Two young men named Nathaniel and Johnathan are building us a garden shed. They got started last week in bitter cold. Their first task was to clear the concrete slab foundation, which was poured last fall and has lain encased in snow and ice. They got it swiftly shoveled but the ice proved recalcitrant. One of them drove off in his pickup and soon returned with two gas-fired heaters. They improvised a tent over the slab with a black tarp and two sawhorses, then angled the heaters toward the center and fired them up. I was certain this would end in a call to 9-1-1, but the men carried out their task with the breezy nonchalance of youth. They were right. Within a few hours the slab was clear and drying in the wan March sun.

The next day dawned at zero degrees Fahrenheit and temperatures never rose above five, so the pair worked with the heaters pointed at their workstations, warming themselves and all of Lyme, New Hampshire. And who could blame them. Today, not even a week later, it was sixty-eight degrees and sunny and they both wore t-shirts. By now they’ve framed the four main walls, leaving the roof open to a blue and yellow sky. I checked in with Nathaniel, the more senior member, as they were picking up for the day. “Looks great,” I said. “What’s next?”

“Tomorrow we might get started on the back part.” He meant the additional open section where I’ll store my wheelbarrow and bulky garden paraphernalia. There is rain in the forecast, and I pointed to the roof, or rather the opening where the roof will be. “What about the—” and here I hesitated a millisecond as my brain cast about for the right word. Was it truss, joist, stringer, transom or—“beams?” I asked.

“Yep, rafters after that,” Nathaniel said, without missing a beat. “I already have all the rafter stock on site.” He gestured to the longest stack of lumber near the carport.

“Rafters,” I said, “right.” And so I learned the definitive name of the long piece of wood that supports a roof: rafter. It is not a new word to me, and is in fact so common I must have heard and read it hundreds of times. But knowing the meaning of a word in context is different from conjuring it contemporaneously in conversation with an expert. And not just any expert, the one who will install said rafters.

He was gracious not to make a big deal out of the correction, and probably doesn’t expect the homeowner to know all of his trade’s terms of art. I didn’t feel embarrassed, and anyway there’s no quicker way to learn something new than to hazard a guess and get swiftly—kindly, politely—corrected.

It’s not so different with wine. Like construction, wine is a complicated domain that bristles with specialized terminology. It begins with the essentials of grape and territory: red Burgundy means Pinot noir and white Burgundy means Chardonnay, but also maybe Gamay (in the 14th century) and Aligoté (in a trendy wine bar). Layer on pronunciation; long ago I asked a somm for a wine from Veneto, pronouncing it “ven-EH-toe” instead of “VEN-eh-toe.” I still burn with shame.

Then add terms like varietal and variety, unfiltered and unoaked, native, typical, balanced, Old World, New World, medium-plus. Finally, top it all with the neologisms that gush from fertile descriptivist minds: natty, glou-glou, minerality, crunchy, zero-zero, raw.

Wine’s vocabulary can serve as a scaffolding that supports understanding and insight. Fluency is freeing, stimulating deeper conversation among peers. Professionals like to talk about wine, and in fact need to talk about wine in order to make progress.

But language can also seem exclusionary, and fluency can feel like a badge. The words are shibboleths that grant access to the temple. Those who are only partially fluent have it hardest because they know what they don’t yet know. I feel this way whenever I travel in Italy and France, where my limited command of these languages risks nerve-wracking self embarrassment. The partially wine-fluent know they cannot yet summon the mot juste for every context, and their anxiety is especially electric in highly charged social contexts: a date, a business dinner, a potent family gathering.

So for those who seek to earn wine fluency: Go easy on yourself. It takes a while to become au fait with any domain, but especially one as ancient and professionalized as wine. Take comfort knowing that this strange discourse of wine is evocative and evolving. It loves new ideas and neologisms, and everyone will want to hear yours.

For those who have already earned this fluency: Go easy on others. Remember that time before wine felt effortless for you. Be generous and gentle. Be like my builder Nathaniel. Smile warmly and say, “Yep, rafters.” Then go right back to work.

Build it up ©2026 Meg Maker

To write is to move meaning from writer to reader. Text is the way that happens. It is the only way that happens. The text is everything the writer has said and it is all the reader can know.

This primacy of text lies at the heart of a standard workshopping exercise. Writers pair up and read each other’s pieces, then answer three questions: What’s this about? What’s working? And what might change to make it more fully itself? A writer dilates as a reader’s testimony unspools. That’s what you think my story is about?1

This technique is useful for writers of all genres, but it’s especially helpful for wine writers. Wine is factually dense, so it’s easy to get caught up in a piece’s details, forgetting it must also be about something. Something more than just the reportage, more than what we know. Something we believe.

Wine writing is nonfiction writing. Most lands at the journalistic end of the spectrum, but it should not feel artless. Wine writing is creative nonfiction. It drives truth toward daylight using the gestures and motifs of imaginative storytelling. The results vibrate with pleasure, heartbreak, tension, obstacle, disappointment, triumph, and deliciousness.

Below are several short sentences about wine writing2 offered as nourishment for the creative process. Some are directive, some reflective. They’re things I’ve come to know over the years, or rather come to believe.

Creative nonfiction has been called “true stories well told.” A true wine story contains verifiable facts about place and making. A true wine story also contains honest impressions about those facts. The first is journalistically true, the latter memoiristically true. Both are equally true.

A corollary: Be honest but not cruel. Per Dickenson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”3 Good criticism aims to build, not demolish. Wine is just a beverage, but it’s also people’s livelihoods. When a wine, producer, region, or experience merits criticism, be constructive and circumspect. Ask yourself, Who needs to hear this, and why? Know how your critique will land and aim for that spot, but not one any larger.

At the same time, don’t pander. Don’t write to please producers, importers, hosts, restaurateurs, beverage buyers, or colleagues. Write to please your reader. Or rather, to serve your reader. Build readers’ trust by disclosing your sponsors, samples, seats at the table. Be transparent.

Every piece has a surface narrative. These are the details about the winemaker, region, where you went, what you saw. This is what the piece is about at the level of topic. Every piece also has something below the surface narrative. This is what the piece is about at the level of meaning. An active subnarrative shows that as a writer you are thinking, not merely recording sensations. In other words: Story, story, story. Find it.

A faithful source will tell you things they believe to be true. But these so-called facts are not necessarily true, so you must check. This is also why you shouldn’t ask a source for data (facts). You should ask a source for opinions (beliefs). So not, How many acres of Grenache ring the winery, but, What’s the hardest thing about growing Grenache around the winery?

