by Writing Workshops Staff
3 weeks ago
What if the secret to sustaining a writing practice isn't willpower but kindness? Sarah McColl, author of the acclaimed memoir Joy Enough and creator of the newsletter Lost Art, has built her creative life around this paradox: that true discipline emerges not from harsh self-criticism but from the encouragement that keeps us coming back to the page.
In her eight-week course, In the Woodshed with a Woodstove: a Generative Winter Writing Camp, McColl invites writers to reject the January culture of transformation and instead honor the quiet, inward pull of winter—generating pages and pages of flawed, half-formed work while building the community that sustains a creative life.
Through weekly newsletters featuring writers like Natalia Ginzburg, Gretel Ehrlich, and Barry Lopez, students will discover how to navigate the inevitable lean times of their writing practice, overcome perfectionism by embracing mess, and find creative fecundity in winter's stillness.
Rather than emerging victorious at the course's end, McColl guides writers toward something more valuable: the lifelong practice of showing up for your work with both devotion and self-compassion, armed with strategies for carrying on when the well runs dry.
Writing Workshops: You named this course after the jazz term woodshedding, that exalted, solitary grind of practice before you can unlock the treasure chest. But you're also explicitly rejecting the new year, new you culture of self-improvement. How do you hold both discipline and gentleness at once without one destroying the other?
Sarah McColl: The word discipline has punitive associations for me. But when I think of the root of discipline, discere, to learn, I feel a ton of aliveness and interest and curiosity. Woodshedding is learning a piece of music so that it's no longer separate from your body. I'm devoted to learning how to be a better writer and reader and will be for the rest of my life. So that's the way I think of the word discipline, it's the lifelong practice of being a student of writing. What will keep me going? Is it a mean, scary drill sergeant type coach? I'm already critical enough of myself, so I don't need an extra dose of that. What I do need is encouragement so that I'll keep coming back. That's the gentleness.
Writing Workshops: Your memoir, Joy Enough, is about making a life from what remains after loss: your mother's death, your divorce. And now you write Lost Art, a newsletter about the creative work of (mostly) dead women. What do you understand about creativity that can only be learned from what's gone?
Sarah McColl: David Naimon, host of Between the Covers used a term recently I loved. He said writing about women who have been lost to history or excluded from the canon is "a feminist citational practice against oblivion." Yes, I thought, that's what I'm up to: resisting oblivion. I think that's what every artist is up to. Art-making is an act against oblivion. It's what keeps us hopeful. I am forever fascinated by how people keep going in the face of unimaginable loss. The atrocities and horrors people live through and still sew curtains, make soup, write a poem. What could be more hopeful than creating in the face of loss?
Writing Workshops: Week 5 of the course is called "Lean Times." We're supposed to be cozied up by the woodstove, but you're also not letting us escape into comfort. What happens when a generative writing practice meets scarcity, and why do writers need to go there in January?
Sarah McColl: Sometimes the well runs dry. Or we've received a particularly crushing rejection. Or we're feeling especially low at the limits of our abilities. What do we do? How do we keep going? Moments like this can feel unique and personal when they are in fact universal and common. I think anticipating the low points and having a spate of tools and strategies for how to carry on is one of the kindest ways we can encourage our discipline to our craft.
Writing Workshops: You've done residencies at MacDowell, Ucross, Millay Arts – all these sanctuaries where artists go to be alone with their work. But this course is explicitly about community and accountability. What can 20 strangers on the internet give each other that a month in a cabin can't?
Sarah McColl: One gift of a residency is a room of one's own. Another is the way food magically appears at mealtimes. But the third element, equally magical, and easiest to bring into everyday life, is sitting down at a dinner table with a bunch of artists who understand exactly what you've been up to all day. "How'd it go today?" someone asks. It's the rare opportunity when we can speak freely and openly about our process (the good, the bad, and the ugly) to a receptive audience that gets it. Whether live or online or asynchronous, a classroom is that dinner table.
