Natalie Audelo

I’ve been teaching creative writing for many years. And teaching writing is a weird thing, because it’s not just about helping students master a subject. It’s really about helping them discover what stories they’re meant to tell, how best to tell those stories, and how to overcome the inhibitions that inevitably arise when we seize the mantle of... See more

I don’t have any answers because I don’t think there are any. But I’m fond of Margaret Wheatley’s framing of creating “islands of sanity,” which a kind reader reminded me of in the lovely comments of my last post. These islands are crucially not places of retreat, but rather of contribution — hyperlocal, small in scale, yet deeply meaningful. To... See more

I don’t think that humans can really move forward into whatever’s coming for us next without facing what we’ve done to our home and each other. Such a reckoning includes the beauty, joy, and community found in crisis, as well as the pain. The sociologist Donna Haraway calls this “staying with the trouble.”

The Overton window is the range of subjects and arguments politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.[1] It is also known as the window of discourse .[2] The key to the concept is that the window changes over time; it can shift, or shrink or expand.[3] It exemplifies "the slow evolution of societal values and norms"

The thing that no one ever tells you about your calling is that it’s boring. Oh, everything is interesting if you’re interested… shut up. Yes, it will be exhilarating and fun and fluid and and natural and meaningful. It will also be tedious. It will hurt. You will encounter obstacle after obstacle until you feel like you’re in a video game with... See more

All of everything in us comes from somewhere else. And we get to take those elements, and I think I use the word in the book, re-present. We have this information, and we get it, and we get to mix it up and reform it and re-present it back to the world. And sometimes we re-present it back to the world in a way that no one’s seen it before. And

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Why were we taught that to be worthy of our own love we have to be exceptional?