Jen Knox's Blog, page 6

On the last lecture & week 48 of 52

You’re on stage and not the least bit nervous. You take a deep breath and release, feeling your shoulders soften and cheeks lift. You zero in on a face in the crowd and see how eager this person is to hear what you are about to say.

Your message encompasses the essence of your deepest insight. It is the message that will best support others.

You begin to speak…

Photo by Denisse Leon

One of my students recently wrote about The Last Lecture, a book by the late Carnegie Mellon professor, Randy Pausch. My student’s paper was moving (and relevant) enough to make me not only buy the book but also watch Randy’s last lecture. It was about how to lead your life in a way that feeds, rather than depletes, dreams.

“Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.” — William Shakespeare

The concept of someone having a last lecture to deliver may be one that particularly appeals to professors and teachers, but I invite you to personalize this one.

Imagine: It’s your last story, your last book, your last meditation, your last words, your last conversation with a friend … your last lecture. What do you say?

This question sparked my creative inspiration after a short lull. The piece I’m working on now feels urgent and necessary. To answer for yourself, I recommend tapping a strategy I teach in my leadership courses: define your why and write it out—create a mantra.

These change over time, so I feel it’s always a valid exercise, even if it’s one you’ve done before. If you’d like an example, here’s mine (today).

To live, create and teach from a place of compassionate inquiry, finding ways to connect with and love others for who they are, always looking beyond the surface and pretense. I uncover new ways of seeing what I think I see. I explore on the page and share on the stage. I trust in the purpose of my life without needing to define or limit it. I have fun, and I share what works.

It’s your last lecture. What do you say? And why not share that message now?

On sensory gluts & week 47 of 52

A few folks have asked what will happen after I hit 52 weeks. If I step out of the experiment portal, and I’m still embodied, the answer is clear. I will go back to writing about writing with philosophy and leadership weaved in because, well, the writing life encompasses it all. That’s the beauty of it. And I will explore new ways of approaching the craft and the business of writing as the world changes. As we navigate these turbulent waters, I will also be candidly sharing the perils and joys of releasing what’s personal and vulnerable and revel in the delicious inefficiency of it all.

Subscribe now

For now, let’s talk about distraction.

Photo by Nat Osipko

Lately, I’ve been feeling like my mother’s cat, Winston. He has a habit of running back and forth, attacking plastic bags and fake mice only to skid to a halt with drama as though remembering the value of watching the mid-afternoon light dance on the wall.

He stares a while, then goes back to his frantic ways.

Subscribe now

I write this on the heels of a meet-up with a new artist friend. I sat in a cluttered cafe and watched as indulgent brunch items were delivered, glancing down at my notebook to catch a thought here and there. When she arrived, I had ten thousand things, more or less, on my mind.

I was eager to get to know this new friend, a transplant from elsewhere in the Midwest and a powerhouse artist. As we sat with tiny pots of tea in between us, we spoke about writing experiences and aspirations. The moments were immersive.

But after about an hour of pleasant conversation, I lost my train of thought and went back to the internal race after plastic bags and fake mice. My to-do list loomed. It was a total blackout from the moment, even though it only lasted a short time. My new friend pulled me back by reminding me where I’d left off.

Where did I go in that instant?

Scattered is a loud symptom when we’re in a sensory glut so much of the time. The tricky thing is that hyperattention can sometimes feel like it, but it is not mindful attention. And it’s not creative attention. It’s more like trying to feel everything at once.

We are all in a mode of cognitive switching all the time—going from phone notification to social post to our endless to-do lists.

I will admit that I sometimes get smug and think this is everyone else—not me. I meditate, practice gratitude … I do all the things.

When I walk around campus and see student after student with heads down, fingers swiping content, passing each other with near misses (and sometimes collisions), I feel sorry for them. Sometimes it’s professors and staff. But, increasingly, I am noticing myself doing this.

This comes with practice. The more we practice, the more we notice our own patterns.

It’s easy to say, “Be mindful.” It’s easy to practice with intention on the meditation pillow. And I often say, “Make time to go deep into the creative process.” But to be part of the world and fully embodied means not having to meet every call for attention or having to entertain every piece of information thrust upon us. And it means facing that fact that it’s us, too.

Mindful creativity is not complex to understand. It simply means listening patiently to oneself and others. Patience is power right now. It’s also a gift. I realize, after some contemplation, that my little blackout moment was about pulling the same urgency and excess to in-person interactions that I feel online.

It was a simple clarifying reminder.

We cannot digest it all. We do not have to.

I have not given myself time to slow and still. By not giving myself time, I have not been able to reset. So here’s what I’m going to do. Maybe, if you’ve felt this way yourself, we can do this together.

Stare at the wall, daydream, find boredom, find nothing at all, pet your dog, say hello to yourself, look in the mirror, look around, find something new, look at the backs of your eyelids, take a walk. No tech. No conversation. No stimulus other than you and the world. Practice stillness.

A student told me about this, and I just downloaded it. While it seems like another app would be a bad thing, using this one on your phone and planting a tree (the app does it) can actually help to hold you accountable.

Imagine a giant RESET button being pressed. Now answer this question in writing: How does the world move when I become truly still?

Subscribe now

Let me know how this goes. Wishing you all good things.

