surfacing, a practice book for writers

Closing practices as a channel for feedback and continuity, little books as counterweights

In a few weeks, I’m releasing something new: Surfacing, a book of closing practices for creative writers. To get a copy as soon as it’s out (November 12), you can order now (and thanks for pre-ordering if you can! Early support means a lot to new projects like this).

This project comes out of my obsession with hands-on and right-sized practices, little tactile objects, field notes, and feedback loops. The book is a meta-project, really—this year has been so uncertain and heavy at times, I needed the container of making something small, tangible, and honest as a counterweight. And the practices you’ll find inside the book are also small, tangible, honest… hopefully a counterweight to whatever is feeling heavy or uncertain for you now.

This is one of my first public projects as I revisit and distill field notes, practices, and ideas from the last seven to 10 years of my writing and workshops. I’m in a moment of reorienting myself to what’s most true about my practice, where my ethics and roots really land (and draw from), what my honest capacity is (i.e., spoon availability)… between my dad’s cancer process, everything I’m learning about creative “community” as it relates to solidarity and Palestine, and the ongoing otherworld-disruption of my migraines, this year has taken shapes I didn’t expect and am still sorting out.¹

There has been some new writing, but more than anything lately, I’ve been returning to my archives² and experiences to ask:

What’s actually true here?

What’s real?

Where are there gaps and silences in my teachers/mentors/creative lineage?

What’s most important to me, knowing what I know now?

What’s most alive in my practice?

A wise person in my life referred to this as “resourcing myself” after a period of discovery, shedding, and de-affiliating. The former Catholic in me (can never quite shake it off, it seems) keeps wanting to refer to this process as an examination of conscience.

I’m also taking cues from the engineers in my life who have shared their love of thorough, specific documentation, and how documentation is a form of care and stewardship… a mantra I’ve come up with for now is: documentation is accommodation. self-documentation is self-accommodation.

One of the first practices that has called out as “yes, this is true, this is essential, this is good to hold and keep working with” is the practice I call surfacing. I developed it through the Hummingbird Sessions, a writing experiment at the start of the pandemic, and until now, it’s been caught in the archives of those recorded writing sessions.

Not all the reflection I’m doing now is meant to turn into books (or even public sharing in any form), but surfacing is a practice that wants to be in a friendlier, more accessible form. When I returned to it and started tinkering with the ideas in pages and spreads, it just felt right, like it had been waiting to take the shape of a book.³

Surfacing is for an underappreciated space in the creative act: the moment where you stop writing, depart from the work, leave the page, close the notebook, exit the screen. The moment where you go from writer-brain and back to the rest of your day. The book has 70 closing practices, an explanation of how I use them, and suggestions to create your own closing practices.

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Outside the US? Order here or through your local bookstore. The book is also on Amazon, if other options aren’t accessible in your area.

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A lot of attention is given to the start of practice—how we get into writing and set up the conditions for making things happen. The end of practice can be just as interesting. There’s feedback waiting in the closing that probably wasn’t with you at the beginning of a writing session. Ending well gives a writer something to carry out. It builds a kind of continuity in a practice.

The little ritual of closing also helps with a jarring part of the process: the shift from the nonlinear, deep immersion of writing and back into the linear, more shallow everyday world.

I honestly find the transition out of writing to be more difficult than the door in to writing. Getting absorbed isn’t the problem, even if the writing itself isn’t great… getting hyper-focused is usually irresistible to me, regardless of whether I’m falling headlong down the wrong rabbit hole.

The real challenge comes when I have to pull myself out. I need a tether to get out of the depths and re-enter the rest of my life. Without a practice for doing this, it feels like being slapped back into the world and just not fitting. Sometimes it feels like the writing isn’t really done with me yet, and then I’m floating between two worlds in a not-so-elegant way. (Worse is when someone interrupts me mid-dive, and I feel totally, furiously ripped out of water. Then it helps to have a practice like surfacing to recognize what’s happening and reset my rage self.)

The more I experiment with closing practices, the more it feels odd to just drop the writing and go to the next thing… especially because at the end of a writing/revision/creative session, your attention is primed. Even if it’s only a little bit more than when you came in, it’s present in a more accessible way.

At the end of writing, you’re no longer imagining the idea of a thing. The process is less abstract. You’ve done something real. And so you’re responding to an experience, not just an imagined outcome. There’s often a question or two hanging out in that space, to jot down for next time. Or a field note or observation that can clue you in to what’s coming through in the material, techniques you’re trying, etc.

What if this is actually the most interesting or useful moment to observe yourself as a writer-artist? What if the closings/exits/departures are where continuity and momentum can really take root in a practice?

That’s my working theory or curiosity, at least. This book is an attempt to experiment with it in a more concrete way, and I’m excited to find out how other folks connect with the practice and make it their own. 🌀

1. I realize from the outside all these things may not seem connected, but for me, they are. They’re tectonic. I have to work with them as parts of a whole, or at least I’m trying to. At a minimum, they’re connected by how they influence my sense of time and urgency. People who know spiral time or crip time or think in generations instead of years or work things out in dreams will know what I mean.

2. Is this the best word for it? I’m not sure. I’m trying it on.

3. Why are cohesive spreads such a thrill to tinker with? Long live the two-page spread, I’ll love you forever.