A. wants children. And I’ve decided I don’t. Or at least not right now. Maybe there are other reasons why we’re not right, but neither of us confesses them aloud.

Now, it’s June and my words run on empty. I walk to the grocery store and can’t remember why I’ve come. I find bananas in my freezer. I crave cigarettes even though I don’t smoke. I sit on my stoop and watch a wedge of geese veer into the evening pink. My period comes four days early.

I ask my readers what I should write about this month and they all say the same thing: love.

And so I’m writing about love.

When you’re a person who’s visible online, there’s a weird second sting to every breakup. You now have to find a way to explain to everyone that your relationship failed. It feels like telling fans you lost the game or confessing to your parents that you crashed the family minivan. You steel yourself against their disappointment. The loss of their collective hope. You don’t know how to face all the women who previously DM’d you their joy about the existence of a successful romantic relationship in this dating landscape.

You can’t help but feel like you’ve somehow let everyone down.

Another weird wrinkle about being an online writer is that your life becomes a strange play. A living novel that anyone can pick up and read. You know that your exes will still read everything you write online, long after you stop speaking to one another. Then, men you meet on dating apps will read about your exes even before they kiss you for the first time.

Meanwhile, you’re still cataloguing what’s been lost. An unbearable galaxy of shed idiosyncrasies. You, the obsessive curator in a dimming archive, taking stock: typewritten love letters. A smattering of books. Homemade sushi and kiss-kissing in the kitchen. A tiny word bank of shared expressions, sunset spots, and the stupid nicknames the two of you decided on for both your cats.

Sure, you’ll find something new and different and sweet. But never exactly that again. The multitude of miniature heartpricks is the price of admission to each strange and singular love story.

When I started dating A., I wrote about how, in the face of a fascist, anti-human, war-poisoned, robot-infested, rapidly warming future, I still believe in love. And I do. Mostly, anyway. I tell myself I just have to keep putting my paper boats in the water, even though most of them are scuttled. Even though the lake is on fire.

After my love life, the question I’m most asked is what projects I’m working on. Readers want to know what I’m writing.

Here’s my answer: I’ve started a novel and it feels like screaming (in a good way). Fiction feels like lying and flying at the same time. I love writing in third person. I get to swing the magnifying glass away from my own insides for awhile. Suddenly I can breathe again. I write late in the evenings and first thing in the morning. I read everything I can get my hands on and I indulge my dumbest and riskiest ideas. I make my characters embarrassing and unlikeable, poignant and complicated, patched up, mesmerizing. They’re always, of course, some version of me. I don’t let anyone read what I’ve written.

Much like life, I have no idea where my book is going yet, but, with any luck, maybe it’ll turn out to be some kind of love story.

COME WRITE WITH ME!

As a thank you to my paid subscribers, I offer quarterly workshops. Our summer workshop is about revision!

​Join me for a craft workshop that will not only change the way you revise, but also what you see on the page. Revision, at its core, is about expanding vision and I’m going to share all my best strategies for transforming your work. Together, we’ll find the brilliance and poignancy in your draft.

This one is an all-time fan favorite. xx

Register below!

Read more

In some ways, I get it. Collectively, we’re burnt out on hustle culture, corporate America and girl bossing. But, somewhere in the current dialogue, it became scary, unpopular even, to admit to the less aesthetic experiences women obviously still want like income, impact, and well-earned success.

Ambition, I’ve come to realize, is a sticky thing for a woman to have. No matter what you achieve, you’re still expected to be grateful, baffled, and even mortified by your own success.

Before I became an author and founder, my first real job was teaching English at a charter high school where most of the student population had done a stint in juvie. It was the hardest gig of my entire life and, most days, I worked 10 hours straight, bled through my skirt, and avoided the male teacher who liked to pinch me in the hall. I made 21K for the entire year and was too poor to care about anything other than trying to survive.

After that, I swung desperately into corporate America. As a copywriter, I finally made a livable salary, but, after 6 years, I was so overworked and strung out on stress, I developed carpal and cubital (bonus!) tunnel in both my arms.

When I finally emancipated myself into entrepreneurship, I was surprised that, even with its enormous learning curve, I was good at it. I finally got to greenlight my own creative instincts. I was able to funnel my insatiable love for excellence into a sustainable income without being squished under the weight of someone else’s dream.

I realize now that my interest in exceptionalism, autonomy, and even my perfectionism was the precise cocktail that made entrepreneurship possible. And as much as I love poetry (and peaches and sunshine), I simultaneously crave efficiency and quality. I’m not advocating for hustle culture, but, more than ever, I care about producing meaningful art. I want to work hard for it.

I tell my friend: I’m a working dog who is tempted to masquerade as a lap dog. But I can’t. My brain needs to run and solve and achieve or else I get depressed.

When my book became a national bestseller, a lot of interviewers asked me how it felt. My answer was always the same. I don’t exactly feel euphoria, just a small sense of relief. For a moment, the dog in me was able to lie down.

It’s taken me 40 years to understand that my ambition is inherent to who I am. I no longer pathologize my perfectionism. Instead, I honor my ferocious need to get it right. I accept this as the birthright of every artist and writer who must commit to her vision with some level of neuroticism. Obsession, after all, is the impetus for all interesting art.

On the glowing dung pile of shame, I refuse to add my own excellence.

But, as a woman, I’ve found it increasingly hard to admit or even openly share my goals and milestones. Recently, I wrote an essay about how to make 60K in a year on Substack and a lot of readers (mostly women) got mad: When did you become a sellout? This is capitalism! One woman repeatedly commented in caps: HAS THIS ACCOUNT BEEN HACKED?

That same week, a male author I follow wrote a newsletter detailing how he makes 70K every single month. I ran to his comment section only to find exactly zero attacks on his morality. In the service of anti-capitalism, it seems we continually make it women’s responsibility to get smaller.

Perhaps this is why women, on average, are more reluctant to invest, own businesses, acquire wealth, and adapt to technology. Ambition has a higher cost for us. Achieving and earning begin to mean something about our goodness, our morality, and our authenticity as artists.

Maybe women also don’t say their wild ambitions aloud because there’s anxiety in naming what we really want. It’s like the stray dog you never gave a name to for fear you’d attach. But the truth is you can’t help but feed that dog in secret. That bitch still follows you home, scratches in the morning at your door.

Even now, it’s scary to admit I want to make serious money and serious impact. The desire just keeps getting stronger and I let it. The word middling terrifies me, sticks to my teeth like crushed butterscotch. Ambition is the dog I bet on.

These days, I let myself want what I want. To own a house with a fireplace and a long dining room table where all my friends can sit. For my writing community to be world-class. I want to explain craft cleanly and expertly. I want to make the NYT bestseller list and rock the huge oversized glasses all creative women writers wear as they age. I want a full night’s sleep without nightmares. I want time to write. And, next, I want to write a book far better than my last.

