Have you ever met someone who made you laugh so hard while you were with them, but then when you went home they had you pondering the meaning of life, and whether or not society is barreling toward its own destruction? That’s what it was like getting to know you. On the surface—hilarity. Underneath—did you actually just articulate what is wrong with everything? Let’s start with the jokes...
There is so much I want to say to you, I don’t know where to begin. First, I thank you (and maybe my friends curse you) for introducing me to the joy of thinking like a poet. After we met, immediately everything looked different...
I don't know if it's getting older or the experience of running businesses and having to make all of these meta-decisions all the time, but somehow I've become a forest person. You know how people criticize other people for not being able to see the forest for the trees? I'm the opposite of that. I have become suspicious of trees...
The time we spent together has been transformative. What’s it like being an instruction manual for the creative life? I bet every artist you meet never wants you to leave. (When are you coming back to visit, again?) This letter is probably going to be too much about me, but I will risk it because I want you to know the effect you’ve had...
Recently, one of my Internet follows wrote about how Sylvia Plath really wanted to be a prose writer but kept writing poetry despite herself. I don’t want to see more relevance in this than it actually has (I have a tendency to relate everything I read to what’s happening in my own life), but I can’t stop thinking about it...
First, an apology. During our time together, I didn’t say much. You shared generously about your life as an artist, daughter, mother, sensitive person. I didn’t share much about my experience at all. I probably seemed reticent to you, or unfeeling. In truth, I was stunned...
Is it too much to say you changed my life, and are changing it still? I don’t think it is. When Ursula Le Guin introduced us, she said: 'In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face, crossed a street we never crossed before. But it’s very hard to say just what we learned, how we were changed...'
I was so excited to read you. Having read Doerr’s Memory Wall and Four Seasons in Rome, I couldn’t wait to see how his gift for detail would come through in a novel—and one with your scope, at that. (I heard you took him ten years to write!) What interested me the most was his choice to write about a blind girl as one of the main characters. In everything I’ve read of Doerr’s, he relied so much on visual description. How was he going to stretch himself to rely on the other senses?...
I’ve been wanting to write you for a while to tell you how much I enjoyed getting to know you. It’s been a bit, true, but only because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to express it in words. I was a little intimidated by you at first—I thought you’d be so dignified (and you are! but also an incredible wit!). Not to mention you’ve been proclaimed, '…the longest and most charming love letter in literature,' which makes this short and simple one a bit lacking. But I overcame my hesitation. After all, the point isn’t to write you the most charming love letter in literature, but to tell you what it means to me that you exist...
Forgive me for using your English name. I know you prefer the original French Notre-Dame de Paris, but I was afraid this wouldn’t get to you if I put that in the address. I was so excited to meet you! I (of course) watched the Disney movie adaptation as a child, and it’s always been one of my favorites. I feel a special kinship with Quasimodo. I know I’m not alone. Maybe we all feel like strangers here, sometimes? Maybe it’s the most common thing to feel as if you’re looking at the world from far away, able to see its beauty and sense its glories, but unable to connect with (most of) its people? I don’t know. But I have a feeling you do...
When we first met, it was kismet. Let me explain. I’ve experienced a transformative shift in the way I see myself and my writing in the past year. I’ve become bored and impatient with the forms I’ve been practicing for 20 years—narrative non-fiction, the personal essay, the how-to. Everything and everyone has begun to sound the same in my ear. I’ve been craving fiction (hence, this project). I’ve even started writing it...
Hoo boy, you are captivating. Even though I’d heard you were a heart breaker and I didn’t know if I wanted to have my heart broken while on vacation (or let’s be real, work-cation), I couldn’t help getting to know you, and then being siren-called all the way into the deeps...
I cried when we said goodbye. I don’t know why exactly, it’s so hard to explain. Isn’t love always? It wasn’t one thing, it was the combination of everything. Your humor, your beauty, your truth, your wry insights into the distant-but-half-seeing mind that values poetry above all—the sum was so much more than any of these. Maybe I can try to break it down...
I ached when I read you. I am aching still, thinking about it. Was it really just a few days ago when we said our goodbyes? You gave me Therese, and I love her. I love that you let me get so close to her, allowing me to see her interior life as clearly as the exterior. Therese’s sensitivity so often mirrored my own, it felt like a bell ringing...
I know we said our goodbyes last week, but I wanted to tell you how special our time together was to me. I think I laughed more during that one week than I have in a long while. It’s a rough line to walk between witticism and cynicism, especially in memoir, but you do it so well. Your observations somehow escape being merely ironic or self-deprecating (the easiest kind of humor to find, these days), and instead make a larger, more generous point about how different and strange and somehow still lovable we all are...
Well then: it’s a pointless task, and that’s exactly why I need to do it. I’m sick of going after things that have points; for too long now I’ve been cut off from my own spirituality, hemmed in by the demands of this world, and only pointless things, only indifferent things, can give me the freedom I need in order to get back in touch with what I honestly believe is the essence of life, its ultimate meaning, its first and last reason for being...
My brother died two weeks ago. I keep looking at that sentence, thinking, 'That’s a shocking thing to say; it feels sensationalist. Do I want to be sensationalist?' But it’s just true. He didn’t die of what I thought he would die of—he had Type 1 diabetes that was hard to keep under control. Throughout my life I’ve often imagined his funeral to prepare myself, just in case...
