The art of adaptation (and the program I never thought I’d pitch).
A wide dock in a blue lake, under a clear sky. Photo credit: Christine Caswell, via Unsplash.
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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 — cozy, book-lined rooms with perfect acoustics, homemade cookies, tealights flickering and soft chairs…
Read this as you will — deep care, rampant perfectionism, teensy-tiny control issues. We had it for a while and it was magnificent, but I didn’t know it would come crashing down, and we would start the years-long process of figuring out how to deliver this work in a global pandemic.
In other words, we were about to start the grueling, messy, deeply creative and ultimately liberating work of adaptation.
Disability activists have been my best teachers during this time of change.
Living in a world designed for able bodies makes adaptation their daily art. Alice Wong writes about this beautifully in her book Year of the Tiger. She says:
Adaptation is a negotiation between the past and the present. Adaptation pushes boundaries and creates new futures.
The truth is, disabled or not, life is a constant process of adaptation, as we negotiate the gap between our expectations and our inevitable losses. Our bodies slow, the people we rely on go away, smoke fills the sky, grocery prices skyrocket.
And we adapt, when we can. We get orthotics, we grieve, we close the windows, and we take avocado off the grocery list. We create curriculum for a truly beautiful one-day workshop we never would have dreamed of before. It’ll break your heart if you let it, but, hearts aching, we can still find a path.
So yes. We’re inviting you to a one-day online workshop to recreate a summer cottage experience from home.
I’m standing in the centre of that sentence, with love and humility. It’s going to be a sweet and hilarious mix of creative prompts, long stretches of sanctuary writing time, and an open-mic-style “campfire” in the evening. It will be silly, creative, and brand new.
I still love those book-lined rooms with tealights, and I do plan to get us back there.
But I’ve learned that this work and the people who show up for it are much more resilient than I’d imagined. And, I have a new deep appreciation for the accessibility the internet has infused us with. I’m so happy to be able to offer more doorways in.
There’s a reason why I keep mentioning community in this newsletter.
Like so many things, adaptation works infinitely better when we approach it together.
That’s why Alice Wong’s friends set up a GoFundMe to help her face her current medical bills, which are over $600/day. If you have the means, you can contribute here, to help her keep writing and organizing.
My dream is for a world where we can lean into each other without hesitation when the changes we’re facing are too much to adapt to on our own.
Here’s to the life-giving work of change — yours, ours, all of it.
In it with you,
