This house was built on failure.

Wooden flooring, with sun streaming in.

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.

Some failed because no one signed up.
Some failed because the format didn’t flow.
Some were too complicated.
Some were just a bad idea.

A few weeks ago I was explaining this to someone who was just starting offering her own workshops. She was full of hope and nerves, wanting to launch the just-right thing. When I started listing failures, she was shocked. She’s only ever seen what’s working at Firefly.

“Oh honey,” I said. “Failure is our floorboards.”

What is creativity except a long string of attempts? We get a picture in our heads of something that has never existed, and it feels fantastic. We gather up our intelligence, experience and intuition and we start to build. Sometimes it becomes a room we can stay in for ages. Sometimes it becomes floorboards that hold us more sturdily next time.

If there’s an art to failure, it’s the art of taking ourselves less seriously. When the walls just won’t stay up, it’s easy to think, “Why did I bother” or “I am a failure” or “This is all a failure” — but then we’re gone. Useless.

Of course that happens to me sometimes. But if, instead, I can pause in the sweet wreckage, grieve what didn’t work, breathe in the wonder and privilege of being about to try, and then start planning the next thing… the creative process kicks right back in.

If there’s an art to failure, it’s about letting some things grow and some things go, and not trying to figure out which is which too far in advance.

Seventeen years in, we have a lot of floorboards under our feet. And also we have a lot of living rooms and crooked hallways and quirky screened-in porches. A few turrets. I like this house.

And… despite all your uncompleted writing projects, all your half-full journals and abandoned ideas, here you are on the eleventh paragraph of a letter about writing. So we continue, together. It’s perfect.

Here’s the hard part, and the easy part: Don’t stop trying.

Failure doesn’t mean that anything is wrong. It just means we get to experience the first part again, and newly.

I’m glad you’re here.

P.S. Credit where it’s due, that photo at the top is adapted from a shot by photographer Majid Sanaye, shared with permission on Unsplash.