What’s your relationship with excellence and ambition? What do you deeply want? Tell me in the comments. I’d love to hear from you.

Subscribe now

See why we sell out each year

Last night’s replay: Strange Encounters

In class, we discussed:

• How defamiliarization is a poetic technique that empowers writers to see the world in fresh and unexpected ways.

• How to write the boring, the bizarre, and the wondrous.

• How to make the commonplace shape-shift.

• How to flip clichés, move readers, and push into wilder, weirder territory.

Here’s what people said about last night:

Joy, I somehow forgot what a distinct and wonderful pleasure it is to receive your teaching style. Thank you for always bringing the inspiration! —Elizabeth B.

This workshop was a great reminder of a fresh new way to look at ordinary life. I loved it! —Angela H.

Joy brings so much knowledge and wisdom to every class. Her examples and prompts a…

Read more

A. is gentle and specific and full of facts that do not irritate me.

We’ve silenced our phones so we can’t keep watching the news, though we both feel the sadness—lingering like a pin bone in our throats. We pour leggy glasses of wine and pick out songs. Beach House drifts through the kitchen, and we slow dance around the stove as if cast in some terrible Hallmark movie. Except this one is a low-budget dramedy set in the apocalypse. The man and the woman are both scared, but learning to trust. The man puts his palm across the woman’s heart when her anxiety spikes. The woman gets chronic UTIs. Sometimes, they make sushi and dance and try not to despair.

Love feels like such a gamble these days. Culturally, we are in what experts call a relationship recession—a trend that shows how 50% of U.S. men and 41% of women aged 25-35 are not living with a partner. Dating apps, avoidance culture, Covid, rising economic costs, a gap in political ideologies, shifting gender dynamics, and social media are all listed as contributing factors. Most of the women I know (myself included) report feeling emotionally terrorized by the dating pool.

Collectively, it seems, we are giving up on love.

And beyond romantic love, it feels as if we are simultaneously losing the art of friendship. Research shows that our friend groups are getting smaller. On average, we lose about one friend each year. We rupture and do not repair. We avoid and call it self-care. We isolate and call it rest. We splinter and sequester, choose screens over skin. We are increasingly fragile creatures.

Meanwhile, the earth warms. We’re at war again. And the robots are everywhere.

And yet, love, as it always has, demands resilience. Love is inconvenient and inefficient and unhygienic and noisy and exhausting. Love is monstrous and obnoxious and too expensive. It requires gripping the silver goblet of our terror and swallowing it down.

Every time I see a couple on a date, I want to bless them—as if they are spiritual travelers now, laden with a fading light kept alive only in the shelter of their two bodies.

Yesterday, A. texted: “I want to build a nightstand for you so that in a small way, every day, you can interact with a positive impact I’ve had on your life.”

My therapist says the only reason to be with a partner is to evolve, to improve each other’s lives, to see the flaws in yourself and face them straight on. To square off with our fear, our inadequacies, to fail and try again. To partner, hand-in-hand, toward some better kind of world.

And (forgive my earnestness) but I still want that world. I want to be inconvenienced and wrong and exhausted. I want to get caught in all my lies and mortified by my cynicism. Give me cataracts from staring too long at love. Let me learn someone’s face like a new alphabet. Let me say sorry. Split me open, divide me like a daylily.

Maybe, these days, the most revolutionary, anti-fascist thing we can do is to still try to fall for one another.

When the rice is done, A. scoops it onto a sheet of seaweed. He cuts thin strips of green onion, cucumber, avocado, and sets aside a little salmon for the cats. He rolls the sushi neatly and cuts it cleanly into even pieces. I don’t have a dining room, so we pull out the coffee table and pour soy sauce into the blue and white shoyuzara A. bought us. Before we eat, we take turns reading each other a poem to bless the food—as if covering one another for a moment in a very quiet prayer.

Subscribe now

Upcoming Events With Me ❤️

WRITING WORKSHOP NEXT WEEK!

My writing workshop for paid subscribers is next Tuesday! Learn the strange art of making your readers feel by transforming the ordinary into the unfamiliar. This is one of my favorite classes to teach!

Join us

And that sentence profoundly changed my craft.

In this writing workshop, we’re going to get weird. We’ll learn how to give our readers strange and ecstatic experiences. Details below!

Strange Encounters: The Art of Defamiliarization

Workshop for paid Substack subscribers
Tuesday | March 17th| 5pm PST

What we’ll cover:

Defamiliarization, or “the art of making strange,” is a technique that empowers writers to see the world in fresh and unexpected ways. In this workshop, we’ll transform the boring into the bizarre and the ordinary into the wondrous. We’ll strange-make, shape-shift, and reimagine. We’ll identify the experiences we most want to write about and zap them with possibility.

Join me as we abandon familiar pastures and push into wilder, weirder territory. All genres welcome.

In the workshop, you’ll learn how to:

• Flip clichés and give our readers ecstatic experiences

• Transform traditional language by using vivid and strange expression

• Disrupt automatic perception and invite startling fresh awareness

How to join:

• Limited seats so register early

• Replay available

• Paid subscribers, scroll down for the registration link.

• Free subscribers, get access with the annual Necessary Salt membership. (Subscription for an entire year is 1/2 what I normally charge for a single writing workshop. In addition, paid members get access to all additional upcoming workshops, the entire replay library of past workshops, and my full WOMAN IN THE WORLD essays).

Link below. Hope to see you there!

Read more

And what she meant was—when you’re busy or exhausted or depressed, don’t quit the practice that makes you feel most alive: making slow chewy art.

Don’t refuse medicine when you’re dying.

When I founded my writing community four years ago, I named it Sustenance (and not ENDURANCE, ha) because I believe that creativity is essential nourishment. It’s necessary to our ability to survive. As Audre Lorde says: poetry is not a luxury.

Your creativity isn’t a hobby but your life force. It’s the antidote to despair.

If you’re looking for a place to finally be fed, my craft-driven writing community, Sustenance, opens its doors in 48 hours to 40 new members. We support essayists and poets who are ready to seriously pursue craft, take risks in their work, and finally bring their words into the world. It’s a space where you’ll be held, even in your dry seasons.

Sustenance hosts monthly feedback sessions with MFA-level mentors, renowned guest speakers like Ellen Bass, Chen Chen, Marie Howe, and Pam Houston, along with writing challenges, generative sessions, IRL quarterly meet-ups, and small groups. Writer’s. com recently named us as a top writing community of 2025.

In an effort to offer intimate support and connection, we’re capping our community this year at 250 poets and essayists. We have 40 open spots until we hit our cap. That means this may be the last time to join for a while. Tuition will increase next year.

