listen up, bitches
work in process//42.
It’s taking all my willpower to not start this post “Listen up, bitches.” I know that to some the word perpetuates patriarchal dominance and aggression toward women. But I don’t mean it that way. I mean it with affection, respect, and ferocity—I mean fierce humans of ANY AND ALL GENDERS who stand up in their own power and act from it.
No more waiting for permission, approval, or invitation. No more being polite. No more pulling punches.
It’s time to go gloves off—with your art, your creativity, your ingenuity, your ideas and body and bravery and vision; with the thing only you can make in the world.
It’s time to make it.
After the election, I couldn’t write. My brain stopped firing. All the connections that usually light up my mind like the tiny lightbulbs on my 6th grade electricity experiment fizzled out. I didn’t have words. I just wanted to walk myself down to a nubbin and disappear. Was this going to be a permanent affliction, or just the next four years? Either way, it was bad news.
Last week I woke up. The world was on the verge of radical change and it was no time to sleep. I felt the familiar stirring of ideas, intensity and, yes, bitches, outrage. This is good. Use whatever moves you. It doesn’t have to be soft-focus, feel-good self- love. It can be anger, grief, desire, outrage. This is your engine, your energy.
Pour it all into your work. No apologies.
For the last year, I’ve been working on a book called How to Disappear about creative process. Naturally I have lots to say about how to disappear in both your mind and your body, but I don't want to say them in the usual way. I can’t say them in the usual way. So I’ve been fighting: with myself and my book. I’ve written 50 different beginnings, rejecting almost all. (“Fifty?" my therapist asked incredulously when I told him this. OK, I conceded, maybe slightly less.) I don’t like fighting. At heart, I’m a peacemaker. I want clarity, harmony, flow.
But on Monday, after watching the inauguration and the litany of balls-out measures and executive orders designed to erode our safety and humanity, our democratic systems, I realized: Fighting can be productive. Sometimes it’s essential. It’s part of the process.
And, yes, bitches, it’s going into the book.
On Wednesday, I printed out my manuscript. All the chapters I’ve been trying to organize and make pretty and presentable to make the reader’s job easier, to conform and comply, to be good. I spread them across the floor to see what I had. They were scattered and messy and at the same time strikingly clear: I don’t want to make the easy book. I’m making a map of the imagination—a weird marvelous book that only I can make.
Yesterday I took the dogs for a run in the snow. It was a soft dusting, just enough to freshen up the dirt and feel like a novelty, but the dogs of course went wild, so I did, too. I was listening to a Zen podcast by the wonderful teacher Zoketsu Norman Fischer. His dharma is wise and full of humility, as you’d expect from someone who created the community foundation Everyday Zen.
Norman is usually soft-spoken and gently suggestive with his teaching, but this talk he started with bang by saying the new president’s pardons are unconscionable. Say it out loud, he told us. Name the outrages so we don’t become numb and normalize them. This is our job now.
Listen up, bitches. This is what we say to each other at Flow Camp before we read our writing aloud to each other. No apologies, no caveats, no preambles or explanations allowed. Just: listen. The people who come to Flow Camp are among the most confident, tender, and curious humans I’ve ever met. They have stories burning inside them to be told. We all do. Write them, make them, say them out loud—even if only one person hears. This our job now.
Today, as I was getting ready to write this post, I texted my friend Kelly, the ultimate bad bitch, Flow Camp yoga teacher, and no B.S. spirit guide and truth teller, whose own gloves-off Substack post, “Housecleaning,” today lit my brain on fire and inspired this one. (Subscribe now!!!)
It’s taking all my power not to start this post, listen up bitches, I wrote.
Well then you might just have to cross that line, she replied.
Yup, crossed it.
Cheering you on to do the same.
xo katie
Listen up, bitches. We’ve had a last-minute cancellation at Desert Flow Camp and it has YOUR NAME ON IT! All bad bitches of all genders welcome. Writing, running, hiking, yoga, going wild, delving in, saying it all, sitting still, making the true thing. This will ALL be happening in Big Bend, TX, Feb 12-16. It’s not too late to join!
Registration is now open for Mountain Flow Camp, Sept 5-8 2025 at High Camp Hut, Colorado. Early bird pricing of $2400 pp now through January 31st.