Don’t feel beholden to the dominant narratives (for example, at present, The sky is falling). Don’t recapitulate clichés du jour. Reflect expansively on what you’ve seen, heard, tasted, read, learned, know, and feel. Then, synthesize these into something new for readers to ponder. This may take a while.

Pro tip: Turn a piece into a story using a narrative arc. This trick came before reading and writing and will probably last after it. The story started in one place and ended in another. There were obstacles, complications, bad things happening to good people, some mysteries, a revelation. Something changed along the way. What changed? Why does that matter?

Another trick: Switch on your reader, wake up their sensorium, using words with palate texture. Make them salivate, or at least imagine it. Use words like sip, clink, spit, lick, liquid, delectable, loquacious, picket, ticket, rattle. Slurp.

Be mindful of textual texture. Use a mix of stylistic tactics to animate your piece. Be mindful of pacing: Crisp evidence moves swiftly and also lends authority. Quotations snap readers to attention. Lyric passages invite them to sit back and relax. And while you don’t have to do all of their work for them, you can punctuate your piece with pithy observations. It’s your piece, after all.

Readers won’t get all of your metaphors and allusions. That’s okay. You wouldn’t get all of theirs, either. Just explain yourself. If you got cherry Twizzler, say so but say why: that rubbery texture, the fruit’s artificiality, your nostalgia for third grade.

It’s okay to write about things you don’t understand, but only if you don’t pretend you do. Confess your ignorance and invite readers to join you. Show them why you care and what you’re doing to learn. You’re human. You can ask questions.

Write from your heart, meaning from yourself: your culture, your values, your status, your identity, your beliefs, your language. Ignore other people’s biases and lexicons. Ignore their topics and takes. Ignore their successes and failures, viral and otherwise. Focus on you, on your own voice, your own ideas and beliefs. Develop them. And keep moving.

Before you write, ask yourself, What sound am I trying to make in the noise of the world? And, Is this the sound it most needs now?

After I finish a long piece of writing, I give myself a quiz. I open a search bar in my document and type very, with a leading space, then hit return. The leading space is important, because otherwise the search finds words like every and discovery and bravery and livery. I’m looking only for very, and I’m glad when I don’t find it.

Very is a contradiction. It’s designed to strengthen but in practice weakens, draining energy from neighboring words. It clutters, creating an obstacle to trip over en route to the point. Over the years I’ve taught myself to write without it, although it’s slippery, sneaking into copy unbidden. Re-writing, I ferret it out.

Read more

Terry Theise and I met, so-called, nearly two years ago—“so-called” literally, as our friendship began and has been conducted by phone. I’d read his books and followed his work for years, but we’d never spoken until February 2024 when I got an email from him out of the blue. Subject: “We need to tawk.”

Apparently he’d seen glimmerings of my ideas about contemporary wine writing which resonated with his own long-held convictions. So talk we have, monthly, on hour-long calls in which we kvetch and catch up on what we’re writing, reading, and thinking about.

To say we share a sensibility about wine and wine writing vastly understates the degree of alignment. We both believe the tasting note is an impoverished way of talking about wine’s significance and impact. We believe the professional system of tasting and scoring wines, often under time pressure, elides the taster’s experience in ways that make the writing affectless. We believe that wine is worth writing about, but also that we owe the subject the courtesy of more of our human creativity.

We have come to these opinions and predilections by different paths, his through decades selecting wines for import from Germany, Austria, and Champagne, mine through not quite as long studying and traveling to understand what makes wine worthy of remark at all.

Subscribe now

But Terry’s not merely a market savvy importer hell-bent on the discovery of deliciousness. He is also an exquisite writer, one with stylistic proclivities that are one-hundred-percent Terry Theise. Once, when I was visiting Müller-Catoir in the Pfalz with a press group, we all looked up from the tasting sheets our hosts had lain before us and smiled at each other knowingly: “Terry wrote these, didn’t he.”

Terry views wine expansively, holistically, and writes with clarity about wine’s personal and cultural signatures. He’s published two books; the first, Reading Between the Wines (2010), grappled with wine’s practical and emotional contours. The second, What Makes a Wine Worth Drinking (2018), delves even further into wine’s philosophical intimations. Now retired from the import business, he maintains a website and blog and contributes reports and articles to World of Fine Wine.

This summer, we decided to collaborate on a piece about wine writing and pitch it to that publication, which felt exciting and also the most natural thing in the world. We fired up Zoom and over two sessions let our conversation wander over the topography of contemporary wine discourse. We edited these conversations together so they read as a seamless unity.

The editor of World of Fine Wine, Neil Beckett, graciously accepted the piece and made it the cover story of the print edition of WFW 90, December 2025. Titled A Defense of Wine Writing, it has now also been put online without a paywall. I hope you enjoy reading it, and will return to drop a comment with your thoughts: Read it here.

Screenshots from one of our two Zoom sessions, May 2025.

I was recently asked to contribute ideas for an article about 2026 wine trends. The assignment was open-ended, just three bullet points about whatever I see on the horizon.

I’m not a trend-chaser, although I’m always monitoring industry news, which is lately alive with headlines about tariffs, neo-Prohibitionism, labor shortages, packaging innovations, and growers’ responses to climate chaos.

But my principal research interests consider wine discourse itself, the practice and poetics of storytelling about this beautiful, sometimes confounding, cultural artifact. I’m interested in how we individually and collectively make meaning out of wine, and how language can serve that exercise. So instead of focusing on industry trends (which other writers could better address anyway), I offered three bullet points about the immediate future of wine commentary.

Naturally, I had a longer list, but stopped myself at seven. Most of these trends are well underway. Some are dispiriting, some uplifting. But all of them, being our collective future, are within our power to change.

Wine writing trends for 2026:

Read more

Wine as a category is experiencing myriad existential threats: climatic, meteorological, social, cultural, financial. It’s a destabilizing time. Wine writers exist, in part, to help make sense of it all. We pry apart false and shaky claims, dismantle gatekeeping, and share stories of innovation, creativity, and progress.

But wine writing itself is also in a precarious state as publications shutter and work dries up. What can wine writers do, collectively, to address these very real threats our profession?

We can help each other.

Wine commentary is like many other fields where experts labor solo, competing for diminishing scraps. The situation can lead to zero-sum thinking, the notion that there are only so many resources to be had, and if one helps a colleague, it reduces the pool of goodies available to oneself.

