Dear Reader,

I often write Behind The Scenes of Business for paid subscribers that focuses on the strategy, systems, and real life numbers I encounter during the launch of a class or offering. I will do that next week with my class Divinity and The Written Word, but I thought I would come to you today with the how. How did I invent this incredibly niche and specific class, how do I think it will go, and what are my hopes for teaching it?

In classes on creative business I am often asked how I decide what format / what container something will go into. When I have a big idea - is it a book, a zine, an online course, a podcast episode? I don’t know that there is an exact science to knowing, but there are a few ways I arrange my desires to see it clearly.

First of all - I am an avid morning pages devotee. This means that most mornings or afternoons I write three full pages in a notebook. This is where ideas come to me, how I see clearly if something is to be monetized or stay free, and in what order these ideas want to come through.

I’ve been obsessed with the idea of god since I was a child, trying to figure out what the right fit for me was from conservative Christianity to paganism and witchcraft. I always knew I wanted a Higher Power, but it wasn’t until I entered the world of the twelve steps fifteen years ago that I started to craft something so spacious and so beyond this world that I could comprehend it.

For years I knew I had an assignment to write my own daily reflection book. There is such a strong and beautiful lineage of day books across genres from codependency recovery, money, relationships, debt, and more. It felt like I needed to make my own that felt a little more queer and radical than the other ones I had encountered. So I set out to make my own.

That assignment felt clear it was a book, the container itself came first, the words came second. I’d say this order is often how I see things. I start to get obsessed with something - a theme like attention started as an online class in 2019 called Cultivating Creative Attention which became many newsletters, which then became the idea for a book, which became a proposal, which became my upcoming book The Practice of Attention.

Ideas that begin as one container can quickly find form in other containers, morphing along the way to be the right fit for the moment. I am often thinking about where something fits in my need for monetary exchange, so if I am thinking about how I want to make my money at any given time, which is generally through teaching, then I put my ideas in the container of an online course.

Divinity and The Written Word came out of a few desires :

Wanting to teach a writing class
Wanting to explore god in a room with other people
Wanting to expand on the themes in Look About You
A need to have a class not be about making money and creative business
Exploring a return to the journal as a place for contemplative exploration
A place to listen to music together while we write

All of these desires led me to design this strange little class, inspired by the many writers who have come before me to present their own strange versions of writing classes.

There are certain ideas I have where I feel confident a handful of people will sign up. My bills will get paid, my debt will clear for the month, the mortgage will be settled. This class isn’t one of them, but that didn’t stop me from inventing it. Sometimes what needs to come out of me isn’t the smartest or most business savvy, it’s the one that won’t leave me alone.

If you want to get weird and think about god in a zoom room of other freaks, consider signing up. Class is this weekend Feb 21 + 22 from 12-2pm EST

I hope class will bring me closer to god, which brings me closer to money, community, and myself. I hope students who take class feel a deeper connection to their writing practice, having it be less about the output and more about the process.

If two people show up, we’ll have a perfect time. And if a flurry of you arrive, we will flock together!

Thank you to Carter Umhau for interviewing me for her new podcast How to Be Alive

Quiet and evocative, Joyce is an embodied dark crip magical realism novella examining life in a haunted body.

Join Wardrobe Rituals: a 6-week small-group journey where style becomes ritual, reflection, and a practice of becoming. Begins Feb 23. Sliding Scale.

Your home is an ecosystem (Feb 27). The first in a free design psychology webinar series on creating a habitat that supports offline life amid chaos.

(C)Osmosis x MONEY FIELD is a way of meeting the actual living MYTHIC intelligence of Money in its state of Health. Three sessions, online on Zoom.

Want to book a classified ad for March? Read all about it here

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The last two weeks I wrote about my multiple chest surgeries in Third Times The Charm and my Top Surgery Meltdown

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