Holding Space (for your work)—I started a Patreon!

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(cross-posted from my Substack)

It’s that time of year again! Feeling sad/SAD about the scarcity of daylight and bemoaning that night begins at 4:30 pm! (Cue “It’s the Most Wonderful Time…”)

I know I’m not alone in this, at this moment or historically, given how many light-themed festivals and holidays coexist in the last quarter of the year—Diwali, Hanukkah, and Saint Lucia’s Day (yes, I’m thinking about American Girl dolls) among them. I picture my ancestors checking their winter stores of canned and salted food, and facing down fifteen hours of darkness for weeks at a time, and I understand the holy importance of sparkle lights and indulgent little sweets.

Two years ago, I visited Germany and had the Christmas market—Weihnachtsmarkt—experience, eating part of a whole salmon smoked on a log in front of me, riding a Ferris wheel, and drinking tiny mug after tiny mug of gluhwein. The Weihnachtsmarkt is not a one-night thing, but a gathering space set up for weeks. Beyond offering gifts and knickknacks for sale, the temporary space feels like a cozy outdoor bar. On a list of recommended markets to try, someone commented something to the effect of: “It’s the terrible dark cold time of year again—we need these artificial lights and blazing fireplaces and hot wine so badly!” I liked that phrasing, that it’s not pointless carousing but a deep human NEED for cheer, more necessary when the atmosphere is bleak.


I want to know: What sources of light are sustaining you this autumn-into-winter?

One bright spot for me this fall was the first few minutes of each Book Club Workshop class, checking in human to human as each person signed in, and talking about our in-progress projects.

I think our lives and our creative work exist in symbiosis: feeding one part feeds the other. It’s easy to think that the creative part is not important, or that it can be the last priority—that we’ll get around to it later. But my life feels better, lighter, less unwieldy when I tend to this part of me. It’s that cheer-in-winter feeling: necessary. If you’re a person with the urge to create, you probably need to tend this flame, too, to feel fully alive.

That’s why I’ve created a virtual gathering space for us.

  • Are you a creative with great ideas but can’t seem to make time to work on them?

  • Are you a recovering people-pleaser who can keep appointments with other people but not with yourself?

  • Are you neurospicy in a way that makes a fixed routine (even for things you want to do) feel like a burden?

  • Does body doubling help you get shit done?

Then I made this for you!

Holding Space (for your work)

is a group for getting around to it now and it looks like this:

  • I hold the space and you show up, in whichever configuration of the schedule works for you. “Rise & grind” is not how my energy or creativity works, and is not the only way to complete a project. Pick one of the morning sessions weekly? Cool. Pick just the final half hour of both evening sessions? Also cool. Put Holding Space (for your work) on your calendar as a promise to yourself, and an excuse that protects your time: “I already have plans then.”

  • Each gathering is divided into pomodoro sessions: 25 minutes of working followed by 5-minute breaks. Gatherings will also include creative prompts, meant to be helpful if you don’t already have a project underway :)

  • Every week, I’ll pull cards for a Creative Work Forecast, a way of thinking about and through our projects and our relationship to creating that week.

  • I’ll post accountability and celebration threads each new moon and full moon, where anyone who wants to can share your creative goals and wins.

  • A monthly Q&A post will answer questions about writing, editing, publishing, staying motivated/curious, and anything else you might want to know about following creative rhythms and sharing work with an audience.

  • We’ll have a monthly visit from a special guest—an author, agent, editor, or other creative (filmmaker, visual artist)—on Zoom, with a recording for subscribers who can’t make it.

I’m soft-launching the group this month! You can sign up here. I’m not scheduling a guest this first month, so anyone who signs up in December will receive a discount for your first month as a thank you.

(Note that, because of some weird new Apple Store rules, subscriptions made through the Patreon app cost more than subscriptions made through your browser, so sign up through your browser!)

One publication I neglected to mention in my last newsletter was this: Northwestern University Press invited me to do a tarot reading for their fall season. You can read it here.

That’s all from me for now as I wrap up the year! I’m looking ahead to February, when Cosmic Tantrum will be out. Media friends, if you are interested in a review copy, let me know.

Curiosity & Ritual newsletter gets a shoutout in Electric Literature

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Many thanks to Nancy Reddy for including my Substack newsletter, Curiosity & Ritual, in this roundup of “8 Newsletters to Spark Your Creativity.”



For the full article, including additional newsletter recs, click here.

To subscribe to Curiosity & Ritual, click here.

If you’re looking for feedback on a completed book-length manuscript, stuck-in-the-middle book-length manuscript, or individual story or essay—or you’re looking for accountability and feedback while drafting your book-length manuscript—I’d love to work with you. Fill out my contact form here.

Announcing Book Club Workshop!

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I’m teaching a class, you guys

(cross-posted from my Substack)

One curiosity I’ve had since childhood is what it’s like to live another life, and the ritual that lets me do it is reading. I used to get a little carried away. (Apparently you’re not supposed to read novels at the dinner table, or during math.)

