Your Summer of Creative Rewilding Begins Here

I loved hearing from you after last week’s letter, and in response, I’ve been putting together for you a fresh seasonal intensive so we can go deep!

Your Summer of Creative Rewilding begins here. Today we’re kicking off a creative rewilding practice unfolding from now until mid-August. As always, Slant Letter seasonal intensives are open to all paid subscribers. You are welcome to subscribe and/or cancel at any time.

Join us!

Grab your backpack, binoculars, and a good field notebook—through July to mid-August, our Slant Letters will be dedicated to your creative rewilding.

• A close reading of rewilded writing

• One rewilding practice to try today

• + exploration of many themes:

  • How to get grounded and feel safe in your creative environment

  • The joys of getting lost in a creative pursuit

  • How to liberate yourself from the most common constraints of writing, starting with taking an honest look at how you believe you’re supposed to write

  • Reconnecting with your first writing and reading loves and returning to your creative intelligence

  • Creative foraging exercises

Save your spot!

You feel it as well as I: the creative life suffers when we tune outward before tuning inward. When our creative process is inverted and formed first by what we think the people and powers want rather than by authentic self-expression. When we shapeshift what we have to say because we’re trying so hard to follow the “rules” as we understand them: keep it tame, tone it down, tell the truth but not in a too much kind of way that makes people uncomfortable.

If we write as if a red pen is poised over our creative offerings, writing will always be exhausting. Not to mention if everyone follows the same perceived pressures to conform, we end up with flat sameness. We end up churning out overengineered, empty sentences void of the texture of human story.

As a reader, and as a writer—no, thank you.

To free up our creative capacity and the depths of our gifts, we are called back to our core. Back to the wild.

Rewilding begins with assessing the health of the natural habitat, and letting the land rest by design. Rewilding is a conservation effort to protect and preserve the conditions necessary for natural life to flourish. In an age of algorithms competing for your attention, the interior garden of your inner life is being jostled and grabbed at from all sides. It is not just worthy of protection, your interior life is the most precious creative intelligence you possess.

And rewilding is the way we protect it at all costs. So let’s protect it, beginning with a close reading, and an exercise for tapping into your inner springs.