The link for sign up will be emailed out this Thursday (1/15) at 1 pm PST to the waitlist only. Spots typically fill within minutes. If you’ve been longing for creative nourishment, now’s the chance. Join us. ♥️

See details

See what members say

Join us

My two kittens come to help. They inspect the situation with serious whiskers and concerned paws—gingerly batting the nails and slow blinking as I begin to cry.

Everything feels sadder at Christmas

I’ve already braved IKEA the day before—enduring the crowds of couples and eternal disdain of the yellow-shirted staff who vaguely waved their hands when I asked for directions. They seem to hate me and, having once worked a Christmas season in retail, I don’t blame them.

I select a huge mirror and haul it into my car, driving 20 miles on the highway with it blocking my rearview window, then drag it up the steps—exhausted but triumphant—only to be undone by a screw.

Two hours later, I cave and hire a TaskRabbit Tasker who arrives tall and polite, at exactly 7:30 pm. He softly takes off his shoes and greets both my cats. Then, he puts my mirror together in under six minutes with a mathematical precision which can’t be properly described as anything other than erotic.

I really wish I knew how to do simple manual labor tasks. But I don’t. I’m bad at measuring and math and cars and maps. I’ve spent my time learning how to write complicated metaphors and craft air-tight sentences. I possess the emotional intelligence of a trauma therapist, own my own business, and write best-selling books, but hand to heart, I can’t hang a fucking picture.

The men I date are good at laying me down and loving my body. They understand sex—the fixed urgency and indisputable necessity, but somehow miss the rest. It’s hard to explain my tangible appetites, especially as a feminist, are a little boring. That I’m turned on by the idea of someone carrying up the heavy bags of cat litter or assembling a desk or doing the mental labor of picking a dinner spot. How to explain that what I deeply fantasize about is an equitable and shared life in which, at some point, I get to rest.

Dating men + Girl Boss culture seem to teach me the same lesson: It is impossible to stay soft and survive.

The previous tasker I hired came last summer and installed my AC unit. We had to sit on my bed to reach the window and, in the slow June heat, he told me about how (when he wasn’t working odd jobs installing AC units for tired, horny women), he was a boxer. He learned boxing because his father, the church pastor, knocked him about until he grew big enough to punch back. He laughs and stretches out his bent fingers to show where the bones didn’t heal straight: I’ve never loved anything like I love boxing, he says. It’s the only thing I’m built for. He flicks a switch and the AC aches on.

Most days, I don’t rely on men for much. Not for building furniture or changing my oil or having babies or entering marriage. Recently, a man lay beside me in bed and asked what I really want. I shrug silently in the dark. Somewhere inside me is another answer: I would give anything to be allowed to be soft again.

When the boxer leaves, he slips me his phone number. In case you ever want to reach me off the app, he says. I’d like to see you again. There’s a tiny filled-in heart at the end of the sentence instead of a period.

I tip him 30% and never call. But on warm nights when the AC clicks on, I remember his careful, crooked hands.

Big news:

Are you a poet or essayist feeling the call to your creativity?

My writing community, Sustenance, is capping enrollment. And we have only 30 spots left. Once we hit our 250 member cap, our community will be closed indefinitely and will only open new spots if someone leaves. This means this January 15th may be your only chance to join in 2026. Join the waitlist here. 💗

P.S. Sustenance now hosts IRL quarterly meetups in seven major hubs so you can connect with other writers locally! If you join the community this January, you’ll also be able to join us for our annual retreat this summer!

See details

P.P.S. : Also! We just completed an annual community survey in which Sustenance scored a whopping 91(!)% in overall satisfaction!

Here’s what a couple members said:

💌 Sustenance has been a lifeline for me, not only educating and inspiring me, but also restoring some much needed faith in the world, the people in it, and the transformative power of art and poetry. This community is a godsend and I couldn’t be more grateful xx

💌 When friends ask me how I’m doing, I OFTEN talk about Sustenance and how much it means to me. It’s become a very important part of my life, and I’m so grateful! <3 <3 <3

💌 Joining Sustenance is still one of the best things I have ever done for myself

Explore Sustenance

Find an obsession and write it down.

Take a little walk. Imagine that you are a tiny luminous alien and this is your first day on earth. God, it’s warm! Use your sparkly new alien brain to explain redwoods, shyness, snow. See how the world collapses, then suddenly is remade.

Later at your desk, morph into a sneaky god and smash new language into existence: Moonsilk. Lovecurl. Doomdark. Fang-temper. Marvel at the taste of this new lexicon on your tongue. Suddenly you are swimming in a deep river with no name. Turn over and float.

Prepare for a strange and beautiful desire to catch hold of you. You’ll feel the ache of it beneath your collarbone, in the pulse of your thumb. Every writer is haunted in this way. Know that this desire will peck away at you, follow you like a flock of yellow-billed loons. Keep something always in your pocket to feed it.

Close your eyes and remember something from your childhood. Get specific: the favorite branch of your best climbing tree. Your friend’s chipped tooth. The sound of your father stompwomping the snow off his boot on the stoop. It doesn’t matter what it is—write to it. Especially if, at first, it might feel small and insignificant. Trust that what you remember has endured to tell you something now on the page.

For a while, lock your words in a shush-vault. Don’t speak or share your ideas too soon. The world can make you fall swiftly out of love. Instead, woo your project in private. Ask no permissions. Take no prisoners. Write what you wouldn’t dare anyone to read. If you are terrified, you are on the right track.

When it is time, print off your Tender Little Manuscript (TLM). Tie it up with a black velvet ribbon (for mystique). Put your TLM in your purse or backpack and feel the weight of it. Ask the weight what is missing.

Next, write what’s missing.

Finally, befriend a band of fellow writers so you don’t have to travel alone. Follow their lanterns when your own light goes out. Remember, creativity is contagious. Make their stories your parables. Take their boats through high water. They’ve traveled this road longer than you. When they read aloud, notice how their voices tremble with holiness. You have been blessed. Now, go out and bless someone else.

Big News!

My writing community, Sustenance, opens for enrollment super soon! We only open 2x/year so don’t miss the chance to begin 2026 with us. Sustenance serves both poets and essayists who want to meet online and IRL. You must be on the waitlist to receive the registration link.

Get notified when doors open

There’s a lot of online communities out there, here’s how we’re different:

IRL meet ups: We’re not just an online school, we’re a thriving community. Members in seven major cities now gather each quarter for IRL meet-ups in their local communities (with lots of impromptu hangs in between). Plus, this July, we’ll gather for our annual retreat in PDX!

MFA-level teaching: I teach 3x/month in the community and we also learn online from guest speakers like Ellen Bass, Pam Houston, Chen Chen, and Danez Smith. In addition, we offer feedback sessions, small groups, generative sessions, and Essay Club every month with Sustenance professors who hold an MFA or PhD in creative writing.

