January 2026: Welcome to the Playground

Howdy, friends—

I’m just back home from VCFA’s Winter residency. It was a whirlwind of learning and playing and teaching. Not always separate and distinct actions. Rarely, in fact. Now that I’m home, I’m pleasantly wrung out and trying to get my feet back under me again. Back to our regularly scheduled programming, etc etc.

While I was out, it was New Year’s Day. For the last few years, I’ve picked out a word to define the year. I have decided that this year, 2026, is the Year of the Scalpel. This is both literal and metaphorical. I have surgeries on the cards, and rehabilitation and rebuilding will follow. Revisions for three different books to work on. It will be a year of patience and sculpting. Making the visions in my head more true, sliver by carved sliver.

Here’s to the knife.

At residency, I taught a workshop about using TTRPGs to write fiction. I decided to do a side-by-side comparison for my students, so I’ve shared that here on the blog as well. It’s the first real jump to using the paid tier function of this site, so if you’d like to see the behind the scenes work I did to turn a few rounds of Ironsworn into the first chapter of Codename: Monster Slayer, you can upgrade your sub here:

You’ll get to see the notebook work and an early peek at the first chapter (a first draft, anyway).

As always, I appreciate your support, paid or unpaid. But some of you have started up subscriptions and I thought it would be nice to offer some bonuses as I can. I’m especially especially grateful this year, as my crystal ball tells me it will be an expensive one.

The week that I was in the States was a turbulent one, to say the least. People from the UK were texting to ask if I was alright (yes), if things were ‘okay there’ (no), what are you going to do (i don’t know). And people in the States were asking if I was glad to be getting out (yes) (no) (i don’t know).

It was strange to be among all of these artists talking about play while our sitting president captured a sovereign nation’s leadership. Strange to talk about poems and stories and queer communities when the US gestapo is shooting women in the face for the crime of witnessing their cruelty.

And yet, it felt good to be among like-minded folks. People who believe, or perhaps could be made to believe that poetry and stories lead to action. A brief week of considering, planning, strategizing before we all go back out into our corners of the world, galvanized and bolstered by the community we built in these ten days.

In particular, I enjoyed the poet David Wojahn’s lecture, called “The Laureates of the Lie” about the relationship between poetry and politics. (If you have an AWP membership, you can read the essay.) I was particularly intrigued by the links he pointed out how propagandists are often failed poets. Joseph Goebbels was a failed novelist. In the lecture, he sets out to explore ways the creative arts can meet the totalitarian moment in “a way that is meaningful rather than flaccid and pitiful.” That, in particular, arrested me, because so often I do feel like our efforts to say ‘poetry is resistance’ are rather flaccid and ineffectual, more an excuse to keep our hands clean and our bodies safe and comfortable.

And so I leave you with some of the points David made, things that the creative arts can do that can make up at least part of our struggle against the waves of fascism on all of our shores (I’m back in the UK, but the tide is higher than my ankles here, if you get my drift). He calls them “worst case survival instructions.”

Worst Case Survival Instructions

1. Lament. Mourn your defeats, so that you may recover from them. The mourning is a reminder of the dignity of our struggle. A beautiful poem he shares is Paul Celan’s “Death Fugue.”
2. Raise consciousness and inspire to action those who are already on side with your cause. Tactical. Strategic. He uses two poems from Shane McCrae as examples: “President Visits the Storm” and “Panopticon”
3. Speak to an audience beyond ourselves. Find a way to cut through the obfuscating discourse and speak to someone who is different from us in clear terms—or at least, terms we can all understand viscerally. He gives us “Some Like Poetry” by Wisława Szymborska.
4. Imagine paradise. “Poetic creation remains an act of spiritual freedom.” (Mircea Eliade) A glimpse at a moment that seems so far away, impossible, herculean to achieve or even dwell in for just a little while. We must look anyway. We must imagine anyway.

I hope these give you something to think on, and then, to act upon, whatever your art is. I don’t doubt that art can do meaningful work, or else why would they be so steady taking it from us, cutting it out of schools and forcing artists to surrender to AI at every turn? So. Let us continue the good work of our hands and hearts.

Stay sharp,

C. L.