Creativity is not a to do list. Creativity is a wild god.

On writing, motherhood, negligence, and creativity

There is so much happening to me right now and it is happening in writing. Writing doesn’t just happen at the keyboard or with the pen. Writing is another process all together that begins with an opening, a willingness to be opened. Writing happens like a web, the way neurons stretch and reach out to each other like mycelium reach for tree roots. All the seemingly irrelevant information is a doorway into what I am trying to say, what is trying to be said through me. It is an active process, a process of seeking and of turning a stone in my hand to look at it from every possible angle, but it is equally a process of surrendering, of completely letting go of what I think the answer might be.

Yesterday when I was supposed to be answering emails and filling orders and cleaning the house, I selected a zine off my shelf that I wrote when I was 24 years old and read it cover to cover. I have been thinking about responsibility, about care, about negligence, about the way I still struggle with basic maintenance tasks and how much harder all of this will become when I become a mother. I was wrestling with freedom and desire and tasks that must be done and the shame of not doing them. I was wondering about how to be the kind of person I am (a writer, a wise woman on the edge of the woods), and still be in this world responsibly, still show up to it all responsibly. I had no idea that the words of my drunk 24 year old self had anything to do with what I’m grappling with at 38. I read the zine from cover to cover and found a power inside of myself I had forgotten about. A steady, brazen, fierce power that bows to no illegitimate authority and is connected to something enormous and very old.

There is so much happening to me right now and it is happening through writing. And somehow this is connected to motherhood, because I am a writer who wants to be a mother and I am a daughter to a mother who is a writer but who refuses to tell the truth in her work or in her life. A former friend who attempted to control me and, when I refused her attempts at control, set off to dehumanize me, recently decided to weaponize my crazy alcoholic past to make me seem like a monster devoid of empathy. This is what got me thinking about my 24 year old self, wondering about her. For so many years I lived in fear of people finding out what I was like between the ages of 17 and 24, because I knew I would be cancelled and dehumanized for it. I knew there is no empathy available for scapegoats, for the incomprehensible and sometimes terrifying behaviour of incest survivors. It took me years to stop turning my back on the crazy girl I was and now she is a part of me. But it’s been a minute since I really sat with her and listened to her speak. She has so much to teach me.

The struggle of motherhood in the context and era in which I live is the struggle to balance the intensive attachment needs of the child and the need of the mother to maintain her sovereign personhood. In species-typical contexts where 30 adults and older children share in the care of the child, where the child is loved collectively, this is not a struggle. The mother can be herself and have time and space that is hers without the child being neglected. In the alienation of the nuclear family and late stage capitalism, combined with patriarchy, this is extremely difficult. Many feminists have dealt with this dilemma by simply neglecting their children and insisting that they shouldn’t feel bad about it because everyone else is also neglecting their children. The whole world is neglecting the children and the men don’t feel bad about it so why should the women? The standards that mothers face, especially with the cultural shift away from chronic neglect, are beyond overwhelming, and demand that the mother leave behind her personhood so that the child may be loved.

I picked up a book about motherhood sitting on my desk, a book considered one of the best contemporary books on motherhood, that attempts to balance or at least acknowledge this dilemma that mothers face between personhood and meeting the attachment needs of her child. This book is on my to read list and I opened it and flipped through it. Suddenly I had a feeling and I went to the index and looked up my mother’s name. She was listed four or five times. I went to the relevant pages and read my mother being quoted on the impossible standards that women are expected to live up to, on how the “new trend” of “intensive” (read: attachment) parenting puts too much pressure on women and does not allow them the possibility of having a career. My mother isn’t wrong in her assertion that one woman cannot do the work originally shared by 30 adults. My mother isn’t wrong in her longing for her work, which in my mother’s case is her writing — like me. But she isn’t honest that her solution to this was neglect. That when the pieces didn’t add up they just didn’t add up, and the one who carried the burden of that reality was the child, was me.

There is so much happening to me right now and it is happening in writing. While I try to force myself to become better at acts of care that were never taught or modelled to me, while I try to uproot my own negligence by force because I have no idea how else to do it, something else is happening that only the writer I am can see. The web of writing, the little tendrils of thought, the synchronicity of my ex friend attacking me by invoking my younger self causing me to return to my younger self and drink of her wisdom. I suddenly feel a surge of power to get published, a sudden will to find an agent, a sudden confidence that I can no longer avoid claiming my legitimacy and finding the institutional backing that my writing both deserves and needs. I am seeking an agent, working on two manuscripts, looking to place a previously self published book with a press, writing a new zine. I am talking to people about my writing, networking, being honest about the strange reality of being an underground writer trying to break into the mainstream. I am claiming my successful career as a writer and daring to expand it right as I stand at the edge of motherhood.

There is a part of me that wants to break down sobbing when I see my mother’s words offered up as a part of the solution to the impossible dilemma faced by the many contemporary mothers who do not have a collective to share the work of mothering with. There’s this terror in me that having a child will mean giving up myself, this self I have worked so extremely hard to recover from the massive amount of trauma that I have lived. But for me, the answer cannot be neglect of the child and an insistence that I should not feel bad about it. The answer has to be something else. And I know it won’t be easy. As I have been struggling to decrease my negligence around basic maintenance tasks like cleaning my bathroom and failing to do so, I have been approaching this work like an unloved child unconnected to the gods. When I read my 24 year old self’s writing I felt something open in me, something wild. Something only the writer I am can know, something ancient.

