Fifteen years ago, I attended a three-week summer Waldorf teacher training in Massachusetts. I found it fairly miserable, the musty dorm room—no AC, so humid—with the little sink on the wall that dripped onto the carpet beneath it all day and night. The twin bed with its mattress the depth and texture of a saltine. “This,” I remember telling Jon, “is why college kids in bad dorms get so depressed their first year.”

But that training changed my life in ways I could never, ever have predicted, because—and I’ve written about this before—I met a writer and teacher there, the poet Paul Matthews, whose workshop fundamentally rearranged how I understood writing. Paul taught me about negative capability, about play, and about the astonishing elasticity of language when approached with the full force of human imagination.

The second most memorable thing about the workshop was how every evening, we’d gather in the great hall for various programs and presentations, which were always introduced with the same poem, night after night, and that poem was “The Phoenix,” by D.H. Lawrence. The same woman read it each night as well, a teacher I did not know—only a couple of teachers from my home school were at this training. The woman had such a strong, commanding presence, and she read this poem in such a way that, even though I heard it twenty-one times in a row, night after night, it raised the hairs on my arms. So as you read this poem, try to imagine a strong, resounding woman’s voice, deep and smooth, full volume but not straining in the least, reading this to you slowly and as if the questions are for you and you alone:

Phoenix

by D.H. Lawrence

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled,

made nothing?

Are you willing to be made nothing?

dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change.

The phoenix renews her youth

only when she is burnt, burnt alive, burnt down

to hot and flocculent ash.

Then the small stirring of a new small bub in the nest

with strands of down like floating ash

shows that she is renewing her youth like the eagle,

immortal bird.

Today, in our 100 Days of Making and Writing, Chapter Eight, The Sacred, we’re exploring the power of fire, and of ritual burning.

Some of you attended Writing in the Dark | The CAMP last year, and if you did, you know I love a good, ritual burning (and thank you, Rachel, for making ours so unforgettable!). In every summer solstice retreat and virtually every other in person retreat I have ever taught, I do a burning on the last night, a burning of things pulled from an exercise we work on throughout the retreat, an exercise that becomes, ultimately, an act of rebirth through fire. Each person releases her pages or wads of papers or even just one small symbolic slip of paper and names it when she says, while tossing it into the flames, “I release _____” even if the word with which she fills in the blank is “this,” in the event the thing is just too private to speak.

Once the paper is in the fire and the release has been named, everyone else chants, “So be it for [person’s name], and so it is,” using the writer’s actual name, and then we move onto the next person. We always, always make sure all the material burns down to ash. At CAMP last year, we had to finish some of the pages off in the morning! It’s very important not to let the papers stay unburnt if the intention was to burn them.

This is an intense ritual, though not heavy in the way it might sound. In fact, it has, if anything, a notable lightening effect.

And when it comes very specifically to making and writing and the simultaneously destructive and cleansing energy of fire in our creative lives, I found a relevant essay in The Millions called “Burn After Reading: On Writerly Self-Immolation,” by Nick Ripatrazone.

The essay opens with this powerful passage about the poet and priest Girard Manley Hopkins, and the alluring pull we all feel at times to burn away parts of our lives:

Gerard Manley Hopkins burned all of his poems before becoming a priest. He called his act the “slaughter of the innocents.” Jesuits begin their study with a two-year novitiate period, during which Hopkins did not write a single line of verse — in fact, he would only write fragments for the next seven years.

Hopkins struggled with the divergent pulls of poetry and prayer. That tension coaxed his best and most unique material. A sensitive ascetic with a wild soul and progressive syntax, he praised God by finding the divine in all things. The burning of his verse was not the end of his poetic life, but a cleansing and rebirth by fire: the start of a long, imperfect struggle.

We burn old love letters and photographs to be reborn. The action of burning is often a process. Find a match or a lighter. Put the papers in a container or can or shove them in a fireplace. There are so many moments along the way when we can have second thoughts, when we can decide to put memories in a drawer rather than reduce them to ash, but it is so tempting and comforting to watch the flames swallow our pain.

Apparently Kafka burned ninety percent of his life’s work as well—a fact I did not know—as have many others Ripatrazone points to in his essay as he questions what it is in us as writers, as artists, as humans, that reaches for this kind of self-immolation at certain points along the path, this need to start again, start clean, the need for the work or some other aspect of the past or some other element of who we are or who we’ve been to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing.

Ripatrazone writes the following about burning the work when we have reached a point of no return:

Set it aflame. Watch the paper blacken and wrinkle. Sometimes we need to burn our pasts, literary or not, to move forward. Trust that your words and secrets are safe, clouded in smoke, soon to become part of the sky.

Today, we make and write from the energy of fire. Full invitation and exercise is below. And remember, as I say every day, this 100 Days of Making & Writing practice is for you to do however you wish, and now—whenever now might be—is always a wonderful time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in if you’ve fallen away.

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re entering the final stretch of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 77, The Initiation. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and today is the third day of Chapter Eight, but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO! Find the Zoom Link for Tomorrow’s 100 Day Gathering at the End of this Post!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Eight | Day Seventy-Nine | Making from the Sacred | The Fire

First, this link will take you to the post where I’ve shared the Zoom link for tomorrow’s party. Last time, some people had trouble with the link, so maybe test it early—even though I haven’t started the meeting, the link should work and just say something like, “host hasn’t started the meeting.” If you are hitting a paywall, that’s because these community gatherings are for paid WITD members—you can upgrade anytime to join us!

Subscribe now

Okay so now for fire: please, whatever you make today from fire, please be safe. We are all adults, and I trust you to not do anything dangerous! Fire is powerful. And with that caveat out of the way, here are some ideas, and from there, you can choose your own adventure.

• Write something you want to release or choose something you’ve already written that needs to be released and create a container in which to

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The Zoom link for the party is below—these live, real-time gatherings on Zoom are for paid members of Writing in the Dark and you can upgrade anytime to participate in our community offerings.

And remember, youo not need to have shown up for this practice every day or any days to attend this party. At Writing in the Dark, we’re never late and always enough.

But if you have been making and writing, please bring things you’ve made and written to share!!

I can’t wait to see you.

Love,

Jeannine

Find the Zoom link here (and I’ll send it out in tomorrow’s 100 Day post as well):

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Yesterday, in the context of our making and writing from the vantage of initiation, I shared a passage from Alexander’s Chee’s Longreads essay, “The Changeling,” about an experience and a verbal exchange—when Chee was an aspiring writer at a steakhouse—that he had with Dr. Ruth, in which she presciently called him a writer. Chee, in the passage I shared, talked about how his life was, at the time, full of coincidences, But he explained that this particular moment felt like something more, something important. A kind of portal, if I were to name it.

Well, today, our work is, in fact, to look at the idea of coincidence itself, and explore the role coincidence has played in our lives depending upon how we relate to coincidence. Do we tend to dismiss it as chance? Do we look for meaning? Or do we do one or the other depending on the moment, the circumstances, the context, and the weight of what stands to be gained or lost in relation to how we define the situation?

Tara Yazdan Panah, in her Lit Hub essay, "Breadcrumbs: Searching for Synchronicity, in Life and Literature," writes about the distinction between synchronicity and a lucky break, saying this about synchronicity:

These teases or shocks to our nervous systems at these moments are not the same sensations as when we experience a lucky break. They are particular to the phenomenon of a synchronicity—that coincidence that is just too coincidental to explain away with chance.

And, as further evidence for her argument that some seeming coincidences are more meaningful than mere chance, Yazdan Panah dips into Jungian psychology, saying:

One notable case included a patient relaying a dream to Jung about a golden scarab from the prior night. As they dissect the meaning of this dream, Jung hears a gentle tapping on the window behind him, and in flies a scarabaeid beetle. Jung, naturally, does not come to a conclusive thesis about the nature of the synchronicity, though he hypothesized that there may be a non-magical force outside the psyche that allows for these mysterious parallel events.

Ultimately, Yazdan Pahah’s thesis seems to be that the value of coincidence is less in its meaning (or lack thereof, depending on how we define it for ourselves) than in the quality of attention it demands from us. Which of course relates directly to everything else we routinely talk about here at Writing in the Dark. Yazdan Parah closes her essay this way, as she sums up the gift of attention that coincidence can give to us:

How nice it is to notice the cat and the butterfly at all, when before they would have each been a mere detail to be overlooked.

So, today, we make and write from the energy of coincidence, and its strange power. Full invitation and exercise is below. And remember, as I say every day, this 100 Days of Making & Writing practice is for you to do however you wish, and now—whenever now might be—is always a wonderful time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in if you’ve fallen away.

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re entering the final stretch of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 77, The Initiation. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and today is the third day of Chapter Eight, but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Eight | Day Seventy-Eight | Making from the Sacred | The Coincidence

As we often do, today we should probably start with making a list of memorable coincidences from our lives. Once we have a decent list—and remember, the coincidence need not be profound, just memorable—then we might want to circle the coincidence on the list that still gives us some kind of electricity in the body. That’s a good one to choose, if you can find it. Otherwise, just choose your favorite.

From there, here’s a laundry list of ways you can make and write from your coincidence:

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Before we get rolling, a question, and bit of a writing anecdote for you.

The question is, for those of you who read Doyle’s essay yesterday, what did you think?

And as for the anecdote, well, yesterday I finished almost three thousand words of a short story I’m working on for an anthology. I had almost two thousand words before that, but I had to start over. The premise of the story got too close to something in my real life—there was an estrangement at its center—and I could not write about it the way I wanted to write about it without feeling like I was writing about people I know, which I did not want to do. I puzzled on this for a couple of weeks, actually, before deciding it was time to start all over again, which is what I did yesterday.

The collection is under contract with Random House, and my editor, the editor of the collection, needs to turn the entire manuscript into her editor by the middle of September. So there’s some pressure here. Fortunately, the new story is gaining some momentum—I’m getting a sense of who its characters are and what they really want, and why they want it, so that means I’m more or less over the hump and I think I will be able to finish my story, which is what I said when I texted my editor yesterday. I didn’t want to send that text until a substantial portion of the story actually existed, even though it’s the oldest writer trick in the book—It’s coming along!, she says, I should have it to you by the deadline!, while staring at a cursor blinking on a blank screen. But I didn’t want to indulge the oldest writer trick, because the deadline is so close and I just didn’t want to jinx myself.

