This New Moon will grow to fullness as January’s Wolf Moon, also known as Stay at Home Moon. We’ll be marking it in the usual Startling fashion with a small gathering for this month’s Writing into Being Writing Hour on Thursday January 11th 4 - 5pm GMT. It’s free to join – all you have to do is subscribe to this newsletter and let me know if you’d like me to send you a link. I don’t want to assume everyone who subscribes would be interested in taking part.
Generally, we come together to write in companionable silence, working on our own current projects and ideas or responding to a couple of prompts I drop in at the start and halfway through. The sessions are generative and the writing we do is freeform and open, rough, unpressured improvisations and experiments. There is no sharing of work, just a brief space at the end for anyone who feels moved to say anything about what came up for them, any struggles or insights, or nothing at all. It’s enough just to show up. You can revisit your writing later and trawl it for possibilities for future work.
It’s a calm, supportive space, enlivened by a sense of shared endeavour and mutual focus – a good way, I think, to help us just stay at home and write.
As well as Emily Dickinson, Henry David Thoreau was also a big fan of sitting tight:
Take the shortest way round and stay at home. A man dwells in his native valley like a corolla in its calyx, like an acorn in its cup. Here, of course, is all that you love, all that you expect, all that you are. Here is your bride elect, as close to you as she can be got. Here is all the best and all the worst you can imagine. What more do you want? Bear hereaway then! Foolish people imagine that what they imagine is somewhere else. That stuff is not made in any factory but your own.
Journal, 1 November 1858
You might also like to read what Rebecca Solnit (and Gary Snyder) have to say on the subject in this short piece in Orion magazine.
Go well.
L
x
Hi - I would love to join the next group please!
Hello Susannah – yes, I'll add you to the list and send a link out a few days before the next session on Thursday 8th February 4 - 5pm. Look forward to seeing you then. L