Writing is a contact sport

Make no mistake. An invitation from Ann Dowsett Johnston.

Apr 17, 2025

Once upon a time—or so the story goes—the great Margaret Atwood was seated at a dinner party beside a brain surgeon. “When I retire,” he confided, “I’m going to be a writer.” “Funny,” quipped Atwood. “When I retire, I’m going to be a brain surgeon.”

This winter, on a sober retreat in Mexico, a regal academic made a similar pronouncement over dinner. “One day, I’m going to write my memoir.” Yes, her story was dramatic: life on the street, teenaged stripping, multiple incarcerations. But I was quiet. “I think I’ll use a ghost writer,” she confided. Wise woman, I thought.

It's a story for the ages: when life slows down, sometime in the future, I’ll make some room for writing, I hear it all the time. But that’s not how it works. Writing is a contact sport, a full-hearted exercise, demanding and rewarding. Engage, and your life will be transformed. Develop a powerful voice, one that’s grounded in your being, and you’ll find a freedom like no other. Finding your through-line in a story? Well, this takes muscular focus. It means shutting down that snake whispering in your ear—“Who do you think you are?”—and locating the sweet bird singing “Here I am, here I am,” day after day after day. To do that, you have to show up regularly, coffee in hand, determined to mine whatever lies beneath your ribcage.

When I became a serious writer, after more than two decades of being a senior editor at a major newsmagazine, it was less a decision than a compulsion. Sure, I had written countless pieces—from covering the death of John Lennon, standing outside the Dakota, with Yoko Ono and her candles high above the crowd below, to spending an afternoon with French film director Jean-Luc Godard. Over the years, I won seven National Magazine Awards for my journalistic endeavours. For two decades, I was in a certain groove.

But my writing shifted when I was shepherding my son to high school graduation, steering the person I loved most in the world right out of my orbit. His leaving did a number on me. To process it all, I took to the page, loving how the knots unknotted and my voice made sense of loss. My first departure piece was “The Boy Can’t Sleep”—a mother explains love to a teenaged boy—and it was published in a bestselling anthology curated by novelist Carol Shields and Marjorie Anderson. I never looked back.

Within a few years, I had won a major fellowship to travel the world for a year to explore the closing gender gap on risky drinking, and was on my way to writing Drink, the book that would change my life. It was then I realized: I knew nothing about writing a book. I interviewed three agents, choosing one: a gifted task master, who edited my book proposal and sent it out around the world. Twenty-two publishers bit, three made serious offers. I landed an international deal for an enormous figure. The year was 2012, and my whole life changed.

Today, I offer an eight-week intensive memoir-writing course for women. Called Writing Your Recovery, it’s shaped by all I learned during my decades of editing, my publishing journey and beyond. My course, now in its fifth year, is designed to teach the aspiring writer all they need to develop a sturdy practice, find their voice, understand the memoir genre, navigate the publishing business and—most of all—excavate the story within.

We begin small, working on 750-word scenes with ample prompts, and we end large, sharing our stories and book proposals, learning from such gifted writers as yes, Laura McKowen or Gail Caldwell or Debra Gwartney, among others. All sessions are live on Zoom: nothing canned. The mood is intimate and supportive, and we keep groups small.

These classes, launching April 30^th, are virtual. But if you want to do something more exotic, why not consider joining me at the soulful Bodhi Khaya retreat near Cape Town, South Africa (November 25 to 30^th)? This will be the experience of a lifetime. And for me? It’s an opportunity to launch into my next book, a study on memory, based in South Africa where I spent two years as a child in Nelson Mandela country—the Transkei—living as one of the last whites in a tiny village about to become the first black homeland. I can’t wait.

So, how do I give you a taste of getting started on your writing journey, give you a sense of the course before you register? Answer the questions? (No, you don’t have to be in recovery from a substance to join—we’re all in recovery from something, be it grief or loss or alcohol, or all of the above.)

Here are three prompts to get you going. Write for 20 to 30 minutes on one of the prompts below. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar or punctuation. The aim is to write honestly, excavating what makes you tick. And remember the oft-repeated adage: show, don’t tell. (If you want to read a superb specimen of this sort of writing, dive into Debra Gwartney’s exquisite essay on grief called “Siri Tells A Joke.”)

Prompt One

Write about your mother’s finest qualities, using a key scene or two to illustrate. Please resist fighting against this prompt: most people are triggered, but enjoy this exercise once they relax into it.

Prompt Two

What object in your childhood bedroom held the most significance?

Prompt Three

Finally, a perennial favourite. What childhood patterns are emerging in your adult life? Do a deep dive, perhaps over a series of days or weeks, on the stories you tell yourself, ones that come from another era. Are you vigilant in the wrong decade? Are there habits you developed to survive, ones that no longer serve you?

In closing, I want to make this vow: do this daily writing exercise for a month, and your self-awareness will grow tenfold. Do it for a year, and you will move through the world in an entirely different way. In fact, your life will never be the same. I promise.

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You are reading Love Story, a weekly newsletter about relationships, recovery, and writing from Laura McKowen. Laura is the founder of The Luckiest Club, an international sobriety support community, and the bestselling author of two books, We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life and Push Off from Here: 9 Essential Truths to Get You Through Sobriety (and Everything Else).

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