I Need to Ask You a Favor
Please help me with content for my book on writing craft. By now, with all my nattering about it, you know that I’m close to wrapping up my long-in-coming manual on the craft of writing. I will be releasing it in June. But before I do, I would like to ask you a couple of…
A Kickstarter Experiment Has Started
My book on writing—how to craft and how to magic—will launch June 4, 2024 via Kickstarter. There’s a marvelous button you can click right now to indicate your interest and get notified immediately when the project goes live. Thank you if you’ve already clicked that button. I checked the number earlier this evening, and 189 people have…
Tech Changes Require Us to Pivot
The writing world and particularly the online creative world is changing very rapidly, and keeping up with it is getting difficult. It’s overwhelming, and I say that as a person who’s found a wonderful community in the writing world and who’s had a lot of fine writing adventures. If I’m overwhelmed then I wonder how…
How Did You Fall in Love With Stories?
I was raised in a scorching town of about three thousand folks set in the steamy and fragrant pinewoods in the south of Georgia, seventy miles inland from Brunswick, on the Atlantic Ocean. Baxley had a Main Street, a post office with a marble floor where our box, number 162, had belonged to my great-grandfather,…
What Is Your Reason for Writing?
Before teaching a workshop recently, I sent out a survey to the participants. I wanted to know more about writing intentions and habits so I’d know best how to help. The questions could also help the writers understand themselves. Thirteen people responded, and I wanted to show you some of their responses. Question—Do you keep…
Launch via Kickstarter
I have made a decision that will surprise you. I’ve decided to launch my new book using Kickstarter. This is a nonfiction book about two things necessary for great writing—the craft of it and the magic of it. It’s called Craft & Current: A Manual for Magical Writing. Photo by Shannon Hartford, Quantum Flow Photos, used by…
Do You Desire to Write a Book?
When I was a girl, I ate books like chocolate. Books were a way to get lost. I wasn’t always trying to escape something bad—my childhood was filled to the brim with good things. Southern food. Place. Really colorful language. Fascinating characters. The keen intellect of people around me, especially my dad. The realization that…
Who is Rosemary Daniell?
Rosemary Daniell is a southern provocateur who writes about sexual politics. In 1975 she published a stunning and controversial collection of poetry, A Sexual Tour of the Deep South, which got her disinvited from speaking engagements and literary jobs, then she went on to write two notable memoirs, Fatal Flowers and Sleeping with Soldiers, among many other books. That’s who Rosemary…
Who is the Main Character in Your Best Story?
You are the main character in your best story. In his book Taking Care: Thoughts on Storytelling and Belief, writer (and my mentor) William Kittredge compared stories to maps that tell us how to get where we want to go. Stories “help us see, and reinvent ourselves.” Then he said that stories are more than maps. They are our selves. Here’s…
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Where in Time to Begin a Story
I want to speak with you about a small and prudent matter, about where in time to begin a story that you’re writing. An axle on which every story in the world turns is time. Time must be managed, like a flock of sheep, or it will run away from you. The story is complicated.…
The Writer is Not the Hero
When you’re writing personal narrative of any kind, you become the de facto hero of your story. What you’re writing about happened to you. You survived it. You overcame it. And now you’re writing about it. As the how-to books will tell you, and as I will tell you, you’re the main character of your own…
Journaling Ecogrief Starts Online in 1 Hour
Today at 5 is a one-hour session of JOURNALING ECOGRIEF | JOURNALING EARTH. I’m offering this space for 5 Sundays in a row, starting today. Join one or join all. This is for journaling (to me, a less strict form of writing), which is for you and your own advancement as a human. My goal…
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Journaling Earth—Register Now for a 5-Week Short Course
I will be leading a short course in Journaling Earth. I believe that each of us is born with a mission. Each of us has been given a purpose, and I think that service is always part of our mission. The earth has called me to protect the ecology of this planet that is our…
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Writing a Memoir—How Do You Decide What to Include?
If you’re thinking about writing a memoir, you get to decide what to include. A writer’s first challenge is to make a decision about the nature of an overarching mission for your memoir. Usually a memoir is about your life, yes, but it also carries a weight that others feel in their lives. It will…
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How to Build Tension into a Story
How I published as much as I did early on is a mystery, because I ignored one element crucial to good writing. And most writing doesn’t have it. That element is tension. The short answer to my question, how to write a story that nobody wants to put down, is: You have to know what tension is, and…
Do You Need an MFA to Be a Writer?