Nonsense. When we help each other it expands, rather than shrinks, the profession. It advances new writers who bring fresh insights. It opens opportunities for more experienced voices. It begets higher quality storytelling as we work to improve our craft. It leads to placements in both wine and non-wine outlets, sending our writing deep into culture. It raises our collective mood while boosting the fortunes of winemakers and regions. That’s better for wine writ large, which is concomitantly better for us.

Subscribe now

So let’s help each other out. Let’s commit to supporting fellow wine writers, even just a single writer, in 2026. Maybe that’s someone new to the profession whom you’ve come to admire. Maybe it’s a colleague who’s struggling with a leap to a new medium, say, from writing to podcasting. Maybe they’re seeking new audiences, trying to reach consumers after a career in industry journalism. Or perhaps they’re switching topics or domains, from conventional to organic growing, from Italian wines to Portuguese, from wine aesthetics to wine economics. Maybe, like you, they’re simply struggling to succeed, earn bylines, and reach hungry readers, and they could use a chat.

Here are a few ideas to get started:

• Strike up a conversation. Reach out to ask for a call to learn more about their work, interests, and ambitions. Tell them what you admire about their writing and why. Find out what they’re working on, what’s in their way, and what they’re trying to do about it. Ask how you could help. Once you have some chemistry and trust, set up a monthly call to check in. You may find, over time, the support works in both directions.

• Introduce them to a favored editor. If you think they’d be a fit for a publication to which you’ve contributed, offer to make introductions. Ask for examples of their best work to make their case to the editor. Tread delicately to ensure each party is introduced in the best light. Such introductions spend some of your own social capital, so handle it all with a healthy mix of discretion and politesse.

• Read their writing and offer feedback. One of the most supportive (and flattering) things you can do for a fellow writer is simply to read their work. But you can also offer to serve as a second set of eyes, reading their pieces in progress for tone, style, voice, grammar, structure—whatever they think would be helpful. Or, offer to help them craft a pitch for that editor you mentioned who is, by now, eager for their byline.

• Give them a tip, a story you can’t tackle. We’ve all run across interesting stories we wish another writer would cover. When this happens, scan your network to think about who might address it beautifully. Send them the details, including sources, and offer to help with introductions if it’d be useful.

• Share their contact information with a favorite publicist. PR firms and marketing teams are always on the lookout for new expert voices. Introductions can be especially helpful if your colleague is brand new to wine writing or is expanding their coverage into new markets or regions. Also, keep others in mind if you get invited to a tasting, event, or press trip you can’t make; ask if the publicist would like a recommendation. Be generous.

• Read and subscribe. Give them some love by reading, commenting, liking, sharing, and subscribing to their output. There’s nothing that says “I respect your work” like paying real money for their writing. And while social media exposure doesn’t pay the bills, it does build platform. It’s called a network for a reason.

Imagine doing all of this for just one other person; by the end of 2026 they would be in a stronger professional position. Now imagine if we all did it for each other: win-win.

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, detto Botticelli, “Madonna of the Magnificat” (detail), c. 1483. Photographed 6 June 2023 at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy; ©Meg Maker. A version of this essay also appeared in The Circular.

It’s been five months since I migrated Maker’s Table to Substack from WordPress. I made the move largely because I was sick of the infrastructure demands and expense of self hosting. I was also annoyed that the vast majority of my traffic arrived from a search engine, saw one page, and bounced. I was eager to take advantage of Substack’s publishing tools and monetization options and the community of readers baked into the platform.

My migration took about a week, and the hardest part, as usual, was editorial, viz., figuring out what to keep and what to cut. In the end I ported about 170 feature stories (dating back to 2008) and jettisoned outdated material, including about 1,200 straight-up wine reviews. My old mailing list had gone stale, so I also left that behind, which meant starting to build readership from scratch. But by the one-month mark I was up to 100 subscribers, and now, thanks partly to having been recommended by the Wall Street Journal (cheers, Lettie!), it’s risen over 300, with a satisfying number of paid subscribers (cheers, everyone!). This week I was even, briefly, “rising” in Food & Drink.

My experience so far has been positive. A weekly posting schedule serves as a swift kick in my pants, and I’ve enjoyed discovering other writers in the community, not only fellow wine commentators but also nonfiction writers and essayists, artists and illustrators. The publishing interface is simple, the stats are good enough, and the monetary payouts have been seamless.

I have had a few destabilizing realizations. It’s certainly possible to use Substack like WordPress, managing it like a magazine. It’s even possible to create multi-department, multi-author publications (Narratively does this well). But the inherent feature of periodic emailing also lets authors treat it as, simply, a newsletter. That makes it feel more like a conversation, with writers sharing what’s top of mind, getting feedback, and building story over time. I’m still wrapping my head around that paradigm shift and what it means for my habit of publishing more or less atomic pieces. And while I continue to contribute freelance writing elsewhere, Substack is now my main focus, so I’ll have to wrap my head around it eventually.

Curious about other wine writers’ experiences here, I’ve been reaching out to long-time colleagues to get their insights. , of The Morning Claret, is one of the most successful among them, having acquired over 4,200 subscribers in just under two years. Simon, a British ex-pat in Amsterdam, is an author, freelance writer, and global expert on organic, biodynamic, natural, and skin-contact wines. He’s published two books: Amber Revolution: How the World Learned to Love Orange Wine (2018) and Foot Trodden: Portugal and the Wines that Time Forgot (2021), co-authored with Ryan Opaz.

I love Simon’s writing, his voice and perspective, the way he thinks about wine and culture. He indulged my questions with characteristically thoughtful replies, much of which resonated with my own experiences, but with fresh advice I wish I’d had before I started. So, I’m sharing all of it here in case it helps other wine writers, or any writers, make the leap. The Q. & A. has been lightly edited.

Did you switch to Substack from another platform? If so, do you still maintain that, or did you migrate completely?

I migrated from my old WordPress blog, themorningclaret.com, which goes back to 2011. It was a bit of a “do or die” moment. The site was my starting point in wine writing, but as I got more paid commissions it rapidly became the poor relation. My reader numbers started declining and so did my enthusiasm to post. In 2023 I published just two articles on T.M.C. I knew something had to change and that filthy lucre was probably the only way to enact that change.

Substack felt like the perfect solution: a platform that normalizes the idea that you pay for independent writing. The migration was seamless, allowing me to port my entire body of work across. I kept the same URL, so my existing readers (the few that remained) wouldn’t even notice anything had changed.

