The character is lacking agency, the narrative is flat, the ideas feel stale. Worse: you don’t even know what’s wrong. Things just feel off.

I had professional development funds to use or lose at work, so I asked to be signed up for a Design Thinking course at Harvard. I thought it’d be super easy and intuitive. I’m a creative person, after all, and design thinking is all about creative problem-solving. I teach this. I do this all the time.

Or do I?

I’ve spoken about DT before (always circling), but I want to introduce a new concept adapted from what I recently learned that might ring familiar to many writers: Imagining Alternate Worlds.

The curriculum suggested that in dilemmas, there are many ways to think about creatively designing a solution. This is just one, and its value is found in pretending to be someone else.

Let’s say you have a problem running a restaurant due the fast-paced nature of the work leading to inconsistent customer service. OK, then, let’s think about what other people who inhabit different roles struggle with fast-paced work. Perhaps a hospital or a roofing team on a hot day. How might someone doing that problem-solve?

As writers, we’re always considering alternate worlds. Even in nonfiction, we can explore the interior and exterior as one, exploring perspectives from many angles.

But when we get stuck and are unsure what to do next—in our careers or in the story (or blog) we’re trying to write, we can implement this same kind of thinking as a solution.

What would others who are inventing things do if they were stuck? A scientist whose theory proved wrong. A hiker needing to traverse a wide creek. A chef who is missing an ingredient.

Then ask how they might move forward if they had to keep going.

How might a scientist respond to an explosion in the lab? How might a hiker use what’s around her to create a bridge? How could a chef experiment with ingredients? How might a first-grade teacher support a student who is struggling?

more questions …

How might your own character write this part of your book? How might a hostage negotiator deal with a publisher that disagrees with edits? How might a psychologist explore agency with your character?

Another way to look at this is adopting an alter ego.

When I think of alter egos, I think of Prince. He famously had many, including a symbol that I’m not sure the world will ever decipher.

One of his AEs was Camille, who he channeled when he wanted to sing in a high-pitched and transcendent way. He had others for song writing in different genres, and yet others for business.

Prince occupied many worlds for and with his art.

However you access the alternate, I think it begins with listening and trusting that we can use creativity to tackle creativity problems. Seems on-brand, right? Give it a try and let me know how it goes.

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Prompt: Next time you or your piece hits a wall, needs inspiration, feels stale, take a Quantum Leap (anyone?) and see how it feels to tackle this from a non-writer’s perspective.

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From memory, rewrite a conversation with someone who has been influential in your life — for better or the worse.

Alternately, write about a character who is trying to remember what someone said.

Human memory is complex, and I want to talk about it.

I want to talk about memory because it comes up a lot when one writes nonfiction, especially personal stories, and I happen to be teaching a workshop for Thurber House on memoir in a week.

I studied creative nonfiction (CNF) in graduate school. We learned techniques for telling emotional truths in responsible ways, by clarifying when a memory is biased or setting the stage when we fill in dialogue we only half-remember. Of course there are disclaimers and mentions of our own tendency toward human error.

I also know the way memory works because I’ve read numerous articles on neuroscience and have watched dozens of videos that re-explain how the memory works and why, at times, it doesn’t work.

As covered in the video I link above, memories can be lost through encoding errors (lack of attention), consolidation (how we store information), and retrieval (takes practice).

Despite our human tendency to be wrong, I believe that we can write responsibly with our fallible human memories, and we can use what we DO remember as endless fodder for creative material. We can also rely on memory to help us imagine.

Compelling CNF often relies on episodic memory, and this is defined as how we remember scenic events, such as conversations or pivotal events in our lives—things we deem important and resonant enough to embody. Various sensory details come into play in our episodic memory, and some of us remember with more or fewer colors, scents, tastes, textures and sounds.

How does our nervous system react to various events or ideas? When you hear the word “networking,” for instance, do you get excited or does your body contract? What about the word community? What happens when I mention your favorite food?

Digging into these reactions is revelatory, fun, and sometimes tough.

I used to have brilliant episodic memory, but lately, if I’m being honest, I have serious short-term memory problems and brain fog. It might be age/hormones/stress/diet/sleep (though I sleep like a champ)/glutamate or dopamine issues/environment issues/distraction or […] fill in the blank.