Fast-forward to my adulthood and reading still occupies most of my time. I’ve read thousands of published books by this point. Between client projects and my acquiring editor days, I’ve also read hundreds of not-yet-published books.

So many unpublished novel manuscripts (that have beautiful prose, interesting settings, and charming characters) feel like they’re missing some subtle, subterranean wiring. Readers can watch a character experience a big emotion but not necessarily feel invested or emotionally impacted ourselves—especially if we haven’t been primed to hope for or dread any specific actions or outcomes.

Plot points are satisfying when (forgive me)…they don’t just fall out of a coconut tree. When they exist in the context of all in which they live and what came before them.

I’m saying you can get tricky and go back and reverse-engineer that context.

You know who’s great at doing that? Poets! For poets, the structure of a work (how it is told) is essential to the meaning of the work. So when poets write novels, those novels tend to be cool as hell. They satisfy reader cravings for structure but often in unusual ways.

I could teach a class on this, I thought. Participants could read two different novels as part of a wider study on structure—and, through that study, create outlines for their own novels. A book club, but not a regular book club. A workshop, but not a regular workshop.

This idea has been turning over in my mind for months now. I made a syllabus but tucked it aside for a rainy day, then took

Esmé Weijun Wang’s excellent workshop on online workshops (more of her classes here) and decided that the time is now. (Thank you, Esmé!)

Book Club Workshop is born!

This first iteration is focused on novels by poets, specifically Monarch by Candice Wuehle (which I had the pleasure of acquiring and editing for Soft Skull Press) and Candelaria by Melissa Lozada-Oliva (which I had the pleasure of reading and enjoying). We’ll also talk about some poems, John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story, and Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode.

Class meets on Zoom and starts August 13th. Candice and Melissa will join as special guests for the final class on October 22nd! (You could have a full outline in time for NaNoWriMo.)

~ * ~ Full deets here. * ~ *

I’d really appreciate help spreading the word if you can!

My book has a cover! (and she's a bratty little beaut)

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(cross-posted from my Substack)

Hey, hi! I don’t normally send back-to-back newsletters in the same month, but I also don’t normally have such good news that I want to share right away!

This is the official cover for my forthcoming poetry collection, Cosmic Tantrum, which will be out February 15, 2025 from Curbstone Books (an imprint of Northwestern University Press). The cover is by Marianne Jankowski (mjdesign.studio) and is a real eye-catcher, IMHO. I love the bold graphics and the orbit lines and that audacious little spark at the bottom of the lightning bolt. Also, this font, which reminds me of Art Nouveau meets The Jetsons.

In addition to a cover, my book now has a page at NUP’s site where you can preorder it! (You should also be able to request by ISBN from your favorite indie bookstore.) Preorders really help authors, as they can signal to booksellers and sales reps that there’s a lot of interest in a book before it’s even out, which can mean more stores will carry the book, generating more interest, etc. 🔄

I’m running my own DIY preorder campaign inspired by a tarot offering I used to do (a mini-reading plus a custom poem). If you’re one of the first 50 preorders (and want this, lol), I will pull three cards for you and write you a little something in response to them. If you’re one of the first 100 preorders, I will send you a signed bookplate. ✍️

If those goodies are of interest to you, email a copy of your receipt to me at cosmictantrum [at] gmail [dot] com and let me know what address I can snail mail your goods to. 💌


Many thanks to Marianne Jankowski, my editor Marisa Siegel, and the whole NUP team. And many, many thanks to Rachel Feder, Taylor Byas, and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, who wrote such beautiful blurbs (and to Lucy Ives, whose beautiful blurb came in after the original version of this post went out):

“William Blake taught us that nothing could be scarier than fairy tales for grown-ups. T.S. Eliot taught us that selfhood inheres in the desire for self-erasure. Somewhere in the wild space between these guiding poetics, Sarah Lyn Rogers’s Cosmic Tantrum lays a table for tea.”—Rachel Feder, coauthor of Astrolit: A Bibliophile's Guide to the Stars

“As its title suggests, Sarah Lyn Rogers’s Cosmic Tantrum brilliantly confronts society’s infantilization of women by pulling an Uno reverse. What happens when society gets the ‘good girl’ that it asks for? These poems rage during meditations, they defy in corporate emails, they turn their brattiness up so loud that we all turn to watch their meltdowns. But in our watching, we are forced to reckon with our own discomfort with Rogers’s ‘outsized’ anger. This book reminds us that a tantrum is often a result of our own inattention and neglect. How do we soothe the monster we’ve created?”—Taylor Byas, author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times 

“Too much of this world’s currency / is shame,” writes Sarah Lyn Rogers, in Cosmic Tantrum, which frees childhood of its innocence to indict the false motives of conditional love. Flipping the language of business, fairy tale, and dissolution, Rogers rewrites girlhood to offer a refuge from domesticity. Shifting form and address to reason with Kafka, Charlie Brown, Little Edie in Grey Gardens, and the ghosts that haunt survival, Cosmic Tantrum summons mischief to banish harm." —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of Touching the Art

“It seems incredible—nay, impossible—that so many great poems could reside in a single collection, but, reader, it is credible and it is possible, because this is a book by Sarah Lyn Rogers. I read each page with absolute greed, astonished by this jewel-like horde of gorgeous ironies and hard-won information about things hidden since the start of the world.” —Lucy Ives, author of An Image of My Name Enters America


Thank you so much for celebrating with me!

