The Circles We Create

Thoughts on writing, collaboration, and community

1. What We Make Together

We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond. — Gwendolyn Brooks.

I used to think of writing as a solitary enterprise: a room of one’s own with a door that shuts. The longer I write, the more I see how much of the work is shared. I’ve come to think of writing as an ongoing conversation — sometimes with the page, often with each other, always with the world we’re trying to catch in words.

Writer friends steady my hand when it wobbles and widen my lens when it narrows. They understand the peculiar ache of a collapsed storyline and the private madness of living with imaginary people. They know when to say “trust the process” and when to say “start again.” They read the clumsy draft with kindness and the final one with honesty. Sometimes it’s a margin note that unlocks a door; sometimes it’s an early morning text that arrives just when I’m convinced the whole thing is a mistake. As C. S. Lewis said, “Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, ‘What! You too?’”

Last month, sixteen writers gathered with Paula McLain and me on the Bay of Arcachon. We wrote and talked, coaxed stories into the light and watched them take shape. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey and Lisa Cron’s Story Genius were touchstones; poems and short stories carried us the rest of the way. By week’s end, our long rectangular table had become a circle. Trust made our pages braver; the work deepened because the circle could hold it. We were all there to witness the hum of a paragraph that finally clicked, the way a small suggestion could release an entire scene.

2. I’ll Let You in on a Little Secret …

In Arcachon we read Kate Baer’s poem, “The Bridesmaid’s Speech,” and one line rang like a tuning fork: “There is very little women choose / to keep from one another.” It reminded me of my three sisters, my earliest conspirators and truth-tellers, my first best friends. We learned early how to share stories and space, how to fight and forgive, how to be each other’s frankest critics and fiercest advocates. (The person who knew you at six will still call you out at sixty! And when you’re in trouble, they’ll show up with soup and stay until the storm passes.)

The Bridesmaid’s Speech 
I have known her all her life.
And by that I mean I’ve seen her
in the impossible light of girlhood.
The spaces in between —  the car
on the way to the birthday dinner,
the moment before the photograph.
I have stood outside the bathroom stall,
held tight while her shoulders shook
with sorrow. I’ve watched joy arrive,
midnight and unexpected, repeated
stories until they were my own. It’s
true there is a cost to this devotion — 
but I’ll let you in on a little secret:
there is very little women choose
to keep from one another. How
lucky are we to know a love like this.

(From Kate Baer’s new collection, How About Now, Harper, Nov. 4)

Cynthia, Clara, and Catherine ❤️

3. Offshoots and Blooms

It’s been just over a month since Please Don’t Lie, the thriller I co-authored with Anne Burt, debuted. As of this writing, it has nearly 9,500 ratings and reviews and remains in Kindle’s top 100 (it spiked to #6), holding steady in the top 20 in categories including Psychological Fiction and Domestic Thrillers. To everyone who has read, shared, and rated or reviewed our book: thank you! We’re amazed and, well, thrilled by how welcoming mystery/suspense readers and writers are.

As we head into the second half of the Please Don’t Lie tour, Anne and I are doing a small marathon of podcasts, Zooms, Q&As, essays, and in-person appearances, with more to come in Connecticut and California. You can find the rest of our tour schedule here. We’re grateful for every indie bookseller who sets out chairs, every librarian who unlocks a room, every reader who shows up with a dog-eared copy and a story of their own.

We wrote an essay for the October issue of Adirondack Life about how the mountainous setting is a character in Please Don’t Lie. The story is illustrated with the drawing below, which I think perfectly encapsulates how it feels to collaborate with someone you trust and respect: roots expanding underground, yielding a living thing that blooms when exposed to the light.

4. Writing Creativity and Soul

Another circle is forming around Sue Monk Kidd and her luminous new memoir, Writing Creativity and Soul (Knopf, Oct. 21). It’s a deeply personal book about a life in writing — creativity, spirituality, and growth in Sue’s unmistakably wise, generous voice. Sue is living with Parkinson’s and can’t travel to promote the book, so writers and readers who love her work are helping carry it into the world. Here’s a line from the book that particularly spoke to me: “The common heart is the place of our deep and shared belonging. As a writer, I believe in this place. I find meaning in the hope that a writer’s work can be a portal into it.”

If Sue’s work has ever moved you, consider preordering or sharing a favorite line when you read it. Books don’t walk themselves into a reader’s hands; through word of mouth, we do that for one another.

5. A Paragraph I Love

I keep dipping back into Susie Boyt’s slim novel Loved and Missed, with its fierce clarity about human nature. This paragraph from the novel offers counsel both bracing and practical:

“There is so much in life that doesn’t matter, so many things that hold you back, hem you in and throw you off the scent of what’s important. Don’t get too bogged down in things that don’t count or things you cannot influence, and specifically don’t worry too much about making sure others know you’re in the right, because it so easily gets in the way of what you want and need. Become an expert at shrugging most of life off and free yourself for what really interests you. Hone your focus. Don’t bother with cleaning or tidiness beyond basic hygiene. Don’t make your appearance your primary concern. It will zap all your creativity. Be as self-sufficient as you dare. Sometimes you hold more strength when people don’t know what you think or feel, so be very careful whom you confide in. People can run with your difficulties when you least expect it, distort them, relish them even, and before you know it they’re not yours any more. Respect your privacy. And earn your own money or you’ll lack power. Take good care of your friendships, nurture them and they’ll strengthen you. Don’t turn frowning at the defects of other people into a hobby, delicious though it may be; it poisons you. Read every day - it is a practice that dignifies humans. Become a great reader of books and it will help you with reality, you’ll more easily grasp the truth of things and that will set you up for life.”

6. An Article that Moved Me

Only after reading this riveting story in Wired did I realize that the byline belongs to a friend. I met Emi Nietfeld when we were in conversation about her memoir Acceptance, which is about growing up in foster care and finding her way in the world, at an event for an incredible nonprofit, Roots & Wings, that supports kids aging out of the system.

Emi’s article floored me. It raises every hard question at once — ethics, power, grief, blame, the law’s expanding reach, and the possibility of untreated illness — inside a surrogacy system that is booming and under-regulated. It’s the kind of piece you finish and immediately want to discuss. What she lays bare isn’t a single “bad actor” story but a structural problem — confidentiality clauses, information asymmetries, uneven leverage, and a legal climate that now treats fetal personhood as a lever.

7. Travel, Writing, and Collaboration to Come

I’ll be teaching an advanced fiction class with Paula McLain and Meg Wolitzer at the Kaua’i Writers Conference in November. Up ahead: Next October — 2026 — I’ll lead a roving literary tour of Madrid, Marrakech (where Jane Green will join me) and Barcelona, with John Shors Travel. It’ll be more peregrinating salon than workshop: we’ll read some pieces together, talk about craft in general and your own creative projects specifically, take guided walks, eat good meals. If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can learn more here.

With Jane in Morocco last year

8. One Final Thought

I truly believe that magic happens when writers see each other not as competition but as companions and confidantes, speaking to each other about and through our work. I hope you have your own circle, whatever form it takes: two friends on a porch, a monthly salon, a text thread that percolates with ideas. Protect your inner life, tend your friendships, read deeply, spend yourself on what matters, and let the rest go.

Until next month!

Christina