It’s not too late to join me and Uta Opitz on Zoom this Saturday morning (10amPT) for an energy bath—you can find more info and a link to register here.

I’ve also scheduled my next Office Hours—it’s been a minute, thank you for your patience! Let’s reconvene (also on Zoom) on October 24th at 10amPT. While I’m excited to see some familiar faces and generally catch-up, I thought it might be helpful to dive into some Good Girl Pattern recognition. Want to do some live back-and-forth with me? Let’s get into it! Link to register is here.

When I was an undergrad English major at Yale, I found myself spending a significant amount of time in the art building—enough that I ended up double majoring in fine art, with a focus on photography. This is funny, because I’m a pretty terrible photographer, put into even greater relief by the fact that I married a RISD grad who is a superlative craftsman and artist. But the art building was a therapeutic reprieve for me, a place where I got to relax and make things, and enjoy the process of rendering concepts in images and symbols rather than words. I didn’t have the language for it then, but I was letting my right hemisphere lead.

In The Matter with Things and The Master and His Emissary, neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist writes about the roles of the two hemispheres of the brain—while he’s careful to not be reductive (they have overlapping functions, etc.), his larger point is that the right hemisphere (the master), manages our experience of the whole, the gestalt, the symbolic. The left hemisphere (the emissary) is responsible for breaking the world down into its component parts (which is why it’s typically correlated with the right hand), of making the raw material of life something to be used, applied, and managed. The left hemisphere is mechanistic, relational, logical; the right hemisphere is intuitive and contextual. The left hemisphere holds the language and the words; the right hemisphere is officially mute, but it holds the meaning. The left hemisphere is literal; the right hemisphere is metaphorical. (BTW, I don’t know why McGilchrist gendered the title of his book, but FWIW, it should be The Master and HER Emissary, as I would argue that the right hemisphere holds the function of the divine feminine.)

McGilchrist’s larger thesis is that in a properly functioning world, the left hemisphere performs tasks on behalf of the right hemisphere; these days, we’re experiencing a world where the left hemisphere is off the leash, convinced that it alone should rule supreme. (There’s fascinating research on stroke victims that shows that the left hemisphere is not only self-impressed with its own importance, but it also lies to maintain itself…it is, after all, a master manipulator.)

Anywho, back in the art building at Yale, I was making things—photographs, specifically, which were about female archetypes/tropes and fairytales. They were technically imperfect, but kind of interesting. When people asked me about being an art major, I was quick to clarify that I was not an artist, nor would I ever be an artist, in the same way that it took me 20 years of working as an editor and ghostwriter to feel like I could say that I’m a writer. (I wrote about that here: “The Ghostwriter.”) I revere the arts, and felt like it was too hubristic to count myself as one.

I was also too scared: Yale has a world-class MFA program, which I benefited from as an undergrad. Working artists like Catherine Opie and Gregory Crewdson taught us too, and our T.A.’s were all emerging stars. I didn’t want to be one. These grad students were brutalized by “crits,” which were a type of spectator sport. We could sit up high and watch, though I rarely did because I found the whole thing painful and not helpful. What always struck me about the theater of them is that the critics—professors, visiting artists, and other people from the art world—would sit with their backs to the work facing the grad student. And then they would dissect the work—literally take something whole apart—and unleash their thoughts. It was so personal and confrontational. I never understood how it could be productive. It wasn’t feedback; it was criticism. The role of the critic is to judge; feedback on the other hand, is nutritious…when delivered well, someone is literally giving you food for thought. It might not taste good at first, and it might stir up all sorts of resistance and self-defensiveness, but it can usually be metabolized into fuel for moving your work forward. Criticism is absolute, unhelpful. (For more on resistance and being in the “belly of the beast” there’s this: “The Power of Resistance.”)

Making things is already so hard—you have to assemble something out of nothing and walk through many dark alleys where it’s all a discordant mess. But the process is where the juice is, as well as the growth. (This is another reason why using A.I. to shortcut your way through the messy middle is a Siren Song—avoid at all costs!) Before any creation is a coherent piece of music, a book, a painting, or a movie, it is chaos. It is just noise. (See: “Creating Things is Chaos.”) And even then, it’s not finished—it doesn’t exist without an audience. Making things is inherently co-creative—you are relying on the person experiencing what you’ve made to harvest meaning. Some people will; others won’t. It’s entirely subjective. But what’s emergent is the whole point.

