Colorado? Italy? Where do you want to write in 2024? Join me and Kathy Fish as we return to our favorite places this summer for an unforgettable experience of inspiration, motivation, and creative community.
OPEN YOUR ART 2024 High Altitude Inspiration in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains July 23-28, 2024
Since we’re at the start of a new year, and I promised you an update, I’ve decided to share my biggest personal lesson of 2023…which doesn’t really have anything to do with writing.
Or maybe it does…
Some of you might remember last January when I was in Puerto Rico, scouting retreat venues, and my phone was swallowed by the ocean.…which turned into a huge but necessary metaphor for my life. Now, one year later, I’m in Costa Rica, halfway through an amazing retreat week of creative work and play with some of my favorite writer people…and feeling all the morphic resonances of one year ago.
Maybe that’s why we love anchor dates like New Year’s Eve or birthdays–they’re familiar catch points along the wheel of the year that help us rememberwho we were from the vantage point of who we are.
For me, 2023 was an extremely full year, rich and dense and flavorful and unexpected and marked with nearly every life milestone or transition: I lost two of my most important people. I moved houses and cities. My youngest child graduated from high school. I fell in love, got married, and gained a stepchild. And I finally published After the Rapture, a book I’d been writing since shortly after my accident in 2016.
Wait–hold up. You got married?
xoxoxoxo (!!!)
During a year of such intense change, I had two guiding principles: radical honesty and claiming desire.
Radical honesty as in the hard but necessary truths with myself and others. Whew. Big sigh. And claiming desire, which turned out to be the same thing as following the breadcrumbs of joy.
These may sound like common platitudes, I know, But in 2023, I learned the difference between idealism and execution. I learned how to save myself, find one more reserve of courage and swim instead of drown…even when there was no island in sight.
I’m not the first to do this. But I have to tell you this in order to tell you what I really want to tell you:
Happiness is possible.
Not happiness as in the absence of pain, or happiness like a new truck, or happiness as in pretty good, but radical, ridiculous happiness. The kind of happiness we might have once believed possible as children, a limitless joy and wonder and delight that we may decide is too immature to bring into adulthood. Too silly, those fantasies. Not practical. Not realistic. After all, nobody is deliriously happy, right?
But…what if real happiness is actually closer to our true nature than any modified adult compromise we may have been living with?
I want to tell you: Real happiness is possible.
It doesn’t happen on accident. If you aren’t radically happy right now, there’s a reason, and untangling that reason or reasons may require some radically honest inventory-taking, maybe even some painful letting go.
Last year I joked that I had to sacrifice my phone to the ocean in order to open some sort of portal…and in a way that was true.The sort of happiness I’m speaking of couldn’t have happened without a sacrifice of the old life, including all the many ways we don’t listen to our own truths or the radical desires of our hearts.
I’ve learned much from grief, shock, despair, illness, loss, and maybe even more from a nagging mediocrity. I had to ask myself: what would it be like to believe in happiness again?
I don’t know how to get you there; I don’t have specific steps or a signature method--all I can offer you is this message if you need to hear it: Happiness is possible.
By the way, my new words for 2024 are dwelling and devotion. I take this to mean: I swam all the way to an island of joy, and I will remain here and become a student of happiness. I will apprentice in this place, introduce myself to the trees and learn the landscape of joy. I will build a house of devotion on this island, and I will lower the white flag (and the red one) and I will discover what it is to dwell here.
And I will also build a lighthouse, in case you need a signal. And the signal will say:
Happiness is possible, my friends.
And as I sit here, still uncomfortable at times in the gentleness of ease but learning, learning, I half expect that one day my old phone will wash up on this beach, strangely uncracked, and the locked screen message will say:
ah…I thought I might find you here.
To your radical, ridiculous happiness, xoxoxoxoxo
P.S. Write with me! spots still available
February 12-23:Launch Your Flash Novel 10-Day Intensive *Online and asynchronous but I am “live” and active during the workshop
March 4-May 24: The 12-Week Flash Novel Mastermind *Online with both live (zoom) and asychronous components
Is 2024 the year you finally write your book? Do you have an idea brewing, but you don’t know where to begin? Is it a flash novel? Novella? Collection? A regular novel or memoir or a million other things? Sometimes not knowing can stop us from getting started. Sometimes the scope of it feels overwhelming.
The Launch Your Flash Novel Intensive is my signature course designed to help you launch your Big Idea. For 10 days we will envision, draft, collage and create momentum; we’ll begin breaking it apart and making friends with the scope of it, and in that process of discovery you will find momentum, insight, excitement, and sometimes a total pivot–that’s okay! For 10 days we’ll get out of our own way–10 days and a flurry of words and ideas and encouragement and camaraderie–and when it’s over you will have the bones (at least) of a longer project and a much better idea of where to go next.
The Flash Novel Mastermind:
a 12-week masterclass and creative community
March 4-May 24, 2024
$799
Whether your book is fiction or creative non-fiction, if you are a dedicated writer, drawing on the skills of flash fiction, this is the long-term container of inspiration, motivation, community and support you have been wanting,
a special 90-minute workshop and strategy session to envision and implement a year of creative clarity, confidence, and courage
Most of us are so busy, but we never seem to accomplish the things that matter most. The book stays unwritten. The stories remain unpublished. The art remains uncreated. The good idea stays in our head. We think if we had a different life, more money, more time it would be different. Or we imagine when we retire, the kids grow up, etc., then we will finally move towards our own vision.
Which means we spend our lives waiting for our lives to begin. The struggle is real.
For 10 years I have regularly taken myself through a process of revisiting and re-orienting–not towards blatant productivity, but towards my deepest creative visions. Each time I do this process I learn how to prioritize the creative work and get clear about my values so I don’t spend my life staying busy but not moving the needle on what really matters.
For the first time ever I’ve decided to share this process with my creative community.
In this 90-minute live strategy session, we will brainstorm and identify our creative priorities for 2024 (and beyond), decide how and why to choose, and map out a realistic and empowering plan to move forward. This is NOT a one-size-fits-all-strategy but a living conversation and method of interrogating ourselves and revisiting our creative goals in order to reorient toward what we value most.
So consider this a personal invitation to envision the new year together. We will work, yes, but the work will be fun–creativity is our job after all! So let’s gather for 90 minutes this Friday and begin 2024 with more creative confidence, clarity, courage, and camaraderie.
Nancy Stohlman 