Community is a critical and commonly overlooked ingredient of the creative life. The writing life is full of rejection, insecurity, and disappointment. That's not you, that's the job! What will keep me going in good times and bad, when I am discouraged and despondent, is a deadline with a friend or a writing group. That's what this class will be.
Writing Workshops: The readings include Natalia Ginzburg, Gretel Ehrlich, Barry Lopez, Tricia Hersey. That's a very specific constellation of voices. What makes these writers the proper companions for your students this winter?
Sarah McColl: These are all writers who found creative fecundity and insight in the arctic, in winter, in snow.
Writing Workshops: You wrote in Joy Enough with what one reviewer called "crystalline perfection," but in this course, you're asking students to generate "pages and pages of flawed, half-formed, and messy work." What's your relationship to your own messy pages?
Sarah McColl: You got me, Blake. I hate my messy pages! And my distaste for mess, my intolerance for imperfection, is probably one of the greatest obstacles in my writing life, if not the chief obstacle to my sitting down.
In the last two years, I began sharing more early-stage work. Doing so deepened my relationship with other writers, and it also made me realize how secretive I'd been about my work-in-progress. Being less perfectionistic about my drafts has deepened my relationships and made my process feel less lonely.
Writing Workshops: You moved to a small town in Northern California, and now you're teaching writers to honor "the natural rhythms of the season" while the rest of the culture is screaming about willpower and goals. Is there something about your physical distance from literary centers – New York, LA, the MFA machine – that made this course possible? What does geography have to do with creative permission?
Sarah McColl: When I lived in Brooklyn, I marked seasonal time by a particular tree on Sixth Avenue, which I wrote about in Joy Enough. A number of readers wrote to me about that tree, their tree, they wrote. I loved that. Of course, it was their tree, too. We're humans, not machines, and we feel these shifts, even when rushing to the F train in Brooklyn. Our breath has a pace, the moon has a rhythm. I'm always wondering: How can I make things simpler? That's a question you can ask anywhere. I find the business of writing and the careerism that surrounds it quite boring. Those conversations center on ego and competition, death knells for creative freedom. I also grew up reading Miss Rumphius so have likely wanted to follow her example for a long time.
Writing Workshops: The course ends with Week 8: Hibernation, right when most January challenges are celebrating their completion and transformation. You're teaching people to burrow deeper just when they're supposed to emerge victorious. What do you know about the creative cycle that our productivity culture keeps getting backward?
Sarah McColl: I don't want to deny anyone their victorious transformation! I hope this course offers loads of learning and illumination about writing and each writer's individual process. As much as I've talked about community and creative friendship, what I've learned about writing is that it is largely an inside job. By which I mean: whatever it is we want from our work or from publishing or from a writing career, we would be wise to identify and find ways to give to ourselves.
As the wise Margaret Malone wrote:
Consider if you may be asking for too much from your poem/book/story/project/essay/memoir, if you're looking for it to… SAVE YOU DEFINE YOU ANOINT YOU ALLOW FOR YOU EXPLAIN YOU it might be worth asking yourself: what are you needing/hoping/wanting your work to be for you? Are you thinking it will solve a problem you have? Or fill a vacancy? Poke around in there and see what you find.
I love Betsy Lerner's wise and compassionate book The Forest for the Trees. Every writer should read it.
"The only person whose rejection really counts is your own," she writes. "No matter how many people return your work, the only one who can send you packing is yourself."
McColl's wisdom about self-rejection cuts to the heart of what makes a sustainable writing practice. If you're ready to trade the drill sergeant for encouragement, to find creative community in winter's quiet, and to discover what you can give yourself instead of asking your work to save you, join Sarah McColl for In the Woodshed with a Woodstove. This eight-week generative camp begins January 4th, 2026, and offers the rarest gift: permission to be messy, imperfect, and entirely yourself on the page.
