driving in the fog

how I found healing in writing

This is a piece describing my experience in Foster’s Season One, in anticipation of “Foster Season Two: The Art of Modern Writing.” If it piques your interest, apply!

Have you ever driven in the fog? 

Headlights dimmed, liquid-smothered daylight hazy as tapioca pudding and twice as thick. Cars rush by before you see them; the mist dulls the engine noise. You could be twenty miles over the limit or crawling at twenty miles per hour. Are we moving?

In late 2021 I was in the middle of my own fog. Work felt grueling and timeless. I spent it alone, in my tiny home office in Oregon, interviewing scientists and writing feature articles on soil physics, pedology, crop genetics, and seed saving. I was getting pretty good at cranking out thousands of words that made the latest formula for calculating the rate of water movement through a glass cylinder of dirt sound, if not exciting, at least palatable. I was writing a lot and it was well received by the readers of our print magazine.

But something was missing. 

Beset by ennui fit for the protagonist of a Brontë novel, I couldn’t figure out what was off. I mirthlessly combed the pre-prints of the academic journals I covered, looking for the story that would make me feel better. The story that would make me feel like a writer.

So imagine my eagerness when I opened that email from Foster, inviting me to join Season One. The twinge—is it a mistake? They’re inviting me? Then the excitement—it’s not!

Finally something to spice things up. A quick fix!

Season One was a three-month journey, each month tackling a topic: reflection, reckoning, renewal. And—spoilers—it wasn’t a quick fix. It didn’t hack my writing productivity or bestow me with the tools to effortlessly, magically produce a bestseller. But it did show me what I was missing. 

“Emotions point us toward the things that matter,” facilitator Jessica Goldberg said in our first workshop. “They help us understand what we should be paying attention to. The things that inspire passion, sadness, and anger in you will inspire them in someone else, so make them feel.”

Where was the feeling in my writing? 

The magazine stories churning from my fingertips felt impersonal and sterile. They were more like popping puzzle pieces in predestined places than creating new work. The articles were a means of fitting words into columns, defining scientific terms without repeating myself too much, avoiding acronyms and parsing complicated relationships between controls and variables, environment and management. 

But where was my passion?

During the season we were asked to share drafts that expressed “our truth”--something that we needed to say. Sharing drafts from my day job didn’t seem relevant. But there was another kind of writing happening in the background--one that, before Season One, I hardly considered “writing.” 

I’ve kept a journal since I was a child. It’s the one place I can go to process my emotions and sort through my own opinions. When I read through my journal, even from years ago, I can see the conflict and themes that I’ve been healing, even subconsciously, in the background of my daily life. 

While my “real” writing was cold and polished, my journal felt like a messy, sticky, sordid, shining compost bin of feeling. I was processing my Victorian-era levels of ennui in the same way the Brontë sisters would have: by writing as a means of expressing my emotions, incessantly and openly, on the pages of my notebook.

For three months I wrestled the emotions and ideas that my thoughts dredged up. I eventually discovered the hole in my heart, in my writing practice, that my profession would never fill. 

I discovered that there’s a difference for me between writing for the sake of pure communication and writing as a means of processing emotion and healing. They create a Venn diagram, and skills from both types are essential for good storytelling. 

Let's call them “service” and “catharsis.” 

Writing as service is storytelling for the sake of others. It’s finding out that something important is going untold, then untangling threads with your weaver’s fingers and laying them out again; wefting, warping until the image is clear. 

In my case, it’s carving apart long, tedious, eye-wateringly boring scientific articles about the performance of a field sowed with a perennial clover and corn, then telling the bigger story about a researcher’s lifetime of work. It’s finding the ways that one person influenced another, nudging them forward, making small discoveries that build into something bigger. It’s stacking the building blocks for inspiring creativity and sharing science between programs, highlighting the quiet work that takes place in a laboratory or a field so that someone’s life’s work does not go unsung. 

It can feel grueling, impersonal, and cold when things are slow. But it’s worthwhile. 

And it’s not everything. 

The other side of that coin is catharsis. How can writing release me, express the things I’m afraid to say out loud? How can it serve as a means for me to unpack, debrief, untangle the mussed up threads of my own life’s story?

Writing as catharsis means taking the painful, emotional, confusing stories rattling around in my head and finding ways to make sense of them. It means finding joy in setting my weaver’s fingers on the tangled threads of my own life. It was what I had been missing in my writing practice. Writing as a service is important, but it’s not everything. 

And the overlap! Ah, that glorious sliver, where catharsis and service meet. That overlap creates a golden-hour space where personal stories become the vehicles for messages about life, love, loss, dreams, struggles. It’s the freedom to take what could be as vain and self-indulgent as the scribblings of a coddled pre-teen in her puffy pink diary and turn them into a means for connection. Because what is writing without connection? 

I combed through my notes from Season One for this essay, and over and over I found the seeds lying there, the seeds for starting a newsletter of my own. 

“You keep writing about starting a newsletter. Do it! You keep writing about your fear, your hunger—feed it! Grow! You can create something new…… Pop the air bubbles, hear them crackle. You are alive and the air is fine.” 

Or another workshop, in which I described what I wanted it to feel like for my readers, if I did speak my truth and start creating newsletter articles of my own:

“This is our pile of leaves, shed from the tree—dry, crackling debris, fallen and crunching underfoot, the fodder for new life, new limbs, new growth. Stay here with me and we’ll look life’s refuse in the eye and say, no, you are a hidden treasure not yet unearthed.”

What I had been missing was writing to understand my own journey on this foggy road. And I needed the permission—the encouragement, the condolence and company—of travelers on the same journey to help me shape my story. I found those fellow travelers in other Season One participants. 

Season One is the reason I found a spark for writing again. It boosted my confidence when I was shattered. It gave me the inspiration and momentum to start writing the watering can, this very newsletter. It gave me a beautiful network of fellow writers to reach out to when it feels like too much to handle on my own. It was a beam of sunlight pouring through the fog.

Looking forward to Season Two, I’m filled with more than excitement. I know it will be harrowing to look unabashedly at my insecurities and worries about writing. 

But I know that the other writers on the same path will be there to catch me, to help carry the burden. We will travel through this fog, creating patches of clear blue sky for each other. And we’ll discover that, yes, we are moving! We’re moving forward, becoming better writers, together.

As always, the writers and editors from Foster have made my writing shine in ways I could not have imagined two years ago. Chris Angelis, Russell Smith, and Jude Klinger provided invaluable feedback on this piece—thank you all!