One day at work many years ago, before I had a book out, a story crossed my desk that defined the life I wanted. I was working full-time at a small conservation magazine as assistant editor. The job was 40 hours a week. At home I was single mom to five-year-old Silas. I wanted to be…
The Decline of Books and What to Do About It
We are living in a time of speedy decline of books. What can we do about it? Thinking about Cultural Change & the Decline of Books For thousands of years, changes in society happened glacially. Humans lived for millennia in relationship with the earth, learning how to better survive on it, and in relationship with…
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How to Write in Scene–Free Online Writing Workshop
In a couple of hours I’ll be online teaching a free online writing workshop on “How to Write in Scene.” It will last an hour. There was one particular moment in my writing life when I figured out what a scene is. That moment was a fulcrum in my writing. Before that, I’d been writing…
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Four Reasons I Write Creative Nonfiction
Creative nonfiction helps us… 1) to become more humane. When Milkweed Editions brought out my first book, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, printed in its pages was their credo at the time. It said, “We publish with the intention of making a humane impact on society, in the belief that literature is a transformative art uniquely…
How Does a Writer Work in Scene?
That’s the way we hear it: Work in scene. And what does that mean exactly? A scene in nonfiction or fiction, as in drama, is a unit of time in which movement happens. The movement can be real motion; it can be inner movement; it can be verbal; and it can be imagined. The movement says, This…
Should I Know What I’m Going to Say Before I Sit Down to Write?
Know? Or not know? Writers usually sit solidly on either side of a line demarcating whether you should decide what you’re going to say before you write or wait for your muse to disclose these secrets. The answer for me is both. Let me attempt to convince you of the necessity for both logic and illogic.…
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Tips on Organizing Your Material in a Longer Work
When you’re working with a mountain of material, you have one major practical problem. Your brain is not a computer. It is not large enough, not normally, to arrange all the files & studies & references & flow-writes & ideas & drafts you’ve collected. Therefore, how do you organize and arrange the pieces? A superfluity…
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What is a Sense of Place & How Do You Get One?
“Sense of place” is our many sensual abilities to attune to the attributes of our landscapes and feel at home on them. You find and expand your sense of place by studying your region. Sapelo Island is Part of My Place To get on Sapelo, a barrier island off the coast of Georgia—beautiful Georgia, my…
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How to Know You Are Meant to Be a Writer
I was told as a child that I had a path, that there was a plan for me. This path wasn’t obvious, and I looked a long time for it. That I would be given a path but no signage whatsoever, or at least none I could read, made no sense. I looked and looked.…
Who Are You Serving When You Stay Quiet?
Silence is asked of us on so many fronts. We are silenced by family values, by the economic class we occupy or want to occupy, by our educations, by our ethnicities, by our genders. Fear silences. Loyalty silences. Love silences. Most of us are taught very well to be silent, to live in cultures of…
Should You Outline Before You Write?
A few years ago I accepted an invitation to serve on a dissertation committee for a brilliant guy who found writing very difficult. His dissertation, which he desired to turn into a popular book on sustainable farming, suffered from lack of an outline. He knew what he wanted to say, and he had done months…
How Do You Get Started Writing an Essay?
To write an essay, a writer begins to collect ideas, dreams, memories, scientific research, scenes, and images about a topic that is of utmost importance to them. I wrote about this in a post about obsessions, why it’s good to sit comfortably within your obsessions. While sifting through your collection of material about a chosen subject,…
Writer’s Voice—How Do You Find Yours?
“Writer’s voice” is one of the problems that flummoxed me very badly when I was a new writer. I wanted to be a writer badly. When I was young I read everything I could find about becoming one. Every how-to on writing told me I needed to “find my voice.” That advice kept me lost…
In Memory of Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy is dead. He was 89. Raven told me about it the morning of the 14th, that Cormac had died the day before, and I dont like it when my heroes die. I have made altars to so many—Martin Luther King Jr., Wangari Maathai, Howard Zinn, Mary Oliver, Richard Nelson. As an artist, and…
Find Your Subject Matter By Writing Toward Your Obsessions
“Writing well is a matter of figuring out what obsesses you,” my professor in grad school William Kittredge told me. Out of all the topics you could write about, which ones should you choose. To find your subject matter, write toward your obsessions. “What obsesses you?” he said. “Head toward your life’s work.” Throughout our…
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Collect Life’s Details for Your Writing
One exercise I did while in grad school helped me learn to pay better attention to the world around me, and I wanted to review it with you. You know how, as you’re going about your day, you notice a small thing, something you see in your yard or on the street or at a…
Crowd-Source Your Research When You Write
Social media taught me that I’m not as smart as I thought. In fact, name any subject and someone knows more about it than I do. Folks have such different interests, passions, obsessions, and specialties. I love that about social media. It’s full of wizards and whiz kids. I’ve found that someone has a smart, beats-Google understanding…
Getting a Book Deal
I’m writing this post because there’s an unspoken rule made for writers like me, who are interested in how to get a book deal, that we’re not supposed to talk about money. We’re supposed to be glad we are actually making any money at all. The trope of the starving artist is no joke, with…
Why Would Someone Want to Read What I Write?
