What is this Substack?
A newsletter about imagination and the imaginal realm, published every two to three weeks
The newsletters will include essays and reflections, conversations with thinkers and artists, and more
At present, all content on this Substack is free to all subscribers, though if you want to support my work, I’m enormously grateful to all those who are able to pay for a subscription, as a form of donation
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 go that place.
This is a project about how we got blocked from 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 stories.
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’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.