I share this with you mainly to say two things: 1) it’s a wild path we walk as writers, and barely ever runs straight in a known direction, and 2) wrangling with this story is making me feel better about my book project, which is due December 1. Yesterday, as I created those 3,000 words from thin air, I was reminded that this is, in fact, something I know how to do. I even gave myself some rules around the story in terms of how much time I can cover, how many characters, and so forth, the same kinds of suggestions I might make to one of you if you were pressing up against a challenging story. And guess what? The rules worked. The rules helped me simplify the premise and get off to a running start. Maybe I’ll complicate it more now that it exists, or maybe not. Time will tell.

Now, for day Seventy-Seven, where we’ll be making and writing from initiation. What is initiation, exactly?

Here’s Merriam Webster:

a: the act or an instance of initiating

b: the process of being initiated

c: the rites, ceremonies, ordeals, or instructions with which one is made a member of a sect or society or is invested with a particular function or status

For our purposes, we can think of an initiation as any rite of passage—formal or informal, celebrated or not, and recognized as an initiation at the time, or not, after which you are no longer quite the same person as you were before.

Alexander Chee writes about such initiations in his beautiful Longreads essay, “The Changeling,” which opens with him living in Brooklyn, working on his first novel, and waiting tables at a steakhouse in Manhattan, the kind regularly frequented by celebrities. One night, Dr. Ruth Westheimer comes into the steakhouse and Chee is her server. At the end of the meal, she calls him over and suggests, conspiratorially, that he is not a waiter, but a writer. She says it’s evident, she can just tell:

I was surrounded by coincidences then, a forest of messages from the universe. But this couldn’t have been a coincidence. Surely this was something else, a more divine and direct kind of message. The voice from the burning bush, but instead of a bush, the message was coming from that marvelous smile, the familiar, kind eyes, the perfect hair — and that twinkle.

Here I was again in an old story, one that had begun with people always telling me to be a writer, starting at the age of 14. My interaction with Dr. Ruth that afternoon, though, mattered in an entirely new way. By that time, I had finally decided to be a writer. I just wasn’t sure I could do it. But I was trying. I was halfway through the novel, though I didn’t know that then. The difference Dr. Ruth made, however, was this: she wasn’t telling me to go and become a writer. She was telling me I was one. And that it was finally something visible, even legible, no matter what else I was doing.

“The Changeling “ goes on to detail a whole chain of such moments in Chee’s evolution as a writer, moments where he was seen to be who he already was, and then, did the work to become it.

For example, staying with the theme of writing, for me, the publication of my debut memoir, The Part That Burns, was a major initiation. But, like Chee, I also experienced countless smaller but profoundly important moments earlier on the path, such as in high school, when the legendarily strict and unrelentingly demanding journalism teacher, Zarm Geisenhoff, whom we called Z, which gives me a warm feeling whenever I think of little Z, told me one day, in no uncertain terms, that I was the best student she’d ever had, and asked me where I had learned how to write.

I was a broken kid in foster care at that time, which Z did not know. Hardly anyone did. I was very good at hiding. What Z said to me might be one of the driving forces behind the work I did to ensure that I did, ultimately, graduate from high school that spring. In other words, it fueled me on my path to becoming.

So, today, we make and write from the energy of initiation, and the initiations that changed us. Full invitation and exercise is below. And remember, as I say every day, this 100 Days of Making & Writing practice is for you to do however you wish, and now—whenever now might be—is always a wonderful time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in if you’ve fallen away.

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re entering the final stretch of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 77, The Initiation. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and today is the third day of Chapter Eight, but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Eight | Day Seventy-Seven | Making from the Sacred | The Initiation

I think the best way to start off today is to make a list of every important

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In a 2017 Lit Hub essay—called “Whatever Happened to the Ecstasy in Art?”— Julie Evans describes her experience at a nine-day ayahuasca retreat in Peru. She reports that as intense as those five nights of ceremonies during the retreat were, and they were, the integration period afterward was harder and more profound. In particular, she singles out something that happened on a rainy afternoon in London, where she lives, when she decided to go to the National Gallery to immerse herself in art, all of which, room after room, struck her as glowing and alive:

In that moment, it seemed to me that all art is “psychedelic,” a word coined by the chemist Humphrey Osmond, literally meaning “mind-revealing.” For doesn’t all good art involve an intensification of consciousness in the artist, an aliveness to light and color, to nature, to emotion and drama, to multiple meanings, to allegory, symbol and myth? Isn’t it the communication of souls—the artist with the divine energy of being, with the artists before them, and potentially with the viewer, if their consciousness is ripe for the encounter.

Joy Williams has written similarly about writing itself, in an essay included in the anthology Why I Write, which is an essay I have referred to and shared countless times over the years, since Maria Popova excerpted heavily from it in a subsequent Marginalian essay, making it all the easier to disseminate:

The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life. The work — this Other, this other thing — this false life that is even less than the seeming of this lived life, is more than the lived life, too. It is so unreal, so precise, so unsurprising, so alarming, really. Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, either is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader’s face… The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings ….

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.

When I first encountered this Williams essay ten or eleven years ago, I felt the strongest sensation of being seen and known. This, I thought, is exactly it. This is why I write, and the only reason I want to write. This is what writing is to me. I had, at that time, never heard anyone say it before.

Nor was I more than very vaguely aware of the long tradition of the ecstatic in all of art. But such a tradition is indeed well understood, as Evans explains in the Lit Hub essay:

For most of human history, this would be a perfectly normal way to talk about the arts. Painting, sculpture, music, poetry, theater, and dance were understood as ecstatic techniques that could connect one’s spirit to the spirits of other humans (dead or alive), to nature and the gods. That’s how the Shipibo shamans of the Amazon understand their songs, pottery, and textiles. The ancient Greeks likewise knew the arts could be a means to ekstasis—a shift in consciousness beyond the ordinary self.

Artists and aesthetic theorists of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, Romanticism, and Modernism all thought arts could be a means to spiritual ecstasy. There is, of course, a great difference between the aesthetic and metaphysical beliefs of Augustine and Edmund Burke, Marsilio Ficino and Emily Dickinson. But it was standard, until recently, to believe that the arts could connect human consciousness to a greater spiritual reality.

Today, this way of talking about the arts is extremely rare in western humanities and arts policy.

So, today, we make and write from the ecstasy. But before I give you an invitation with some ideas on ways to approach the task, or the joy, of making and writing from ecstasy, I want to share an example of ecstatic writing to make this whole idea less slippery and more concrete. I would possibly share something from Annie Dillard, whose writing I taught for the last month in the CRAFT SCHOOL program where I’m on faculty, because her work is full of ecstatic passages. But I’d rather pivot to the work of another writer, a writer whose flash nonfiction I’ve taught many time: Brian Doyle.

I’m not a Doyle scholar by any means, but I have, on instinct, described his work as ecstatic simply because it is the exact feeling it produces in me when I read it. And it turns out others have said the same. Jane Ciabattari from the BBC called Doyle’s collection One Long River of Song “both ecstatic and sober.” Leslie Jamison wrote that his voice “summons all of us to pay more passionate attention to the world,” and his Kirkus starred review called it “a posthumous collection of stunning mystical prose.”

And his most famous essay, "Joyas Voladoras," which is ostensibly about hummingbird hearts and whale hearts and human hearts, but is actually about what it really means to be a human being and to love anything, ever, is the best example I know of ecstatic contemporary nonfiction. prose in contemporary American nonfiction. This essay’s flash, so it’s fast to read, but for me and many others, its impact is long lasting.

Finally, I’ve said so many many times recently, this 100 Days of Making & Writing practice is for you to do however you wish, and now—whenever now might be—is always a wonderful time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in if you’ve fallen away.

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re entering the final stretch of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 76, The Ecstacy. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and today is the third day of Chapter Eight, but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Eight | Day Seventy-Five | Making from the Sacred | The Ecstacy

There are many avenues by which we can approach this today, and the main three options I see—though there are doubtless many more, are to 1) start with the body in an ecstatic state and make something immediately after, 2) make from a memory of an ecstatic experience, 3) make something in direct response to art that feels ecstatic to you.

Let’s break each of these categories down to see how we might begin, starting with making something immediately er vigorous physical movement—dancing, running, swimming—while the body is still flooded with sensation. Let the

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So today, day seventy-five, we’re exploring the idea of pilgrimage as a way of touching the sacred in the world and in ourselves.

Wikipedia defines the term pilgrimage as follows:

…a journey often into an unknown or foreign place, where a person goes in search of new or expanded meaning about their self, others, nature, or a higher good, through the experience. It can lead to a personal transformation after which the pilgrim returns to their daily life.

Merriam Webster says it this way:

1. : a journey of a pilgrim

especially : one to a shrine or a sacred place

2. : the course of life on earth

I love the way that last definition—the course of a life on earth—feels both vast and perfectly precise in terms of what pilgrimage really means. But for our purposes today, let’s think of a pilgrimage as any journey that blends the idea of going from one place to another, no matter how short the distance, with the idea of a spiritual or meaningful personal intention.

The word pilgrimage actually comes from the Latin peregrinus, which means simply being away from home. This implies leaving the ordinary in some way and for some period of time, enough that daily routines and distractions are dissolved or shifted. Often, the notion of pilgriming includes some physical exertion—walking the Camino del Santiago is a famous example—but I feel that for our purposes this need not be an emphasis unless we choose to make it one.

I have myself, in fact, many times, chosen to undertake physical journeying as a means of seeking something otherwise inaccessible, so if that appeals to you, don’t rule it out. The time I remember best was the time I set out my front door on foot to the river a half mile away and didn’t stop walking until I’d crossed both the Franklin and Lake Street Bridges and, finally, the Ford Bridge, five miles from my house. I crossed Ford, turned around, and walked back for a clean ten miles, then did that same thing again every day for a month. Well, sometimes walked the other direction, to the Stone Arch Bridge, but that’s not the point. The point is that I walked and walked and walked until, by the end of that summer, I’d covered the more than the distance between Minneapolis and Duluth, round trip. I started in mid-July, and by the end of August, when school started again and pulled me off the river, I’d watched summer give sway to fall in the sumac along the river as the acorns marbled that familiar path. I saw the same runners and bikers so often that I knew their training schedules, and I saw the same dogs and walkers often enough to learn their names, though mostly I didn’t stop to chat.

Mostly, instead, I walked as if I would eventually arrive wherever it was I headed, though I didn’t know where that might be. This was the summer of 2007, and the beginning of a period of profound transformation in my life, and while the transformation was not the kind with a beginning, middle, and end that lasts a summer, it was a recognizable moment of real catalyst for the kinds of internal changes that would lead to me becoming a writer who teaches writing instead of an elementary teacher who writes. And this was not a mere career pivot, either. It was a puzzle rooted in other more fundamental questions of identity, fear, time, and exposure. For me, the walking and walking and walking and walking from summer to fall, watching the tips of the leaves go bright with anticipation and the paths disappear, eventually, under the muted gold, led me to both the questions and the possibility of new answers. And the river itself, its aliveness and its beauty, yes, but also its disinterested proof of the constancy and power of change, was a kind of destination.

