Creativity enables resilience, and it takes resilience to be creative. THE RESILIENT CREATIVE was founded on the idea that our creative lives are inseparable from the lives we live.
If you write or create art, you already know this. Our creativity is a place where our experiences get metabolized. Anger, distraction, ambition, doubt, the news (good-ness, the news), and the insatable beauty … all of it shows up when we write or create art or express ourselves in any way that is freeing and rooted in inquiry.
This blog is for creatives who want to work at both levels: the craft and the consciousness underneath it.
I’m Jen Knox, a novelist, essayist, writing teacher, and someone who has spent a long time experimenting with what it takes to sustain a creative life and, in turn, be sustained by our creations. My work has appeared in The Best Small Fictions, Chicago Tribune, McSweeney’s, The Saturday Evening Post, and over a hundred other publications. My books include We Arrive Uninvited (Steel Toe Books Award), Chaos Magic (Joshua Tree Prize), and The Glass City (Press Americana winner). My next novel, Radicals, which is a historical novel about the first woman to run for the U.S. Presidency, arrives in late 2026 from Library Tales/Simon & Schuster.
I am here to offer you mindful and creative reflections, along with mindful and creative practices.
For paid subscribers, I offer audio meditations paired with writing prompts that will help you to slow down enough to find what’s actually there waiting to be shared.
There are also creative community circles where writers share the real work of staying in it and we discuss the writing life, experimenting and supporting each other in real time.
If you can’t afford a paid subscription and want access to a post, write to me. I’ll give you 3 months for free, no questions asked.
Start here:
Other ways to support: Read my books. Begin with We Arrive Uninvited. Connect with me on Insight Timer.
Kind words about my writing.
“Jen Knox is a fearless writer. She can describe a Toledo community decimated by apocalyptic drought, a bakery in Nice during a terrorist attack, a surreal museum of living statues, and make every one of these things feel as real and intimate as your favorite worn-in flannel shirt. Acutely alert to the smallest moments that reveal character, her stories can give you a whole life in a few short paragraphs, laid bare in all its sorrow, glory and restless longing. She can work dialogue, twist a plot, make you laugh out loud, and then break your heart.” —Sheila Black, author of Iron, Ardent
"A talented writer exhibiting her intuition, Knox understands that our greatest fear is loneliness … she gifts us with myriad ways to find a cure." —Tara Lynn Masih, author of How We Disappear
"Jen’s feedback on my writing has been instrumental in propelling me forward and believing in my voice. She has helped me find my strengths and encouraged me to press further into the terrain of writing. This is the first time in my life where I feel confident to say, I’m a writer!" —Writing Circle Participant
