Indeterminancy
On postmortems, potentiality, and pretty cool book news
Here we are…
Another year has ended.
Another new one has “begun.”
We take stock.
Do a postmortem.
Refresh our vision.
Set new intentions.
We stride toward.
We plan and intend and determine.
I am a bit of a sucker for this ritual of refreshment, even as I know that I must choose it again and again and again all year long, refining it, accepting limitations, discovering new (often painful) revelations, in order for it to mean anything. Perhaps it is the collective sense that many are doing it at once that makes it feel more momentous (the world is my accountability partner!). For many others, this “setting of goals” and visioning something “new” can feel like a burden or too much pressure. Either way, this time of year does feel terribly liminal, doesn’t it? As in, it could become something new or different, or everything could stay exactly the same.
I am also a sucker for liminal states as places where we may linger without a direction or a purpose.
As poet and Buddhist Jane Hirshfield writes in her essay “Writing and the Threshold Life” in her book Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, a liminal state is “the time and space of transition integral to all rites of passage. Entering this condition, a person leaves behind his or her old identity and dwells in a threshold state of ambiguity, openness, and indeterminancy.”
Indeterminancy is a great word for not only this time of year, but for potentiality in creative terms—a Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle of creativity. From the liminal, we have opportunities to draw energy to take with us once we emerge. Maybe we restore energy lost, or we brew new energy, or we borrow from other energies that live within that place. Maybe we remain there longer than we’d like, unsure how to get out.
If I learned anything this year, it’s that it is possible to both live a complex, messy, struggling life and make meaning and unfurl creative bounty from it at the same time (no, not everyone, not all the time). Privileged to be able to do this, it is my recipe for “okayness.” This past year, 2025, tested my every resolve to do this. In my own post-mortem of this year, I had a long list of “highs”—of travel and book events and seeing old friends. I had a long list of “lows”—loss of loved ones and identities, over-expenditure of energy through caregiving and caretaking (two different things in my world), witnessing and holding others and recognizing when the only thing left to do was to self-nurture.
It manifested in a book.
I’m delighted to share that musings of the kind I’ve brought to you at this Substack , drawn from my own messy experiences in midlife, perimenopause, a fallow and then re-gained writing practice, along with interviews from 28 other women, femmes and other non-binary people, will be coming to you about a year from now, in my forthcoming book Writing Through the Pause: Mining Midlife for Powerful Writing. I signed the contract in the liminal space just before midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Thank you all for reading me, conversing with me, and supporting me. May we continue to make meaning out of our messes together in 2026.
It feels Herculean to thank by name all the people, organizations and more who supported me this year, but know that if you’re reading this, you are among them: Readers and writers, family and friends, events coordinators at bookstores, marketing and publicity people, professionals who’ve helped me heal, and more.
Tell me about your current liminal state—is it one of potentiality, a holding space, are you restoring or readying energy, are you feeling stuck?
JANUARY WRITING EVENTS
Jan 24: 10 am to 3 pm: Day-long Sound of Story Immersive Workshop With the South Bay Writers. At History San Jose
Feel like you don’t get enough time to write, like you want to go deeper into working on your characters and sentences? Spend a day workshopping with me through the South Bay Writers chapter of the CWC in San Jose, which includes a copy of the book, lunch, playing, finding and refining voice and tone to transform your prose. Come prepared to write and rethink the voice, style and sentences of your story.
Jan. 10, 11 -12: 15. Playing With Voice: Online Sound of Story Class
Registration for Sibyl Writing Craft Courses (including mine) are NOW OPEN for courses in January and beyond.
January 29, 10-11:30 a.m PT: Rude, Bold and Brazen: How Attitude Builds Strong Characters. Writer’s Digest Webinar.
Readers love characters who have strong opinions about themselves, others, or the world. In real life you may shy away from being bold, strongly opinionated or even rude, but in fiction, these attributes create memorable characters who leap from the page and create authenticity and reader connection. A strong attitude is also key to capturing agent and editor’s eyes.
This webinar will help you tap into the unique attitudes and judgments of your characters and use that to shape strong voice, powerful character agency that helps you tell a compelling story.
Jordan’s Books
Thanks so much to the luminous Beverly Burch for her review. Her gorgeous book “What You Don’t Know” should be on your list this year, and her Substack, Rethinking...(Almost) Everything is a must-subscribe.
My current liminal state feels less like a pause I chose and more like one I was ushered into by witnessing another woman’s crossing.
I’ve been ruminating on the old adage, “There but for the grace of God go I.” I don’t believe in God, so I translate it loosely: there but for the grace of the universe go I.
A dear friend, someone I’ve known for over a decade through an online forum of women navigating autoimmune disease and disability, recently escaped an abusive marriage. We’ve never met in person, yet our bond has been forged through shared vulnerability, advocacy, and the long endurance of chronically ill bodies. She fled a far off country in the middle of the night with her two cats, her power chair, her documents, and whatever pieces of her life she could carry. It was literal flight. Threshold made flesh.
Watching her cross that line has cracked something open in me. Not because our lives mirror each other, but because they could have. I live with disability. I depend on care. I know how easily power can tilt. And yet my own spouse meets my medical crises with steadiness and love. The contrast has left me stunned with humility, and with a visceral awareness of how fragile safety can be.
So my liminal state is one of reckoning rather than momentum. I am not stuck, but I am still. I am not actively restoring energy, but I am conserving it with intention. I’m standing in that ambiguous space where gratitude and grief coexist, where I’m honoring the truth that my life is not earned by virtue, nor hers undone by failure.
This threshold has made me more porous, more compassionate, and more alert. I am holding space for the randomness of grace, the terror of contingency, and the responsibility that comes with surviving something you never had to escape.
If there is potentiality here, it’s quieter than ambition. It’s the potential to witness without turning away. To love without illusion. To remember how close we all stand to the edge, and to let that knowledge soften, not harden, the way I move through the world.
fabulous! let’s take the mountain!