But I want today’s exploration of the pilgrimage concept to feel completely accessible to everyone, regardless of physical limitations or abilities. Certainly physical exertion or covering a significant physical distance can lead to inner transformation, but I think for us the intention for transformation is the most important part.

Wherever or however we journey, and whether we go there now or went there in the past, or whether we go in real life or in our imagination, the underlying wish is to foster an encounter with the divine and how that connects to our own deeper purpose. That it gives us a traceable route upon which we are seeking renewal or healing or clarity before returning to ordinary daily life.

So, today, we’ll explore making and writing through the lens of the pilgrimage, and see where it leads. And thank you for being part of this particular pilgrimage with me, which has been and continues to be transformative. I’ll provide the full and detailed invitation at the end of this post.

And lastly, I’ve said so many many times recently, this 100 Days of Making & Writing practice is for you to do however you wish, and now—whenever now might be—is always a wonderful time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in if you’ve fallen away.

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re entering the final stretch of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 75, The Pilgrimage. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and today is the third day of Chapter Eight, but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Eight | Day Seventy-Five | Making from the Sacred | The Pilgrimage

Let’s think expansively about how to define or approach making and writing from a pilgrimage. As I said in the intro essay, you might take a physical journey today, covering some distance between one place and another, with a sacred intention, or you may revisit a past journey that had the qualities of a pilgrimage, or you may take an imagined pilgrimage, seeing yourself, sensing yourself, journeying to a place that represents something meaningful for you.

Since today’s invitation is so broad, by intention, here are several concrete ideas that might spark your imagination:

Read more

We leave our beautiful pool party at noon today at Grey Cloud Island. It’s been so magical, and we’re so grateful to Christina for making her home and our time here so wonderful.

And last night, after the kids were all in bed (and before the incredible lunar eclipse!)—this was all after Esme told the rest of the children the most wonderful story as they sat in a circle on the rug, a flashlight at the center, because they’d taken an evening swim so late that we couldn’t keep them up even later for another campfire—I found, in preparation for today’s post, Day Seventy-Four (The Offering) of our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice, one of the most beautiful poems I’ve read in a long time, “An Offering,” by Kathryn Hunt.

It’s short, and you can read the whole thing here, this gorgeous meditation on the connection between all living beings in a living universe and the way a momentary sensation of this fundamental truth jolts or perhaps elevates the narrator back to childhood, back to the safety of their grandmother’s arms, and being held …

to the thunder-headed sky

as if I were an offering.

Saying, There,

See how meager we are made. How our

bones ring out with fury and light.

This beautiful line: How our bones ring out with fury and light.

And is this not what all of the most beautiful writing does? Captures the whole of things in a single breath, the complexity of love and pain so inextricably intertwined so that there is, ultimately, almost no distinction?

And what of the offering? What, ultimately, does it even mean to offer something, anything, not to another person, but to the truth of the living world itself, to whatever is divine and eternal?

It seems to me that often, such offerings bypass any logic or intellect and come solely from whatever part of us is still intuitive, governed not by common sense or even the five major senses of the body but the other, deeper sense that lives within us as a form of knowing that defies explanation.

I think of an experience when my children were very small, and we visited by Nana’s grave in Duluth. The truth is, none of my children really knew my grandmother. She died when Sophie was two and Max was still a baby, Billie not yet born. So this visit to the cemetery where she was buried was, for them, just an outing. It was a lovely fall day, if memory serves me (and I am not sure that it does, as this was a one-time event some thirty years or so ago). The lake was beautiful, as always, and the volcanic rock upon which Duluth is built was doing as rock does. It had taken me quite a while to find the cemetery, and the children were happy and boisterous to be out of the car when we finally arrived. What struck me about finding Nana’s gravestone, and what I remember most vividly now, is how the children worked together to carefully line up pebbles on its surface, and, when they were satisfied with that effort, decided, and this was something of a spontaneous group decision, to also arrange some of the candy I’d given them during the long car ride, because, as Sophie put it, “Nana loves candy.”

Nana did love candy, that was true, but I don’t think Sophie actually knew that. Instead, I think the children sensed something about this visit to an unusual place for reasons beyond their understanding, they sensed something, and felt moved to honor it in the only way they knew how, through the ancient human gesture of offering.

Today, we’ll explore making and writing through the lens of offering, and see where it leads. Thank you for being part of this journey with me, which has been and continues to be transformative. I’ll provide the full and detailed invitation at the end of this post.

As I’ve said so many many times recently, this 100 Days of Making & Writing practice is for you to do however you wish, and now—whenever now might be—is always a wonderful time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in if you’ve fallen away.

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re entering the final stretch of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 73, The Prayer. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and today is the third day of Chapter Eight, but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Eight | Day Seventy-Four | Making from the Sacred | The Offering

Depending on our religious backgrounds or lack of, this invitation will bring up different things. That’s okay. Let it be whatever it is for you.

In my imagination, the kind of offering we’re exploring today is one moved by an

Read more

Welcome to Chapter Eight—third day of Making from the Sacred!!

Before we jump into Day Seventy-Three … I’m writing now from Grey’s Island on the Mississippi River, where Jon and I are with all of our kids and grandkids at the most magical vacation rental we’ve ever stayed in with our family for a two-night pool party. I think I mentioned yesterday, this was our Christmas present to everyone.

Fifteen wooded acres, a gorgeous stretch of the mightiest river in the country, with an outdoor pool and a large gracious house, with five grown up bedrooms, one for each couple, and two magical kid bedrooms full of bunks and trundles and nooks and crannies our grandchildren love.

Our host, Christina, is taking the absolute best care of us. She left an almost-full Sturgeon moon blessing pack with s’more stuff and glow bracelets and sparklers for the kids. She left Mary Oliver’s devotional cards for me. She put my out-of-print children’s book, Mama Moon, on the top of the pile of kids’ books in the playroom. And tomorrow, she’s sending a surprise ice cream truck for the kids in the middle of the afternoon!

The kids are in heaven—Esme, Emerson, Bryn, Oscar, Zavior, Teddie, and Cedar.

It’s a perfect context from which to talk about prayer, because this—this kind of experience of family, well, that, for me, is nothing other than an answer to a prayer.

As I’ve said so many many times recently, this 100 Days of Making & Writing practice is very rich for me—and the start of a new chapter is a wonderful time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in if you’ve fallen away.

So, join us in discussing prayer, and what it does or doesn’t mean to us.

Ah, prayer. In her iconic poem, “The Summer Day,” which I can recite by heart, something I’ve written about here before, in The Surprising Sound of Mary Oliver’s Voice, Mary Oliver says that she doesn’t know what exactly a prayer is. What she says, precisely, is this:

I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Oliver was not the first to tell us that attention was prayer. I don’t actually know who the first was, but I know that Simone Weil said it before Oliver did, and Weil said it this way:

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.

It’s so easy to read these poetic passages or quotes and feel something from them, they do ignite a feeling in me, and, I imagine, likely also in you, without doing the work of really understanding them. We can resonate with true things and still not integrate them fully into our conscious understanding. The latter, that kind of integration, takes work, and in my experience, the kind of work it takes is not intellectual work, it is the work of doing, the work of action, the work of engaging the body and the bodily senses in order to experience the sensation of attention as prayer. Only if and when we pay close enough attention, long enough and hard enough, can we finally understand what Oliver and Weil are trying to tell us, rather than just feel that vague and pleasant but also fleeting and shallow sensation of something that feels true.

Today we’re going to explore the concept of prayer, whatever it might mean to us, but I would venture to say that whether our prayer is secular or religious, attention is always a part of it.

Brother Lawrence, a 17th-century French Carmelite lay brother famous for his simple approach to constant communion with God (collected after his death into the classic The Practice of the Presence of God wrote:

My only prayer practice is paying attention. I carry on a habitual, silent, and secret conversation with God that fills me with overwhelming joy.

For me, prayer is something I feel in my body, most often either in the morning right after walking, but before rising, or when in nature. What happens in the morning is that I become hyper aware of the sensations of the sheet on my skin, the warmth of my skin against Jon’s, the light slowly brightening in the room around us, the feeling of Frannie’s warmth and weight against my right side, the comfort of the world that envelopes and includes my body, and the sense of oneness in which I’m enfolded. In nature, the constellation of feelings is different although the end result, the oneness, is the same. In nature, I feel a kind of vastness, a timelessness, a kind of collapsing of the distance between myself and the physical world, wherein I am not just with the tree, but of the tree, wherein I am the tree.

These are my prayer experiences.

Also, sometimes, though, I pray to a God I don’t believe in, at least, not in the traditional sense. But because I did believe in “Him” when I was a child, or, at least, thought I did, I can’t help—whenever I send up beseeching prayers asking for protection of those I love most, or prevention of whatever catastrophe I’m currently fearing—I can’t help but picture, if that’s the right word, a kind of deity even though what I’m trying to pray to, in my willful mind, is the universal powers that be, the universal laws that govern all that is meant to be for me and the ones I love most. What the difference is, between “Him” and those universal powers, I can’t claim to know. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Today, we’re going to make and write to the idea of prayer. I’ll write my best version of an invitation at the end of this post, and you can make of it what you will. This is a choose-your-own-adventure kind of day, and, as long as you’re paying attention, you can’t get it wrong. I predict this will be some of the most alive writing we’ve seen so far in this practice!

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re entering the final stretch of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 73, The Prayer. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and today is the third day of Chapter Eight, but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Eight | Day Seventy-Three| Making from the Sacred | The Prayer

Today, I invite us to write a prayer, and in this case, the writing is the making—but that doesn’t mean you can’t still make something else, you’ll just need to get inventive and let yourself be swept toward wherever the muse takes you.

And what if we write a prayer addressed to something unexpected, something

Read more

Welcome to Chapter Eight—second day of Making from the Sacred!!

I was right about this proving to be interesting work! Thank you to everyone who’s contributing (even just by your quiet presence). I’ve appreciated the dialogue around the words sacred and numinous, too. This 100 Days of Making & Writing practice is very rich for me. And by the way, the start of a new chapter is a wonderful time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in if you’ve fallen away.

