If you had told me a few years ago that I’d be emailing you about a “Digital Cottage Day,” I’d have walked right out of the room.

I was a workshop purist, clear in my ideas about how writing gatherings should look…

I used to be so confused by other people’s long-term relationship goals.

Everyone seemed to want spontaneity in a partner — I want someone who will make me laugh, someone who will surprise me, someone who will keep me on my toes.

Hello Bright Lights!

Asifa, Kim, and Mary here—we make up the BIPOC wing of Firefly…

Lately, I’ve been thinking about cusps.

Edges. Borders. Margins. That shimmering line where the familiar and the unfamiliar meet…

Do you ever feel like you don’t read enough?

A while back I innocently started a workshop by asking participants to share a book that changed them. It was so stressful.

Hello Sweet Peeps. We’re launching a new financial aid system at Firefly this week…

I was just reading over my notes from a course I took last fall with Nahanee Creative called, “Decolonial Mindset,” and saw that on the first day, our facilitator Ta7talíya said, “We’re all together in the unknown.”

Hi out there.

You know those people who walk into a room and seem to know how to talk to everyone?

Firefly turns 18 today.

If it were a person, it would be a legal adult, maybe thinking about career options and scanning Craigslist for apartments.

Hi’ya lovely.

Have you been finding writing hard lately?

Hi Lovely. It’s been 9 months since I wrote to you with my big, messy dream of opening a Firefly Writing Retreat Centre. At the time, I was reeling with the hope and overwhelm of it all, waking up at midnight worried about can openers.

Lately I’ve been thinking about this traffic circle in Holland.

Mark Nepo writes about it in his book, More Together Than Alone.

Dear Hearts,

This season, Kim and Mary dreamed up a new speculative fiction workshop for and by BIPOC (see the P.S. below for more on this term), called New Suns.

Hey Sweet One.

I remember a workshop, years ago, where at the start, every person shared that they were exhausted. One of us sighed and said, “There aren’t enough words for tired.”

At our Firefly retreat last weekend, we had a hilarious conversation over dinner about what this would look like if we were a pyramid scheme.

“Buy 5 Hello Writer Subscriptions and re-sell them to your friends, we believe in you!”

I finished my grandmother’s memoirs just before her cancer got really bad.

We didn’t know she was sick when I started putting a tape recorder between us and asking her questions, but when the leather bound book arrived at the old family farmhouse, her hospital bed did too.

Recently I made a list of all the Firefly programs that have failed. It was spectacularly long.

In-person programs, mail-based programs, email and streamed programs, a back country canoe trip, a 3-day novel writing retreat, an art journalling class… the list went on and on and on.

Hello Traveler.

I’ve been thinking about the word “plan.”

It comes from the old French word plain, meaning “a flat and even surface.” A plain was the thing you made a plan on, a sketch, a map, a guess, a place to dream.