I’ve pursued all these possibilities through allopathic and alt therapies. And I still have issues (though much fewer), which I believe are exacerbated by distraction (I do too much, always have) and stress.

What helps are pauses. Prompts like what I led this blog with. Repeating information on paper or recalling it more often seems to be the best strategy to support my ability to hold information that matters.

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The more we nurture our memory, the less we rely on cloudy emotions to tell our story, and the deeper with can mine our material. We don’t have to write nonfiction or get all details perfect to find that deepening our episodic memory deepens our writing. And, ironically, it helps us connect to the emotions of readers because we are inviting conversation and connection.

I always do these prompts I offer you, but usually I try them before I post. This time, I’m writing with you and contemplating conversations I thought I remembered well but don’t, and I realize this is most often because I’m not paying attention.

What might my memory be like if I slowed down a little? What opportunities did I miss by rushing? What realizations await if I just chill a little more?

Lots of questions today, but here are my thoughts.

Memory aides writing and creative output. Writing and creative output clarifies memory. And what seems to help with both is slowing down and deepening our ability to listen.

While much of the world is in a hurry to get nowhere, we are passing by moments we’ll want to remember.

Case-in-point: Where is that guy in the Bronco weaving in and out of traffic at 90 mph in a 65 going that’s so important? I highly doubt it’s to visit his grandmother in the hospital or to support the rehousing of a displaced family. Perhaps it is, but I doubt it.

This isn’t just about presence. There’s room for contemplation and potential in any moment. Our brains will never be static, but we can slow down. We can.

We can make time to read by refusing to scroll as much. We can make time to listen by planting our cellphones facedown when we’re out to dinner. We can have deep conversations on long walks, rather than just before an appointment or over text messages. We can contribute to conversations worth remembering, worth writing down five years from now, worth our precious and ephemeral time.

If you write to the prompt at the beginning of this post, please let me know how it goes.

𓂃 ོ☼𓂃

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Here’s a short meditation on exploring the moment and coming back when we feel the scattered nature of being rushed from here to there. Man in the Bronco, you can slow down. You’ll still get there. I promise.

If you are doing the kind of work that people will remember, you will not be universally liked.

Writing that has a heartbeat sparks reactions varying from adoration to disgust. We see the hyperspeed version of this on social media, but unlike clickbait, thoughtful and intentional art can cause a person to question their perspective.

When I was a kid, the first book that did this for me was Flowers for Algernon. I remember reading it and thinking it was sad, it was strange, it was impossible to put down, and it was confusing because it scrambled everything I knew about being successful or important in the world. It caused me to better understand that there was and is a myopic version of intelligence and that looking/sounding/being status quo can sterilize the heart (though I wouldn’t have used those words at 9).

Not everyone is a fan of every perspective, nor is everyone willing to step outside their bubble. Not everyone is tolerant. Not everyone is kind.

As such, if you are doing the real work, some people will want your words to disappear. I wrote about this here and here. And here I am writing about it again.

Violette Leduc was born in the early 1900s and became a friend of Simone de Beauvoir with whom she shared her creatively courageous work. Already with a platform, Beauvoir championed Leduc’s personal writing and connected her to the right people to get published.

But Leduc was a woman who explored body issues, such as her self-proclaimed ugliness and her unabashed passions as a gay woman, without shying away or hiding behind layers of metaphor. She was compelled to share her truths and didn’t have tolerance for the illogic that told her she was crazy for wanting to do so.

“I want to be remembered,” Violette Leduc wrote. She believed she could do that through writing.

Her first book, La Bâtarde, was edited for “offensive” content. Leduc was called hysterical (as one is when doing anything real in the world) and ridiculed for being honest about her desires. But she was adored by the few who were conscious enough to see her story for what it was. Human.

I never assume to know why a writer writes. But if I were to guess, Leduc didn’t write for acceptance from the mainstream gatekeepers. She wrote to be remembered by those who understood and didn’t speak as freely as she could. And she wrote for those who would read with enough openness to try to understand.

Leduc is not the focus of my next book, but she’s one of many who inspire me to keep going. She’s influencing my reason for continuing to write by hand under a willow tree while the world seems to care less about the musings of a strange middle-aged woman who is relishing in something as simple as sitting on the ground beneath a shady tree.