Today I was reading a Substack about Canadian publishing versus U.S. publishing, and it turns out that Canada heavily subsidizes its literary fiction with huge grants, mostly not available in the U.S. That writer< Kenneth Whyte, recommended a Substack Great Reads By John Biggs and I had a minute, so I checked it out. There Biggs recommended…
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Why Are Stories So Powerful?
At eight years old I couldn’t imagine what would become of me. I had watched my dad walk through a window, attempting to reach a blinding light he believed was God. I had seen sheriff’s deputies hie him away in a patrol car, had seen my mother weeping, had wandered through our four-room house wide-eyed…
Write the Story of Giving Birth
When you gave birth, what happened? Birthing a baby takes superpowers, and because of that, birth stories hold a tremendous amount of power for people, especially mothers who birth. Yet, think about how few containers there are to hold our birth stories. I’m offering a virtual workshop for writing your birth story. We’re going to…
Workshop | Flash Essay
I’ll guide you in writing a short essay in one morning from the comfort of your own writing room. The short essay holds infinite possibilities for publishing, from a magazine-ready piece to a well-crafted post to meaningful newsletter copy to a short chapter in a book you’re working on. You can Zoom from idea to…
How to ReWild, for Earth Day
Because the universe is the source and home of all energies, all spiritual connections, and all magic—and because the earth is our home within the universe—and because earth-based cultures are the most magical—and because we as humans were more mythic when we were wilder, I work to get wild, stay wild, and rewild. To rewild…
Two Current Classes That Will Be Offered Again in the Future
The Magical Craft of Creative Nonfiction course started last week and is going swimmingly. There is so much energy in these fireball writers that my computer sometimes feels that it’s going to burst into flames. You think I’m exaggerating but I’m not. I have another powerful group of writers in the Kittredge Essay Schema, which…
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Lecture | Following Golden Strands
You are heartily invited to join me this evening for a live lecture and presentation, Following Golden Strands, where I talk about nurturing a relationship with spirit in many of its forms, from gut feelings to dreams to divination. I’ll talk about deep sources of power, how to tap that power, and ways to transfer it to…
Four Reasons Place is Important
We are a species for whom place has been vital. We are made of places, literally—bone and sinew. We are different depending on the place we are from. As Wallace Stegner famously said, “Tell me where you’re from and I’ll tell you who you are.” Or, “I may not know who I am, but I…
Facebook’s Destruction of a Sense of Place
I understand the services offered by the internet. I am obligated to understand them, because the net has taken over my life and all our lives. In terms of benefits, the internet lets me learn about people, places, and things I might not otherwise hear about. It slakes my intense thirst and need for information.…
Read “Loon Boy”
This essay, “Loon Boy,” won terrain.org’s nature-writing essay contest recently. My friend Simmons Buntin, the founder of Terrain.org, had asked me to be the judge, which I was honored to do. Their staff winnowed the entries down to four and sent them to me. In the end, I chose the essay that was the most old-fashioned…
Do You Have a Secret (or Not So Secret) Desire to Write?
I am teaching a Level 1 class in creative nonfiction and memoir starting in April. If you have a story or book that is burning inside you, now is the time to begin. It happens for 6 weeks in a row on Tuesday evenings from 7-9 Eastern, which means April 4 | April 11 |…
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A Poem Written at Bread Loaf Environmental Writers Conference
When I was teaching last summer at Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference in Vermont, I got to tour the Robert Frost cabin and also walk an interpretive trail where poems by Frost have been printed on metal signs and posted along the way. A small incident happened at the poem “The Road Not Taken” and I’ve…
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Is the Substack Model Sustainable?
I had been questioning books and the written word 1) as book sales decreased, 2) as newspapers folded, 3) as universities turned away from the humanities, and 4) as making a living as a writer became increasingly difficult. All writers have to confront gatekeepers and these confrontations leave huge gaps between the beliefs we hold…
UVA Press Releases Anthology on Solastalgia
On Valentine’s Day UVA Press released an anthology called Solastalgia: An Anthology of Emotion in a Disappearing World, edited by Paul Bogard. “Solastalgia” is a Latinate word for eco-grief. I have an essay in the book. My essay is called “Step-by-Step Instructions” and it says about what you would expect it to say. Feel the pain,…
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Thoughts On Publication of a New Book
I don’t take a new book lightly. First off, books are made of trees, which (along with people) are my favorite things on earth, and a tree has to die to make a book. A book takes an incredible chunk of the earth’s flesh—not simply trees but also fossil fuels to move it around, electricity…