See inside Sustenance

Extraordinary outcomes: Sustenance has been around for nearly 4 years and is steadily growing. Our 250+ members are doing incredible things and I’m so freaking proud of them.

Feeling the call to write? We’d love to have you. This is the last time Sustenance will be offered at the current price and the only opportunity to join for the next 6 months.❤️

Explore the community

See why we sell out each year

Last night’s replay: Curated Obsessions.

In class, we discussed:

• How to get intensely curious about what haunts you, whether it’s a joy or a fear.

• How to drive surprising connections between disparate obsessions, reveals the “story beneath the story.”

• How the

  “third thing” is the key to compelling writing.

Here’s what people said about last night:

Joy is a fabulous teacher and always has the best quotes, prompts and she leads with such beautiful examples. She’s a delight to learn from. —Stephanie G.

I really loved the Venn diagram writing exercise. I will use this tool again as a jumping-off point. —Natalie R.

This was jam-packed-full of inspiration and beautiful tips! What a privilege to have been there. — Courtney C.

This was fantastic! I love how hands on it was, and the opportunities to share and interact. — Karen G.

Would love to read your work in the comments! xx

Read more

For years, I was so plagued by my sin, I had night terrors. I wet the bed. I thought my soul was, undoubtedly, damned. I’d cry sometimes for hours on end. Eventually, I confessed to my mother—who in an effort to liberate me from my own hysteria—finally suggested that I write a confession to my teacher. We were living overseas at this point which meant my mother had to shell out the postage to mail my confession internationally. And would you believe it? My kindergarten teacher wrote back with the incredible news that both she and Jesus forgave me.

I never stole again after that, but I did graduate to other sins like swearing under my breath, smoking cigarettes in high school, and eventually going all the way with boyfriends post-college.

To this day, I’ve never quite shaken my wish to be very good. And I’m starting to think this desire holds me back—as both a woman and a writer.

In groups of women, I notice I’m not alone. There’s a lot of performative goodness and tortured ethics in femme circles. Research supports this too. Women often pay far heftier prices than men for breaching arbitrary standards of morality. This isn’t even to mention the“nice girl tax”—the invisible psychological and social penalties women pay for maintaining agreeableness.

I remember driving once with a friend in Montana who I recognized as secretly competitive. Like a lot of women, she’s brilliant, a perfectionist, and likes to always get it right. It’s totally okay to be competitive, I say with my hand out the window, I’m plenty competitive. Own it. She flinches in the passenger seat: I’m only competitive with myself.

Okay, I laugh.

As women, we not only impose impossible standards on ourselves, but on one another. We cancel and unfriend women who don’t meet our virtuous ideals. Time and again, I’ve seen women authors eviscerated online for revealing their own humanity. And I think this keeps us from fully seeing ourselves—squarely—as glorious and imperfect creatures.

As I get older, I’m moving in the opposite direction. I crave knowing where women are cracking at the seams. I live for it. One of the most endearing things I like discovering about my friends is what I call their tiny evils.

This is just to say: I want to know where you’re delightfully devilish. I don’t want to hear how you were bad by eating a cookie or texting your ex or skipping spin class. Tell me, instead, where you’re kinda wicked, a little sideways, a bit bent.

Tell me your tiny evils.

Side note: Tiny evils ought not to be confused with guilty pleasures. Guilty pleasures are defined as low-brow, but pleasurable behaviors—like binge watching Love Island or ordering late-night McDonald’s. Tiny evils also are not the same thing as vices. A vice is something that is inherently harmful to you, but not generally to anyone else (e.g., smoking, stalking your ex’s instagram, or *shifts uncomfortably* reading your Goodreads reviews every day).

But TINY EVILS? They’re their own delicious and philosophical category.

Here’s my tiny evil:

Sometimes, at the store, I walk down the aisles and look for specific kinds of food to crunch. Freeze dried blueberries are an excellent candidate. Chex Mix is also ideal. When no one is looking, I like to crush one or two pieces in the bottom of the bag before leaving the store without purchasing it. There’s something about the sneaky little crunch that really satisfies me. This qualifies as a tiny evil.

My friend, loves giving wrong directions, but only to men. When a man asks which way, she gives a detailed and wrong account: “When you see the water tower, turn left. You literally cannot miss it.” Joke’s on them—there is no water tower. It’s her way, Kiara says, of balancing the emotional labor in the world. 😈

I’m obsessed with Kiara.

My friend E. admits that, when she worked as a barista, she always made people’s lattes full-fat when they asked for skim.

Another friend confesses that she once stole back her wedding gift at a reception after not being compensated for helping plan the ceremony.

My pal, S., never pays for parking and religiously parks in tow-away zones. (This is a tiny evil I sometimes also commit).

Another friend—let’s call her Robin Hood—confides in me that every time she throws a party, she always serves shoplifted fancy cheese from Whole Foods. Some tiny evils, it turns out, are also tiny crimes.

So now, I want to know yours. Go ahead, scandalize us. Tell us your tiny evils in the comments, you beautiful devils.

Subscribe now

Oh, and before I forget! Here are a couple of upcoming events I’m super excited about:

Curated Obsessions: Autumn Writing Workshop

I’m leading a really fun writing workshop on November 18th! It’s all about discovering the topic you’re intensely fascinated by and uniquely qualified to write about. It’s great for folks who struggle with writer’s block and imposter syndrome.

See details

IRL Event in PDX

Also! I’m co-leading an in-person erotic dance and poetry event on December 6th. We have only 5 spots left!

Join us!

Curated Obsessions: Writing compulsions and fascinations

Autumn workshop for paid Substack subscribers
Tuesday | Nov 18th| 5pm PDT

What we’ll cover:

Ever get stuck trying to figure out what you’re uniquely qualified to write about? What are the ideas and experiences that haunt and bait you? What is the story you truly need to write? Together, we’ll identify our compulsions and fascinations and examine what has driven other authors to the page. After workshop, you’ll walk away with a map of where you write from here.

Together, we’ll learn how to:

• Map your unique obsessions and discover what you’re qualified to write about

• Find intersections, gaps, and productive stickiness

• Examine literary obsessions from famous authors and see how the play on the page

How to join:

• Limited seats so register early

• Replay available

• Paid subscribers, scroll down for the registration link.

• Free subscribers, get access with the annual Necessary Salt membership. (Subscription for an entire year is 1/2 what I normally charge for a single writing workshop. In addition, paid members get access to all additional upcoming workshops, the entire replay library of past workshops, and my full WOMAN IN THE WORLD essays).

Link below. Hope to see you there!

Read more

It’s Sunday night and I’m thrashing around on the studio floor to Blood Orchard’s Sexually Frustrated. Beside me, two friends slink and sway. A kind of velvet heat purrs between us.

