Writing in the Dark is more than a newsletter.

Based on Jeannine’s best-selling workshop by the same name, Writing in the Dark is a vibrant home for writers & creatives committed to exploring the nexus of language, art & truth.

By taking up the study of writing you are assuming a responsibility to make words mean what they say. To keep our language capable of telling the truth.

Wendell Berry

Writing in the Dark is in invitation to wake up. To defamiliarize language. To let it hold truth again.

We believe writing is a metaphor for life, and we’re striving to make both infinitely bolder, realer, truer, and more beautiful.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

Toni Morrison

The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Mary Oliver

  • Clear advice, backed up by solid examples—there is a craft book waiting to be written, surely.

    Dinty Moore, editor of Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction

  • This is the best thing I’ve read all year on creative nonfiction writing. I feel like I took an entire class just reading this! Thank you!

    Bethany Jarmul

  • I read your newsletter with delight, and found your Eleven Points post to be excellent, to the point, and perfect. For me, it was seismic.

    Mercedes Turner

  • So many lines in this that I want to quote and reference back that I do not know where to start. The writing exercise has my brain spinning, but just for sheer beauty of language, writing instruction aside, I so deeply loved this.

    Jeannette Laelanc

  • I cannot recommend Jeannine Ouellette’s Writing in the Dark highly enough. Every time I read her posts or am lucky enough to learn from her in person, I come away with new respect for her deep yet accessible knowledge and insight.

    Casey Mulligan Walsh

  • Powerful writing advice from Jeannine Ouellette. Immense value.

    David Burn

  • Your newsletter is such a fantastic resource to me as a writer and teacher. Each post is thoughtful, beautifully crafted, and useful. I'm grateful for the love and labor you put into each one. Thank you!

    Libby Kurtz