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.

Hey Lovely.

I was so stressed out before our community bonfire. I planned, I changed plans, I delegated, sometimes well and sometimes badly. I ran a survey, considered ice breakers, changed my mind a thousand times.

We’ve been feeling the ground shifting at Firefly.

It usually looks something like this:

“I really want to be here, but my head is pounding.”

…

Hi. We’re having a bonfire and you’re invited. When we decided to close our studio last fall, right away we started talking about gatherings. We kept coming back to the idea of a fire — a summer night with the crackle of wood, murmur of conversation, maybe water nearby.

As you may know, there’s a great big dream at the heart of all this.

I — all of us — want to one day open a Firefly Writing Centre, a farmhouse or big ol’ cabin somewhere in Southern Ontario, probably in or around Northumberland County.

Hi everyone — Kim here, one of the coaches at Firefly. One of my favourite things to do is talk to writers about their stories. I love getting to know and understand how different stories work, asking questions and bouncing ideas, watching writers uncover new arcs and strengthen hidden themes.

Hello one-who-longs-to-write.

I think a lot about how to get started writing. So often, it feels excruciating. If you love writing, you know that feeling of going, of being in the middle. But how do you get past the soaring wall that seems to soar up around the first couple paragraphs?