I had a dormant subscriber list, collected over many years. I imported that into Substack and it really helped: I launched in January 2024 with 1,400 free subscribers so it looked popular right from the get-go—even if half were probably dead contacts. Still, I clocked 100 paying subscribers in the first month, which was a huge surprise. I clearly had a loyal audience hungry for more.

Is Substack your principal writing platform now, or do you hope it to become so?

It’s become my main platform and that’s exactly what I wanted. It’s exhausting pitching to publications with little interest in the niche topics I care about. The fees range from insulting to poor, barely covering research costs, if at all. I used to wonder why I was giving my best content away, especially as it rarely generated me any engagement.

In 2025, Substack has become the biggest slice of my income. I’m still short for the first Jaguar (Subscribe now!), but it is real money and it provides the motivation to write that was almost completely gone. I couldn’t be more thankful to my subscribers for this.

How does Substack fit into the ecosystem of your other writing and publishing activities?

I still write for a few other publications, but only the three or four that bring some kind of satisfaction. Noble Rot allows me to republish on my site after a respectful delay, so that’s a bit of extra value for my subscribers. I’ve recently agreed a cross-publishing deal with TRINK magazine, and I hope that’s going to work well for both of us.

What are the best aspects of Substack for you as writer-publisher?

The freedom to publish what I want, when I want. It’s incredibly frustrating when a publication stalls on a topical piece, or the editor tones down a hard-hitting article.

The weekly rhythm of publishing and editing has tightened and honed my craft. Substack’s analytics also allow me to monitor engagement on each article. This constant reflection on what works and what doesn’t is so valuable. I’m learning from my audience in real time.

What are the most challenging aspects?

The downside is that I can’t (yet) afford my own editor. The decision to publish weekly means I’m editing myself under considerable time pressure. I firmly believe in editing: my own writing is always better if I leave it for 24 hours and then do another pass.

Substack risks becoming all-consuming. I set myself the target of one 1,000- to 2,000-word article a week, so that’s two to three days of each week gone. It’s a big chunk of time, and I wonder how it’s going to feel when I get into my next book.

Any advice to a fellow wine writer who’s considering starting a Substack?

Wine Substack is becoming progressively more crowded. It can feel like a long, hard road for someone just launching their newsletter. The journey from zero to one hundred subscribers is brutal. It’s even worse when you start trying to convert them to paid. I lose one paid subscriber for every two that I gain. It’s slow progress, but you just have to keep showing up in people’s feeds.

Focus on developing your own unique voice and specialize as much as possible. Unless you’re already an influencer or a TV personality, no one will read your generalist wine blog. And I’m sorry, but no one is interested in your tasting notes. It’s much better to find a country, a style, or an angle that deserves more attention.

I can’t emphasize enough the need to improve your writing. Even if you’re a good writer within the wine world, you’re still a terrible writer when it comes to the greater literary ecosystem. Read and analyze the work of high-level journalists, and work with editors as much as you can and note how they tighten and prune. Stay humble.

Substack is awash with poorly researched, unedited drivel. If you want to succeed, you must rise above this sea of sub-par content. There are no shortcuts. Research obsessively, write passionately, edit like a true pedant, and don’t give up.

Top image ©2025 Meg Maker. Some portions of this article also appeared in The Circular.

There’s a nonprofit in my town (Lyme, New Hampshire; population 1,730) dedicated to education about the forests of northeastern America. They create materials about forest ecology, conservation, and stewardship, publishing a print quarterly called Northern Woodlands along with a blog and newsletter.

They recently hired a new executive director and publisher, Jackson Saul. Among other things, Saul’s taken over the production of a series called “This week in the woods.” The job—if you can even call this work—is to wander the landscape taking pictures, then pen brief descriptions and post it all as a gallery on their channels.

His lens is good, his captions are captivating, and the results reveal a keen ability to spot the unusual and ferret out its story. (No wonder; Saul has an MFA in creative writing and previously worked for a literary journal.)

Even so, the exercise makes him tingle with imposter syndrome. “The blog might give the false impression that I am a most suitable person to inform others on the ecology of the region, but I learn much of what I share while I draft each post,” he wrote recently. “I take photos from a place of curiosity, sometimes before identifying a species or phenomenon, delight in the excuse to research it, and then present the material as if I’ve known it all along.”

But that’s the whole point. Nature is vast and mesmerizing and confounding, and weather and climate and season add mysterious complexity. It’s impossible for a writer to know it all. Thankfully, readers don’t expect them to. If we are to learn about the natural world, we don’t need someone who’s expert about everything. We need someone who’s curious about everything.

It’s the same with wine. Wine is vast and frequently bewildering. The domain stretches far beyond viticulture and enology to embrace geology, geography, history, economics, politics, religion, material culture; I’m sure I’ve missed a few. Wine is stuffed with memorizable facts but also slippery with opinion. It’s scientific and aesthetic, calculable and inestimable. It’s about fashion and taste and commerce and beauty and culture. Even tenured wine experts frequently bump into things that are novel, surprising, or just plain “news to me.”

Wine communicators require more than baseline knowledge to write persuasively about this gangling topic. We need a high level of expertise even to know which questions to ask, or to recognize when something’s interesting enough to be worth writing about. We learn some of these things by reading, but we learn most of these things by getting ourselves onto a territory, meeting with growers and makers, talking, tasting, and taking notes.

In other words, we don’t need to know it all, but we do need to educate ourselves as broadly as possible. The best way forward is to do what Saul does every week in the woods: approach our subject with humility, ask questions, find answers, and share the news with others.

Subscribe now

All photos ©2025 Meg Maker. A version of this essay appeared in The Circular.

I ended a recent essay with advice to budding wine writers. I said, in essence, that it’s fine but not essential to earn formal wine credentials, because if your primary motive is to share your insights with others, the most important thing is to learn to write, and to practice that every day.

Fine, one reader said, in a comment about the piece. But how do I go about that? How can I learn to write persuasively and professionally? Where should I start?

It starts with writing, I replied. A short piece, just a page or two. Choose a topic that’s been on your mind, an opinion, a point of view, a take, maybe a hot one. Write longhand if it’s easy for you, since it frees you from the freight of technology. Let your idea flow out, then re-read to see what you have. Edit to sharpen its edges, but don’t fuss too much.

Then, find a trusted person, someone who won’t break your heart, and ask them to read it. Don’t offer a preamble or back story. Don’t explain it. Just let them read it. Once they’ve finished, ask them to answer three questions:

• What is this piece of writing trying to do?

