I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a Substack for years. I started writing Creative Nonfiction in late 2022, when I decided that I didn’t want to channel my brainpower and time into only academic writing and publishing anymore1.

Anyone that writes creatively knows that it’s as much about process as it is product. Sharing our art, allowing others to see even a glimmer of our innermost thoughts, is profound. But the more time I’ve spent more writing, the more I’ve realized that the true prize is buried in the writing process itself, even when it’s a slog. The joy is the mess, the discovery, the sharpened sense of knowing oneself, the translation of heart and soul to something the reader can engage with on the page.

This discovery about writing isn’t unlike others I’ve had recently about caregiving and parenting. Parenting—and now caring for a sick parent—has always been a blur of small wins and trials. I don’t remember when my daughter was finally ‘potty-trained’ years ago, only the days trapped in our house with a screaming half-naked toddler, whisper-shouting at my partner about the book he read, trying figure out where we as parents stood on the approach (reader: this particular approach was not for us). The win, I realized later, wasn’t in having a ‘potty trained toddler’ (though that was nice), but in having that discussion—where did we stand on bodily autonomy? Could we ignore what others were doing and create an approach that balanced structure and grace? And, ultimately, who gave a fuck about a book if we didn’t know ourselves as parents?

The knowing oneself is the point, in writing as in life. That’s what I want this Substack, The Muddy Middle, to be.

Why The Muddy Middle?

I’m in the middle of writing a novel (35K words written, at least 40K to go) and I am in what many writers call “the sagging middle” of Act II. That part of the story where the premise is established but all of the action and resolution of Act III is still to come. Save the Cat encourages writers to use this part of the book to put the protagonist through a bouncy-ball-like series of trials and wins. Make them think they’re winning, and once they surmise that maybe they’ve figured something out, tear them down. Rinse and repeat. The book aptly names this part of the three-act novel structure “Fun and Games.” This got me thinking: I must be in the Fun and Games part of my story.

Said another way: whoever is writing my story is doing some bouncy ball shit right now.

As a parent, I am in what Catherine Newman calls “childhood’s second act” in her essay collection Catastrophic Happiness: Finding Joy in Childhood’s Messy Years. With her labeling of ages four to fourteen as the second act, I started to think that this is where the promise of the premise is fulfilled. This is where tiny people are shaped, where they intuit a value system, where they observe and learn and push in ways that will forever change them and you. This is not to say that what came before four wasn’t hard (let’s be real: that shit was hard), only that this second act of sorts is a whole new venture. This time, with its sincere curiosities about Venus and brachiosauruses that turn into pointed questions about money and privilege and sexual consent and why the world is as broken as it is, is its own new, challenging thing. My oldest is only five but Newman’s framing rings so true that I can feel it in my bones.

At the same time, I am part of “the sandwich generation” twenty years earlier than I expected to be. My dad died suddenly in 2023 at the age of fifty-nine. My mom was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer in Fall 2024. She underwent a lobectomy, chemotherapy, low-grade prophylactic brain radiation, and immunotherapy in 2025. She is currently cancer free but she’s also a shell of who she used to be—no longer brazen and rash, no longer her. My children aren’t teenagers, self-sufficient or knowledgeable of how the world works. They are only able to translate the world into concepts that mirror the experiences that they’ve already had. Being sick is curable—a cold or a sore throat—not a terminal lung cancer diagnosis delivered at fifty-eight.

In an interview with Nancy Reddy, writer Rachel Kramer Bussel talked about how ‘sandwiched’ caregiving has changed her and her creativity:

Caregiving has both made me more empathetic and helped me get in touch with my anger, and navigating how those can coexist, and how I can learn from them, isn’t always something I desire but it’s a gift in its own way.

I feel the same way—the intensive caregiving that is required at this time is a kind of pulling apart that forces transformation. You become a tightly-knit ball of hot rage and desperation, a cocktail of numbness and regret and thankfulness. It is the definition of being in the middle of things.

In my writing, this ‘middle’ of sorts is the discovery phase, which has started to become my favorite part of the writing process. This summer, a mentor asked me what the ‘organizing principle’ of a flash piece was. Only after listing eight or nine things for a seven-hundred-word piece did I realize that I didn’t know. I didn’t know what the center of gravity was. She had me free write—outside of the piece—with the prompt “I would never tell someone…” and it came to me swiftly: I’m afraid my dad won’t be remembered because my children never really knew him.

I went back to the draft and it was already there in all of the details I had already written: dialogue where my daughter refers to Dad as “my dad” and not “grandpa,” his body only ashes now, his mannerisms only real in my dreams, my daughter’s concern that after we die we’re only a pile of possessions. My subconscious had known before my conscious did. I was scared and resentful because his memory was my responsibility and I could change the way I lived my life because I knew this. Once I knew that this is what I wanted to say, I could sharpen the piece so that the reader would feel this alongside me.

This piece just got rejected (today!) and it felt like a footnote because the discovery was the point. The knowing myself was the point. The readership and publication and the sharing is great and it’s something that I still want from this piece. But no one can take that discovery away from me. We can’t skip to the shiny end, the wrap up where we got the thing and won the day—sometimes growth comes from just camping out in the discomfort.

So what will this newsletter be?

• Parenthood in childhood’s second act

• Writing for discovery

• Sandwich caregiving challenges and joys

• Essayistic thinking and living as defined by Heather Lanier. Simply: a willingness to walk in the dark

Is this container tenuous? Maybe. But everything feels tenuous right now. This is me leaning into it.