As for life life, lots going on. I’m excited today to be off to a two-night pool party at a beautiful local Airbnb with our kids and grandkids; this was our Christmas present to them. Looks like we’re in for lovely swimming weather and, given Jon’s surgeries and mobility issues this summer, we haven’t had as many adventures with our grandchildren as we normally would. And Frannie is allowed, so, really, best of all worlds. I’ll share some photos in the chat. Then next week, I have a meeting with my editor at Random House about my book. She was out on sabbatical for a bit, but is back now, and I’m excited to meet her (and nervous to make some progress over the weekend so that I feel prepared!).

Anyway, to the topic of altars: below you’ll find a short intro essay to today’s topic, then, at the end of the post, a detailed invitation to make or remake and altar to find your most magic self reflected.

I can’t talk about altars without thinking of one of my favorite humor pieces in the New Yorker, “Dear Mountain Room Parents,” by Maria Semple, where an elementary school teacher is trying to celebrate The Day of the Dead in her class, with, of course, the traditional Day of the Dead altar. I’ve taught this piece a bunch of times, and I think maybe I also shared it here a year or two ago when we were in our Letter Reimagined intensive, because it’s an epistolary piece. And I am sorry if you can’t access the link, the New Yorker doesn’t give me the option of a gift link! But if you subscribe or have any free articles left, read now, thank me later. It’s so good.

I mean, I think it is. But it’s probably funnier than average for me because I was a teacher in a school a lot like the one Semple is capturing, a school where it was often impossible to please anyone and where the best of intentions often ended up in a messy heap, and where no good or generous deed went unpunished, somehow. There were, of course, many deeply good things, too, but the school where I worked had some serious administrative problems, so what this particular teacher Semple creates for us is navigating, I know all too well.

Which has little to do with an altar, except in a way, it does. Because it shows us that an altar only means what we believe it means, it only holds power if we say it does, and while tradition can hold a lot of weight and do a lot of work toward meaning, at the end of the day, as corny as this sounds, it’s what’s in our own hearts that makes something real or not.

Some of you already started making and writing about altars yesterday, when we started with ritual. So you might have to bring some real imagination to today’s invitation in order to see your own relationship to altars from a newer, revitalized perspective—which is always worth doing.

So, what’s an altar, anyway? According to the Collins Dictionary, the first search hit that came up on Google, an altar is:

… a raised table, platform, or sacred space used for worship, prayers, offerings, and religious rituals.

So, it’s important to me that “a sacred space” is included here, because that is how I feel about altars—in that they need not be a table or a platform, they need not be built at all, an altar could be a certain spot under a beloved tree, or, maybe all those branches touching overhead forming archways that I spent my childhood searching for, maybe those were altars, too. Maybe that’s what I felt inside those graceful portals: a kind of offering.

Today’s invitation will ask us to consider whether we have, or might like to have, new altars in our lives—and maybe how we define altars for ourselves, and why.

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re entering the final stretch of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 72, The Altar. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and today is the second day of Chapter Eight, but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Eight | Day Seventy-Two | Making from the Sacred | The Altar

Today, I invite us to make or remake an altar, and with a very specific intention. It does not need to be elaborate at all. It can be inside or out. It can be large or small. It can be whatever is best suited to your intention for it—this is a chance to think about what we’re wanting to nurture in our lives. Which, by the way, can always be as simple as more gratitude.

I really love this essay I found about altars, and how to make one, and why. It’s not attributed to any author so I’m just going to share the link here so you can see it for yourself, in all its richness,. The essay is on a site called

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Welcome to Chapter Eight, and the first day of Making from the Sacred!!

This is going to be very interesting work, and maybe some of the most unusual so far in our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice. And the start of a new chapter, by the way, is a wonderful time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in if you’ve fallen away.

Below you’ll find a short intro essay to the chapter, with some thoughts about what it means to reach for the sacred, then a detailed invitation to make and write from ritual at the end of the post.

There are certain words I don’t use often. One of them is “blessed,” partly because it’s become a cliché, but also because something about it just doesn’t feel genuine to me. Not just because I didn’t grow up with religion. It’s just that I don’t feel this connection to something being bestowed by a higher power. Instead, I say, grateful. It seems more connected to the world I live in, somehow.

Likewise, the word sacred makes me slightly uncomfortable in a similar way, but it also feels different enough from blessed that I still feel a certain draw to it, a strong enough draw that I wanted to understand it better, so I did a little research for today’s intro essay.

Merriam Webster says that sacred means, in the secular sense, entitled to reverence and respect, and highly valued and important. This resonates with me, although we know there is something more to this word, which is why the word can make some people uncomfortable, including me, some of the time. For one thing, it evokes the complicated history and impact of organized religion. Organized religion, in turn, brings up—again, for some of us—thoughts about doctrine and obligation and exclusion, while simultaneously reminding us of the long history of what has been done in the name of the holy.

So, if you, too, have a complicated relationship to the word sacred, I’m with you, and I’m here to say that this chapter can still be for you. Hear me out for a moment, or, rather, hear out the ideas of Rudolf Otto, the German theologian and philosopher whose work I discovered only for writing this intro, and who coined the term numinous in his 1917 work The Idea of the Holy. Otto was trying, with the word numinous, to get at something that’s pretty hard to categorize—something simultaneously mysterium tremendum et fascinans. That is to say, a terrifying mystery and a fascinating one, both overwhelming and irresistible.

Otto said this experience of the numinous was a fundamental human capacity—that we are all capable of encountering something that exceeds ordinary understanding, something that stops us in our tracks and produces awe. I definitely believe that. I mean, Einstein did, too.

Then we have Mircea Eliade, who built on Otto’s work in his landmark study The Sacred and the Profane, and concluded—and this was after a comprehensive cross-cultural study of the history of religions—that almost all human beings across recorded history have shared a capacity to experience the sacred. It seems like maybe we are, as a species, creatures who want and even need to reach for transcendence. We seem to build rituals and altars and prayers and ceremonies for no other real reason than that we want to.

And reaching for transcendence might not be altogether separate from the creative impulse, either. Sometimes, for me, it feels like the same impulse. After all, as Mary Oliver wrote:

…intellectual work sometimes, spiritual work certainly, artistic work always—these are forces that fall within its grasp, forces that must be held in the hand.

And Nick Cave put it this way:

Your imagination, it seems to me, is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence, and is not intrinsic to you, rather it is a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.

Spiritual ignition! That’s it right there, I think—the truth that the made thing, the thing we create, is simply what catches fire from a source beyond our deliberate intention.

Rachel Naomi Remen, M.D., maybe put it most directly of all:

At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.

The sacred, in this sense, requires only our attention—our deepest attention, the kind with which we can notice that something matters beyond its ordinary function. This is the kind of attention that treats an object or a moment or a practice as worthy of a level of care that exceeds the usual. In this sense, the sacred can take wildly different forms in our individual lives. It can be a garden tended with the same devotion every morning. It can be a candle lit before our writing begins. It can be a walk outside where we actually notice the world around us, in all of its aliveness. Or it can be a meal prepared for someone we love with ingredients we’ve chosen with extra care. These are all sacred acts if the person performing them does so with a quality of attention and intention that transforms the ordinary into something more.

Chapter Eight asks us to consider what sacred looks like in our lives, and how it shapes us, or how it might, starting with the role of ritual, which can, in its own way, hold sacredness.

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re entering the final stretch of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 71| The Ritual. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and today is the last day of Chapter Seven, but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Eight | Day Seventy-One | Making from the Sacred | The Ritual

Let’s start by thinking of things we do every day, in the same way and at the same time, or things we do to mark a transition.

For me, it’s coffee. Every morning, I make my espresso and froth the oat milk, put in a tiny bit of sugar (most recently, with a small gold spoon that arrived when we purchased utensils for the bagel bar at Max and Kaela’s shower).

What are the practices you allow yourself before the day starts in with its demands? Or, what are the evening gestures that you rely on to close things down? Maybe you even have certain seasonal rituals that mark the turning of the year—Jon does things in the garden every spring and fall, year after year, things that bring him joy and that seem to tell him that all is well with the world as it turns and keeps turning.

Maybe you have a small ceremony that you perform before you write, or after you write, or a ritual that helps you in the middle of writing whenever you get stuck. Remember, rituals don’t need to be ornate or elaborate. Sometimes the most powerful rituals are the quietest ones.

So, before you make anything today, I invite you to perform any kind of ritual. You can choose a ritual you already know and love, or you can invent one for this day only. Be open to whatever comes, and then, when it does come, let it be

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Guess what? I am maybe one third into the short story I am writing for a forthcoming collection, which I’ll tell you about soon. I finally got to the point yesterday where the story started taking over, that feeling of the thing writing itself. What a relief. I don’t know yet exactly where it is going, but it did come alive, and that makes all the difference.

Meanwhile, quickly, for those who don’t know, we’re on the last day of Chapter Seven, Making from Relationship, in our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice. It’s always a good time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in! Below you’ll find a short intro essay, then a detailed invitation to make and write at the end of the post.

We began this chapter with Aristotle, who called humans “political animals,” which means literally animals who live in the polis, the city, the community, animals who can’t become fully ourselves in isolation, but who instead can develop wholly only in relation to others. We recalled how Mary Oliver told us to let the soft animal of our bodies love what they love. Again, we are mammals: we love, we bond. Our bodies are constantly measuring connection with others. We register the presence or absence of connection just as we measure other survival-related conditions like air temperature or food availability. And we learned during this chapter, too, how the pain of rejection and heartbreak feel the same as physical wounds, and explored how we know this unequivocally based on measurable signals in our brains. We are shaped by our relationships in ways that go far beyond comfort or companionship. We are formed within our close connections, carried by them into every room we enter, every interaction we undertake, and every page we write.

So we set out, ten days ago, to make and write from all of this complexity, and see what lived there. Here is some of what we found:

• That the brief encounter can carry the full weight of a relationship. Ellen Bass showed us that the waiter with plum black eyes who kissed the aunt’s powdered cheek as they left the restaurant was not nothing—it was the last human touch that woman ever received, and its brevity was irrelevant.

• That the most formative relationships shape us gradually, invisibly, over time, until the shape is simply who we are. Toni Morrison captured what the formative relationship does at its best:

  She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

• That most lives contain at least one costly relationship—the kind that requires sustained effort, that fractures and repairs, and that we sometimes stay with despite everything. The difficult relationship often teaches us to recognize the chasms that sometimes exist between the person we need someone to be and the person they actually are. Carmen Maria Machado named the paradox so well:

  People settle near volcanoes because the resulting soil is extraordinary.

• That rivalry, at its best, ignites rather than corrodes. Sebastian Smee wrote that a person’s greatest rival often becomes an invisible collaborator. The rival simply shows us what’s possible when someone reaches as far as we hope to reach, and then farther still. If the beginning of rivalry is imitation, then the end of rivalry is uniqueness.