• What’s working best to achieve that?

• What might change to make it stronger?

Your job, while they’re answering these three questions, is to sit quietly and absorb what they’re saying. It’s not a discussion. You’re not trying to clarify your position. It’s not a test although it may feel that way to both of you. Your friend’s feedback is a disclosure to you about what your piece says, what parts say it, and what might shift for the piece to be even more fully itself.

The foundation of this exercise is a truth about storytelling: that every piece of writing is trying to do something. It’s trying to say something, to mean and be something true. Even a short wine review, of fifty words or a hundred, is trying to say something true. The writer bakes that something into the piece, into both its larger armature and its fine details.

Meanwhile all the reader has is the text. It’s literally all they have to go on. All they know—all they can know—about what you’re trying to say is encoded in the words on the page. The text is the piece’s face value. Sure, every reader brings their own ideas and prejudices to the exercise, their chemistry and biases, a kaleidoscopic cocktail of influences ranging from everything they’ve ever read to what they had for lunch.

If they are faithful readers, they will set aside what they themselves would do with this material and look instead at what you are doing with this material. They’ll try to tease apart what you’ve said and why, finding those places in the text that best advance your goal. Your goal, not theirs. And then they will think creatively, on your behalf and for your benefit, about what might shift to make your piece stronger, or, rather, more strongly about what it’s about.

It sounds complicated, but everyone gets the hang of it eventually. I know this because I used this approach over and over in my graduate writing program, and then ever since. It’s a workshopping technique, which works a little differently in a group but also works just fine one on one. It’s applicable to any piece of writing, and it’s also a helpful strategy when you’re stuck.

I concluded my advice with a suggestion: Repeat this exercise daily until you feel ready to start sharing your work more broadly. At which point your readers, now anonymous, may reply with questions of their own.

A version of this essay also appeared in The Circular.

I’ve been rummaging through older wine writing, material from 50 or 60 years ago, trying make sense of our craft’s short history. It’s been fun. I’ve stumbled onto tasting notes from the year I was born. I’ve been reminded about the early careers of great personalities, like Lalou Bize-Leroy, Becky Wasserman, Ann Noble. I’ve chuckled at a writer’s discovery of “new” Oregon Pinot noir. Yet many questions arising from these yellowed pages feel fresh, even eerily contemporary: Is this wine “alive” or has it been deadened by sulfite? Is my son’s generation improving or ruining the legacy of my domaine? Where will we find customers in an uncertain economy?

The writers of the late twentieth-century era were somewhat homogeneous: British or American, white, well educated, mostly male. (Thankfully our ranks are now more diverse, although we still have far to go.) These commentators were at the forefront of a burgeoning scene, when the world’s wines were getting bottled, shipped, and made more broadly available to the middle class.

They were, notably, writers first, cultural commentators second, wine writers distant third. Cyril Ray was a war correspondent, travel writer, and military historian. Frank Schoonmaker was likewise a travel writer and, later, wine merchant. Hugh Johnson initially wrote features about travel and food. Frank Prial was a feature writer before being tapped for the New York Times’s new wine column, in 1972 (from which he retired in 2005). Jancis Robinson started in the travel business, because although she was interested in gastronomy, “at that time the subjects of food and wine were regarded as irredeemably frivolous,” she has said. Wine wasn’t a suitably serious pursuit for someone who’d just earned a Master’s in Maths and Philosophy at Oxford.

Indeed, several of the British writers had fallen in love with wine at university, specifically Oxford and Cambridge, whose excellent wine societies fostered both conviviality and wine knowledge (we have them to thank for inoculating Robinson and Johnson). Formal wine training wasn’t seen as an urgent requirement for writers back then. That’s partly because it was almost entirely unavailable. The Wine and Spirit Education Trust launched in the UK in 1969, and its courses and certifications crept abroad slowly, gaining global foothold only the 1990s. The timeline of the Court of Master Sommeliers is similar. Robinson was the first person outside of the wine trade to earn a Master of Wine, in 1984; in this (and many more ways) she was exceptional.

Instead, these writers learned by doing: visiting producers, stomping in vineyards, staining their teeth blue in the name of research. That was the foundation of their work, but it wasn’t the whole of it. An understanding of wine takes one only so far. They earned readers’ trust because they were expert at both evaluating and describing the experience of wine. They were good writers with something to say.

As wine writing became professionalized, many novice wine writers began to feel compelled to pursue formal wine training to earn credibility. The credentialing organizations have a commercial interest in encouraging that approach, and to be fair do a thorough job of educating nascent writers about wine history, styles, making, growing, and more. They also furnish students with tools and terminology to describe the world’s wines, and a framework for evaluation and assessment.

But they are not designed to be writing programs. They teach about wine, not wine communication. So new wine writers must, separately, like the greats before them, learn to tackle setting and description, characterization, plot, pacing, texture, dialogue, narrative arc, the myriad formal and informal facets of the craft that make a piece of wine writing (any writing) worth reading. They must also learn journalistic protocols about disclosure, accuracy, and fairness.

That writerly expertise is hard-earned and only comes with time. Facts are learnable and discoverable, but the ability to share facts in a compelling way, to use them to say something true, is harder to acquire. You can look up the vineyard area in Aloxe-Corton. You can’t look up how best to communicate, persuasively, the impact climate change is having on those vines and its farmers. The former is a fact. The latter is framing. You might need to try different frames to find one that suits the picture.

So yes, I tell new writers: learn as much as possible about wine, its viticultural and enological aspects, its historical, social, and societal implications and influences. Earn a wine credential if it’s appealing and affordable. But don’t stop there if what you most want to do with your knowledge and insights is share them with others. Learn how to write, then practice that every day.

A version of this essay was originally published in The Circular.
Image: The wine library at G.D. Vajra in Barolo, Italy ©2025 Meg Maker

I’m writing this longhand. You’re reading it typed. It ends online, but it begins on paper.

I use a flavor of cursive, not exactly the one I was taught in third grade but close, letters flowing together to keep my hand moving. I’ve filled dozens of notebooks this way, with everything from journal entries to germinal essays. The technique’s success lies largely in its tempo, the way mark-making falls into rhythm with thought-making, brain and hand in concert. The pace is such that by the time my hand has written “the pace is such that,” my brain has decided how to finish the sentence: The pace is such that my brain can finish the sentence. It feels frankly miraculous.

