What is this Substack?
Essays about imagination—by which I don’t mean simply making stuff up. I’m talking about the capacity to experience and express expanded possibilities in reality itself. I’m talking about living life in the most pleasurable and true way: as a constant act of creation.
This kind of imagination, which expands the future and the world you live in, is your birthright. I will die on this hill.
I explore these ideas via the deep history of myth, art, literature, and the wild and varied ways humans have thought through the ages.
All written content on this Substack is available for free. I can’t seem to write to a schedule; pieces come when they come.
Paying subscribers are invited to join Zoom talks, a book club, and occasional live events.
Welcome home
Some truths:
When I was 36 years old, I stood on a beach, in the middle of a divorce and a pandemic, smashed to pieces by life. And just then, a wave rolled right on inside me, broke somewhere near the back of my rib cage, and saved me. It showed me that I was part of the waves, and I’d been fine all along.
Around the same time, birds started to visit me. A hummingbird flew into my home. Flocks of pigeons circled above my car every time I stopped at a light. One day I went to the beach and found dozens of pelicans battling a wall of wind.
Folk tales have followed me around, tapping my shoulder until I grasped that I was already living them, and they were trying to teach me. Grasshoppers have told me to leave relationships and countries. Trees have turned into lights before my eyes.
I’m not just cracked.
OK, maybe I’m a little cracked.
But experiences like this are part of what it means to be human.
Wise cultures have always known this. They have always recognized that there is another world—an otherworld—before and beyond material reality, and that the threshold between these worlds can be crossed.
The Western, rationalist, post-Enlightenment tradition denies the existence of this more-than-material reality, and yet the West’s most celebrated and definitive thinkers have self-avowedly sourced their genius in that place. Da Vinci. Einstein. Even Descartes.
So if I’m cracked, so were da Vinci and Einstein and Descartes.
What I’m saying is: these experiences matter. That other place matters. If there is such a thing as human genius; if we want to learn to live better, deeper, fuller, truer lives; if we want to weather the storms of today and tomorrow—it all begins there.
The good news is, with patience and curiosity and willingness, anyone can learn to have such experiences. Can rekindle their imagination—which is a capacity not for inventing things, but for experiencing and expressing expanded possibilities in reality itself.
This is a project about how we got blocked from imagination and the imaginal realm, and how we can get back there.
Because imagination is your birthright.
It’s the only hope.
And it’s already right there.
Who am I?
I serve imagination and art.
I’ve written about these themes for publications like the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement, the Washington Post, and the LA Times.
I’ve worked as a fiction editor at publishers in New York and London.
I’ve studied with mythologists, storytellers, poets, and novelists.
I have a master’s degree in the Poetics of Imagination, as well as a couple of degrees in literature.
I’ve written an advice column called Ask Ellie for the LA Review of Books, drawing on the wisdom of myth and folk tales.
I’ve spent a year living on the road, creating a magazine of stories from small-town America.
I’ve translated a novel from Spanish (Publishers Weekly called it a “stylistic tour de force”).
I’m also a person who has often found living very difficult.
Sometimes I think I was born without any skin.
Being skinless and a bit cracked, I’ve had a strange kind of life. It’s led me through dozens of homes on multiples continents; through alcoholism and recovery; through marriage and divorce; through ego death after ego death, until I finally realized that there was nothing wrong with me, and I didn’t have to solve myself. That I was just born to feel things. That that might be why we were all born.
And that if you feel things deeply enough, and you serve a power greater than yourself, and you’re willing to humble yourself and get broken and recognize how tiny you are, you’ll find your way to an infinitely rich imaginal landscape.