• That the unexpected relationship requires the fertile soil of genuine openness—and that these relationships flourish best when they arrive in our lives at moments when our usual categories have temporarily failed us and we are unusually available to the wider realm of possibility.

• That the animal relationship operates almost entirely outside language, which might be why people sometimes feel their companion animals know things about them that other humans don’t or can’t. And we were reminded that all creatures know love. That the oxytocin that rises when we make eye contact with our dogs is the same hormone that mediates bonding between mothers and babies, and that’s part of why dogs learned to look at us the way we look at each other, and how we came to feel it.

• That anyone who has taught anything, ever, especially for any length of time, discovers that there is perhaps no more powerful way to learn and to grow than to teach, and this is only true because of the role of the students, whose questions and efforts remodel the teacher, one exchange at a time.

• That place is a relationship too — perhaps one of the oldest and most formative ones we have, and that the “gauze” of place creates a filter for everything that comes later. If you don’t know where you’re from, Wendell Berry told us, you’ll have a hard time saying where you’re going.

So, we’ve spent ten days making from relationship. Long ones and brief ones, difficult ones and unexpected ones, formative ones and rivalrous ones, animal ones and human ones, student ones and teacher ones, and the ones written into the land itself. Over and over we’ve seen how our relationships have had has made us who we are and, in turn, helped make our art what it is. The made thing we have been reaching for in Chapter Seven lives between us and others, in the space of genuine encounter—in that space where, as Paul Matthews wrote, through a word or a sentence shared in writing, we could move into the presence of a communion greater than anything we intended.

At such moments it is no longer a classroom with the teacher at the center. It becomes, as Matthews taught me, a circle of truth, poetry, and love.

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re entering the final stretch of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 70 | What Relationship Gave Us. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and today is the last day of Chapter Seven, but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Seven | Day Seventy | Making from Relationship | What Relationship Gave us

Okay, so before we move on to Chapter Eight | Making from the Sacred, let’s make one final thing that tries to get at whatever Chapter Seven opened up in us. It doesn’t need to be some kind of summary of our ten days of making (though I did that, didn’t I?). No, though, I think we’re after, for the making and writing here at the end of our relationship chapter, more of a gesture toward

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It was a pretty good writing day yesterday. I’m shooting for another one today! More luck would be welcomed!

Meanwhile, quickly, for those who don’t know, we’re in Chapter Seven of our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice, Making from Relationship. It’s always a good time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in! Today, we’re making and writing something from the student. Below you’ll find a short intro essay, then a detailed invitation to make and write at the end of the post.

And now, some thoughts on what it means to have a relationship with a place.

Six days ago on a Monday, this was a lovely late summer morning some 75 days after an important conversation on a Paris terrace—Jon and I closed on a timber frame cottage on Madeline Island, the only inhabited island of the Apostle Islands in Lake Superior. Ours (ours?!) is a wooded property with 9.6 acres of mature and even old-growth forest, 452 feet of Superior shoreline, and deeded access to a private sandy beach called Hidden Beach, which we can reach with a five-minute hike through birch and maple and cedar and balsam along a tumbling, rocky ravine.

Friends, I have been in love with Lake Superior my whole entire life. I was born at St. Luke’s Hospital in Duluth, which is just a mile from Duluth’s harbor. My most beloved adults, my Nana and her sister, Lala, taught me to search for agates on the rocky shores of Lake Superior when I was very small. And my mom warned me always about the lake’s “undertow,” an hysteria later made fun of—only oceans have undertows—only to subsequently learn that Superior does indeed have riptides! In 2005, I married Jon on the shore of Superior, at Brighton Beach in Duluth, just at the turn of the road where the city ends and the North Shore begins. I wrote quite a lot about Lake Superior’s deep, wide, and enduring influence in my life in my memoir, The Part That Burns. For all my fifty-eight years, this one lake has been the water I return to not just in memory and in dreams, but in real life, in the here and now of the physical world, I’ve sought its magic as often as I’ve been able.

As I wrote in my essay “Place as Cartography of the Self,” published in Writing in the Dark during our Power of Place intensive:

The places of our lives … shape us. Through soil, water, light, scent, and feel, through the streets we walked as children, the kitchens where adults cooked or played cards or drank or raged or told stories or bandaged our cuts or cut our hair or held us when we wept, through the landscapes that framed our first griefs or joys, the places in our lives become sources of identity, belonging, and creative possibility.

Wallace Stegner, who might be one of the most beautiful writers of place I know of (at least, in Crossing to Safety, his place writing blew me away), put it this way:

Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or she will see all the world afterwards.

What a gorgeous metaphor! The gauze of place, posited as a filter for everything that comes later. I love thinking about how our most important places can become their own kinds of lenses that then color how we see the world. Maybe also how we write about the world.

Eudora Welty, in her essay “Place in Fiction,” describes what happens when a writer gets place right:

The moment the place in which the novel happens is accepted as true, through it will begin to glow, in a kind of recognizable glory, the feeling and thought that inhabited the novel in the author’s head and animated the whole of his work.

But Wendell Berry might have put it best when he said:

If you don’t know where you’re from, you’ll have a hard time saying where you’re going.

I’m excited to see what happens today when we explore, in our writing and making, the impact of our relationship with a place that changed us. I have some good ideas, too, for how we might do that, which you’ll find in the full invitation at the end of the post. I think this one will be fun!

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 68 The Place! Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we are in the middle of chapter seven—Making from Relationship—but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Seven | Day Sixty-Nine | Making from Relationship | The Place

Think of a place that shaped you—it can be a place from a long time ago or a place from more recently, as long as it’s a place you still carry in your body. Maybe you’ll focus on your childhood home or an especially beloved landscape. Maybe a favorite city, one you’ve visited often, or, maybe as for me, you’ll choose a treasured body of water. But it could also be a street corner or a room where something happened that changed the direction of your life. The place you choose need not be grand or scenic. In fact, it need not even exist anymore, as long as it once mattered to you.

And before we make anything, let’s repeat our ritual of spending some time with this impactful place in memory. With the power of imagination fully engaged, walk through the place slowly. Notice what you notice—and be especially mindful of what your body remembers.

Then make something from the memory of this place. Here are some concrete ideas for ways into the making:

Read more

Good morning, WITDers. I’m super excited because after what feels like months of hubbub, today is a writing day for me. A real one, a long one, and very necessary one. Wish me luck.

Also, quickly, for those who don’t know, we’re in Chapter Seven of our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice, Making from Relationship. It’s always a good time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in! Today, we’re making and writing something from the student. Below you’ll find a short intro essay, then a detailed invitation to make and write at the end of the post.

One of my mentors, the poet and teacher Paul Matthews, has the most beautiful passage in his craft book, Sing Me the Creation, about teaching, which completely captures how I feel about it:

Maybe when we meet there seems to be nothing between us; yet if you give me your word I can reply with the next, collaborative, responding to questions asked, needs recognized, testing each other’s immediate joys and fears in the writing. That is how I started my work as a poet-teacher—with nothing almost, with simple human acts of language—until I became aware that through a word or a sentence shared in writing we could move into the presence of a communion greater than anything I had intended. At such moments it was no longer a classroom with me as teacher at the center. It became a “circle of truth, poetry and love….”

But before I was a writing teacher, I was an elementary and middle school teacher. And about fifteen years ago, at age thirty-nine, I stood in an eighth-grade Waldorf classroom in Minneapolis and lit a beeswax candle. I placed my hands over my heart to say morning verse with the same students I’d been teaching for eight years, since they were first-graders. They were just months from graduating and leaving the school forever, and I found myself, as I wrote in an essay published in Past Ten and included in the Past Ten anthology:

… gaping into the jaws of my own future, jaws yawning open and shut, mouthing the brutish question of whether I would ever return to my dream of writing.

I had taught these children through the loss of grandparents, through learning to read and write and struggling to multiply fractions and conjugate Spanish verbs and perform Shakespeare and knit socks. I had taught them everything I knew. And all the while they had been teaching me something I would need for the rest of my life: how to receive.

The relationship between teacher and student is one of the most mis-described relationships I can think of, because we almost always describe it in one direction only, with the teacher doing the giving and the student doing the receiving. But anyone who has taught anything ever, especially for any length of time, knows that the opposite is also deeply and immutably true: there is perhaps no more powerful way to learn and to grow than to teach, and this is only true because of the role of the students, whose questions and efforts remodel the teacher, one exchange at a time.

I have felt this in every teaching relationship I’ve ever been in. Students ask questions I’ve never even thought of, or they resist a text in such a way that I come to understand it differently. My students—and this includes those of you so generously sharing your work in this 100 Day practice—produce writing helps me rethink everything I thought I knew about the craft. I’ve actually written in depth about what it has meant to me—what it still very much means to me—to teach writing on Substack and in community, and these sentiments only deepen and become more true the longer I teach. That longer essay is here.

And my former Waldorf students—now in their thirties—gradually became some of my dearest friends. I wrote in that Past Ten essay about what happened when Jon and I got married in 2005:

The school community, including my students and their parents, made up most of our wedding guests.

My students (fifth-graders at the time) came to my wedding. And then, in the most unexpected twist of all, last year, Max married Kaela, who was in my Waldorf class.

But—and this is super important—the teacher-student relationship needn’t be institutional to be formative. We teach each other constantly. A friend who shows us how to be brave in a conversation we’ve been avoiding. A child who teaches us something new and beautiful about patience. A colleague models an intriguing new way to solve a problem. A stranger does something offbeat or graceful or generous in public and helps us realize some part of ourself that’s longing to be expressed. Every time one person helps another grow toward something they couldn’t have reached alone, that’s a teacher-student dynamic that changes both people.

Today I’ll invite us to make something from a relational dynamic in which we taught something to someone else, and were changed by it, no matter how subtly.

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 68 The Student! Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we are in the middle of chapter seven—Making from Relationship—but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Seven | Day Sixty-Eight | Making from Relationship | The Student

Think of someone you taught something to—and, remember, teaching can take a million different forms. Have you ever taught a child to read, or helped guide a

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Good morning, friends, makers, writers. A few thoughts before we jump in—mainly to say that I have noticed this summer, in a clear, undeniable way, how the writing I’m surrounded by is changing. What I mean is, your writing is changing. In all of my teaching spaces—here in this space, and in my Writing in the Dark |T he WORKSHOP, and in CRAFT SCHOOL, I am seeing it happen. Writers taking risks, trying new things, elasticizing their relationships with language, while also using new levels of attention and observation to depict the world more vividly so that I can feel it on a different level.

