think, is listening to your own instincts, following your own tendencies and interests, curiosity and humor. It means treating sentences as fluid entities, not so different from paint or clay. It means making one dimensional characters real by investing in their inner lives and outer experiences. It means revealing yourself. It means sometimes being embarrassed and vulnerable but also adept and skilled.

The shaping and scraping of revision can help you put the yourselfness into an othershaped box (or triangle or parallelogram) for an audience. But if we don’t start out writing toward what feels like us, I fear we’ll only ever write simulacrums of what various marketplaces are telling us to write.

Share a little snippet of “yourselfness” in the comments.

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Sunday, April 19th, find me at The Sibylline Press Booth

May 16: When the Character Is You: Curating a Persona in Memoir. Two-hour webinar.

This workshop helps memoirists and personal essayists take control of their narrative by developing a powerful persona that balances the writer’s dual role: narrator of the story and character within it. REGISTER HERE. 11am to 1pm PT (2-4pm ET). $75.

Register HERE or scan the QR code.

Support a writer, wouldya?

Buy Sound of Story

Buy Fallout

Buy Forged in Grace

Buy Women in Red

Every reader’s taste is individual—what grabs one person may not grab another. I like a lush sentence, paragraphs speckled with imagery. A friend of mine loves a story that gets to the point, keeps the sentences simple but has a compelling plot. What I know is that imagery grabs me, grabs a lot of us, and I always feel deeply satisfied when I encounter powerful imagery in writing.

We’re not only moved by imagery, we’re manipulated by it, for better and worse—particularly visual imagery—there’s a whole psychology of the imagery of marketing, after all. Yet in writing, imagery can feel more personal because it unfolds inside the reader’s mind through words. Maybe that’s what I delight in, that written imagery feels a bit like a magic trick. I’m just looking at black squiggles on a page and yet I’m also observing, in my mind’s eye, a river overflowing its banks or a woman whose hair becomes birdlike.

Imagery is a powerful tool for writers, however, and one that can set your writing apart from AI:

I like imagery for its ability to:

• Use description in a symbolic way, through metaphor, simile, or lyrical language.

• Bypass the conscious mind and cut straight to the heart and gut. Think of how some poetry often doesn’t immediately make “logical” sense, but it speaks to you at some emotional, even body-centered place instead.

• Communicate emotion in an indirect way, but powerfully. Imagery is often associative—one thing evoking another.

• Tap into deep feelings through visual descriptions. Images are linked to memory, imagination, and, if you believe such a thing exists, perhaps the collective unconscious.

Some of my favorite imagery comes from a novel by Karen Russell (author of the recently shortlisted novel for the National Book Award, The Antidote) called Swamplandia. I love that she can make imagery mean one thing when viewed through the character’s POV and another when considered by the observing reader. For example:

The Bird Man’s eyes were like new lamps for the old performance. He kept smiling and smiling at me, and when his gaze rolled over my skinny legs, the pins of my knees became twin suns.

Without knowing much, you might interpret this moment as a character who has felt overlooked being seen in a new way by “The Bird Man”—a beautiful moment, right? His eyes become “new lamps for the old performance”—they aren’t just dully observing her. And the way he is smiling at her transforms the “pins” of her knees into “twin suns.”

Except.

The reader knows—the POV character is Ava Bigtree, a vulnerable 13-year-old girl whose parents are preoccupied. The Bird Man is a stranger and an adult. Here, the imagery is both lovely and menacing at the same time.

Images As Similes

Images often take the form of similes—comparing one thing to another (using the words “like” or “as”), and this makes them easy to construct. Here’s an example, from Just Last Night by Mhairi McFarlane, ostensibly a rom-com, but one with a tragedy at its core, a mix of pathos and comedy.

But the ease with which I can conjure you up, it feels like a curse. A parlor trick, but it’s ghoulish, a parody. It’s like waltzing with a mannequin.

In comparing her ability to think of her dead best friend, to being like “waltzing with a mannequin” she creates a tone of grief and humor laced together.

Or how about this one, from the novel Age of Vice, by Deepti Kapoor, an epic crime story that spans decades in India.

Ajay feels like he’s become trapped in a grotesque civil war, and somehow Neda is the cause. He imagines all kinds of vague and terrible things about her. That she has come expressly to ruin Sunny’s life, to disrupt the gentle, luxurious harmony that had been put in place. Perhaps she was a spy all along.

The key simile here is “like he’s become trapped in a grotesque civil war.” Neda is the new paramour of Ajay’s boss, Sunny, and she creates challenges for Ajay. He’s risen from a life of poverty and worked his way into a good job and life, and now this woman threatens it. It’s not just frustrating, however; it’s like civil war, where friends may have to turn on, even kill, one another.

Images As Metaphors

Images can also be metaphors, and these are a lot of fun to create. A metaphor invokes a comparison between things that can’t be:

• From the YA novel, The Fault in Our Stars by John Green:

My thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations.

• From Gina Frangello’s memoir, Blow Your House Down. After the sudden death of her best friend in her early forties, Frangello is taking stock of what their often tumultuous friendship meant to her in this passage.

Were we also fun-house mirrors for each other’s images and needs?... I wish I could thank her for the ways her skewed vision of me gave me the confidence to take on the world, making me more, even as the loss of her felt like a forensic blue light shining mercilessly on the invisible cracks left behind, not just in my “perfect life” but in me.

• From Lorrie Moore’s short story “Go Like This,” one of my favorite lines of all time:

I am something incorrect: a hair in the cottage cheese. Something uncouth, a fart in an elevator

Now you try!

• Create an image in the form of a simile:

Compare something to something else using “like” or “as.”

• Create an image in the form of a metaphor:

Call something it isn’t or cannot be.

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April Events

Sunday, April 19th, find me at The Sibylline Press Booth

Friday, April 24, 11 am: I’ll give a brief webinar to the National Association of Memoir Writers

Sign up here: https://www.namw.org/april-member-event-1/

Sunday, April 26, 1 to 3pm. Morgan Hill Library

FREE, but please register so we know how many to expect.

May 16: When the Character Is You: Curating a Persona in Memoir. Two-hour webinar.

This workshop helps memoirists take control of their narrative by developing a powerful persona that balances the writer’s dual role: narrator of the story and character within it. REGISTER HERE. 11am to 1pm PT (2-4pm ET). $75.

Support a writer, wouldya?

Buy Sound of Story

Buy Fallout

Buy Forged in Grace

Buy Women in Red