Those of us who are not mainstream, not wealthy, not hiring ghostwriters or having AI write for us, need to keep going until we have nothing left to say. The more diverse and nuanced the human tapestry is, the less language can be used against us. The more muddled and diluted we allow it to be, the more our reality will look less like a tapestry and more like my mother’s yarn after her cat gets into it.

So here’s a prompt for you.

Anything that you’ve outsourced or rewritten or censored deserves to be resuscitated. Breathe life into its lungs again and let it reform. The sentences and paragraphs you’ve rewritten into something polite and unrecognizable might get likes, but likes are cheap.

Instead of adding a filter to our work, let’s allow the rawness. Let’s invite people to try to remove passages because we know our true audience will find them.

Prompt: Write one paragraph that scares you this week. Write the emotional, uncomfortable work. Write what AI cannot. Write about passions or what is taboo or what you disagree with that you know you’d take shit for.

And don’t do it to fit in with yet another group or to sound cool or counterculture, just write your truth. See what comes. You can always burn it later if need be.

Two items remain at our old house, one of which is a monstera plant that lives on the back deck. We left it for the new resident to babysit because a wren nested there. As I was doing backyard cleanup and hauling boxes, mama wren would watch me as her babies began to open their little mouths each time they sensed movement.

Stopping to greet them brought peace during the roller coaster of cleaning up and cleaning out our old home.

Moving our worldly possessions 18 miles meant filling and unloading a U-Haul truck four times over days that boasted temps in the 90s F (32.2 C)—it was an extreme sport.

Beyond the financial, physical and mental taxation of a move, the process has been like holding an unforgiving mirror up to my own state of mind and patterns of behavior.

For my husband, who is more sentimental than me, there were realizations about what he was ready to let go of and what habits he wanted to break.

For me, the pangs came as I flipped through dozens of unfinished notebooks. Some were journals. Some contained story ideas or half-finished novels that will never see completion, at least not by me. Seeing the sheer number of them reminded me of the dynamic nature of this human experience—the various states of mind and ideas—but more, it reminded me of the value of this practice.

I remember reading a cynical but cool and well-crafted essay, “On Keeping a Notebook” by Joan Didion, and have a slightly different take.

“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself.” —Joan Didion

For me, and for many in 2026 I’d venture, to keep a notebook offline is something more entirely. There is something about drafting longhand in our digital and sterilized world. It is a record of impressions and ideas that are true.

When I’ve been in times of transition, handwriting offered a palatable balance of clarity and understanding.

Yes, I was particularly exhausted and emotional during the move. Not just due to the sheer amount of work and details to keep track of but also because my life wasn’t stopping and I had no time to process.

When I was a kid, journaling was not “being a writer,” it was more than that. It was everything. Curiosity, clarity, creativity, fun … magic. I used to dream of sitting under a willow tree, making this magic happen. I imagined feeling sheltered in wonder, and writing or drawing or just dreaming.

I’m here in my new home now, staring out at this majestic tree. Sit with me a moment. Take a few breaths.

There are moments like this. We take a breath and pull in the entirety of the scene, embodying it.

Then there are moments when reality stings. As I sit here in days to come, bugs will crawl over my legs and I’ll have to refresh the sunscreen, a neighbor might try to give me a flyer about being saved, the unpacking could be endless, or I’ll sit beneath the willow and notice nothing but yard cleanup (adulthood!), then think about work emails or data centers.

Nonetheless, I think about a prompt a good friend and former student gave me that allows wider perspective. He suggested I think about who I was when I arrived at the old place and who I was when I left.

I plan to visit this in my journal soon. Shortly after writing this, in fact. In the meantime, I do know who I am here and now. I have it in writing. I’m grateful because I know I will nurture and create here. And if you know my story, this vision realized is nothing short of the very magic I did in my imagination.

I hope you find a place that fills you up this way, too, where you live or where you can visit. I had beautiful places to write where I used to live, too. There are spaces and places that call to us.

I suppose this blog is offered with the suggestion that we all remember to sit reverently in those places. To call back what gave us wonder as children.

When we reconnect to what mystified us as kids, after all, we come back to ourselves.