You’re doing something that Annie Dillard compelled her students to do—which is to use the power of the concrete and specific to create a world on the page that evokes something in the reader. Dillard put it this way:

Always locate the reader in time and space again and again. Beginning writers rush in to feelings, to interior lives. Instead, stick to surface appearances; hit the five senses; give the history of the person and the place, and the look of the person and the place. Use first and last names. As you write, stick everything in a place and a time.

Don’t describe feelings.

The way to a reader’s emotions is, oddly enough, through the senses.

–from Image Journal

It is so enlivening, edifying, and, actually, electric to watch this kind of writing happening all around me. I’ll have more thoughts to share about it later, but, for now, just to say that I am experiencing the mystery of teaching in some new and profound ways. It is transformative.

Also, quickly, for those who don’t know, we’re in Chapter Seven of our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice, Making from Relationship. It’s always a good time to jump into this daily creative ritual, or jump back in! Today, we’re making and writing something from the animal. Below you’ll find a short intro essay, then a detailed invitation to make and write at the end of the post.

Back during the pandemic, I read a novel—it was a bestseller, actually—called Once There Were Wolves, by Charlotte McConaghy. It was kind of a strange book, though I mostly liked it, and there was one line in it that I repeat regularly, even now, five years later. The line was spoken by the father of the protagonist, a father who was a survivalist living off the land in the woods, sometimes with his daughters, who went back and forth between their mother and father. Anyway, what he said to his daughters at one point was, “All creatures know love.”

All creatures know love.

When I’m snuggling with Frannie on the couch, or when she’s scared of the open stairs in a new place, or terrified of a bigger dog coming toward us on the street, and I pick her up and she’s trembling and burrows into me, I just instinctively repeat this line to myself, all creatures know love, because it’s so beautiful.

Interestingly and not surprisingly, plenty of good scientific research supports this idea, at least in the realm of dogs. Just one example comes from researchers at Azabu University in Japan whose study, published in the journal Science, showed that when humans and their dogs make sustained eye contact, both brains release oxytocin simultaneously. We just talked here about oxytocin a few days ago—it’s the hormone that mediates bonding between mothers and babies, and it works similarly between humans and our dogs. When we look into each other’s eyes, oxytocin rises, leading to more gazing, which causes more warm feelings of affection, which, again, causes more gazing, etc. It’s a feedback loop of love that transcends the species boundary, and it can be measured in a laboratory. Notably, wolves don’t trigger this loop when they make eye contact with humans—scientists think dogs developed this capacity somewhere in the long history of living alongside us. In other words, dogs came to look at us the way we look at each other, and we came to feel it.

The human-animal relationship is ancient and strange and often beautiful, and it doesn’t depend on language. Some animals, like dogs, can be taught to understand a certain number of words, but our overall connection with them is not language-based, which might be why people sometimes feel their companion animals know things about them that other humans don’t. Like the way our dog might sense grief before we speak it, or our cat might respond to anxiety before we acknowledge it.

I have my own long history with dogs—from Pete, the white mutt with the black spots who slept at the foot of my childhood bed and whose warm weight on my feet gave me what I called a melty feeling inside, and who was sent to “the farm” when my mother moved to Minneapolis, a farm I knew even then did not exist. In my essay “Four Dogs, Maybe Five,” published in Proximity magazine, I traced all the dogs of my life to that point—Pete, Brandy, Charlie, Smokey, Trixie, Wolfie—and discovered new ways of understanding how those animals, even as they came and went, contributed something meaningful to a childhood in free fall.

Then, of course, came Louis, the yorkie-poo who helped soften the sharp edges when Jon and I and our kids combined our families. Louis’s puppy antics made some of the rivalries, upsets, and indignities easier to bear. And Frannie. My heart of hearts, arrived in 2019, six months old and having been mostly confined to a kitchen pen, with no socialization whatsoever. She would bark all day at shadows and moths and shoeboxes and every single little sound until I’d break down and cry—and she taught me things that I explored in another essay here called Nine Big Lessons My Fearful Puppy Taught Me About Writing, including how fear is a history, not a character flaw, and trust is slow, slow work that requires showing up again and again in the same way until the nervous system finally believes the danger has passed. Frannie was terrified. So have I been, at various points in my life. We understood each other.

Today we’re going to try to make something from an animal relationship by giving some kind of form to what an animal has given us. The relationship doesn’t need to be with a domesticated pet, either. I’ve had genuinely profound experiences with animals in the wild, and I imagine you have, too. So, today I’m hoping we can simply look more closely than usual at what can pass between a human and an animal, what can cut right across the species boundary in the wordless language of eye contact, warmth, presence.

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 67 The Animal! Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we are in the middle of chapter seven—Making from Relationship—but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Seven | Day Sixty-Seven Making from Relationship | The Animal

Today I invite you to think of an animal who has mattered to you. Maybe this animal is a pet—a dog who accompanied you through your worst days, or a stray cat who showed up and chose you. If you are lucky enough to have known horses, then maybe it’s a horse whose size and patience taught you something new about trust. But it could also be a wild animal you encountered only once—like a coyote or a fox at the edge of the yard at dusk, or a loon calling across the glossy black of a lake in the early morning, or a deer who held your gaze for an impossibly long time.

Before you even start the making, I invite you to take a moment to simply

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Good morning, friends, makers, writers. For those who don’t know, we’re in Chapter Seven of our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice, Making from Relationship. It’s a good time to jump in, or jump back in! Today, we’re making and writing something from a the formative one. There’s a short intro essay, and a detailed invitation at the end of the post.

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

This stunning quote comes from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and it captures perfectly the power of our most formative relationships—the ones that gather the pieces of us and return us to ourselves.

Sometimes, maybe most often, the most formative relationships do this gathering and returning work so early and deeply that we barely see it until much, much later, because the influence simply becomes part of who we feel we’ve always been.

This is probably what makes most formative relationships so powerful—sometimes we internalize the formative person so completely that their voice becomes part of our own internal monologue. Their responses to us and perceptions of us become part of our own operating system. The formative relationship doesn’t exactly shape us the way sculptors shape clay—from the outside, actively, with tools meant for the job. It shapes us more like water shapes stone—gradually over time, and invisibly, until the shape is simply who we are.

So today we try to make something from that shaping—we try to give a solid shape to an influence that we’ve absorbed so thoroughly we sometimes forget it’s an influence at all. Today we ask: who gathered our pieces and returned them to us in the right order?

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 66, The Formative One! Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 66. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we are in the middle of chapter seven—Making from Relationship—but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Seven | Day Sixty-Six | Making from Relationship | The Formative One

Today we’re looking deeply at the way we’ve been formed by specific relationships—and in particular, we’re trying to focus on a single person whose influence runs so deep that we can barely imagine having become who we are without this person in our life.

For many of us, this person might be a parent or grandparent, an aunt or an uncle. It could definitely be a sibling or a teacher or a childhood friend—or a teacher, mentor, or first love. Whoever it is, this is a person whose voice we still hear sometimes when we’re making big decisions. Maybe we can feel their

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Hi, friends. So sorry to not be posting till late morning Central Time. I had a 9 AM meeting with my agent today, a meeting she held specifically with her authors who have books coming out in 2027 (that’s me!) to talk about the state of nonfiction publishing. I learned a lot and will be sharing soon for those of you who have your sights set on book publishing and would like to know more. I’ll keep you posted. But the meeting set my morning back. Doing these posts every day has been … a very healthy challenge! It’s teaching me a lot, and I’m grateful for your presence and grace.

Meanwhile, for those who don’t know, we just started Chapter Seven (Chapter Seven!) of our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice, Making from Relationship. It’s a good time to jump in, or jump back in! Today, we’re making and writing something from a the unexpected one. There’s a short intro essay, and a detailed invitation at the end of the post.

But before we make and write today, I want to remind everyone that we have a library of more than 1,000 posts here at Writing in the Dark, and they’re full of writing riches for you, any time you want or need them.

The Curriculum Index is where you look for writing exercises (and essays) for any mood, any time—just click here.

The Foundational Posts are a good place to start, like these:

Five Foundational Exercises Including One for Paying Attention

Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things

Absolute Attention is Prayer

Exercise for Attention

Shimmers & Shards: A Practice of Paying Attention to Concrete Details

What Close Reading Really Is: A Practice of Attention

What I Mean By “Aboutness”

A Surprising Tool For Finding Your Story’s Aboutness

How to Actually Become A Better Writer (& the problem with “workshops”)

Okay, so now, Making from Relationship, and the unexpected one.

Just think for a moment about how much of our lives happen by chance, no matter how much we like to think we’re making our own choices. I’ve got a great big story unfolding in my own life right now, a story about the intersection of intention, attention, negative capability, and surprise. I’m literally living this story as we speak, and it feels deeply connected to our 100 Days of Making & Writing and how this practice is subtly and not so subtly shaping how I’m moving through my own life. I hope to write that up in the next few days. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, I recognize how healthy it is for us all to consider from time to time how much of our lives is or is not in our control. In some sense, we do, many of us, much of the time, at least more or less, choose where to live, where to work, with whom to spend our time. But when you look honestly at how much I just equivocated on all that, it raises the question of how large a role chance plays in all this? Maybe especially when it comes to our most important people.

This, in turn, raises the question of how open we are, and how attentive, to whatever may be arising for us in any given moment, especially things that are just outside the bounds our our pre-existing assumptions and expectations.

Nicholas Christakis studies social networks and argues that human beings are fundamentally shaped by connections we never sought and could never have predicted. Our lives, he says, are often changed by people we didn’t choose—friends of friends of friends, strangers at parties, people who randomly sit down next to us and then to our surprise expand what we think is possible.

As usual, I looked for some examples, and found a few good ones.

Like Helen Keller and Mark Twain, who met by chance at a party in New York City in 1895. Keller–deaf and blind since she was nineteen months old—was fourteen at the time, and Twain—the most famous writer in America and increasingly disillusioned with fame, was sixty. The became fast friends, corresponding for many years. Twain advocated fiercely for Keller, even helping her raise funds for her education, and described her as “the most remarkable person” he had ever met. She, in turn, described Twain as one of the great gifts of her life.

Then we have Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Theirs was a relationship marked by jealousy, misunderstanding, and creative rivalry, but they kept turning back to each other anyway.

As Lit Hub noted:

Although their alliance was regularly knocked off course by jealousy or misunderstanding, these two ambitious women kept being drawn back to each other through mutual recognition of their shared literary talent.

Their friendship shaped the course of English literature, despite that neither of them would necessarily have chosen it in advance.

