Does writing need to be a slog? (Push Week is back!)
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Hi hi hi! 👋
We’ve all heard it, right? Writing is a chore, a long painful task, and that — and this line is attributed to too many writers to count — “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
I just don’t buy it.
Now, yes, writing is hard. There’s a ton of emotional labour in moving the truth from inside to outside, let alone the physical work of typing it all out. Sometimes it stretches us. Sometimes that stretch feels excruciating.
But here’s something else that’s true: At our first little studio, my neighbour would leave her kids’ windows open on class night so that they could fall asleep to the sound of our uproarious laughter. That’s writing too. Pure joy.
I’m thinking of Ross Gay today, who just released his second Book of Delights. Ross decided in 2017 (and then again in 2022) to write a short, handwritten essay every day about something that delighted him. And before you dismiss this as fluffy — this book is deeply grounded in life. It has a basement. He writes about racism, dead friends, loneliness, loss. And, it’s so teeming with joy that it dances off the page.
Ross talks about joy as an act of resistance and a kind of survival. He says:
“Joy is the evidence of our reaching across to one another in the midst of — or as a way even for carrying — one another’s sorrows.”
I don’t know about you, but the way I was taught about writing was the opposite of joyful.
Maybe for some people, a three-paragraph essay about Macbeth is a delight, but it wasn’t for me. I also hated the constant evaluation and correction of school, the feeling that I was never good enough.
Most of us don’t step into adulthood with a deep reservoir of good writing experiences, but we can always start building it. We can write about what we want to write about, and the voices we want to write in. We can say the hard thing, and then say the funny thing right after. We can find people who will laugh with us, sit with us in the hard parts, and make the whole process sparkle.
So. We’re trying something new this fall.
It’s a new take on our popular “Push Week,” a program we invented early in the pandemic, to help our community dive into creative productivity.
We’re coming back to it, but this time we’re building it all around joy. We’ve built in daily poems, accomplishment celebrations, short evening workshops to incite joy in our process, and an open mic at the end with silly door prizes.
This is a “large format” program, so participants can easily pop in and out and build their commitment around busy lives. All the sessions are optional, and designed as one-offs. It’s also all sliding scale.
It will be led by Kim and Asifa, with workshops by Britt, Mari, Asifa, and me. We are so excited to all be working together on this. Lalala! This is going to be fun. We’d love to have you there.
Whether this is a fit for you or not, I’m warmly wishing that you will find some ways to let the light in to your writing process in the weeks to come. It’s fall! Nature is telling one of its greatest stories of the year. Here we are inside it, telling our stories too.
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This may be a strange way to wrap this newsletter up, but joy can also be a huge struggle.
It can be hard to find it, and to feel it when it’s right here. I struggle with this tremendously, rushing around, getting shit done, worrying about everything. That’s real. And it’s not just me.
But when things are hard, community is where I reliably find a way to soften. I hope you find that this fall, with us or elsewhere.
As Ross Gay says, “What if joy is not only entangled with pain (…) but what emerges from how we care for each other through those things?” Here’s to that.
In it with you,