Prompt: Write longhand for a week and see what happens. Maybe ask what your childhood self might’ve found magical about your current enviornment.

It’s harder to delete what we write longhand. It’s harder, and that’s why it’s everything.

So, I’m off to explore my friend’s prompt, then unpack some more boxes. I’ll post what I’d originally planned to post here soon.

Friends, thank you for slowing down with me and taking time to read.

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Part of resilience is about finding ways to deal with failure. And I often feel I have failed more than most people I know. Is that true? Maybe not, but it sure feels like it.

As writers, we can get rejected, which I think is the most straightforward way of failing. Or, we can fail by quitting or comparing or not believing in ourselves.

I was recently asked to help create a class for undergraduates at OSU that centers on resilience and, specifically, how to bounce back from failure.

To go beyond the empirical, I’ve been diving into studies and therapies and business theories and poetry and interviews to come up with the most engaging way of helping students understand what makes a person able to handle failure and even thrive because of it (rather than despite it).

Especially when the failure is recurrent. (What do we do then?)

As mentioned, I fail a lot. Writers do. I have piles of rejections. In fact, as I started packing to move, I found a little chest full of paper rejections from the years I first started submitting my writing to literary journals in my 20s. The chest was full.

I’ve had books flop and publication processes go horribly. Once, in my late twenties, a story I thought was my greatest work to date was published in a college journal I won’t name. It was a print journal from a prestigious place, and due to a lot of experiences I won’t name here, I wanted every word to be perfect. I edited and proofed and had friends check it.

When my copy came in the mail, I felt the bubble of excitement as I tore open the envelope. The journal itself featured a poignant image and felt silky to the touch. I flipped to my story and saw the title and smiled, then I read the first line. Typo.

I’ve failed at jobs. I’ve failed at getting jobs. I’ve failed as a friend. I’ve failed in initiatives as a business owner (I tried to put on a literary conference for Unleash last year that utterly failed). I’ve failed myself in conversations. I’ve presented job proposals to get funding I desperately needed and was ignored. I’ve had relationships with agents and friends fall apart. I’ve been ghosted, notably by my best friend when I was in my early 20s. I’ve been illogically upset numerous times due to a failure of emotional regulation.

Failure is not fun. And even if you’re used to it, the numbness of perseverance is not real. Unless you’re heavily medicated, it hurts.

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” —Samuel Beckett

In my research, and while reflecting on my life experiences (which a blurber of my forthcoming essay collection called “tumultuous”), I realized what it takes to fail … if not well, at least with some artistic flair.

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I can break this down more. Here are some of my notes and observations over the last weeks:

1. Meditative perspective. Don’t quit. Or quit. Either way, don’t be hard on yourself. You can come back. You can always come back to the present, and despite the memes, it’s okay to also stay in the past or future at times. It’s how we reconcile it all.

2. Social perspective. Comparison and competition can kill fun and make a person forget why they do the thing. My only advice here is a social media fast. And a call or email to the person who has something you covet that thanks them for their contributions in the world.

3. Research perspective. A course on failure at Duke University applies the nine-dot puzzle, which has been around since 1907, to help people think about limitations and how to redefine it. Exercises like this can be frustrating in of themselves if we don’t figure it out right away. (I didn’t, and I like to think of myself as a wildly creative person.) The point is, even creative people fall into patterns of thought.

   

4. Practical perspective. Failure and disappointment are real. We can fail in many ways. We cannot avoid it by not having goals or not trying because not trying in of itself is a failure. So, if either path leads to failure, let’s return to Beckett’s words.

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As we get better at watching our own patterns of thinking, we can identify expectations that don’t match reality. We can shatter expectations and create from a place that’s more complex than success/failure. And this is when we can trust ourselves. This is when we open up new worlds and find a strange beauty in failure.

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This post is public, but I would be grateful if you’d support by considering a paid subscription or donation; alternately, share it with a friend, a writer, or anyone who needs a reframe.

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Prompt: List a few of your failures with the awareness that failure = human experience. Failure = Living.

Pick one and write in any genre, just using the failure itself as a catalyst. I’ll do this with you. Here’s the mishap from my childhood that I plan to expand on.

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P.S. - Next time I post, it’ll be from my new house. Till then, fail well, and please tell me about it.

