The Muse & The Marketplace 2024

You’ve given your MS everything, for too long. Or maybe it’s your finest work but no one’s biting, and your frustration has become a block. Or, or, or…almost every published writer has a grim tale of abandoned work. In this lighthearted, guided writing session, we will publicly honor the importance and ambitions of our beloved works, privately name (and forgive!) their shortcomings, and propose for ourselves a kind of continuing conversation about what those works have given us emotionally, technically, and professionally. We’ll take cues from Ross Gay in Inciting Joy and write about all we meant to do with our manuscripts, and then share their best seeds in the garden of a receptive audience, at last. Guided by mindfulness practices in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Anger, we will concretize our villains and transform bitterness toward them into care. Art therapist Beth Pickens (Make Your Work No Matter What) will help us quantify what we’ve learned and what we’re happy to leave behind, and poet Chloe Honum (The Lantern Room) will inspire us to memorialize this unforgettable place and time in our lives. By the end, we’ll walk with wisdom into our writing futures separate from our work, but with gratitude for it.