A year ago, I would have told you erotic dance was just “not for me.” As a shy person with dubious coordination, I barely knew what it was. Last year, I stumbled into my first erotic dance class and I discovered I didn’t just like this practice—I needed it.

Even now, I wouldn’t say I’m particularly good at erotic dance, but I’ve come to realize it doesn’t matter. I don’t have the best technique or greatest flexibility, but moving with authenticity still makes me feel pretty goddamn hot most days.

Here’s 5 ways erotic dance transformed my life:

1. I found a new vocabulary of movement.

Erotic dance class was the first time I felt the freedom to move sensually without hyper-vigilance. After a lifetime of trying to keep myself safe on the sidewalk and invisible at the bus stop, this practice allowed me to truly move and be seen.

After decades of trying not to invite attention, erotic dance allowed me to finally indulge in the beauty and sovereignty of my own body.

2. Erotic dance expanded what I actually find erotic.

What I discovered I love: Vulnerable eye contact with other dancers. Playfulness. Sometimes, rage. Always, slowness.

Once, a woman in class spent an entire song only removing only the hood of her sweatshirt. It was so gorgeous, I cried.

As we often say in class: Do less, be worshipped.

3. I learned dance is just poetry translated by the body.

I used to think erotic dance was naughty pole routines and sexy choreography.

But after a year of this practice, I’ve discovered it’s more about expressing personal agency and dark poignancy. You begin to recognize your own potency. You’re just asking your body what it wants to say. Erotic dance demands of viewers what poetry demands of readers:

Encounter me. Witness me. Remember me.

4. My female friendships deepened dramatically.

Sure, erotic dance helped me better understand my own sexual power with men, but I rarely dance for partners.

Instead, I was shocked by how much moving erotically in a safe container felt like a kind of ancient ritual. It was a communal cradling that led to some of my most connective friendships with other women.

Here’s a little video of me and my friends, Lauren and Beth, rolling together in a love fest on the floor.

5. Erotic dance made me remember joy.

Once when I tripped on psychedelics, I imagined myself as a tiny purple-throated frog in the middle of the Amazon, croaking full thrum, radiating bliss.

That’s what the erotic is. Purple sparks and frog heat. It reminds me why I’m alive and, honestly, it makes me want to keep on living.

P.S. GUESS WHAT?

I’m co-hosting an erotic dance and poetry IRL event in Portland, Oregon, on December 6th! At our BODYPOEMS event, we’ll have a craft class on writing embodied poems followed by a sensual movement lab. The entire event runs about 4 hours and you’ll make a bunch of new friends. We’ll dance barefoot (or in socks) so you won’t need to worry about bringing special shoes.

Also! I can’t wait to introduce you all to my co-host, Lauren Nagel, who was instrumental in helping me fall in love with this practice and is one of the strongest, most approachable facilitators I know.

Early bird ticket sales end THIS coming Tuesday, 10/21, so grab your spot now if you wanna come.

See all details

P.P.S. Don’t be nervous! Jitters are normal—but as a once-newbie myself, we’ve designed this event specifically for beginners. The night will feel fun and playful and deeply transformative.

Get early bird ticket

Lately, I’ve been making small changes that accrue momentum over time. Here’s a quick list seven things I’ve done in the last year that have propelled my life in a positively better direction.

1. I adopted a pair of kitten brothers.

   After my beloved cat of 15 years passed away, I adopted a pair of owl-eyed babies. Turns out, it was the best decision I made in awhile. The house is filled with their tiny chirps. At midnight, they finally sleep curled in the crook of my neck, and I kiss their bellies at least 14x a day.

   

2. I started a writer’s group.

   I’m a big believer in creating the space you want to be a part of. This year, I gathered friends from disparate circles into one monthly gathering where we could chat writing projects and read each other poems. I think we should all read to each other more. Each month has a different theme: sexy poems, spooky poems, culinary poems. It’s one of my favorite monthly rituals.

3. I hired a business coach.

   My writing community, Sustenance, was already thriving when my business coach approached me to work together 1:1. At first, I was dubious—coaching was a huge investment, and I wasn’t sure I needed it. But hiring Tom is like having a business therapist. I finally feel less alone in entrepreneurship and am able to expand without burning out. After 8 months of coaching, Sustenance is growing exponentially, we’re introducing local member meet-ups across the country, and we’re getting ready to open our doors to 40 new members in January. Join the waitlist here.

4. I doubled down on breathwork.

   Breathwork is the closest I can get to a psychedelic trip without taking mushrooms. It gives the trauma in my body a fire escape. I get my best creative ideas in that meditative state and feel generally lighter for days after.

5. I embraced the power of the erotic.

   Up until last summer, I’d never done erotic dance, never touched a pole, never worn heels higher than 2 inches. Discovering erotic dance put me in touch with the woman inside me who was electric and darkly hungry. It made me aware of the power of my sexuality and as Audre Lorde says: “Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling…”

   P.S. I’m about to announce a one-day erotic dance and poetry retreat I’m leading in PDX. Get on the waitlist to get notified here.

6. I said no to all forms of “casual dating” and “ENM.”

   In the last six months, I’ve fully stopped dating men who identify as non-monogamous, casual, or avoidant. No shade on anyone who thrives in ethically non-monogamous relationships, but it’s bad for my nervous system. And too often in places like PDX, non-monogamous connections exposed me to the very worst behavior and wild dishonesty from straight men. A giant gift to myself was getting clear on what I need and removing my energy from men who don’t give me that.

7. And finally, I got Brick for my phone and also quit Facebook.

   Recently, I deactivated my Facebook account. It made me a little sad—it felt like losing a time capsule. I mean, there were pictures from college up there. But the platform had descended into such a fear-mongering, incendiary, AI-generated circus. Once gone, I haven’t missed it.

   I also got Brick, an app that blocks apps you don’t want to see from your phone, and it’s helped me retain focus and block out more time for writing and friends. I can fully check out on my hikes now. On the whole, my brain feels brighter and my anxiety is lessening dramatically.

   

   Tell me one small incremental change you made that added up this last year. I’d love to know.

   Subscribe now

I always imagined Miko’s passing would be peaceful. I thought maybe he’d drift away in his sleep or gradually become ill and gently tell me when it was time. But that didn’t happen. One day, he just sprung up from a nap, hissed into thin air, and 48 hours later, he was dead in my bed—a tumor as large as a gooseberry growing against his throat.

Cats release gas as they’re dying, and Miko stunk the sheets. I sobbed so forcefully, the at-home vet began to cry too and our breath slid together for a moment, the way wolves harmonize in the dark.

The vet said a lot of owners leave for the actual euthanasia but I didn’t want Miko to think I’d abandoned him in that middle place, in the lonely stretch of field between this world and the next, so I buried my face in his stinky fur and stayed. I don’t know any blessings for dying cats so I just kept saying I love you and thank you on repeat.

