We are Vanessa and Cassie.
The Writing House is the front door to our huge-hearted love.
We are opening it to writers, artists, and people who are dreaming new worlds into being.
What flows between us - curiosity, warmth, a love of hearth-making, and a deep attentiveness to the way the world works and could work - is what shapes this place.
Vanessa is a host. Of people, of places, of practice and of what happens when you build a container that is rich enough for life to meet itself through you, in words.
Vanessa is also a writer, poet and world worker- and brings a particular brand of artistry to the work she does in the outer world. In her writing life, she is a long-time member of the Firefly Creative Writing community. She co-created The Writing Cabin with theatre-maker Rae Vineberg and brought the Imaginarium to life to deepen our capacity for systems artistry. She is the former Executive Publisher of ascent magazine, an Utne award-winning art, yoga, and spirituality publication exploring where inner life meets the wider world. At Axladitsa, a 24-acre olive farm in Greece, she hosts residencies and immersions with land and place alongside the elements, the numinous and the deep intelligence of the earth… all the ways that life itself is a creative act.
Vanessa brings to the Writing House is a writer's sensibility (and struggle!) and a host's deep attention. Writing needs atmosphere, she says, a wild relationship with time and a particular kind of quiet so the thing you've been circling for days or for years can find its way to you.
Cassie carries a deeply intuitive practice, moving through the world as a quiet weaver of people, ideas, and possibilities. Sometimes known as an Interstitionary — when this article came out many people sent it to her!
She notices the subtle threads between things, sensing what belongs together before it fully reveals itself, connections already alive, waiting for the right conditions to take root. This way of moving has taken her to the edges of many different worlds, often playing a catalytic role in helping alternative futures take shape. Much of that work unfolds at large scales — ecosystems, bioregions, systems in transition.
The Writing House draws her attention to the intimate scale. Here she tends the living field that forms between people, the other intelligences that are alive in the other-than-human world, and holding the atmosphere of welcome, curiosity, and connection from which unexpected things can emerge.
Why a Writing House, now?
Most traditions that created a dedicated space for writing did so at a moment of rupture or transition. The Egyptian Per-Ankh flourished at the edges of empire. The great scriptoria preserved what would otherwise have been lost in the collapse of Rome. The Celtic filid and later, the Hedge Schools, served as the primary keepers of culture precisely when oral tradition was under threat. The Taoist hermit retreated to write. In each of these traditions, the writing house was understood to be doing the most intimate and cosmological work: work at the level of what stories the world gets to live inside. And in each case, the writing house was a response to conditions of fragility and change and a tangible, physical space saying: something must be held, carried forward, and something new (or very, very old) must be dreamed into being. We think this is one of those such moments!
The metacrisis is at its root a crisis of meaning and imagination. The old narratives of progress, of growth, of the human as separate from and above the living world are failing visibly and violently. The stories that could carry us into what wants to come next have either not yet been written, or they need to be remembered back into our bodies and collective lives. This gap — between the stories that are dying and the stories not yet born — is one of the most dangerous and most generative places in human history.
So we are calling in the ones who can name what is dying with enough tenderness that it can actually be let go, and who can reach toward what is coming with enough precision that others can recognise it when it arrives. A writing house in these times is a place where that work can happen. Where a writer can be held well enough, fed well enough, quieted enough, to go deep enough. To write not just for an audience but for the moment and for what that moment is inviting.
Withrow Park in the Autumn.