It’s not. It’s a practice. I’ve been drawing since childhood; like most people I drew before I wrote. But I kept drawing, and over time my dominant hand became canny at translating vision (literal and conceptual) into marks on paper. All of that drawing apparently did something to my creative apparatus, teaching my hand and brain to collaborate on expression. When I started writing essays, I realized I had a hardwired link between hand and brain, I/O perfectly in sync.

I’m sensitive to an ableism that suggests this technique could work for any writer. Many people struggle with handwriting, and some people use learning and motor strategies that rule it out entirely. But the approach works so well for me I wanted to expand on it here in case it seems useful to you, as a writer.

Notebook, pen, quiet. Sometimes I have clear sense of where a piece of writing wants to go, so I begin at its beginning, or what I think is its beginning. Other times it’s notional, more feeling than idea. In those cases I might start by writing a question: What is this about? or, Where does this start? or even, What do I want to write? I write the answers that come. The main thing is to get going, because the ideas come when the pen starts moving. It’s a practical matter: The hand needs to write words, so the brain comes up with something for it to say.

I write, I keep writing. The work spools out, sentence by sentence, even as other parts of my brain attend to the larger picture, the longer story, the arc, where it’s all headed. I pose questions about what’s getting written, propositions and contrapositives, and try to address those, too. But I don’t self edit and don’t let myself judge what appears. Sometimes what appears is a surprise, a revelation, a sentence that perfectly summarizes a scene or idea. A sentence I couldn’t have written without this handwork. The act of writing draws it out.

Read more

I recently returned from Oxford University, where I participated in the inaugural Pinot noir and Identity Symposium. The event, a culmination of four years of planning by the organizing committee, convened academics, independent researchers, and passionate wine advocates for three days of discussion about this characterful grape.

My presentation and paper—unsurprisingly for anyone who knows my research interests—considered the evolving vocabularies of Pinot noir. In particular, I looked at how our representations of Pinot noir exemplify the shift, over the last half-century, from considerations of wine’s intrinsic nature toward its experiential properties—from “what is this wine about?” to “what is this wine about to me?”

Early twentieth-century wine writing was largely evaluative, the writer rendering judgments and delivering pronouncements based on domain expertise. As the century wore on, the writing became more descriptive, blooming with flavor and aroma analogies and leaning into wine’s hedonic impact.

Pinot noir is a good exemplar of that shift in discourse partly because it is so much discussed. There’s substantial verbiage produced about Burgundy, of course, but Pinot has wandered around the globe, inspiring myriad commentators in the diaspora. And because the grape has a broad expressive range, the writing can also consider a vast diversity of wines, still and sparkling, expensive and cheap, red, rosé, and “blanc.”

Over time some linguistic tropes have emerged. We see them everywhere in the literature, whether the writing’s about Chambolle-Musigny or Meiomi. Here are a few:

Pinot noir is feminine. Gendered metaphors are always troubling, and this one drags in connotations of shyness, delicacy, even fragility. On the other hand, I found examples of Burgundy producers describing their wines as masculine, assertive, violent, and savage.

Pinot noir is elegant, seductive, sublime. Let’s throw expensive onto the pile. Perhaps some Pinots read like that, but for consumers of supermarket brands it’s functionally just Pinot, a reliably fruity, not-too-tannic partner for whatever else is on the table.

Pinot noir is sensitive. This is perhaps the most ubiquitous trope, stemming in part from the grape’s physiological properties, its thin skin leading to rot and other calamities. But the grape’s genetic fecundity and adaptivity have allowed it to thrive not only in native Burgundy but also California, Oregon, New Zealand, Germany, Japan, and beyond. Instead of sensitive it might be better characterized as cunningly adaptable, even robust.

The point is that writers can easily easy to fall into the trap of repeating, even amplifying, these clichés. Perhaps we can acknowledge the cinder of truth on which some are based. But if we want to advance the discourse, we should think creatively about what we believe Pinot noir is and can be, then put that into our own words.

Ed. note: A version of this essay was originally published in The Circular.

I enjoy reading criticism—of books, art, cinema, architecture. As a fine artist and writer (who herself writes criticism), I find it instructive to see how critics from various domains approach the exercise.

I was particularly struck reading a recent New Yorker piece, an essay by Julian Lucas reflecting on the critic Hilton Als’s profile of author Derek Walcott. That’s meta, I know: a writer writing about a critic writing about an author. But the piece was part of The New Yorker’s 100-year anniversary series called Takes, in which a present-day commentator provides a fresh “take” on material from the archives, usually a profile of a person, place, or thing.

Lucas was ruminating on the approach Als had taken in profiling this famous but also complicated author. He noted that Als could have written a “moralizing takedown,” or alternatively penned a “dutiful hagiography.” Instead, “Als simply arrived on the beach—sunglasses and folding chair in hand—and set out to discover how such an imperfect man wrote such extraordinary work.”

It was that phrase, “dutiful hagiography,” that reached out from the page and grabbed me by the collar. Because who among us has not read such a profile of a winemaker, or even of a particular wine itself, in the pages of a contemporary wine magazine?

Wine is an experience good, demanding both subjective and objective evaluation. It’s also an inherently social product, and so the wine industry is likewise social and small enough that relationships among its dramatis personae, producers and writers alike, create propulsive force. Our work repeatedly invites us to confront a key question of criticism: Is it possible to be objective about a subject when the subject is people, especially people you know and like?

On the whole, writers tend to respect producers and the work required to place an aesthetic product into the hands (glasses) of the market. We are, generally, polite; you will rarely see a “moralizing takedown” in a magazine except in the rare instances of a deep transgression: worker abuse, fraud, environmental demolition.

Some wines are indeed iconic (some vineyards and territories, too), their goodness agreed by generational consensus. Some people are likewise icons, their reputations formed from a collage of commentary about their life’s work. We respect the tiny climat for what it is. We respect the grande dame for what she does. There is irrefutable proof of their overall excellence, despite a few quibbles over foibles.

But the reader isn’t served by a “dutiful hagiography,” even of these enduring characters. Our work is to interpret and contextualize rather than lionize. Not that we need to muckrake as a matter of policy, but we do need to research and write with circumspection, to question received wisdom, to visit and taste for ourselves, to talk not only with the principal but also the cellar hand, to pull up our “sunglasses and folding chair” and watch for a while to see how the work gets done.

A wine may deliver epiphanies or may simply be banal, but our job is to understand how and why so we may arm readers with insights before they taste for themselves.

Ed. note: A version of this essay was originally published in The Circular with the title Considering Criticism.