I’ve never been a very successful witch, but I tried some small magic as he died and, indeed, I felt our chemicals merge into that shimmering mandala that appears at the helm of all passages, in the collapse and rebirth of time. In that Elysian fizz, I begged him to haunt me.

Then, the vet carried his body out and the house turned quiet as a bone.

My friends are better witches than I am. They know about astrology and tarot. They understand how to bless cats, enchant garden beds, curse ex-boyfriends. They have spells for road trips, making wine, and the summer equinox.

I grew up as a hyper Christian kid who was never allowed to play the Ouija board or read Harry Potter. My parents, old school Baptist missionaries, worried even The Smurfs were demonic, so I was always wary of witchery. What I did have, however, was a fundamental understanding of ritual and prayer. I knew the significance of speaking earnestly into the air, of crying out, of seeing the world as multi-planed, full of invisible splendor.

The wisdom of prayer is the genesis of all poetry, I think.

When Miko died, I called my witches and they appeared at my neighborhood bar bearing gifts—a heavy stuffed animal the exact weight of Miko, a hand-made mug full of tea bags, a home-made quiche, an easy-to-care-for succulent, bottles of orange wine, piles of dark chocolate.

After I left Christianity, I was afraid to pray for a long time. Instead, I asked my friends to say prayers for me—I figure they might have more of a direct line to Whatever Is Out There. As I've gotten older, I've come to realize we all have direct lines. And that we need it for all kinds of things: dying cats, bad dates, missed periods, hospital visits, new jobs. I find everything is spiritual now in the same way that everything is political. Time gets holier by the minute.

Miko walked beside me for 15 years, through grad school, and a near marriage, from Ohio to Oregon, through writing a book, and launching it into the world. And he left me right before my 40th year—that decade where you really wake up to your witchiness, where you finally learn to dog-paddle in that mysterious and sacred current.

Miko’s death feels like a portal. As I leave my 39th year, I find I’m turning darker and more velvet—something shimmering beneath skin. My eyeteeth grow sharper. I hiss a little when stepped on. I pray over dead cats and summon love in all directions.

Last week, I adopted two dark owl-eyed kittens. I sing them lullabies at night and carry them from room to room on my shoulders. The first humans who met the kittens were my witches, who came to bless them as they grow.

Miko’s ashes lie in the garden bed just beneath my bedroom window so we can stand watch now while the other sleeps.

Subscribe now

4 years ago, I had a poem go viral on Instagram. I got 10K followers in a week. Over a year, that turned into 20K, 60K, and then 100K. I remember watching the numbers tick up. Excitement suddenly shifted to irritation. I had the uncanny sensation something was being set in motion that I couldn’t undo.

Friends in the publishing world told me I’d need a sizable social media audience to attract an agent and a Big Five book deal. They also said I should show my face more on Instagram, since readers “fall in love with personalities just as much as poems.” So for a while, I really fed the frenzy—showing my face, writing my heart out, and confiding in the internet like it was my best friend.

Somehow, it worked. Two years later, my debut collection of poems, Instructions for Traveling West came out from Dial Press of Penguin Random House. It was an instant national bestseller. It felt like all my hard work had finally earned me the title of a real writer.

Alongside my burgeoning following and book sales, however, something darker and more ominous was growing too. I noticed that people started referring to me online as an influencer. I googled myself and found an entire Reddit thread dedicated to people analyzing my poems (and sometimes my appearance). Soon, people started recognizing me on the street.

Online adoration is really fun—until it isn’t. You’re suddenly filled with this weird cynicism about new connections—never knowing who genuinely likes you, who is simply after online clout, or who might just be angling for an intro to your agent.

Without a doubt, becoming somebody online has often made my real life infinitely lonelier.

Dating got harder too.

Read more

I get a perpetual ache in the Oregon summer if I’m not outside. Being indoors when the sun is out feels wrong here—like going to bed when it was still daylight when you were little and from the open window, you’d overhear the neighbor’s barbecue, beer tabs popping and the fragile hum of voices saying sentences you couldn’t quite make out. You suddenly learned to yearn.

This summer, I cancelled all my out-of-state trips so I could have a few hot, happy, and uninterrupted months here in Portland. I guess I want to feel ready when the rain returns.

Here are the moments I want my brain to remember:

The man I’m seeing picks me up in his blue car. I never know the make or model of anyone’s car, but I always remember color and shape. L’s car is the color of sea foam and afternoon clouds. It’s our seventh date and we hike so far up a mountain, my calves shake. I wonder how many summers I’ll get like this before I die, though I don’t say this out loud. Instead, I tell L about the first novella I wrote when I was 12. It was a fated tale about a winter fairy who falls for a spring fairy. Unsurprisingly, it ends in tragedy. I talk too much and L indulges me. Being encouraged to ramble is a love language. Later, we stop for Sugar Pine cherry sundaes and give ourselves belly aches. We drive home, kissing softly at stoplights.

On Sauvie Island, I go berry picking with my friend . We fill teal vats to the brim and I eat the berries almost as fast I pick them. Blueberries. Blackberries. Double gold. I learn about black caps, a kind of dark gamey raspberry and feel a small thrill discovering they exist. It feels like catching sight of a color you can’t name or having a dream about a lover you’ve never met. My fingertips are stained purple all day.

In my backyard, I host a sultry poem night with my writer friends. When my friends come over, we pick raspberries off the bushes in my backyard. I like when my friends are in my backyard eating my raspberries. They each read their sexiest poems and we swan dive across the blankets. We pass around dolmas and orange wine and cheese with tiny cheese knives and I feel like I’m seven again. I make my mom’s hot fudge sauce and serve it atop vanilla ice cream in green bowls with large spoons and I love the sound of all that clinking. Some days, I think the thing that keeps me most from despair is simply the sound of my friends’ spoons.

In Laurelhurst Park, I gather with the local members of my online writing community, Sustenance. I love gathering people together and watching them thrum. We go around the circle and share our names and our favorite childhood books: Boxcar Children, Amelia Bedilia, Nancy Drew, and my personal favorite Emily of New Moon. I sprinkle around cards from {THE AND} Strangers Edition so folks have a little leg up if they need something to talk about. Then, we take turns reading our poems as the sun weakens and finally everyone fades off quietly in little clumps. Intimacy is leaning closer in the growing dark, straining to hear one another’s words.

I visit Sosta House with my friend and we meet her chickens. I’ve never held a hen before and Tove gives me careful instructions how to scoop EmmyLou by the underfeathers, snuggle her feet, and press her plumed chest against my chest. Later, I write an instructional poem and list all the ways I also would like to be held. Much like EmmyLou, I want to be gathered and feathered down and, mostly, I want to be held onto, very tight.

