Writing Wild

What emerges when we let things flow...

Photo by Prince David on Unsplash

“Are you a Wednesday class regular?” a woman asked me as she unfurled her yoga mat next to mine.

“No. This is my first time in this studio,” I answered, coming out of my pre-yoga class reverie.

“Welcome. This is a special place,” she said. “My name is Jill.”

“I’m Kristine,” I said.

It was the beginning of July 2024, and I was maybe a week into my first month in Pittsburgh. I knew nobody. One of the first items on my To-Do List was to find a Yoga Home for my short stay in The Steel City. My experience in Gaylord, MI, taught me that wonderful things flow from a yoga studio that is the right fit, so it seemed like a good starting point.

As soon as I walked into 1.1 Yoga, I felt at home. The plants, the energy, the conversation, the stuff on the walls, the laughter and smiles—this seemed to be the place for me. It was the second yoga studio I attended in Pittsburgh, and the difference in how I felt was huge. I paid attention.

That Wednesday class was amazing, cementing 1.1 Yoga as my Pittsburgh Yoga Home. After class, Jill told me that she and some other yogis usually meet for coffee after Friday’s class and asked if I would like to join them. This offer fit squarely into the "Say Yes to Things That Won’t Endanger My Life" criteria I had set for myself, so I said YES.

Jill, who has since left Pittsburgh for London, leads Wild Writing groups, a practice she learned from Laurie Wagner. When she invited me to join one of these groups, I had to say YES based on my decision-making framework. Despite what the title suggests, bodily harm wasn’t imminent.

I started my third round of Wild Writing with Jill on Wednesday, 1/15/25. Each group of writers is different, a constellation as Jill calls it, and she offers poetry readings as a jumping-off place for our minds, hearts, and creativity. Then, we write wild and free, silencing the critics and voices and fears that tell us not to write that or go there. The voices of grade school grammar teachers are mute. We let it all hang out. One thing everyone has in common—the courage to show up as they are and share their hearts through their words.

Our first prompt on Wednesday was to write Ten Things I Want You to Know About Me. What follows are the stream-of-consciousness words that came out of me in the ten minutes we had to write wildly. It is pretty much in its original form.

***

Ten Things I Want You to Know About Me:

The first is that I’m afraid to stand still right now. As a woman who has craved stability her whole life, has wanted deep roots, and to be able to answer the question, “Where are you from?” succinctly, this is odd to be resisting stillness.

Two—I slept in 61 distinct beds in 2024—some more than once—all by myself. Some of those beds were surrounded by strangers and friends and fellow peregrinos.

Three—The women in my life held me up when I was falling—they wove a net of love and kindness and non-judgment that caught me before I splatted to the ground.

Four—I can no longer plan very far into the future. It doesn’t make sense to me. Take the right next step. That is all I can do.

Five—I will be 58 on Saturday, and although this age looks nothing like I thought it would, I am more grateful to be alive than I ever have in my life.

Six—I want to be in love again and to be loved. I hope that is on my Bingo card.

Seven—If I don’t move my body, my mind goes off track, spins, and isn’t kind or helpful to me. Moving my body is a part of who I am.

Eight—One of my greatest joys is to share a meal with my children and other people I love and care about.

Nine—I try to laugh every day. Sometimes, I hate to admit, it is when I come across a meme of someone falling, and I share it with my sister and daughter.

Ten—I liked this exercise more than I thought I would.

***

I wanted to share this not because it is a good piece of writing but because it is honest. True. Unedited. Surprising. Wild. It is a little window into me that I couldn’t have plotted, planned, or predicted to come through my pen onto the page. That is why I love it.

When I lived on Cape Cod in the late 1990s to 2002, I was part of a small group of women who embarked on a writing experiment. Every Thursday night, four of us, and then three, met around each other’s dining room tables and wrote, a box of tissues and snacks within arm’s reach. We modeled our meetings around Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, where anything went, sharing our work was optional, and feedback was always constructive and positive. Over the years, we rarely missed a Thursday. Two of us gave birth during that time, and we wrote while cradling infants. I was back in the writing circle with my daughter Maggie a week after her birth. We wrote wild, we revealed truth, and we grew to know each other and ourselves in a way stripped of normal conventions. It didn’t matter that we weren’t “writers.” The writing was a vehicle—a means to get where we needed to go, especially if we didn’t have a road map to get there.

I have been trying to recapture that lightning in a bottle for over twenty years.

Although we are now gathering through Zoom rather than in each other’s homes, writing from different states and continents, the magic exists. Jill brewed up the kind of enchantment that allowed us to dig deep and let things flow and then share them with strangers who somehow felt safe and receptive to each other’s hearts. I don’t know how it happened; I just know I want more of it going forward.