When I say that, what is the first thing that comes to mind? (Please put it in the chat before reading on … I’m so curious.)

Identifying regionally as a writer can offer some interesting material, and we don’t always have a choice about what that is or how others label it. More (and this is the toughie), where we are located influences what and the way we see reality.

What does it mean to be a writer or person in the world where you are right now?

How does it impact the way you see the rest of the world?

I grew up knowing that I was in the state that was “round on the ends and ‘hi’ in the middle.” Please don’t hold that against me. Then again, if you do, that’s part of my story.

I grew up in a test market city, middle America, where businesses got their start or realized they wouldn’t make it because we, Ohioans, supposedly represented what was average about the American experience.

To be born in the Midwestern states can mean different things today, but to me, growing up in the 80s and 90s, it meant being raised with an appreciation for honesty and sarcasm in equal measure. It meant having access to endless lush green (but mostly flat) land, to be surrounded by an abundance of creeks and cardinals and crawdads. It meant to call the little bugs that light up at night either lightning bugs or fireflies, depending on the side of town.

To be from the capital of Ohio also meant to come from a bustling downtown that was just a few miles from an abundance of farmland; Columbus, during my lifetime, was always a growing city where the freeways couldn’t keep up and everyone was supposed to love football. To be from here means being from a swing state that shifted red, not by population shift but through redistricting.

Ohio is the target of many stand-up jokes. It’s understandable. But even within that, there is material to mine as a writer. Regionality, like any experience, shapes how and what we see.

I often tell coaching clients: start where you are. Not in the ‘write what you know’ sense alone, but in the more literal sense. Where does the ground under your feet lead you? What assumptions has your region baked into you without your consent?

Even when I was in Texas, I often wrote stories centered in the Ohio that was imprinted in my mind, and as I look back on all that I’ve examined, I realize, increasingly, the distinction of that lens.

It’s there in Radicals (my forthcoming historical novel), too. Ohio shaped Victoria Woodhull, born in Homer, raised in a family of grifters and visionaries, who left and kept leaving and never fully escaped the place that made her. She became the first woman to run for president, and almost nobody in the state that produced her knows her name. That erasure feels very Ohio to me. The flatness that swallows things whole.

But tapping into where we are doesn’t have to be limiting. It can be freeing.

It can open our eyes to what we have to offer and what we have to learn.

What’s outside your window? What do you see during your commute or when walking the dog? What landscapes fill your vision? What is available or not available at your local grocery store?

Being present and honest about where we are and how it influences us helps to set the stage for creative exploration and helps us to question our assumptions, so let’s do that.

Prompt: Take some time to explore what it means to be where you are right now. What does your geography ask of you? What stereotypes are placed upon you, what nature surrounds you, and how does all of it reflect and resist who you are?

Mindfulness practice: Try it for a week. Get all regionally aware. :)

Sidebar: Along with my narrative about Victoria Woodhull, my forthcoming novel interweaves a current-day narrative that reflects a truth that is emergent and terrifying here. The modern-day character, Avery, is searching for Victoria’s strength as she tries to stand in the way of the construction of a new data center in her neighborhood.

As I move, this is actually happening in the town I will soon live. The good and the bad both feed our narratives. They are part of the human story and dilemma. I am not amused by the coincidence.

I, Jen Knox, am a writer from Ohio. I am also more than that.

Here’s a little sample of how the state showed up in my early work. I wrote this flash piece I wrote for my sister when I didn’t think we’d speak again (I look so young! Eek!).

Keys tapping or the gentle pen scratch sooths my heart and mind. Writing is medicine, and while life sometimes gets in the way, I never talk myself out of the act of writing and flow—the creative stream weaves its way around any block … eventually.

But I have, and continue to, talk myself out of talking about my writing or representing myself as a writer. I have a mean case of promotion block. I just don’t do it wholeheartedly.

In part, I dislike promotion because I find people who constantly promote themselves annoying, and I don’t want to be annoying (especially to myself). To be authentic, I need to stay aligned with the curious nature of the thing I love. Conversely, I am also afraid of doing my best work and being ignored. And my muses are those whose stories I feel the need to excavate.