May newsletter: Containers for abandon

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Once, during the part of my life that was colored by open mic nights and home concerts, Julian Koster invited me to leap over a bucket of fire. (Well, also the dozen other people who’d gathered to see The Music Tapes play a house show.) I can’t remember what we wrote on the papers we burned. Things we hoped for? Things we hoped to cast aside? What I remember is the sense of play (“Are we really going to do this?”) and how everyone looked after their leap—light, disbelieving, unburdened of a way of being.

I haven’t yet participated in a Beltane ritual (happy belated), which the internet informs me also involves leaping over fire, but I feel something like that lightness when the weather turns. I can’t hold on to it for long (and who could right now), but I am always seeking a summer feeling, and that ritual encapsulates it for me. It’s a container that can produce the mindset.

Something about being in my mid-thirties means I’m seeking containers for abandon—a wildness I don’t usually permit myself. I didn’t do so much of this in my twenties, when movies say we’re entitled to. But I think some part of me is always looking for outlets for Big Feelings or somatic sensations that want to move through and out. For a while, karaoke emo and pop-punk songs were the container. Lately it’s clubbing. In other contexts, I’m someone who’s more comfortable watching the action, and who doesn’t know what to do with her hands . . .

. . . but the magical thing about club-container is knowing that my body will take over if I take that first conscious step. My body wants permission to bounce, to take up space, to be a real doofus. Clubbing is a somatic experience, not an intellectual one. (So is beach, which moves at a slower tempo.) As someone whose career and hobbies are wordswordwords, I feel relaxed when I can be social without having to use any.

A few weeks ago, I went to a screamo show and was struck by the container of the mosh pit. There’s the middle of the circle, a space for whirling and churning. Then there’s the circle itself, the structure against which the whirlers can ricochet and not collapse. The structure creates a safe space for disorder. But this disorder still has rules: Don’t be a dick. If someone falls down, pick them up.

Protest is a container, a ritual space in which we can object through public demonstration.

Creative writing and other art-making can be a container for what we otherwise can’t say or be. I’ve always loved this Patricia Lockwood quote, from Priestdaddy:

“This is the secret: when I encounter myself on the page, I am shocked at how forceful I seem. On the page I am strong, because that is where I put my strength.”

How many of us are writers because of how often we’ve been verbally shut down, shouted over? Being the loudest and fastest and most certain with no notes is not a game I’m ever going to win. (And, in my experience, the people who “win” those conversations aren’t often factually correct, which is irrelevant to them but not to me.) We understand the pull of the container of written work. Time can move differently here. Attention and focus work differently here. A written work (and other art) can be a lighthouse, a crafted thing that draws others to it, offering guidance or refuge to a seeker, someone who feels wayward.

Before I wrote anything for this month, I was already thinking of The World as the right-feeling tarot card for this time of year. I was thinking about maypoles, and dancing in a circle. I usually read this one as something like “having made it through a long cycle, you revel in a sense of triumph, celebration, and hard-won wisdom before beginning a new one.” This card usually features a circular border around the central figure: a wreath, an ouroboros. Today I’m thinking about how that circle looks like a sacred container: the safe space for celebrating, for understanding, for dancing naked and free.

Questions/experiments/rituals:

  • Take a page out of Julian Koster’s book. On slips of paper, write things you’d like to leave behind, or things you’d like to call in for yourself. Then, in a fire-safe container, burn them. (Don’t have a tiny cauldron? Maybe a cast-iron pan . . . in your bathtub. Burn responsibly!) Leaping optional.

  • Write/draw/etc. a shifted understanding or expression of yourself/others/time/space/intellect/emotion/the mind/the body. What structure did you create that allows for this shift? In other words, what’s the supportive circle for this mosh pit? And what’s happening within it? How does your adjustment of one of these factors influence the other?

There are some very cool goods and services (manuscript consultations, book recs, signed books, a Donna Tartt sweater) up for auction at this fundraiser to help families evacuate from Gaza. Auction closes May 12.

That’s what I have for you this month. I hope you find the containers you need, your leaping-over-fire moments, this month and beyond.

See you at midsummer!

This is a repost of a newsletter that was sent to subscribers on May 6. If you enjoyed this newsletter and want more and timelier, sign up for my Substack here.

If you’re looking for feedback on a completed book-length manuscript, stuck-in-the-middle book-length manuscript, or individual story or essay, I’d love to work with you. You can fill out my contact form here.