I was on a podcast the other day, and the host asked me, 'Are you a startup CEO or a maintenance CEO?' Fifteen or even five years ago, I would have absolutely identified with the passionate, impulsive nature of the visionary—someone who’s good at kindling fires but bad at keeping them burning. My natural bent is to pour myself totally into some grand pursuit (and, if I’m being honest, to run hard and fast away from outcomes I dread). But at some point, that changed...
During the pandemic, David Whyte (one of my favorite poets and thinkers) has been offering online seminars. I highly recommend them; they’ve been such a source of connection and belonging for me, even without a 'community' component (maybe especially without a community component, for an introvert like me). His wisdom and poetry is good medicine for the heart...
As the season of the weirdo at &yet is coming to a close, I wrote this piece to make a business case for weirdness...
I wrote this piece for &yet's Find Your Weirdos project. The buffalo image is by my teammate Lynn Fisher, inspired by my public Roam project. 'Where the buffalos roam'…get it?...
Only a few achieve the colossal task of holding together, without being split asunder, the clarity of their vision alongside an ability to take their place in a materialistic world. They are the modern heroes… Artists at least have a form within which they can hold their own conflicting opposites together. But there are some who have no recognized artistic form to serve this purpose, they are artists of the living. To my mind these last are the supreme heroes in our soulless society...
In this podcast, designer/developer Bryan Zavestoski and I chat about when to take risks, how to be strategically creative, and how to remain entrepreneurial even when being part of a larger organization...
In this episode of To Build a Swing, Adam and I are talking about the soul vs. the personality and the importance of integrating the two...
Gather the Courage is a guided journaling project we made at &yet to help creative leaders to reflect, be encouraged, and make courageous decisions...
Adam and I did a podcast once! In our first episode, we talk about Covid-19 and its effects on our mental health, clarity, and ability to make decisions...
Dear friends, family, and folks we know from the Internet who have squirreled their way into our hearts, we have a new name! We were going to wait until the wedding celebration we’d planned for later this spring, but after much conversation, we’ve decided to change our names now and hold off on a ceremony indefinitely...
I wrote a newsletter for &yet a few weeks ago from Nashville, TN, host of my angsty teen years. We were there to attend a seminar David Baker was hosting on Advanced Positioning and Lead Generation, which ended up triggering a different kind of angst. This is that newsletter...
When I was in the eighth grade, one of my teachers (who was also a self-proclaimed prophet) told me that the lesson I would need to learn in my life was 'Do not strive.' This is a wild and confusing thing to say to a 12 year old, which is probably why I’ve never been able to forget it...
I've always valued the privilege to deeply focus on whatever I'm working on, but I've strived to do this while still having multiple big projects and priorities going at the same time. It isn't that I enjoy that juggling act, but I've never seen another choice...
You know how you hear about a book so many times that you feel like you’ve read it, but you actually haven’t? That’s the case for me with The Highly Sensitive Person by Elaine Aron. I finally finished it, and while I’d somehow picked up most of what was in it already, it’s gotten me thinking about the different ways I handle being both an entrepreneur and highly sensitive...
This fall, my partner and I bought Tumbleweird, a local free alternative paper started a few years ago by some great people who wanted to see a counter-cultural publication in our area along the lines of The Stranger in Seattle and The Portland Mercury...
For the past year and a half, my counselor has been working with me through some hard personal stuff. I’ve experienced tremendous growth during that time, both personally and in my role as a business strategist, but I’ve been publicly very quiet as pieces of my life have gone through various stages of brokenness and healing. In case you find yourself in a place of maybe-possibly-pretty-soon-ready for growth in any area, I’d like to share a few thoughts that are helping me...
Last month, I wrote that I'm doing a complete re-write of Gather the People (rather than a heavy edit). Since then, as I've worked with the clients who will be sharing their triumphs and failures in the new edition, I've realized that the philosophies in the first edition are truly only half the story...
So...fun update for you. But first I need to put on my confident zombie goddess face. I'm not sure why I need confident zombie goddess face for this? Well, I sort of do. I'm kind of self-conscious about my tendency to change things all the time. And if I know anything about goddesses, self-consciousness does not apply to them...
My problem with waking up started 17 years ago. I wish I could explain it to you in a way that doesn’t make me sound insecure and sensitive beyond all imagination, but I can’t. When I try, it takes three thousand words and lots of angst, and it’s not really what I want to write about anyway. So I’ll just give you the facts...
Act one: Get laid off. If that’s not possible, make some other kind of drastic/heroic/insane move that will make step number two possible...
It’s almost New Years! And even though I say I won’t make a big deal out of New Years and its promise to make me into a brighter, shinier version of myself, I always do. Because let’s be honest, planning for the future is the most fun in the world...
I love to work on the areas of my life that are not quite what I know they could be. If I had to pick a hobby, personal growth would be it. A few things I’m currently working on...
When I was a kid, I loved playing role-playing games. (Still do.) I love that you can be whoever you want to be…that you can explore the world around you and open any door. Even your nosy neighbor with the weird striped lawn wouldn’t bat her wrinkly eye if you walked right in and started jumping on the bed or smashing the flowerpots looking for gold coins...
Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going...I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence and then go on from there...
They say that when you’re your own boss, you’ve got the worst boss in the world. It’s true. To myself, I am like the Attila the Hun of bosses. To others…well, I won’t put words in their mouths. But I imagine Attila the Hun wouldn’t be the one they’d compare me to...