I have written about my creative practice that creativity is not a to do list, creativity is a wild god. I do not treat writing like a to do list. I do not approach writing above ground. I know what writing is something else, something old, something profoundly and primarily spiritual. I know how to approach writing from this place of both action and surrender, humility and raw power. I think the answer might be to start treating everything else this way too. I think the reason I can’t clean my bathroom is because I am treating acts of care like a to do list instead of a relationship with a wild god. But acts of care are acts of creativity, they are the life force expressing itself in the same way it does in my writing. I think there is a way to treat motherhood this way too, and to actively seek an answer to the impossible dilemma that neither requires the neglect of my child nor the denial of my personhood. I have had to do many impossible and difficult things in my life already. I have had to walk many paths without a map, without mentors, without teachers, and I have found my way, and I have found mentorship in unusual places, in books, in the long conversations of literature, in ancestors, in plants, in former and future versions of myself, in the gods, and in the writing. The alienation of my context is a terrifying force, but I am connected to something much older than that.

There is so much happening to me right now and it is happening in writing. Rather than writing as the thing I’m so scared of losing or the thing I choose over my child (as my mother did), writing is a key, a door, another way to approach the problem that allows me access to wisdom much greater and older than my own. I am following the web of writing, the unfolding synchronicities, the directions which aren’t detours but are in fact various ways at arriving where it is I need to go. Even an attack meant to dehumanize me was alchemized into medicine I desperately needed through the embodied practice of writing. I trust this. I’ve always known this. And now I will trust writing again and again and even more as I head toward the unknown landscapes that lie before me. The writing isn’t something else. The writing is everything.

---

Announcements

I reached ten thousand total subscribers to this substack! Thank you all for being here!

I have decided to reprint limited runs of some of my old zines, as an homage to my various selves that brought me here. Licking Stars Off Ceilings is a zine I used to write in my late teens and early 20s, in another lifetime. I was 24 when I wrote this issue and it has been out of print for 13 years. It is gorgeous poetic writing about sexuality, spirituality, violence, trauma, power, and madness. It pulsates with life. If you guys think I'm a lot now -- wait till you meet 24 year old Clementine, she's fucking crazy. I love her so much. You can get the zine here.

There’s a new episode of Fucking Cancelled: The Theology of Exile with Juno Zavitz. If God’s law is to love one another radically, then the various forms of exile and dehumanization practised by human beings through the ages may constitute a kind of ‘cultural sin’, a deviation we keep coming back to over and over as a species because it feels good. Not only might this practice lead us further from love, and not only might it not even work to give us justice, but it might also inflict a moral injury upon all of us. In Episode 75 we’re joined by Juno Zavitz, student of divinity, former social worker, and owner of Aporrai Counselling, to discuss the theology of exile — as well as the epidemic of wreckerism sweeping through the nonprofit world.

I updated the Body of Work section of this website. It’s for paying subscribers and includes access to digital versions of all my zines, including many out of print zines you can’t get anywhere else, several recorded workshops and three recorded live events, as well as a bunch of translations of my work. It’s a huge archive and you can access it here. I also updated my giant and ever-expanding bibliography.

I am doing another event at Breitenbush Hot Springs in March 2025 called Writing is a Lightning Strike. Last year’s workshop was incredible and I am even more excited for this one because it is about writing. You can register here. There are only a few spots left!

This workshop is an invitation to take yourself seriously as a writer, regardless of how much experience you have with writing or publishing. If you feel the call to write, this workshop will help you answer that call. If you already have a writing practice, this workshop will help you deepen it. Hosted at Breitenbush Hot Springs, you will have the opportunity to soak, relax, and recharge between sessions. As we will discuss in the workshop, your writing practice continues to happen underground in uninterrupted moments such as these.

The energy of forcing, proving, and seeking legitimacy is not the energy that will help you crack open your writing practice. This workshop will go against a lot of conventional advice to simply and consistently show up to the page and will instead highlight how much of the writing happens when we are not at the page. Rigorously anti-shame and rooted in the wisdom of the body and the depths of the unconscious, this workshop will create the conditions you need to approach your writing with curiosity rather than with demands.

Drawing on the work of various underground and outsider writers, as well as our own wild intuition, we will read, write, move, breathe, share, and talk about our writing. Clementine, a longtime independent writer, will share her knowledge and wisdom on how to trust your process and your voice.

---

I am a writer, zinester, and literary punk based in Montreal, Canada. I have been making zines since the year 2000 and have probably made more than 100,000 hand stapled zines over the course of my career. My best selling zine, Love Without Emergency, has sold more than 11,000 copies, and I have many other zines besides that. I write essays, literary nonfiction, and philosophy, and am known for my unflinching approach to deep and difficult topics, as well as my accessible, down to earth use of language. I am known for my work on many topics including surviving incest and other forms of trauma, trauma informed polyamory, bisexual women’s sexuality, opposing cancel culture on the left, and finding compassionate, non-punitive approaches to ending the cycle of violence. I have a podcast with my partner Jay Lesoleil called Fucking Cancelled where we develop our thinking on how to build a robust, effective left that doesn’t eat itself alive, and where we’ve had the pleasure of interviewing many important thinkers and writers. I have published six books over the course of my career, Rupture, The Size of a Bird, You Can’t Own the Fucking Stars, Trauma Magic, Fucking Magic, and Sexting. I sometimes teach workshops on various topics. This substack is a huge archive of my writing, a place where I am regularly and consistently producing new writing, and one of the main ways I support myself as an independent, underground writer. Thank you for being here. As well as the archive, make sure you explore my bibliography, my body of work, and the list of interviews I’ve done. Thank you for your support of my work.

I am looking for a literary agent and publishers who are excited about unconventional, underground writing. If this is you, or you have any leads, please get in touch.

---

---