Finally, we’ve got Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson. The famous friendship between these men first got sparked when Anderson wrote Wilson’s Edgar Allan Poe paper in exchange for the better bedroom in their University of Texas apartment. That trade set in motion an amazing creative connection that led to films like Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums.

Unexpected relationships always happen on their own terms and in ways we couldn’t have seen coming. And they often reveal their importance slowly, and only after the significance has become obvious to us through what it’s led to.

Importantly, though, the unexpected relationship does require the fertile soil of our own genuine openness. These relationships tend to flourish best and grow strongest when the arrive in our lives at moments when our usual categories have temporarily failed us and we are unusually available to the wider realm of possibility.

Before the creative invitation for making and writing, once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 54, Dreams! Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 54. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we are just ending chapter six—Making from Darkness—today (it started here with this introductory essay and invitation), but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Seven | Day Sixty-Five | Making from Relationship | The Unexpected One

Think of the relationships in your life that arrived in a way or at a time when you weren’t expecting them. Before you make anything, spend a few minutes

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Hello! Hello!

To those who don’t know, we just started Chapter Seven (Chapter Seven!) of our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice, Making from Relationship. It’s a good time to jump in, or jump back in! Today, we’re making and writing something from a healthy rivalry. There’s a short intro essay, and a detailed invitation at the end of the post.

But before we dive deep into rivalry, I wanted to remind everyone that we have a library of more than 1,000 posts here at Writing in the Dark, and they’re full of writing riches for you, any time you want.

The Curriculum Index is where you look for writing exercises (and essays) for any mood, any time—just click here.

The Foundational Posts are a good place to start, like these:

Five Foundational Exercises Including One for Paying Attention

Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things

Absolute Attention is Prayer

Exercise for Attention

Shimmers & Shards: A Practice of Paying Attention to Concrete Details

What Close Reading Really Is: A Practice of Attention

What I Mean By “Aboutness”

A Surprising Tool For Finding Your Story’s Aboutness

How to Actually Become A Better Writer (& the problem with “workshops”)

Rivalry shares, or can share, at least, some general terrain with jealousy, but they’re not the same thing. If I am understanding correctly, based on what Merriam-Webster tells me, then envy and rivalry are both about wanting something someone else has, whereas jealousy is about not wanting someone else to take what we already have for ourselves. Here’s from M-W:

While often used interchangeably, envy is wanting something someone else has, while jealousy is the fear of losing something you already have to a rival. Envy involves two people and an object or trait, whereas jealousy involves three parties (you, someone you value, and a perceived threat).

Cheryl Strayed, writing as the advice columnist Dear Sugar in Tiny Beautiful Thing, addresses a reader consumed with envy this way (Strayed is using jealousy interchangeably):

You actually do stop being an awful jealous person by stopping being an awful jealous person.

It’s like she’s reminding of the obvious: that the envious way of thinking is a choice that becomes a habit and, over time, mushrooms into a whole corrosive way of orienting ourselves—it’s an orientation built on the false belief that the world’s supply of recognition is finite and what other people get leaves less for us.

Rivalry, though, is not this. It’s actually something else entirely, because instead of corroding us from the inside, rivalry—at least the way I am understanding and using the word—actually ignites us outwardly, making us reach further than we would or could have alone. Unlike envy, rivalry can feel good, it can feel great. It’s that kind of inspiration and determination to stretch that we feel when someone else achieves something truly astonishing or even just admirable in a way that moves us.

The art critic Sebastian Smee, in his book The Art of Rivalry, argues:

…the beginning of rivalry is imitation; the end of rivalry is uniqueness.

So in this sense, we can look at the rival as someone who shows us what’s possible and compels us toward our own version of it—toward work that’s fueled by admiration and yet still wholly ours. It’s just that we might not have found it if not inspired by the rival.

Art and literature are apparently full of rivalries that helped lead to extraordinary work. Here’s just a couple of examples I found:

When Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys heard the Beatles’ Rubber Soul in 1965, he was so overcome by its achievement that he immediately began writing his own album Pet Sounds, which turned out to be one of the most celebrated albums ever made. So much so that when Paul McCartney’s response to Pet Sounds was to write Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was a case of two bands raising the stakes for each other from across the Atlantic, with rivalry central to the genius.

Picasso and Matisse are another example. Reportedly, their friendship was charged with competition from the moment they met. They studied each other’s work intensely, each using the other as a standard against which to measure their own ambitions. And yet, by all accounts this rivalrous friendship was remarkably healthy and deeply generative. Instead of becoming toxic or destructive, their decades-long competition served as a genuine dialogue that pushed both artists to take massive creative risks, continue reinventing their styles, and, ultimately, help define 20th-century painting.

Smee writes that “one person’s greatest rival often becomes an invisible collaborator.” Just think about that. The rival simply show sus what’s possible when someone reaches as far as we hope to reach, and farther.

Once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 54, Dreams! Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 54. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we are just ending chapter six—Making from Darkness—today (it started here with this introductory essay and invitation), but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Seven | Day Sixty-Four| Making from Relationship | The Healthy Rival

Today I want us to think of someone who pushed us to stretch harder, reach higher. Someone whose presence in our lives sharpened us or whose talent or success or confidence made us go farther than we’d have gone otherwise.

Importantly, a rival might be someone we know personally—a fellow writer, a co-worker, or someone in our same circle whose work inspires us. But a rival can

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To those who don’t know, we just started Chapter Seven (Chapter Seven!) of our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice, Making from Relationship. It’s a good time to jump in, or jump back in! Today, we’re making and writing something from a relationship that cost us something. There’s a short intro essay, and a detailed at the end of the post.

But before we dive deep into the bonds that cost us, I wanted to remind everyone that we have a library of more than 1,000 posts here at Writing in the Dark, and they’re full of writing riches for you, any time you want.

The Curriculum Index is where you look for writing exercises (and essays) for any mood, any time—just click here.

The Foundational Posts are a good place to start, like these:

Five Foundational Exercises Including One for Paying Attention

Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things

Absolute Attention is Prayer

Exercise for Attention

Shimmers & Shards: A Practice of Paying Attention to Concrete Details

What Close Reading Really Is: A Practice of Attention

What I Mean By “Aboutness”

A Surprising Tool For Finding Your Story’s Aboutness

How to Actually Become A Better Writer (& the problem with “workshops”)

And as for Chapter Seven and writing from relationship, we’ve so far talked about long relationships and brief encounters, and today, as I said, something of a pivot as we look specifically at relationships that have cost us something. After all, every life contains at least one costly relationship—the kind that requires sustained effort. Often these relationships experience repeated fractures and repairs, and, sometimes, we stick with them despite knowing or at least speculating that we’d be better off not doing so.

Today we’re going to get curious about these relationships that have asked the most of us, sometimes requiring us to grow in directions we may not have chosen voluntarily. If we’re lucky, we end up, as a result of these connections, developing capacities for patience, forgiveness, or honesty that our easier relationships never asked of us.

Sometimes, though, these difficult relationships are genuinely harmful. Carmen Maria Machado opens her memoir, In the Dream House, which is absolutely brilliant—and I say that without a trace of hyperbole—with this sentence:

I speak into the silence. I toss the stone of my story into a vast crevice, measure the emptiness by its small sound.

In the Dream House chronicles Machado’s descent and subsequent escape from an abusive relationship, one that cost her years of her life, her sense of reality, and her ability to trust her own perceptions. Part of Machado’s experience of writing the memoir, an experience I was lucky enough to her her speak about at HippoCamp in 2022, was facing the truth that very little had/has been written about abusive relationships between women. Machado set out to address that void:

We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity.

But difficult relationships aren’t always bad relationships, and almost nothing in life is just one thing or another. Most things are several things at once, and much of the time those things are contradictory. In many costly relationships, love and harm occupy the same space, and the cost of staying or leaving are both high. Machado describes this paradox with heartbreaking acuity:

The fact is, people settle near volcanoes because the resulting soil is extraordinary.

One of my own most costly relationships was also one of the quietest, and that’s the one I had with my father. In my essay “What My Father Knew,” published in Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, I wrote about a phone call I made to him in 1993, when I was twenty-five and newly a mother, hoping to finally speak to him about my difficult and painful childhood. And although it was a crackling landline on old-fashioned, pay-by-the-minute long distance, that phone call still brought me face to face with a man who had known—who had always known—about the abuse I’d endured during my childhood. But he’d done nothing. In that same essay, I wrote about reaching for my father’s hand at SeaWorld when I was eighteen, and how it felt smaller than I remembered. Then I recalled a visit to Tampa—where he lived—nearly thirty years after that phone call—only to find he couldn’t spare ninety minutes for lunch with his daughter. And I wrote, too, about those plastic animals that the machine used to spit out, hot and soft, into my cupped hands when I was a very small child at the zoo with my father, and how they smelled like love. I still can conjure it, if I close my eyes.

The difficult relationship teaches things no other relationship can, like the difference between love and reliability and the chasm we sometimes discover between the person we need someone to be and the person they actually were.

The difficult relationship sometimes asks us to look directly at what we would prefer to look away from, and to make something from what we find there. Today, we try our best to make something from a difficult relationship—something that holds the complexity of that relationship without simplifying it, and that honors its cost without erasing what was also real and true, and, in some cases, worthy.

Once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 54, Dreams! Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 54. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we are just ending chapter six—Making from Darkness—today (it started here with this introductory essay and invitation), but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Seven | Day Sixty-Three | Making from Relationship | The Difficult One

Today, I invite us to make something from a relationship that has cost us something—from a bond for which we sacrificed something meaningful. It doesn’t need to be an abusive or a harmful relationship, although it might be. But it could also simply be a relationship that for whatever reason asks or asked more of us than could be easily given.

Maybe the relationship is one we’re still in, still paying the cost of—but it could also be one we’ve left, or that’s left us, the difficulty of which we’re still processing years later. The thing we make is an attempt to hold the

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To those who don’t know, we just started Chapter Seven (Chapter Seven!) of our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice, Making from Relationship. It’s a good time to jump in, or jump back in!

First, I’ve been meaning to do this, but I I wanted to remind everyone that we have a library of more than 1,000 posts here at Writing in the Dark, and they’re full of writing riches for you, any time you want.

The Curriculum Index is where you look for writing exercises (and essays) for any mood, any time—just click here.

The Foundational Posts are a good place to start, like these:

Five Foundational Exercises Including One for Paying Attention

Eleven Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things

Absolute Attention is Prayer

Exercise for Attention

Shimmers & Shards: A Practice of Paying Attention to Concrete Details

What Close Reading Really Is: A Practice of Attention

What I Mean By “Aboutness”

A Surprising Tool For Finding Your Story’s Aboutness

How to Actually Become A Better Writer (& the problem with “workshops”)

And okay, back to Making from Relationship. It’s gonna be fun, and it’s gonna be messy, because, well, relationships are messy. And fertile. And poets know all about this.

