A Little Bit of Astonishing News!

IT’S HAPPENING!!!!

I’ve been sitting with this news for about a week now, waiting for it to be officially announced, and, meanwhile, letting it settle into my bones just like a good line eventually does—first with a startle, then slowly, then unmistakably.

Today, finally, I get to say it aloud:

My next book—ONE WORD AT A TIME—based on Writing in the Dark, has found its publishing home with Harmony Rodale/Penguin Random House, thanks to my incredible agent, Laurie Abkemeier.

It’s real!

Even now, typing those words feels fantastical. But also inevitable, because this book didn’t come from nowhere.

It came from you.

Every single writer who has ever signed up or shown up here or to a class or a workshop or retreat or CAMP or last year’s SCHOOL or next year’s CRAFT SCHOOL feeling nervous or hopeful or tired or even outright scared but still willing. Every person who let me hold their story with reverence and curiosity. Every single edit someone trusted me to make. Every comment left on the posts here—celebratory, vulnerable, thoughtful, or just quietly present. Every writer who took my workshops in the early days before Writing in the Dark, before The Part That Burns, before my MFA, when I knew what I believed about writing, when I knew exactly what broke my own work open, and wanted to share that with other writers, but didn’t have much “street cred.” This book belongs to every one of you who has chosen to believe in this human project of doing language together, and waking ourselves up in the process.

You helped create this book as surely as I typed its first sentence.

And that first sentence has been a long time in the making. It’s been more than twenty-five years since I first started teaching, and more than fifteen since I began teaching creative writing exclusively. That’s a lot of years watching sparks become sentences, sentences become voice, and voice become power. A lot of years of watching people grow—not just as artists, but as beautifully awake humans.

This book is a love letter to all of it.

To the drafts and the doubts.
To the sentences that resist.
To the readers who see us even before we see ourselves.
To the way language feels like oxygen.

To the way language moves in us like life itself.

Mostly—it’s a love letter