Monday Motivation

Dear friends:

This season, it is just about 6 years since Emily and I first soft-launched Circe Consulting. The world was on the brink of 2020, though we as of yet had no idea what that meant—no idea that we would all soon be in lockdown, working, teaching, learning, and gathering on a thing called “Zoom.” Emily and I were both at complex junctures of our lives (well…are there ever simple junctures in life, after a certain age?) and looking for a creative, collaborative partnership that would stand the test of time. We’d been friends for a long time already by then, having first crossed paths when I wrote her fan mail about her outstanding blog in 2011—an act that, to my chagrin, is not actually typical of me but that remains one of the smartest and most rewarding things I’ve ever done. In 2011, Emily was caring for her dying son, Ronan, and to put it mildly she did not have time for small talk; our friendship was intense, intimate, deeply revealing from its onset, which tends to be exactly how I like things. One of the closest friends of my life died shortly after I became friends with Emily, and at first I was embarrassed to discuss it much with her, considering what she was going through, but I soon learned that Emily was, in fact, one of the people who understood my grief best and who gave me permission to feel it. Female friendships were—and are—a governing center of her life as they have always been mine, and even in the face of her son’s illness, she never trivialized or dismissed my loss of a surrogate sister, nor did she “avoid” it out of the discomfort many tend to feel with grief. We got into the weeds with one another quickly and stickily, as Emily’s once-happy marriage to her son’s father dissolved under the weight of their impending loss and as my own long (also once deeply loving) first marriage, which had been under significant strain for many years, began catapulting towards a painful end when I fell irrevocably in love with a close friend and hammered nails into my matrimonial coffin. In the ensuing years before we launched Circe, Emily would remarry, have her second child, relocate to California and begin a new professorship, and see her new marriage crumble; I would lose my dream job, be there for the end of my father’s life, be diagnosed with breast cancer and undergo a bilateral mastectomy and chemo, become engaged, and see my eldest two children off to college, all before losing my mother, too, in 2019. Even before the pandemic hit, Emily’s and my lives were both in what seemed a constant, rapid-fire flux of challenges and joys. We both had memoirs coming out—Emily, in fact, had two, because that’s how she rolls! When we decided to join forces to launch Circe Consulting, we had no idea how profoundly connected the success of our business would be to the global tragedy of Covid, that forced the world online. By sheer strange coincidence, Emily and I—no tech goddesses, to be sure—had launched a virtual business just as the entire world was about to go virtual, and amidst our personal and collective losses, Circe somehow managed to thrive.

We loved the work. In those early years, it was often more than we could keep up with, too. There is only so much sourdough bread one can bake, and everyone, it seemed, was now dusting off the old manuscripts in their drawers, looking for developmental editors and writing classes. We held a couple of retreats; we ran overlapping online classes; we ghostwrote projects together that have since found homes; we had repeat clients who ended up becoming treasured friends. Running a business is not always easy, as many of you out there also know. It’s particularly not always easy when you both have other full-time jobs (I got my PhD in the early years of running Circe), are parenting children, have disabilities, are writing your own books, and are doing your damndest to have personal lives, whether dating or nurturing a new marriage. Running a business—meeting deadlines together, managing money together, dealing with clients together—is, in fact, a kind of marriage, too: one that entails the occasional shifting of who is carrying more of the load, that entails negotiation, that entails a stubborn persistence to see each other’s beauty and gifts even when (or especially when) time is tight and schedules are crazy. When Emily and I co-launched Circe, we had been friends for some 8 years, but we had hung out in person probably fewer than 20 times and most of our relationship, like our business, took place online. Now, since moving to the California desert in 2024, an hour and a half from Emily’s home, we have become on-the-ground family too, often spending weekends together when her daughter is with her father. If you know us well, you’ve probably even seen us making “thruple” jokes, as Emily was friends with my husband for years before I knew either one of them, and we are often an irreverent trio giggling in the corner together, stranded on train platforms together during a heatwave in Wales, getting lost together at Olympic Park in Munich, and making up “feminist rage” songs together on my desert porch while my husband plays the guitar. We (I’m not counting my husband here, though I hope he doesn’t feel left out, ha!) own numerous matching dresses. We’ve become close to each other’s longtime other best friends. Over the course of these 6 Circe years, we’ve gone from being “good friends” to having lives that are deeply, and hopefully permanently, intertwined.