Being ignored or minimized or copied and shouted over by positionally powerful people is what erasure looks like, and my current aim is to unearth the stories of women whose lives have been buried in this way.

The inner critic that says don’t be seen, due to fear of being annoying or fear of being erased, is fed by experience.

I’ve always written here that the beauty of art was in the making, the production. The sharing part is where the artist lets go and Capitalism takes over. We release.

In theory, the work is the lifeblood and the representation of the work is theater. Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize and Bob Dylan was too busy to attend his Nobel awards ceremony. But the work of the philosopher and the music reached out nonetheless. This is the spirit of the freethinker and artist, right?

Or did such acts just offer a different type of publicity?

The truth is, I want people to read my Vicky Woodhull book. I just participated in my first of many podcast interviews for Radicals. It won’t air for a while, and the interview itself was fun. But I realized halfway through the conversation, when the interviewer asked me about some of my older work, that I was tired of talking about myself. I was there to speak about a historical figure who’d been erased.

I do recognize the dissonance here. I want to unearth a woman’s story, but I fear the annoyance of my own.

Based on a coaching certification program I completed during the pandemic, we all have an inner critic and an inner mentor. This philosophy is similar to the psychology-based “parts work,” in which you assign a part to each emotion. I learned about this over ten years ago from a therapist, and I loved the symbolism. But sometimes those little parts are screaming in harmony, and they are screaming truths.

Minimizing or ignoring the inner critic is lovely, but it won’t work if we truly want to realize our potential.

After all, the inner critic has a good track record of keeping us safe and being, well, right.

With pursed lips, arms akimbo, it says: “No one will care.”

Arguably, fewer and fewer people are reading books, so maybe fewer people want to hear podcasts about books being written.

It nags: “You are not as confident/intelligent/attractive as XYZ.”

Maybe, maybe not. But that person does seem to be more articulate and camera friendly in interviews.

It whispers: “People will attack me for writing the truth.”

There are many, many records to support the idea that dissent is attacked, that hard truths are attacked, that the vulnerable are attacked, and that sometimes authors are attacked simply for being ahead of their time or reflecting societal truths that expose injustice.

The more I look into historical figures, like Woodhull and Sand and Hurston and others, the more I see the marginalization, the ridicule, the erasure, the imprisonment, and the scorn they’ve faced.

These are facts, not unwarranted fears.

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So what do we do?

Neuroscience tells us that the brain will not believe the lies we tell it. I see people reframing bad news all the time for no sustainably good outcome. But there is a difference between anxiety/fear that is helpful and the anxiety/fear that is harmful.

For those who just want to put some ideas out in the world or share our truths, we need to think about which truths to pay attention.

There are truths about what our value is and truths about marketability and they don’t always add up. But the truth is, your voice matters. Mine does too. A podcast can be what I make it. If I am done talking about older work, I can pivot. This, my friends, freed me to continue to enjoy the conversation. We changed directions and began speaking about process, the art, the live and beating heart of the work beneath its marketability. So when people listen to that podcast, that’s what I hope they hear.

Maybe not everyone will, but so be it.

The only truths we can afford to focus on is the value of our personal perspective in the world. The value of that perspective finding who it needs to find.

We cannot read a positive thinking script or trick ourselves into believing lies. But we can focus on what delights us and bring that joy to every possible moment. We might not like every part of the process, but we can infuse anything with light if we focus it in the right direction.

Prompt: How can you be creatively courageous when the stakes are high and the potential to be ignored or ridiculed is possible?

Inner critic meditation:

(Paid subscribers and supporters of Unleash, join us here June 19 for an ekphrastic workshop taught by Alex Stolis and Catherine Arra.)

I am cold beneath my blanketlike coat as we traverse winding Ohio roads after the first snow. My husband drives fast below a winter sky that reminds me of images I’ve seen of the Arctic Ocean. I tell him to slow down, and he tells me not to backseat-drive as the news thrums, sinking our hearts. I watch the sky turn to pure ice.

A white bird perches on a rooftop ahead. Not a barred owl or blackbird ordinarily seen in these parts. Too large and too lost for this stretch of road in the Midwest, it reaches out, the ocean of sky behind it. Sailors used to believe albatrosses were supernatural, to be revered. Maybe it was the bird’s width, imposing a ten- or eleven-foot wingspan that dwarfed the sun and invited a break from navigation. I blink, nudge my husband.