I saw my friend Denise Di Novi this weekend, which also happened to be the opening weekend for her new film, Practical Magic 2. I’ve been a passenger on her journey to make this follow-up, which, as the timespan was not only not easy, but improbable and actually miraculous: The original 1998 film was panned by critics, beloved by audiences, and ultimately resurrected by social media and younger generations—it has a following because it means something to people, in a very right hemisphere way.

I asked Denise how opening weekend was going and she told me that she was experiencing déjà vu: On Rotten Tomatoes, the movie is scoring a 38% from critics, while the audience is giving it a 92%. Later that night, I looked at some of the reviews—one writer called this iteration “creepy” because the pentagram had fire in lieu of whipped cream like the original. (To her, I would offer, read the room—we’re in apocalyptic fire times, not Cool Whip times.) Another critic wrote, “Over the 28 years since its release, the original Practical Magic, despite its dismal reviews and middling box-office reception, has accrued a sentimental affection from fans. … Every time I thought the film hit as low as it could go — with a hideously framed shot or a poor, syrupy-sentimental approximation of how humans actually interact or an interminable scene focused on the new daughters that goes nowhere — it somehow found room to fall lower into a morass of ill intentions without a strong artistic point of view.” (First, if I can offer some feedback, “a lower morass of ill intentions” is word salad—what?!? Use English! But I digress…) Several reviews were overtly sexist.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago in “Something New is Afoot,” I loved Practical Magic 2. Yes, I loved the original (apparently, I’m “sentimental”), and yes, I love witches, but the movie moved me. It felt like a balm, like it delivered a summation of this weird, wonderful/terrible time we find ourselves in. The movie is fun, and funny, and in the way of a great fairytale, or myth, or allegory, it touches profound and universal themes around sisterhood, intuition, intergenerational trauma, the feminine, and the ineffable nature of real power without needing to literalize it, rationalize it, or make it all “make sense.” The movie is imaginal; symbolic. It is not supposed to be dissected and taken apart, it’s to be experienced wholesale, as a feeling, an experience.

There’s obviously a lot to say about this “tension” between critics and audience: I guess it’s worth underlining that I don’t think criticism belongs in the arts. I don’t get who or what is served by the practice. And still, the gap in perception for movies like Practical Magic 2 points to the undeniable reality that members of the press often deride what’s popular and collectively resonant. I don’t know if this is so they can feel snobby and superior and like they have superlative taste, but the end result is that it…alienates. And ultimately, it makes the whole practice of engaging with authoritative sources and “papers of record” increasingly irrelevant. This is unfortunate at a time when we need to trust that the press is representing a shared version of reality, that we’re all experiencing the same thing. We need to be leaning in, not feeling mocked. (I have many thoughts about how digitizing the experience of news—collapsing carefully titled physical sections into an endless scroll—has conflated news (ideally “facts”) and opinions (“stories we tell about those facts”) in the minds of readers and created a real quagmire where it’s all one thing. For another newsletter!)

On that first point—the derision of what’s popular, or “mass”—I feel like I have skin in the game and probably my own bias here that’s worth stating. I don’t write academic books, even as I do aggressive amounts of research and am compulsive about sourcing and scaffolding my arguments. I try to put all that effort in the back, in the endnotes, so that the experience of reading one of my books is fun, fast, and hopefully revelatory. I believe that it should feel easy for the reader because I’ve done enough hard work processing the material first (including integrating lots and lots of painful feedback). It’s never my aim to impress intellectuals with all my effort—my aim is to write books with broad appeal. I would count myself lucky to sell enough copies to be “mass” or “popular.” My goal is always to resonate in that way. To that end, my books have never been formally reviewed or criticized, or “taken seriously.” A New York Times profile about me (which I loved, and am very grateful for) didn’t directly take on my work or ideas either—it was about the fact that women find me interesting and worth paying attention to. Isn’t that funny?

Even as I’ve felt ignored—particularly in contrast to authors who write about boys and men—I much prefer the subterranean conversation, of writing books that are passed from hand to hand because they mean something, or give voice to a truth that feels universal. I hope, more than anything, to meet people directly on the page—not through the judgment of others.