Even when Circe had more business than Emily and I could reasonably take on, we never expanded to take on another business partner, because…well, in some ways, that would be a bit like becoming a real thruple. It’s a big decision! We’ve referred plenty of business out over the years, but to take on a third partner would change the balance of things immensely. We’ve both had brilliant friends who might have been interested, but even when tempted by thoughts of expansion, we remained smaller by choice so as not to disturb the ecosystem of either Circe or our friendship. And, to that end, Circe does remain a two-woman enterprise (along with our longtime wood nymph of an administrative coordinator, Heather!), and likely always will. But, just a few months ago, Emily and I also became two of three partners in a new LLC venture about which we could not be more excited: CRAFT SCHOOL. And so, with this newsletter, we would like to welcome with a full heart our newest business partner and hopefully also lifelong friend…drumroll for Jeannine Ouellette!

I want to talk about what it means to choose who you’re going to walk with on your path: personally, professionally, creatively. I have always been drawn to artists and people who are not afraid to touch the flame and have been privileged to have many such role models, intimates, and muses in my life, and with the launch of CRAFT SCHOOL, I’m taking a leap and doubling down on the kind of artists (and humans) in whom I most believe. Jeannine Ouellette is precisely such a person. Not only is her debut book, The Part That Burns, genuinely brilliant and profoundly emotionally resonant, but Jeannine is a natural and dedicated community builder extraordinaire. A former foster child who has long taught in the prison system, she also has a deep innate respect for human dignity and understanding of what it means to be an underdog to whom nothing is just handed. Emily, who grew up working a farm on her prosthetic leg, and I, who grew up below the poverty line in a high crime area of inner-city Chicago, feel a profound sense of kinship with Jeannine’s fierce work ethic, her trauma-informed pedagogy, and her belief in the importance and saving powers of underrepresented voices. Chances are, of course, you already may be familiar with Jeannine, as her Writing in the Dark is one of the top literary Substacks, with close to 19,000 subscribers. If so, we know we don’t have to tell you how extraordinary she is.

Here is a Thing: when you are 57-years-old and you have lost your breasts, your hair, both hips, buried both your parents and two of the closest friends of your life, have a serious AI condition, and have already come face-to-face with your own capacity not only to love and nurture but to do serious damage with which you’ve had to reckon, you do not have the time or the will to fuck around with frivolity. When you live in a family where all three of your children are marked for intense discrimination and potential persecution by your own government, you lose a whole lot of interest in things the culture tries to tell you are important, like what the number says on your bathroom scale or how many “followers” you have on social media or how allegedly “invisible” women of a certain age—an age you are damn grateful and euphoric to have reached—supposedly are. And so, the people with whom you want to surround yourself…well, they are the people who also have little interest in that noise. They are the women who know what it is to have to pay literally the bulk of their income on a prosthetic not covered by insurance just so that they can walk and yet still have plans to run a half-marathon; they are the women who have it in them to still love with absolute ferocity and laugh with abandon despite having once stood body pressed to the edge of a bridge contemplating jumping in the fugue grief of child-loss; they are the women who have endured and survived generational abuse and silencing to come out the other end as strong matriarchs who provide bottomless love to their own families; they are the no-filter, no-bullshit, no-time-to-be-a-hater women who don’t have any more interest in the misogynistic, ableist, racist, ageist, heteronormative Machine that attempts to keep the vast majority of humans down and voices silenced, and they are the ones who decide instead, Hell no. With what time I have left, I want to lift.

And so, in that spirit, CRAFT SCHOOL is now open for business! Here at the precipice of beginning our first year-long cohort on January 28, we can have no idea what is in store, but we know it’s been a long time since we were this excited about a new venture and a new partner. Designed specifically to accommodate larger groups of students with a craft-centered (rather than workshop-centered) model, CRAFT SCHOOL affords Jeannine, Emily, and me the chance to broaden the communities we have already spent these past years nurturing, and to also expand our mission of using what platforms we have to connect people, help foster lifelong friendship and learning, and demystify the publishing industry to make it more accessible for all. We want to wade into the sticky, beautiful, and difficult with you, and expand our brains and hearts while doing it.

This holiday season, if you’re looking for more of any of the above in your life, consider giving yourself, a sister, a friend, an adult child, a parent, a mentor, the gift of CRAFT SCHOOL (yes, payment plans offered). And most of all, please join Emily and me in welcoming Jeannine to our deepest inner circle of collaboration and trust. If you would like to get in on the ground floor of this new chapter in all of our lives, please learn more about CRAFT SCHOOL here.

With all love and hope that 2026 will be a brighter year, and in solidarity with all who are struggling—we see you.

Gina