“I see it,” he says.

“It sees us.” I watch the bead-like eyes, but the bird’s head darts away. As the vast fields crystallize, it swoops closer, wings expanding. It hovers like a charismatic leader who becomes big and shadowy when there is collective grief, spreading arms and promises, while the sun slowly recedes like a hairline, or the ocean, or our ability to take a deep breath without prompt. The car slows as the bird descends.

The news reports yet another opportunity for consolidation of power, yet another slight to human rights. Looking deeper, advocating for something more, is to feel the wings wrapped around our necks. My husband brakes as the bird nears.

Albatrosses, some of the most monogamous creatures, are getting divorced due to planetary warmth, due to longer trips to find their food in waters that might as well be boiling, clear and unblanketed in the Arctic. This bird, out of place and perhaps freshly divorced, envelops our car.

I grab the wheel, tell my husband to hit the gas. As we push forward under the embrace of a majestic bird, the window cracks. The radio goes fuzzy as feathers swirl and the cold rushes in. We listen for something better.

The bird is gone. My husband is driving too fast. We barrel forward, watching the rear view as the fields wander backwards and we wish for something supernatural to return, an opportunity to blur into another dimension, another now. Instead we listen, bear the cold, and get comfortable with being uncomfortable, because like the albatross we need the clarity that comes with a good chill.

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—George Sand (Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin)

Everything in the creative world builds, if given the right care.

Through one heroine’s story, we find another source of inspiration, a new question. Sometimes fictional characters nag us or follow us from one story to the next; sometimes essays help us to determine new patterns in the world that feed new perspectives.

Writers, like everyone, go through a cycle: we learn, we gain perspective, we forget, we recognize what we’ve forgotten, and we are introduced to one subject by studying another.

When writing about Victoria Woodhull, I learned about the writer George Sand. From the immersion in one story, I was pulled into another.

Recently, on the anniversary of her death, The Guardian published an article about Sand, calling her “a grandmother of fiction of social exclusion” by her forties. This title was earned through her influence on the Brontë sisters and others.

Woodhull chose to publish translations of Sand’s writing in her newspaper, which was seen as a controversial move. The French author was known, similar to Victoria, as a radical, and the publication reflected her critique of arranged marriages.

Sand wore pants and smoked and centered her fiction and essays around women and the rural poor. In pictures, she looks like a relative of Oscar Wilde (to me) and while this was not the case, Wilde was fond of her work and defended it against attacks that ridiculed her for being silly and offering a philosophy that is “dead.”

Since discovering her, I’ve read some of Sand’s translated work, from Indiana (her critique on marriages norms in the 19th century) and essays, and I personally find her very much alive. Even today. This is from her intro.

“If any one asks me my purpose in writing it, I shall reply that I desired to do a very simple and very touching thing, and that I have not succeeded as I hoped. I have seen, I have felt the beautiful in the simple, but to see and to depict are two different things!

The most that the artist can hope to do is to induce those who have eyes to look with him. Therefore, my friends, look at simple things, look at the sky and the fields and the trees and the peasants, especially at what is good and true in them: you will see them to a slight extent in my book, you will see them much better in nature.”

—George Sand

Sand wrote about everything, it seems, including her romance with composer Frédéric Chopin. She processed her life with radical candor on the page and explored her own spiritual beliefs without worry over convention.

Me being me, perhaps what I find most fascinating about Sand is her invention of a natural spirit or diety, which she explained was both man and woman, representing the interconnectedness of things. She named this divine force Corambé and revisited the spirit in her writing often.

Another “radical” of her day, Sand saw patterns that extended beyond what was defined for her. She exposed basic injustices and noted the beauty of nature with reverence. It makes me think the most basic observations are also the most complex. They have to be, or they wouldn’t be repeatedly trampled by the agendas of certain leaders.

This brings me to a prompt and reflection.

Prompt: Pick a simple truth. Something as simple as the fact that humans breathe oxygen, which is provided by trees. Take that simple truth and begin to write a story or essay that examines how this truth is disregarded and why, then circle back to this truth at the end.

Let me know how it goes.

