“Joyful Effort: Practice & Play”

New Substack post + A professional development workshop at StoryStudio

I wrote about the Buddhist concept of "joyful effort" as it relates to practice and play in writing. I also discuss the importance of ritual in my writing practice, Malcom Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule, the Sanskrit word “lila,” and Van Gogh’s mediocre (and maybe just plain bad) early drawings. I'm delighted that so many people have found this article to be encouraging!

Excerpt from “Joyful Effort: Practice & Play”

I also taught a secular version of this mindset in a professional development workshop StoryStudio, a nonprofit creative writing based in Chicago where I work as a consultant. The instructors and staff are incredibly talented and hardworking. In this hybrid online/in-person workshop, we discussed strategies on how to teach practice and play in the creative writing classroom, and why these mindsets are so important in our own writing practices.

If you’re a business or nonprofit leader who would like this training adapted for your staff, please reach out using the contact form.

Below is the description for the training:

Our most dedicated students often experience the same complaint that we feel in our own writing: this work is hard.

We should acknowledge that writing takes discipline and effort, but how can we also encourage our students to infuse their writing process with joy and playfulness? What are ways in which the time spent “warming-up” for the big game invites new possibilities, spontaneity, and surprising directions? How can we communicate to our students that writing, like any other artistic discipline, takes hours of practice? And that practice is essential to mastery?

In this professional development workshop, we’ll form our own unique pedagogies around the idea of practice and peer-share some of our favorite writing exercises to help students reframe the hard work of writing as a form of play.

Thank you to everyone who showed up, online or in-person! (And thank you program curator and author, Ananda Lima, for the photos!)

Reading at Tuesday Funk on 3/2/24 + New post on Substack

Hello world!

I’m very excited to be reading at the Hopleaf tomorrow night, 3/2/24, for the Tuesday Funk Reading Series. I love, love, love the Tuesday Funk. It is never boring! I promise to read something that will transfix and delight you—and it won’t go on for too long.

Also, I have a new post on Substack, The Antidote Is Love: Relieving Chronic Pain & Less Through Meditation. Bodies are wonderful, but damn if it doesn’t hurt to have a body sometimes. This post includes Mexica/Aztec host figurines, Tibetan Body Mandalas, somatic bliss, chronic pain, my mother’s disability, holding pain with love, and the limits of healing narratives. I hope it brings a sense of comfort and freedom.

This Is All Going Away: a Substack

I’m very excited to share my thoughts on Vajrayana Buddhism in a newsletter and not just on iPhone notes! I’ll be posting observations, short essays, and sneaky-secular Dharma once a month.

You can read and sign up for This Is All Going Away here.

Or read the About page to see if this newsletter might be for you.

My first post was definitely one that made me feel a bit more vulnerable than I expected. (A new vibe for me, since I’m used to fictionalizing my emotions and dressing them up as other people). I wrote about how, as a college student, I couldn’t afford to study Dharma at a center in my hometown, and how I nearly started dancing as a stripper to study abroad in a Buddhist country.

You can read the full essay, “What Strip Clubs Can Teach Us About Dharma,” here.