Reading · The Seeker with Brad Wetzler

Hi friends,

First, welcome back to my newsletter, where I share about my world:

living and embodying the life of a working writer
teaching you about storytelling, creativity, and travel and memoir writing, in particular, and
occasionally write about what’s lighting me up, most often essays about living open-hearted and embracing the mystery of this wild world.

I took some time off to plan some new courses and events. But I’ve missed you. And I’m glad to be sharing news from my world. Here I share about the writer’s life, memoir writing specifically, and living in a human body with wonder and purpose.

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One of the things I’ve learned after decades of writing and teaching is that writing, at its best, is a deeply generous act.

Yesterday morning I met with my Writing the Soul group, the small community of writers I gather with every Tuesday and Thursday. We meet on Zoom from all over the country. Some people have been writing for years. Others arrive having barely shared their writing with anyone before. We begin with a short meditation to settle ourselves, then we check in about our lives. After that I tell a story and offer a prompt. Everyone writes for about twenty minutes, and then we come back together and talk about what the prompt stirred up. People read their pieces aloud if they want to.

I’ve been teaching writing for a long time. I’ve also been a professional editor and published writer since 1991, which means I know how to mark up a manuscript and push a writer in the margins when a piece needs to go deeper. I know how to offer detailed feedback about structure, pacing, and language. But something different has happened in this group, something I didn’t entirely plan. From the very beginning the writers have responded to one another with encouragement and curiosity instead of critique. I never made a rule about it. It simply happened. People listen closely. They talk about what moved them. They reflect back what felt alive in the writing. Because of that atmosphere of trust, the writers have grown in ways that surprise even me.

Yesterday one of the members read something that stayed with me all day. I’ll call her Claire here because I want her to tell her own story publicly when the

time comes. Claire joined the group last August. She’s an artist, someone who sees the world through color and texture and landscape. When she first arrived she told us she hadn’t written in a long time. Her life had been full of creative work, but the writing had been quiet for years.

Yesterday when I asked if anyone wanted to share something from the prompt, Claire said she had been working on a piece for a few weeks and wondered if she could read that instead. She began slowly, her voice steady and careful. The writing moved through images of nature and the way she works with her hands in her studio, how the seasons shape her attention, how making art has always been a way of staying connected to something deeper in herself. Gradually the piece opened into something more personal. She began describing what it was like growing up in a family that misunderstood her.

Many creative people know this story. You grow up in a household where the values are more conventional, where the paths that make sense to people are practical and familiar. Your sensitivity, your imagination, your way of seeing the world feels strange or unnecessary to them. Sometimes the people around you try to explain you to yourself. They give you names that don’t quite fit.

At one point in the piece Claire described how members of her family had always called her flamboyant. I almost laughed when she read that word. There isn’t a thread of flamboyance in this woman. She is quiet, grounded, deeply connected to the earth. She is humble and open-hearted. She simply sees the world in her own way and has followed that thread all her life.

When she finished reading there was a long silence on the screen. Several people had tears in their eyes. Claire did too. We could feel the journey she had been on, the confusion of being told you are someone you’re not, the slow work of discovering your own voice anyway. And something else was happening in that moment. By telling the story clearly, by naming what had happened to her and who she actually is, Claire was reclaiming her own ground. The writing had become a way of returning to herself.

Listening to it brought something to the rest of us as well. Many artists grow up inside families and communities that don’t quite know what to do with them. The imagination can look strange from the outside. Sensitivity can look impractical. A life organized around art or writing can feel confusing to people who measure success in more conventional ways. Holding onto your creative

spirit in that kind of environment takes courage. Sometimes it takes years before you realize that the qualities that made you feel different are actually the center of your strength.

Moments like that remind me why writing matters. Writing can look like a solitary act from the outside, but in truth it connects people. Someone names an experience out loud and suddenly others recognize parts of their own lives inside it. The act of writing becomes an act of generosity.

One of the best pieces of professional advice I ever received was to remain curious and open, to stay interested in things that challenge you instead of shutting them down. That advice also came with another reminder that has stayed with me over the years: writing isn’t only about your own books. It’s also about participating in the literary community around you. Buy books. Go to readings. Read drafts of friends’ work. Talk about the writing you love. Help create the conditions where other writers can find their voices.

That spirit is what I feel in this group every week. Many of the people who joined Writing the Soul arrived simply wanting a place to reflect and journal. Over time they have begun sharing their work publicly on Substack and other platforms. They are writers now, even the ones who didn’t think of themselves that way at the beginning. Several are starting to imagine writing full memoirs of their own.

I feel grateful for this community. The kindness in the room is something rare. It creates a space where people feel safe enough to go deeper into their lives and tell the truth about what they find there.

We meet every Tuesday and Thursday, and at the moment I have room for a few more people to join us. I’m careful about adding new members because the spirit of the group matters to me. It works because the people in it care about one another and show up with open hearts.

If you feel drawn to writing and would like to explore it in a supportive community, I’d be happy to talk with you. You can email me at brad@bradwetzler.com or send me a message here. I’d love to hear your story.

You can also read more about the community and sign up here: https://bradwetzler.com/writing-the-soul-course/

One small confession before I go. I’m not especially fond of posting so many pictures of myself here. I’d rather let the writing speak for itself. But I’ve noticed that when I use generic images, the posts tend to disappear into the stream and hardly get seen. The platforms seem to prefer a human face. So the photos have become a small concession to the strange mechanics of this online world we’re all trying to navigate. The second photo is of my whiteboard: Courage and a heart. The root of courage is “cour”: heart.

The Generous Act of Writing

One of the things I’ve learned after decades of writing and teaching is that writing, at its best, is a deeply generous act.

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