The Slow Fire of Reading | Chelene Knight

What’s the biggest mistake you’ve made as a creative? Chelene Knight answers without hesitation: “I think the biggest mistake was just not being me.”

This week, we sit down with acclaimed poet, novelist, memoirist, and Tasha’s own writing mentor, Chelene Knight, to talk about what it means to build a creative life. Not the tidy, “professionalized” version, but the messy, alive, human one that actually feels good.

Chelene’s most recent book, Safekeeping: A Writer's Guided Journal for Launching a Book with Love, is part guided journal, part treasure map through the writing life. It also, as she puts it, “contains all of my mistakes as a writer and all the things that I’ve learned.” Listening to her is like being handed a permission slip to go slower, trust yourself, reread the same book forever, throw out the pressure to finish, snack on a single poem and call it a meal.

We talk about:

* Why “there is no reading, only rereading”

* The mistake of ignoring your instincts and how to recover.

* Poetry as the foundation for all writing.

* What happens when writers trust the reader enough to leave space.

* How slowing down turns reading into a kind of prayer.

The adventure

Chelene guides us through two delicious reading practices: one with Julia Bouwsma’s Dear Ghosts, I Pick the List, and another from Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler. They’re haunting and beautiful.

The exercise is simple but radical: Hear a poem once, notice the phrase that hooks you, then hear it again. The second time through, the text has changed… and so have you.

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What stayed with us most from this practice is how a poem can feel like a hurricane one moment and a whisper the next, depending on how you let it in.

Reading, in Chelene’s hands, is more than consumption. It’s a meditation, a prayer, a slow fire that lights us from within.

Let us know in the comments how this practice goes :)

Thanks for practicing with us,

🧘🏽‍♀️ Tasha & Jeff 🧘🏼‍♂️

Chelene’s Links:

* The Say No with Love Letters

* Safekeeping: A Writer's Guided Journal for Launching a Book with Love

* Cheleneknight.com

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