What’s been your best moment of summer so far? I’d love to read about it in the comments.

Subscribe now

Ps. I’m so thrilled Danez Smith is visiting Sustenance on August 17 to teach us about Invented Forms in Poetry! We have very limited seats so register early. I hope you’ll join us.

​Workshop description: What if we go beyond sonnets or sestinas and instead choose an experiment of our own design? In this workshop, explore wonders found in recently invented forms like the bop, the burning haibun, and the Molotov sonnet before turning our attention to forms we will pattern ourselves. This workshop is for those looking to push the limits on their work as well as those looking to take the brakes off completely. In times of great violence and hope, can we break from the received forms of the times and become fugitives into new shapes and possibilities? In this workshop, we will trouble those answers together.

Grab your spot

If you were there live, I’d LOVE to read anything you wrote during the exercises. Please drop your work (or any thoughts at all!) in the comments.

In class, we discussed:

• Using concessions and confessions to gain trust and relatability

• “Opening a window” in your work by using voltas

• Allowing metaphor to hold the weight of your pieces

• Writing truth with absolute precision
  

Here’s what people said about last night:

Just amazing! That filled me up. —Nicole

Really appreciated the structure of the workshop and variety of poems shared - definitely heard some new ones. I love how you make it so interactive in such a short amount of time! And the poems generated at the end of the workshop were so beautiful and moving. This is my second workshop of yours I’ve attended, and it was amazing and engaging. Thank you!! :) —Erin

I loved the workshop today and was gently slayed by the poetry generated and shared. —Meridian

Such a great workshop. I loved the content and the interactivity. — Karen

This was amazing. I didn't expect to walk away with something of my own. —Michelle

Read more

It’s a hot Thursday afternoon, and my bones feel like they need a good cry. I google the closest massage therapist to me and am elated to find a last minute opening for 2pm.

I arrive at Massage Now a little nervous. The spa is vaguely beach-themed—with rooms roped off by boat cables and canvas. There’s driftwood and wafting ocean sounds. Everything is dimly lit by salt lamps and tastefully neutral—the emotional equivalent of beige.

My bodyworker, Darian, has a firm handshake. She’s polite but not exactly pleasant which I admire in a woman. Without ceremony, she instructs me to undress and gives me just two minutes to wriggle beneath the draped sheet before she begins her deep tissue massage. Darian’s hands are unrelenting with no-nonsense efficiency. I lie and say the pressure is fine.

Once, after being rear-ended, a chiropractor adjusted my back and instantly I was flooded with memories of the car crash. He clicked something back in place and, suddenly, there was shattered glass and Cat Power on the radio singing we’ve lived in bars and danced on tables and the sound of tires shrieking. My chiropractor nodded knowingly: A lot of trauma gets trapped in the vertebrae.

As Darian’s hands move, I slide into memory after memory—a shimmer of them just beneath the skin. She covers me with so much coconut oil, I feel freshly born. After a few minutes, my body surrenders. My muscles unlump and my brain squishes into gold.

I pay Darian extra for a scalp massage which makes my hair oily for days even after multiple washes, but I don’t regret it. As she works my temples, I find my mother again scooping me up off the floor at age four after I rolled out of bed and I watch how she carries me to the humid porch to rock me back to sleep. It was the only time I ever had my mother all to myself and I can vaguely recall how she’d take the edge of my blankie and trace my cheeks and forehead singing: Now the day is over, night is falling fast and I could never have guessed then that one day I’d be too big for her to pick up. No one, not even lovers, touches your face like that as an adult. Except perhaps the make-up women at the Clinique counter who dab your face so softly with powder, it makes you ache.

Darian moves down my arms—focusing on the ulnar nerves and my carpal tunnel wrists and exhausted hands, lifting each finger out like we’re co-conducting a waltz. One winter, years ago, when I was the saddest I’ve ever been, I sat across from a beautiful woman at a coffee shop and she stretched out her index finger and touched mine and said: Zap! Keep going. And sometimes when I am very low, I can still feel her zap.

Darian rarely speaks which is a mercy. She moves methodically to my ribs and abdomen, sometimes rocking my spine back and forth like a grief spell or a keening.

Months ago, when my stomach would not stop mysteriously spasming, the ER staff pawed me onto a gurney and forced a tube down my throat and shot me through with meds that slammed me in and out of consciousness and forced IVs into my arm until my body did not feel like my body any more. And I performed the old trick I’d first learned in my twenties when men hurt me which was to exit my skin. To Irish goodbye my own body.

The first person who held me after I got out of the ER was my friend Bonnie who took me to a salted soaking pool and wrapped her arms around me until I stopped shaking and finally floated back into my body and became a woman with a name again.

Darian works my calf muscle and I want to forgive everyone. Mostly, I want to be forgiven.

I had a boyfriend once who was a massage therapist himself and I remember how he laid me down and ran his hands along my body until our desire got too big. And how sometimes, when he was too tender with me, I longed for him to slap me in the face so I could cry into his hands.

Darian presses into the arches of my feet and I think about the Bible stories I was taught as a kid about Jesus washing the feet of his disciples and how my friend Ellen traveled to Ghana to give Catholic nuns massages because they experience so much skin hunger. And no matter how you cut it, touch without selfishness is always, by every definition, holy.

The clock runs down and Darian removes her hands. I feel like raw honey. When I open my eyes, she’s looking down at me like a benevolent beekeeper. All day, I think about how touch is both a luxury and a necessity and I suddenly want to hold everyone— the postal worker, the barista and her beautiful ears, the old man curled beside the bus stop.

Recently, I helped support a yoga class in prison with my friend Nikki where she asked the incarcerated women the first thing they wanted to touch when they got out. A lot of them said their children’s faces or their partners’ hands. Another said an ice cold latte. But the woman I’m thinking about right now is the one who said the thing she most wanted to touch on the outside was feathers.

Subscribe now

P.S. I’m leading a masterclass on writing hope THIS Wednesday (7/23) for paid subscribers. We have over 170 folks registered so far.

In this workshop, we’ll explore how to write hope without being saccharine. We’ll discover techniques that move our reader through complexity, empathy, and ultimately into action.

Together, we’ll learn how to:

• Write the hard stuff well

• Devastate and heal readers all at once

• Transform grief/rage/anxiety into something that glows

Hope to see you there. xx

In some states, you are not allowed to dance in prison.

You are also not allowed to touch another human, which includes high fives, handshakes, and hugs. And sometimes, you are not allowed to move from your bunk for long periods of time while the facility goes on lockdown or the guards attend off-campus employee appreciation luncheons for multiple days in a row.

In prison, your body is no longer your own.

