Writing saved my life, so I teach writing as if it might save yours.
I’m the author of the memoir The Part That Burns and I teach writing at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop, and Writing in the Dark, the independent creative writing program I founded in 2012, which has since become a vibrant creative community on Substack.
The work writers produce in Writing in the Dark has been published everywhere from NYT to Brevity to Fourth Genre to Huffington Post, and many other journals and magazines, plus a wide array of anthologies (also, books). You can check out our big, beautiful, fast-growing (and always incomplete) directory of WITD published work here.
But you don’t have to want to publish your work to write in the dark with us. I love creating spaces where writing becomes more than writing and begins to transform how we walk in the world. Spaces where writing creates us anew.
As for Writing in the Dark’s tagline—for people who do language—that’s inspired by something Toni Morrison said in her Nobel Prize lecture in 1993:
Word-work is sublime … because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
That’s what Writing in the Dark is really about.
