Welcome to The Word Cave!

This is where you’ll find my series of essays on visual art and writing, Museum Pages, as well as occasional What I’m Reading dispatches, short essays on the writing life, and we’ll see what else. This is also the best place to find out about my upcoming writing classes and freelance editorial availability.

The title of this newsletter comes from a the opening line of a Paul Celan poem: “Line the word-caves/ with panther skins”

My father made a series of woodcuts inspired by this line, and one of them hangs in my home office, which, on the best days—the days when I shut myself away and feel completely enveloped by writing—I think of as my word cave.

The idea of a word cave evokes the feeling of retreating into the work, going deep within your own mind to dig out the words you need. And the imagery of lining the word cave reminds me of the tending and preparation necessary for such deep work. Going to a museum feels like lining the word cave, reading a good book feels like lining the word cave. All the things that mentally and emotionally nourish so we have a well to draw from when we sit down to write (or… mineral deposits I guess, if we’re sticking with the cave metaphor).

So the name of this newsletter is an attempt to hold onto that feeling—to remind myself to let this project be fun and generative, to spring from the word cave. To answer the question: What if rather than pre-rejecting ideas that excite me because I don’t know where to publish them… I just stayed in my word cave and wrote what I wanted to write, and put it somewhere where people could read it?