The known is finite, the unknown infinite ~Thomas Huxley

Hi, hi! A couple of things! First, both sessions of The Through Line are now full/closed, yay! Thanks to everyone who’s placing their trust in me for this very special in-person work. And if you missed out or weren’t quite ready for The Through Line, but want to study with me live, don’t worry! I’ll be announcing what will likely be the final 2026 session of Writing in the Dark | The WORKSHOP (late October start date) soon. You can join the waitlist here for first notice when enrollment opens.

Second, our first celebratory Zoom for 100 Days of Making & Writing is tomorrow at 10 Central! All paid members are welcome to join, whether or not you feel you’ve made and written enough, or anything at all. We are coming together to share bits and pieces of the work, the process, and the inspiration and encouragement to keep going or to jump in, whatever the case may be! It will be fun and I can’t wait to see you there!

Friends, if you’ve been hanging around here at Writing in the Dark for any time at all, you know I teach passionately on the topic of embracing—not just accepting but truly embracing!—uncertainty as a core part of our artistic process. My first exposure to this idea came about fifteen years ago when my mentor, Paul Matthews, introduced the work of John Keats and his exploration of a concept he called negative capability.

What is negative capability? I talk about it here a lot, in terms of its tenet that artist’s need to cultivate a tolerance for, even a friendship with, uncertainty—otherwise we will never see beyond what we already think we know, and there is no creativity inside the things we already think we know. Negative capability is where new things come from.

Some people have a hard time getting over the way the idea of negative capability sounds so … negative. It’s not negative, though. The “negative” part of it refers to empty, as in visual art. A space where something is not yet. A space for discovery.

But if the word negative gets under your skin, then maybe this gorgeous quote from Rilke, from Letters to a Young Poet, is easier to take in:

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

And there we have the heart and soul of our work today—to live the questions now. And to live the questions, genuinely live the questions, we have to open ourselves to what the world is offering instead of what we think we already know about the world. This, of course, requires close attention.

Simone Weil asserted that close attention is actually a form of love—and in that sense, then, being willing to stay with the unknown and attend to the unknown for what it is, and not what we want it to be, to give our full attention to a question we can’t answer, is also an act of love.

I’m so excited to see where that act of loves takes us today as we attempt to make something from the unknown. What does it mean to give form to a question or an absence? To create a new thing from a genuine mystery that’s been resisting resolution? With today’s invitation, we get to find out, and I can hardly wait.

Here’s a short video and a few words about the riches you’ll find here (and it’s a place to introduce yourselves, as well). With this Curriculum Index, you can check out all the things we have going on in our incredible archive of essays and writing exercises for any mood.

Right now, we’re smack in the middle of our 100 Days of Making & Writing Practice, Day 54, Dreams! It doesn’t matter if you start on Day 1, Day 12, Day 20, or right now with Day 54. I call each ten-day section a chapter, and we started Chapter Six—Making from Darkness—this week, with this introductory essay and invitation, but you can also explore the entire experience here in any order that suits your desire.

There is no right or wrong way to do this—every day is another chance to choose our own adventure. We’re just so, so glad you’re here!

Welcome, welcome!

Paid members can find the link here.

Mark your calendars for our 100 Days of Making & Writing Community Zooms for us to come together, share snippets of the work, ask questions, and celebrate the creative synergy. I’ll send out Zoom links closer to the events—and you can always check the WITD calendar of events here, too, but, meanwhile, here are dates to mark:

Today, I invite us all to create something new from what we don’t and maybe can’t ever know. Some questions have no answers, and there are mysteries we