I’m Lori-Lyn
I think about New York in the nineties, me in my twenties, strings of colored lights in liquor store windows, the dusty velvet sofa that furnished my Brooklyn living room, standing on a crowded subway platform squinting to see energy.
I catch these glimpses of the invisible lining within the visible world. I brush my fingers across it. That is the feeling I write into.
I write a Substack about the interior life, the currents that move beneath the surface of everyday experiences, and explore what it means to be human. That’s where I share my spiritual experiences and philosophies, my memories, my opinions, and advice for left-of-center creatives.
I'm a writer and an artist with an MFA in fiction writing and a background in studio art.
I've always been more interested in following my inner guidance than the expectations of the dominant culture. Maybe that describes you, too.
What you’ll find here:
Essays and reflections on Creative Living Diaries.
A seasonal writer’s circle in The Constellation Room (coming soon.)
eBooks and downloads for further exploration
A FEW QUICK FACTS
I live in a slightly haunted house with my partner.
We percolate our coffee.
Born in 1969. Sun and moon in Aquarius, Capricorn rising.
Aunt to my favorite people.
Bowie expert.
Kentucky by birth. New York by heart. California dreams.
Why I’m Building the Constellation Room
My friend said, “you’re a creativity doula…”
It was the nineties and I was in my twenties, living in Brooklyn, and feeling like a woman who had somehow misplaced herself.
One afternoon, walking up Seventh Avenue, I saw a flier on a telephone pole. In those days, we made announcements to one another on sheets of paper stapled over paper. Most of them I never would have noticed. But this one seemed to glow. I was drawn to it like an exhausted moth. It was advertising a writing group.
I hate making phone calls, but I tore off the little tab with the phone number and stuck it in my bag. Later, I used the landline phone in my kitchen and called.
I ended up going to that group once a week for about six weeks. I walked from Park Slope to Carroll Gardens, past Mary on the halfshell, and entered another world. The woman who led the group was kind and exacting in the way that only someone who takes writing seriously can be. Everyone in that room was a serious writer. I found my voice there.
Near the end of our time together, another writer in the group told me I should apply to graduate school. I hadn't considered that, but once it was spoken to me, I realized how passionately I craved it. I applied to the only program I wanted and got in. I spent two of the best years of my academic life earning my MFA. My thesis was a novel, which I didn’t publish, but I graduated as a different person. I think of that Brooklyn writers group as my true turning point, the thing that put me on the path I'm still walking.
The woman who ran that group had one rule for feedback that I have carried with me ever since: before you're allowed to tell someone what isn't working in their piece, you have to first tell them what is working. What you loved. What landed. Only then, if you have questions or suggestions, do you offer them. The idea was simple. You can’t point at what's broken in someone's work if you don’t understand what's alive in it.
That's the atmosphere I'm building with The Constellation Room. Not a critique group. Not a class. A place where we write together in good faith, where the page gets to matter again, and where the way we talk to each other about our work is as considered as the work itself.
A friend recently called me a creativity doula and I thought, Yes! That’s exactly what I’m doing here.