A Winter Pause to Write

Upcoming changes — another threshold

They say that authors often write the books they wish to read. So it was for me, in both Writing to Wake the Soul and Trusting Change. And then, with this newsletter, Threshold Times, it was a community I wished to have, shared with others living through change with curiosity and intention.

Now, with appreciation of the two years during which this community has continually grown, I find myself on another threshold as I turn my attention more fully to a novel I have been working on for a very long time. At the end of 2024, I’ll be stepping back from regular posting on Threshold Times and from presenting, online and in person. I will also no longer be offering retreats.

During this pause, I will be removing the paywall on a number of reflections in the Threshold Times archive as a supplement to the material in Trusting Change, hoping to especially serve new subscribers who have recently arrived here.

Going forward, I don’t yet know exactly what this will look like. How long the pause will be. How often during that time I will post a periodic reflection or brief update for those of you who stay on the subscriber list (as I hope you will). I’m taking my own advice and pausing from what is familiar to make room for the uncertainties of something new. Maybe it will be a pause that serves your needs, too. In Trusting Change, I wrote:

“Pausing in the between is about stopping.… Braking the forward momentum that preceded our arrival on the threshold and projected us in a particular direction. It is caesura in prosody, fermata in melody, lacuna in botany, hiatus in history. Each a stoppage that is not final but fertile, an opening toward something new, a participation in the mysteries of what might yet be but is not now known.”

One thing I do know, is that I will miss you, my regular partners in processing the enormous changes now unfolding in our shared world. In the slow and solitary work of writing a book, it can be hard to remember that literary labor is a relational endeavor and one that is not isolated from the thresholds of our day. And yet, I know both are true.

“Hard times are coming,” Ursula K. LeGuin said with prescience ten years ago, “when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of Being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom . . . – the realists of a larger reality.”

“Our job [as writers] is to invent a different ending than the sorry one we were given.”
Barbara Kingsolver

Or as Barbara Kingsolver put it at the National Book Awards just last month, “Our job [as writers] is to remember what there is to love, the people and places that need us to bring them into the room, into the heart of the unacquainted stranger. Our job is to invent a different ending than the sorry one we were given.”

In the historical novel I’m now writing, I hope to bring some forgotten people and places into the hearts of future readers. It revisits a time that, like our own, was also polarized, fraught with uncertainty and fear, and charged with violence. I write it not to escape our time, but to imagine alternative endings to the story we are living now.

Isn’t this what we’ve been doing here together, writers and nonwriters alike? Imagining and creating new chapters and new endings in the story our lives are telling. Which is what makes it possible to trust change. As you dwell on your own thresholds in the coming year, I hope you’ll continue to find encouragement in the pages of Trusting Change and in the Threshold Times archive. In the coming days, I’ll send another email with links to a few other resources, too.

On my threshold, as I turn toward my screen and keyboard, I will be grateful for your part in the “cloud of witnesses” that reminds me I am not alone. That, in fact, none of us are. And just as I plan to post a few updates to you now and then during this pause, I will welcome any periodic messages you wish to send my way.

Meanwhile, take good care, friends. Keep hope and faith alive.

With gratitude and love,

Karen

The “presenting corner” of my garret office, now empty as I turn toward my writing desk.