Except perhaps for one hour on Tuesdays, when my friend facilitates yoga, breathwork, and movement classes. Nikki has been facilitating classes at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility through her nonprofit On the Inside for over seven years and recently, I was lucky enough to get to tag along. When asked about her classes, I often hear Nikki say: I don’t teach anything that won’t make your life better.

On this particular Tuesday, Nikki and I arrive at the prison wearing roomy t-shirts and sweatpants, as carefully instructed in the visitor guide. We are not allowed to wear the color blue, a shade exclusively reserved for inmates. After we pass through a chain-link fence, we enter the intake office where an austere blonde woman triple checks our ID. There’s a slight delay as she tries to find my clearance papers, and I catch myself over-smiling. When we’re finally buzzed into the yard, I realize I’ve been holding my breath. I feel astonishingly anonymous—no phone, no ID—as if I could disappear here.

Coffee Creek has a pleasant name, but it’s a granite universe. A concrete palace of clocks, walkie talkie chatter, beeps, and intercom calls. Everything in the facility has generic names like E3, Bunk 7, The Yard. Even the inmates are known only by their last names or their numbers—Inmate 12, 45, or 107. The air reeks of bleach.

We tend to imagine prison as a place of correction, but it is rarely rehabilitative. Instead it offers its own topography of trauma. Incarceration often involves sending traumatized people to highly traumatizing environments and expecting them to somehow heal. In prison, your body is made small and your suffering visible. There is never a door to close or a place to hide. Your pain is constant and is constantly observed. When I led workshops for young girls who were victims of human trafficking and often spent time in detention centers, they ranked their experience in juvie as often higher in traumatic impact than even their sexual abuse.

In preparation for class, Nikki and I haul mats to the activity room, and when the women arrive, they enter softly—dressed in blue, hair pulled back in ponytails, makeup-less with high white socks. Once seated, Nikki asks each woman to say the name they’d like to be called. They offer their first names or chosen nicknames—Angela, Ellie, Twitch, Pat. One of the women jokingly identifies herself as Bacon and Eggs, and I never decipher why, but it spreads around the room with familiarity and delight. Nikki instructs the group to call on one another to go next. I want them to say each other’s names, she tells me later, and I want them to hear their name being said.

Many of the women at Coffee Creek are incarcerated for similar offenses: burglary, fraud, armed robbery, drug crimes. Often, they’ve been convicted of violence in acts of self-defense against men who abused them. But here, in Nikki’s class, no one talks much about the past. The women talk about what they want to do when they get out, how they want to hold their babies again, eat fresh fruit, or finally get clean.

Nikki asks the group: If your heart could talk, what would it say? The women, warmed by hearing their names aloud, answer:

• My heart says I’m doing a good job.

• My heart says: I love you. Go forward.

• My heart is telling me —Thank you for taking care of me, finally.

Nikki’s yoga class is unlike any I’ve ever been to, and it’s possibly my favorite ever. There’s laughter and muttering and a lot of falling over. You wouldn’t expect tenderness in prison, but suddenly it’s everywhere. Bacon and Eggs winks at me in vinyasa and whispers that I look like Joy from Inside Out. Between the poses, one woman lets out a sigh so low and burdened, I feel it in my chest even now.

Poet and novelist, John Berger writes:

One of the essential elements in tenderness is that it’s a free act, a gratuitous act, it has an enormous amount to do with liberty, with freedom because one chooses to be tender. In the face of what is surrounding us, tenderness is almost a defiant act of freedom.”

And it’s true —it’s here—in the concrete of Coffee Creek. The tenderness insists that we’re human, all of us, and there is no real difference between our lots other than dumb luck. After class, the women return to their bunks for another lockdown, but I overhear one woman quickly tell Nikki—“I needed this. I’ve been afraid to file for a divorce. Now I’m ready.”

Nikki’s work is truly some of the most crucial I’ve seen. Not only does she provide ways for expression and inner knowledge in spaces of oppression, but she teaches resilience. She helps women trust one another again in a safe container. She reminds them that they are worthy of liberation and healing. More than once, an incarcerated woman has postponed her release date so she could attend one final class with Nikki. Tenderness like this is hard to find, even on the outside.

Nikki's team teaches 5 weekly classes in Oregon alone and 13 weekly around the world. She works with a team now of 6 facilitators—supporting women and youth to grow, heal, and change. Half of her team have been previously incarcerated and now uses her facilitation model to mentor women out of cycles of self-harm, addiction, and incarceration. This work begins in prison and ripples out into communities, cities, and the world.

On our way out, Nikki shakes her head: The absurdity of a prison making it illegal to dance is that if you can’t dance, you can’t express yourself. If you can’t stretch, you can’t release. As we wait to be buzzed out, a lump rises in my throat. She sighs: You simply can’t heal the body without moving it. So every class, I’m going to help these women move.

Nikki and I pass through the final barbed wire gate and exit into sunlight. As we hug goodbye, we say one another's names.

P.S. On the Inside is doing the necessary, re-humanizing work within prisons. In a space where women are reduced to inmates and routinely degraded, Nikki’s work isn’t just helpful, it’s some women’s only chance at healing.

In a moment in our country where we are seeing mass cruelty, growing despair, and the denial of each other’s dignity, join me in tangibly supporting this work of healing and restoration. Join me in offering tenderness as an act of defiance. Together, let’s insist on one another’s humanity.

I’m raising 3K to help Nikki update her website so she can continue approaching more foundations to help sustain this crucial work. Especially now, funding is deeply difficult to get. Our goal is 3K, but, honestly, I’d love to blow that goal out of the water. Any additional funds will go directly to helping Nikki and her team launch a new program that offers mothers and families long-term support both during incarceration and reunification.

If you’re able to give a small donation to support this work, we would be so immensely grateful. And so would Angela, Ellie, Twitch, Pat, Bacon and Eggs, and all the other women on the inside.

Support women in prison

**All photos have been taken and shared with consent.

How to Write Hope: Cutting to the Core of the Wound

Summer workshop for paid Substack subscribers
Wednesday | July 23rd | 5pm PDT

What we’ll cover:

I can’t bear platitudes during unbearable times. I believe in language that cuts to the quick, that aptly names the ache. In this workshop, we’ll explore how to write hope without being saccharine. We’ll discover techniques that move our reader through complexity, empathy, and ultimately into action.

Together, we’ll learn how to:

• Write the hard stuff well

• Devastate and heal readers all at once

• Transform grief/rage/anxiety into something that glows

How to join:

• Limited seats so register early

• Replay available

• Paid subscribers, scroll down for the registration link.

• Free subscribers, get access with the annual Necessary Salt membership. (Subscription for an entire year is 1/2 what I normally charge for a single writing workshop. In addition, paid members get access to all additional upcoming workshops, my full WOMAN IN THE WORLD essays, a paid chat, monthly writing assignments, and accountability threads).

Link below. Hope to see you there!

Read more