I’ve been sharing and teaching Ellen Bass’s glorious poem, “If You Knew,” for about 15 years. Bass opens that poem with a question that commands some attention:

What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone?

Then sets the poem firmly within the ordinary and often annoying transactions of daily life, reminding us of the clerks who don’t say thank you, the men walking too slowly with the wheeled suitcases at the airport, the drivers who doesn’t signal, etc. What, she wonders out loud, might we do differently if we remembered, in those moments, that the person in front of us is going to die?

At the heart of the poem is a story of a friend’s aunt. When the friend takes the aunt to lunch, a waiter—with plum black eyes—jokes as he served the coffee and kisses the aunt’s powdered cheek as they leave. Then, after they walk half a block, the aunt drops dead sidewalk—and Bass uses language, “dropped dead,” which is exactly how my Nana always referred the death of her husband, Henry, who died by heart attack. Or, as Nana put it, dropped dead. It must feel just that way when someone is standing up and alive minute, and on the floor, dead, the next.

At the end, the poem takes what’s called a leap—in this case, a leap into metaphor—asking:

What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time?

Bass is, of course, writing here about the intersection of mortality and attention—about how the knowledge of impermanence, if we could ever actually hold it steadily, which can’t, might make all of our encounters precious. But she’s also writing about the brief encounter as a form of relationship in itself. She’s implying, correctly, that the waiter’s kiss on the aunt’s powdered cheek meant something. It was the last human touch that woman experienced. It mattered in a way that neither the waiter nor the aunt could have known in the moment, and its brevity was irrelevant.

Often, we tend to rank the importance of our relationships by their duration. The long friendship seems inevitably more significant than one that lasts a season, and we celebrate the weight of a decades long marriage over a summer fling. But this isn’t always how meaning works in the span of a human life. Daniel Kahneman, whose work I love and whose book Thinking Fast and Slow I refer to often, found in his research on memory and experience that we remember experiences by their peak emotional intensity and their ending—not, in fact, by their duration. A brief encounter that reaches an emotional peak can leave a deeper impression than years of unexceptional connection. That’s because in a brief encounter, everything is compressed. Instead of gradual revelation, there’s a flash of pure intensity.

Today, we get to make and writing something from a brief encounter that ended up mattering—maybe it was a person who touched your palm only once, but left something lasting behind.

Once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 54, Dreams! Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 54. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we are just ending chapter six—Making from Darkness—today (it started here with this introductory essay and invitation), but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Seven | Day Sixty-Two | Making from Relationship | The Brief Encounter

Today I invite us all to think about various people we knew only briefly. Maybe they passed through our lives in a week, or maybe they spent a summer, or a school year. Or maybe we knew them for the duration of only a single conversation on a train or at a party or in a waiting room. But somehow they left enough of an impression that we remember them still—which begs the question:

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Sorry I’m so slow this morning, friends. Lots of things coming at me this Saturday morning, all of them from various people I love. Which is perfect for Chapter Seven (Chapter Seven!) of our 100 Days of Making & Writing practice: Making from Relationship. It turns out, I have a lot of thoughts about relationships, so, bear with me as we enter into some fun, sticky, very human work in our art through this realm of human connection—which is perhaps our most complicated realm of all.

Aristotle called humans “political animals”—meaning literally animals who live in the “polis,” or the city, the community. He suggested that we do not become fully ourselves in isolation, only in relation to others. So, in the next ten days of making from relationship, we’ll have a chance to look at all of this—to make something from our connections with other people, from what those connections have given us and taken from us, and from what we understand about ourselves only because of those we’ve known and those who’ve known us.

Mary Oliver told us to let “the soft animal of our body love what it loves,” and that’s the thing about mammals: we love, we bond. It’s one of the defining characteristics that separates us from most (but not all) fish and reptiles that lay eggs or bear young with minimal contact. Our capacity for sustained emotional attachment to other members of our species reflects a neurochemistry that makes connection, for us, feel as essential as food.

Our human bonding capacities are fueled by oxytocin, otherwise known as the love hormone, which first evolved to facilitate the muscle contractions of birth and lactation—the most basic of mammalian acts, mothers birthing and feeding their young. But evolution expanded that system for something larger: the warm, pull toward other beings, a pull we experience as love and friendship and perhaps most fundamental of all, belonging. Oxytocin levels rise when we touch or make eye contact with people we care about, or even when we just sit beside them in a room. Our bodies are constantly measuring connection with others, registering its presence or absence just as we measure other survival-related conditions like air temperature. And, as it turns out, our bodies even register the lack of connection caused by rejection as physical pain.

I vividly remember when the rejection-as-physical-pain research first came out back in 2003. I was teaching third grade then, with a front-row seat to the reaction of kids who were rejected by classmates, an everyday occurrence on elementary school playgrounds.

The rejection study, led by Dr. Naomi Eisenberger and published in the journal Science, used functional MRI (fMRI) scans during a virtual ball-tossing game to prove that social exclusion activates the same brain regions (the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula) as physical pain. In other words, the idea that “rejection hurts” isn’t a metaphor. The pain is physical.

Eisenberger’s study was virtual in order to allow for the fMRI scans to happen—but what prompted her work was a real-world “waiting room” experience discovered by her co-author, psychologist Dr. Kipling Williams, based on something that happened to him in mid-1980s. He’d been sitting in a park when a stray Frisbee landed near him, and he threw it toward two nearby strangers who threw it back to him, and so on. This friendly tossing went on for several minutes. Then, suddenly, the two strangers stopped tossing the Frisbee to Dr. Kipling and instead tossed it only to each other. He was shocked by how upsetting and humiliating, how painful, it felt to be excluded—even by total strangers from a game he hadn’t intended to be playing in the first place.

To study this phenomenon in the lab, Dr. Kipling designed a “waiting room” experiment where a real research participant would sit in a waiting room, told that they were to wait for an experiment to start. Two other people—secret actors hired by the lab—would find a ball in the room and casually toss it back and forth with each other. They’d soon loop the real research participant into a friendly game of catch. But after a minute or two, the actors would start ignoring the research participant entirely, no more ball throws for them, and they’d continue this cold shouldering for the remainder of the waiting period, which was, of course, the actual study. This experiment famously showed that ostracism produces immediate psychological distress. But when Eisenberger wanted to map the neurological pathways of that distress, the ones that cause physical pain, they pivoted to the digital version of the game because it allowed participants to lie completely still inside the narrow magnetic tubes required for fMRI.

The point of all this? The pain of rejection and heartbreak feel the same as physical wounds, and we know this unequivocally based on the signals in our brains. This is why loneliness, sustained long enough, damages the body as much as smoking a pack of cigarettes a day. No matter how introverted we might be, human beings are not built for emotional solitude.

And humans are shaped by our relationships in ways that go far beyond comfort or companionship. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the work of John Bowlby, the developmental psychologist who spent his career studying attachment and who asserted that the bonds we form in infancy become the template through which we experience all subsequent connection—that the quality of our earliest relationships organizes our neural architecture and affects how we perceive the world. I’d like to add here, and emphasize—this matters to me greatly given my childhood—that since Bowlby’s time, we’ve discovered whole new universes of possibility around the neuroplasticity of the human brain, which means that the original architecture and perception shaped by our childhoods can be reshaped by future experience. That’s a topic for another essay.

But the upshot for today is that we are shaped by relationships, formed within them carried by them into every room we enter, every interaction we undertake, and every page we write. The mirror neuron system—this is the same system I’ve written about in relation to the power of concrete specific detail on the page—a system first discovered in macaques in the 1990s and subsequently confirmed in humans, fires identically whether we experience a specific sensory stimulus or watch someone experience it or read about it on the page. In other words, our brains simulate the experiences of other people, real and fictional, automatically, involuntarily, as a basic feature of human perception. That is to say, we innately feel what others feel not as a choice or an act of imagination but as a neurological fact.

When the pandemic came in 2020, it forced a global experiment of social severing. For months, then years, millions of people lived in enforced isolation, which caused real damage. Simultaneously, many of us discovered depths in our relationships we’d failed to truly see before. The internet, which had already been reshaping human connection for a decade, became our window to work, family, love, and grief. On the one hand, the internet gave us connection across distances that would have, in the past, impeded relationships entirely. But it also gave us the illusion of connection—the scroll through other people’s lives that produces simultaneous sensations of togetherness and profound aloneness.

What does any of this have to do with making and writing? Well, for many if not most artists, relationships are a primary subject. Frida Kahlo painted Diego Rivera so many times and in so many forms that her art and her relationship are too intertwined to separate. And Rivera himself said:

I did not know it then, but Frida had already become the most important fact in my life. And would continue to be up to the moment she died, 27 years later.

Their marriage was turbulent and intense, yes, marred by infidelity and illness, interrupted by divorce and remarriage—and, yet, it also produced two of the most distinctive bodies of work in twentieth-century art.

Literary friendships also provide a context for extraordinary work. I love the story of Ann Patchett and Elizabeth McCracken (less famous but also more functional than the one of Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy, which Patchett writes of gorgeously in her memoir Truth and Beauty). Patchett and McCracken met at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 1988—Patchett was 26 at the time, and McCracken was only 24. They exchanged pages from the beginning. Decades later, they remain each other’s first readers, and their friendship is one of the conditions that makes their work possible.

Whether we track the way our relationships mold and shape us day by day or not, the reality remains: every single one of our relationships helps make us who we are and, in turn, helps make our art what it is. Long relationships can give us depth, brief ones might spark intensity, difficult ones lead to certain insight and self-knowledge, and lost ones expose us to the softening of grief.

For Chapter Seven, we’ll make and write from all of that complexity, and see what lives there, including, perhaps, parts of ourselves we’ve yet to explore.

Once again, a quick note for newest members of our Writing in the Dark community: Welcome!

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 54, Dreams! Remember, it doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 54. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we are just ending chapter six—Making from Darkness—today (it started here with this introductory essay and invitation), but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

ALSO!

Mark your calendars for our upcoming 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

And here’s how to access the subscriber chat, where every day is a feast, and from where every day I share examples of your incredible art here in the 100 Day posts. It’s extraordinary.

Chapter Seven | Day Sixty-One| Making from Relationship | The Long Relationship

Today, I invite us to think of someone we’ve known for a very long time, the longer, the better—but, let’s say a decade or so, minimum. Ideally, two or three decades, or even your whole life. The person can either still be living or have

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