A good piece of writing is a complicated machine. It has a shiny outer shell wrapped around complex inner mechanics.

The shell is the surface narrative. When we’re asked what a piece of writing is about, we often describe the surface narrative. It’s about a British lawyer who spends two months working harvest in the Loire. It’s about a new wine from a prestigious estate in Chile. It’s about pét-nat and how to serve it.

The surface narrative offers details about who, what, when, and where. It is the topic, and it’s almost never the story.

Read more

In early April the birds begin to filter aloft. At first a trickle, then a river. On a big night, two million birds fly over Grafton County, New Hampshire, where I live. I lie awake after midnight picturing them overhead, wings working, eyeing one another, twittering, a vast fortuitous flock.

There are sparrows and warblers, waterfowl and hawks, thrushes and flycatchers and wrens and thrashers. Male Robins sweep through early, kicking up turf to fuel their flight to Newfoundland. Soon little brown birds sprinkle the lawn, white-crowned, white-throated, streaked and chirping. A pair of American Bluebirds examines our nesting boxes before a House Wren claims them both, comically possessive. Small dramas.

On cold nights with snow or rain or wind, or nights with all of the above, they hunker down instead, sheltering in place until it’s safe again to take wing. For days they may stay put, but soon they must press onward, because territories await, mating awaits, ahead and not behind. On nights when the the weather along the flyway is clear and fine, the river of birds swells to 300,000 or 500,000 in flight at once, traveling 25 miles per hour or more, rising and falling from 1,000 to 3,000 feet to skirt the clouds and get their eyes on stars.

It’s a seasonal river, dry by late June, when all the birds have reached their summering grounds, set up shop and started shouting. They stake their claim and stuff their bills with sticks and grass and fluff and moss, weaving them into temporary mangers for the fragile eggs they will soon lay.

Read more

I recently published a long memoiristic essay about a press trip I’d taken in Northern Italy. A fellow wine journalist posted a comment asking, “Who’s the reader?”

It’s a valid question. Whenever we sit down to write an article, we should consider our reader, and in some ways that means we act as both writer and editor. Those of us who self-publish are deeply familiar with this duality, but anyone who wants their writing to get read (read: everyone) had better think about who’s doing the reading.

“I assume limitless intelligence but limited prior knowledge,” I replied. Meaning the piece was meant for anyone who likes a good story and wants to hear about my experience but doesn’t necessarily know that much, or even care that much, about wine. I snuck in some history and details about the territory and winemaking, but it was principally a work of creative nonfiction. It’s an approach that makes a piece about more than its topic and expands its potential reach.

Since wine is an experiential product, wine writers have latitude to use personal insights and observations to create pieces that are impressionistic, opinionated, characterful. Such pieces underscore wine’s subjective realities: flavors, evocations, myths and secrets. They’re often written in the grammatical first person, and the writer may even wax poetic. These pieces make few claims toward universal truths, instead staking out private boundaries around the writer’s lived experience.

Wine is also technical, vastly complex, so writers may lean more upon statistics and evidence to underscore wine’s objective realities. These pieces rely on research, reporting, facts, and analysis. The material is often strictly in third person. Over time, some forms and norms have emerged: vintage report, trip report, producer portrait, regional profile, explainer. These pieces aim to educate, illuminate, and demystify wine.

Both strategies are valid, and writers naturally slide back and forth between them according to a publication’s goals. Of course they can also be artfully combined to amplify both the appeal and credibility of a piece of wine writing.

But these strategies aren’t deployed in equal measure. (This is perhaps why my colleague was confused about my writerly aims; my piece didn’t fit the “press trip report” pattern language.)

The preponderance of wine writing leans on wine’s objective realities. It aims to educate readers, to explain wine.

This kind of writing makes some interesting assumptions: That readers want to have wine explained to them. That they can learn about wine by reading about it; that reading is an effective means to absorb wine’s truths. That once educated, they will come to value wine. And once they value wine they will buy it, and when they buy it they will love it.

Does it work? Does this analytical, explanatory, demystifying lesson-making actually lead to love?

I’m not sure. I’ve worked in every genre of wine writing, from service journalism to lyric essay and everything in between, and I’ve tried to make it all engaging, but even friends who love wine will read my memoir before my explainer on malolactic fermentation.

Maybe in trying so hard to explain wine, we’ve bleached it of all mystery, robbed it of intricacy and interestingness. A reader of limitless intelligence should be able to tolerate some complexity.

Image: Can’t Explain It, oil and digital media ©2022 Meg Maker. A version of this essay also appeared in The Circular.

“An actor entering through the door, you’ve got nothing, but if he enters through the window, you’ve got a situation.”

— Billy Wilder

We settle into our seats, scrumbling the top of our popcorn as the theater dims. The screen lights up, the titles roll, and suddenly we tumble into chaos. The motorcycle leaps the river and overtakes the getaway van. The horse breaks loose from the pack to snag the Derby crown. The boy and girl fall in love, fall into bed, and then fall out — all in the first ten minutes.

These opening exploits set up the story, pulling us into the action and posing more questions than they answer. They create a situation.

I learned that bit of stagecraft not from the director Billy Wilder (although I love his quote, above), but from the playwright Joe Sutton, who taught my graduate playwriting seminar. Over the eight-week course, we studied the machinery of the play, reading backwards and forwards to understand how a work creates and sustains momentum. To complete the course, I had to write a 45-minute one-act play, a humbling (humiliating) experience that principally earned me deep respect for anyone who can do that well.

Nonfiction writers can also use that dramatic technique — starting in medias res — to create a propulsion that catapults a piece forward. Picture the story pushing off from the wall at the deep end of the pool; the stronger the story’s legs, the farther it can go before it must start working its limbs and lungs. That initial drive compels the reader forward, too. It creates intrigue, interest. A situation.

Read more

I write creative nonfiction, a sweeping genre that includes personal essay, memoir, biography, lyric essay, narrative journalism, and an evolving collection of other forms. Creative nonfiction has been called “true stories well told,” and I like that definition, but there’s more to it.

It’s a curious word, “nonfiction,” framed, as it is, in the negative: “not fictive.” Meaning not made up, created whole cloth, sui generis. Perhaps we feel more comfortable with this inverted etymology because although creative nonfiction is truthful, it’s not The Truth. It is not sterilized truth-telling: the quarterly earnings report, the scientific paper, the technical manual, the legal document; every word in service of litigable facts. Creative nonfiction may iterate objective truths, but at its heart it considers things that are, instead, subjectively rather than objectively true. Truths that are not verifiable; there’s no test that can drive them toward validation.