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Also, enjoy a sleep practice: Let Mother Nature Sooth You to Sleep

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Thank you so much for your support! Especially right now.

—Margaret Atwood

In the last few weeks, life has felt particularly heavy due to many unknowns.

I found myself navigating the process of buying a new house during a faltering economy and job uncertainty; meanwhile, my husband was diagnosed with a genetic disease, hemochromatosis, which makes the body store too much iron. This diagnosis came at a time when he can still reverse damage, but we had to go from appointment to appointment to determine this.

The stress of unknowing settled in my neck and blurred my thoughts.

In the days of unknowing, while we also waited for an inspection on the new house and test results to come in, my head pulsed with pain and, I’ll admit, my imagination went wild. Migraines always hit me during times of stress, and these past few weeks have been particularly rough.

I kept reaching for the one thing I’d been doing less of since returning from Vermont: writing to find out what I actually thought. Writing to process. Writing to journal and dream. Writing to connect to a different part of myself—the part that doesn’t feel anxiety but, rather, flow.

When I was 19 and began writing compulsively, I had started for purely therapeutic reasons.

I found that writing was a way of building self-awareness but also exploring the stories that fed my anxieties. Seeing my own thoughts in black and white showed me how my mind worked and helped me to clarify my existence.

Writing alone in a room with a question or two propelling me forward and my imagination focused on creation, rather than explanation, led me to what Joseph Campbell called the path of bliss. It was a freedom and coming home to curiosity over speculation.

Anxiety, I firmly believe, is just creative energy working against us. It is pure speculation. And it’s addictive, especially when the world feels heavy.

A life of creative exploration, à la Hurston (see last blog post), is innately fulfilling but easy to lose track of when we get caught up in our own stories about the past and future. Or stories about how the world should act or react to what we do.

Things are clarifying in my own life.

My house purchase is going well, and my husband’s diagnosis means lifestyle changes for him, but it no longer carries the weight of the unknown. My headaches are easing, though they are still something of a mystery (possible causes: hormones, food, environment, the state of the world).

But I remember the reason I do what I do, which is to return to curiosity and release the grip of storytelling that feels more like torture than bliss.

To process on the page, honestly and as person navigating the world, is to find the opposite of anxiety. It’s to find that bliss Campbell spoke of. But to do any of that, we have to remember what we don’t know.

Getting clear about what we don’t know, after all, is where we truly create.

Prompt: Notice where you are anxious and channel that into something creative.

As you author your own story, get curious about the possibilities.

Their characters and ideas, however, were very much alive inside me and other readers. And, to my young mind, I believed this to be magic.

I still do. The magic of genuine, human storytelling = nothing short of traveling across time and connecting with others in the quie…

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I’ve always been fascinated by people who sacrifice convention and its de facto safety in exchange for an unrelenting devotion to vision and creative integrity. Such people are often said to be ahead of their time.

This fascination is what led me to write about Victoria C. Wood…

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While I was in Vermont, I didn’t want to think about social media or my website. Well, at least not at first. But after I met an artist who asked if I’d help her navigate my website so she could…

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I have been doing all the things. Maybe to avoid the news. Maybe to avoid my own emotions. Maybe to feel as though I’m doing something of value in the world. Or maybe, just maybe, to avoid what means the most to me.

So long as we don’t do the thing, we can stil…

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Prompt:

1. How many times do we have to hear something before we remember it?

2. How many times do we have to hear something before we remember it in the moment?

3. How many times do we have to hear something before it loses meaning?

I have little to say. Instead, I created a meditation on compassion fatigue for artists, teachers, healers, and other humans who give until they are numb or in need of support themselves.

I believe the people we need most right now are tired. Let’s take a few weeks to recharge and remember the meaning behind the words.

Again, perhaps instead of taking a break or hiding out, we can recommit.

But first we have to process.

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“Until one is committed, there is always hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation, there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising to one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no one could have dreamed would come her way. Whatever you can do or dream you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.”

—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Subscribers! You are invited to a Creative Resilience Circle in March. Sign up here.

The perfomance art movement was influenced by surrealism, conceptualism, the anti-art of Dada after World War I, and action painting in which one throws or drips or sprays paint in a way that is as much the art as the painting itself.

Conceptual art is about an idea. Performance…

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