New Year, New Whatever
a writing prompt for you + January Writing Hour
Welcome to Writing in Company. A special welcome to those of you who have joined just in the last few weeks! This is a community for you, whatever your experience with writing. It’s an invitation to write about what matters—grief, gratitude, grace, and more. Each week I share some words and a writing prompt, meant to be jumping-off points. Use the prompts however you like—to journal, to draft thoughts for your own writing project, as meditation or prayer ideas, or for another creative endeavor. You can always look back through the archive for more ideas. Grab your pen and paper, and let your words loose on the page.
On New Year’s Day, I started a list of emails that came in promising me something new this year. More specifically, these are just the emails that had “New Year, New Something” in their subject line, pretty much in the order they came in:
New Year, New Oil—from my local oil change place
New Year, New Rugs—from Rugs Direct
New Year, New Destinations—from Travelpro
New Year, New Arrivals—from Williams Sonoma
New Year, New Work Wardrobe—from JJill
New Year, New Insights—from NPR Books
New Year, New Stories—from Flatiron Writers
New Year, New Arrivals, Endless Possibilities—from Levenger
New Year, Same Grief?—from What’s Your Grief
New Year, Same Beloved You—from Amelia Richardson Dress
Take what you want from this list, and know that whatever you learn about me from it, I could learn similar things from your emails! This is the current of the targeted marketing ocean in which we all swim. At some point I clicked yes, opting in to communication from these companies. (Usually in an attempt to get a discount code.) Now, they want me to purchase or read or do something new, here at the top of a new year—something that promises to make me (or my car, my house, my hobbies) better. (I was actually feeling not bad about these parts of my life, but perhaps I was mistaken…)
There was a nice flow to these emails, I thought—from the very consumer-focused oil, rug, and wardrobe offers to the more inviting offers to read, write, grieve, and finally, just be in this upcoming new year.
To the dismay of the marketing gods, I didn’t order anything. Apart from the What’s Your Grief one, I didn’t even read the emails. I just mined the titles for this post, then continued with a few more days off from writing. My New Year, New Me started with less of most everything. And I’m just fine with that.
However your new year has begun, know that you are just fine the way you are, too, without opting in or purchasing anything else. Although I’m sure glad you’ve opted in here…
a writing prompt
Take a glance at some of your recent emails. What senders or subject lines jump out at you? (And if you live with a zeroed-out email inbox, please let me know how…)
Which emails do you always read? Which do you always delete without reading?
Maybe you have more than one email account—choose the one you look at the least.
Make a short list of senders and subjects that catch your attention, then choose something on the list that is calling to you saying “Me! Pick me!” Start writing about it and see where your words take you. Write without stopping to edit, for however long you have, and follow your thoughts on the page.
If you need a way to begin, start with “The email said….”
January Writing Hour - Sat. Jan 11 | 4-5 pm Eastern
My next live writing hour on Zoom for paid subscribers is this Saturday. If you want to write in company with others, you are welcome to join in. You can upgrade your subscription for a month ($7) just to try it. A separate email to paid subscribers will go out with the link, or you can find it on my Substack tab called Writing Hours. Let’s write together.
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A few days ago, in an attempt to clean out email folders and assign junk or spam status to some that clearly were that, I made a list of all those subject lines in the 75 or so emails that appeared in my Junk folder. I've been writing about some of them for days. I first had an email account in the 1980s, an "experiment" by a local teaching hospital to offer email accounts to teachers in the local school system to see how we might find them useful. I sometimes thought of myself as a late night Emily Dickinson, sending missives lowered in a basket from my window to friends waiting outside. I loved that I could write something in the middle of the night and the receiver could read it whenever he or she wanted. I guess you can do that with a paper letter just as well, but I did like the idea of sending the mail immediately without purchasing stamps or special paper or new pens. But I've saved letters on paper that my grandmother's aunt wrote to her when my grandmother was mother to three babies (before, in a 21-year span, my grandmother had twelve children to care for); I've saved letters that my father wrote to his sisters during WWII, one recounting how he had heard that Hitler died; I've saved a letter that was written to my daughter by Queen Elizabeth's Lady in Waiting. I wish I had saved the one letter my father wrote to me when I left home for college. I wish I had saved the year of daily email correspondence with a friend after my daughter died. So many words.So much winnowing.