In fact, every genre of literary production, fictive and nonfictive, has elements of fact and elements of invention. A writer’s work slides back and forth along a continuum of truth. That makes many facets of the writing hard to pin down: A dialogue from an early childhood memory: Is it true? The color of the sky on the day she left: Is it true? What he was feeling as the song ended: Is it true? The gesture of the ghost who walked the ramparts: Is it true?

In the best renderings, creative nonfiction is imaginative truth-telling. It’s through the use of imagination and creativity that writers drive truths to light. They mine their own and their subjects’ inner states so the narrative feels like honest disclosure.

Readers of nonfiction famously demand a reliable narrator. But reliability doesn’t mean a writer serves as stenographer to a stream of verities. Reliable mostly means trustworthy. The writer’s statements and assertions and revelations build toward something larger that feels essential and truthful.

A writer must earn the right to make claims about these realities: to report a dialogue from childhood, to say that the sky turned teal, to describe how a sadness lifted, to declare the castle haunted. The writer earns that right by slow accretion, within a given piece and over an entire career, through an aggregation of truths told well, honesties small and large.

A trustworthy writer has more latitude to slide back and forth along the continuum, toward the fantastical and back again. Because the reader knows the prose is kindled by a smoldering cinder of truth.

Image: Counterpoint, oil and digital media ©2022 Meg Maker

“What is voice?” my husband asked. He’s a reader but not a writer.

“It’s, that — no one says a thing the way I say it,” I replied. “Another writer might have the same idea, but that writer will say it another way. It’s not the idea that’s different. It’s the voice.”

The answer came straight out, a real jumble. But it wasn’t wrong.

I’d been editing a book manuscript, thatching it out, reordering, making syntactic suggestions. I’d been trying to preserve the writer’s voice, but the writer had reversed a few lines because they didn’t sound right to him. “I write like I talk,” he said, almost as confession.

He doesn’t, though. Not really. No writer does.

Talking is one kind of voice. It’s literal voice, but it’s not literary voice.

Speech is messy, loose, improvisational. This is blazingly obvious when you read a raw transcript of a conversation you’ve had. The conversation was perfectly understandable at the time, but the transcript feels convoluted and scattershot. That’s because in live speech we rely on tone, inflection, body language, pauses for effect, animations using our face, eyes, hands. Live speech is dynamic, playful, expressive beyond words, beyond mere words.

Writing things down makes new demands. The living gestures and sounds of speech are absent from the printed page. All a reader has is the text, and text is (largely) silent.

So how can a writer inject tone and body language and inflection and expression and pauses onto the page and into the reader’s mind? Through voice.

A writer’s voice varies somewhat according to content, readership, genre, length, and many more factors. Voice is principally, and formally, modulated by grammatical person: first person (I, we), second person (you), third person (he, she, it, they). But voice also transcends these factors, inheres in all of a writer’s production. It’s the rhythm that animates the text no matter the subject or context. The signal is loud in memoir, quiet in breaking news, but it’s always in the background, humming.

My own writerly voice leans on word choice, word order, pacing, texture: syntax as style. I have a few more rules, largely about concision, powerful verbs, tension and release, white space. These rules aren’t fixed (not written down; ha). They’re evident only when I reverse engineer the sounds my texts make.

Voice is intuitive.

When I’m working as an editor, I train my focus on the writer’s ideas, their parent material, and listen attentively to their voice. First, I read a piece from top to bottom without making changes. I may flag passages or sections for later review, but I don’t make specific adjustments until I’ve seen the whole of it. I have to understand where it’s going, what it’s trying to do, and how the writer’s telling the tale. This first read reveals the writer’s rhythms and tone.

When I begin to edit, when I start to remove extraneous verbiage, tighten expressions, suggest changes to flow and sequence, adjust grammatical hiccups, I try to preserve the writer’s sound if not their specific syntax.

Even so, editing can feel, to a writer, like erasure. Especially if the writer has lived with a piece for a while, the most minute adjustments can feel jarring. New phrasing can even seem like it’s introducing new thoughts. A writer should receive an editor’s suggestions in the spirit of genuine collaboration. Because a good editor is also listening to the rhythm, the song, of the reader.

Here’s what I might have replied to my husband instead of the verbiage I blurted: Voice is the writing’s music. If grammar and vocabulary are the notes and raw sounds, voice is what turns it into song. Musicality comes naturally, and, like all natural talents, takes practice.

Image: Counterpoint ©2022 Meg Maker

If you are a memoirist, what will you dare to write about? Will you write about your mother who is still alive? Will you write about your father’s suicide? Will you write about money, sex, religion — yours? Will you write about cancer and disfigurement, anxiety, the times when you thought you would die even though you were healthy, the irrational, ambiguous times?

It’s one thing to be vulnerable to a reader. It’s another to be too candid. The boundary is smeared and jagged. “Writing is therapeutic, but it is not therapy,” said my writing instructor, once. Meaning you will discover what you feel and know and understand as you write. You’ll feel better having articulated what’s inside and heretofore inchoate. But the result, the end product on the page, had better be readable, accessible to a reader. The reader doesn’t care about your therapeutic process, the reader wants an idea, a revelation, something to have been learned. The reader wants your perspective on yourself. The reader wants to trust you.

You want to take risks, else what have you learned? You also want to feel free to write whatever you believe is true. There are some subjects you’ll have a harder time being fully truthful about. Your spouse, a parent, how much money you make. You worry about what the spouse and parent and everyone else will say about what you said about them. You worry about being judged about how much or little money you make. So you pull back, hold some things back; details, feelings. The reader can sense this and poof! Trust evaporates.

Above all, you must find something to say that feels like a pebble of cool truth in your palm, something you can fully describe because you’re so familiar with its contours, being your small possession, that the reader sees it as vividly as you do. This is a thing of you that you know and can describe knowing. This is your idea.

How do you get yourself to a place of knowing risky things, having risky ideas, running with scissors, writing with scissors? Be ruthlessly honest. Avoid platitudes, incomplete realizations, coatings. Remind yourself that other people don’t feel as strongly about you and your thing as they do about themselves and their thing. So you have some latitude, some breathing room, to be fully in yourself and your story, because when you make yourself visible people look at you but they also look away and look back at themselves. You don’t have to feel critiqued, judged. Or go ahead and feel critiqued and judged. Just don’t let that stop you.

Orange Over Gray, ©2022 Meg Maker