On the church of art and story & week 46 of 52

Artist: Mark Carter

As a young kid, I drew my cat, Ouija (which I grossly misspelled), and gave it to my father’s good friend, Mark Carter. He later used it in this collage piece, which he gifted to my father. If you look at the upper left-hand corner, you can see my signature.

The fact that he kept this drawing of my perpetually annoyed cat speaks to the mind of a true artist.

Mark’s work can be found at the Thomas Dean Fine Art Gallery. He, like my father, is incredibly gifted and was a favorite of my parents’ friends because he was hilarious. He’d leave long voicemails in cartoon-like voices and make up telenovela-worthy stories about who he was and why he was leaving the message—all just to say, “Call me back.” I’d listen to them on repeat.

I grew up going to the church of Art & Story. My parents both read to me, and our bookshelves were full. We were not globe-trekking to museums with fancy art connoisseurs, but we had the stories and art at home. Our home smelled of old books and pencil dust. I loved holding my father’s large, bendable gray erasers to my nose and taking a deep inhale.

My sister and I helped my father collect old discarded mufflers and twisted tree branches for his sculptures. We found items on the side of the road, in the parks, and at a shuttered penitentiary where O. Henry wrote twisty fiction.

I saw artists revitalize the neighborhood I grew up in (before it was gentrified), and I read books that slowed my anxious mind enough to wrap me in a blanket of hope.

Nothing is more powerful than the distinct resilience of an artist or writers. Nothing.

And while I rebelled for a while, denying myself expression, art followed me. As I faced intense challenges (as we all do), I began to remember how powerful it can be to funnel pains and disappointments into words and stories, which appeared haphazardly, but mercifully, on the page.

Over time, they began to make sense. Over more time, they began to make some sense of the world.

Subscribe now

“This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness.” —Maria Popova

I am lucky. I saw how my father and other artists could take anguish and turn it into color and resonance and empathy through artistic expression. I saw my father’s untold stories released in stained glass and sculpture.

It feels as though we’re slipping into a Dark Age of suppression and conformity, driven by bullying, propaganda, and technology, but I believe it will be the artists and writers who save us.

We will save by combining efforts and remembering that, together, our narrative is stronger than any suppression.

AYTL Experiment #46: Collect any pain you feel. Use it. Funnel it all, all of it, into art this week.

Find a piece of art that is not in a museum or gallery. Find that drawing that someone left on a napkin in a diner or the graffiti near a creek. Find a child’s old drawing or a piece of a poem left unfinished, and write a homage to it. Or, repurpose it into the larger story of us, those who desire to connect with our words and expressions, to include and expand the meaning of what it is to be human.

Posted early to invite you to something … If you’re free, I’d love for you to join me on Saturday, March 29, for a moving meditation & intention-setting practice on Insight Timer.

On growing up in the church of art and story & week 46 of 52

Artist: Mark Carter

As a young kid, I drew my cat, Ouija (which I grossly misspelled), and gave it to my father’s good friend, Mark Carter. He later used it in this collage piece, which he gifted to my father. If you look at the upper left-hand corner, you can see my signature.

The fact that he kept this drawing of my perpetually annoyed cat speaks to the mind of a true artist.

Mark’s work can be found at the Thomas Dean Fine Art Gallery. He, like my father, is incredibly gifted and was a favorite of my parents’ friends because he was hilarious. He’d leave long voicemails in cartoon-like voices and make up telenovela-worthy stories about who he was and why he was leaving the message—all just to say, “Call me back.” I’d listen to them on repeat.

I grew up going to the church of Art & Story. My parents both read to me, and our bookshelves were full. We were not globe-trekking to museums with fancy art connoisseurs, but we had the stories and art at home. Our home smelled of old books and pencil dust. I loved holding my father’s large, bendable gray erasers to my nose and taking a deep inhale.

My sister and I helped my father collect old discarded mufflers and twisted tree branches for his sculptures. We found items on the side of the road, in the parks, and at a shuttered penitentiary where O. Henry wrote twisty fiction.

I saw artists revitalize the neighborhood I grew up in (before it was gentrified), and I read books that slowed my anxious mind enough to wrap me in a blanket of hope.

Nothing is more powerful than the distinct resilience of an artist or writers. Nothing.

And while I rebelled for a while, denying myself expression, art followed me. As I faced intense challenges (as we all do), I began to remember how powerful it can be to funnel pains and disappointments into words and stories, which appeared haphazardly, but mercifully, on the page.

Over time, they began to make sense. Over more time, they began to make some sense of the world.

Subscribe now

“This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness.” —Maria Popova

I am lucky. I saw how my father and other artists could take anguish and turn it into color and resonance and empathy through artistic expression. I saw my father’s untold stories released in stained glass and sculpture.

It feels as though we’re slipping into a Dark Age of suppression and conformity, driven by bullying, propaganda, and technology, but I believe it will be the artists and writers who save us.

We will save by combining efforts and remembering that, together, our narrative is stronger than any suppression.

AYTL Experiment #46: Collect any pain you feel. Use it. Funnel it all, all of it, into art this week.

Find a piece of art that is not in a museum or gallery. Find that drawing that someone left on a napkin in a diner or the graffiti near a creek. Find a child’s old drawing or a piece of a poem left unfinished, and write a homage to it. Or, repurpose it into the larger story of us, those who desire to connect with our words and expressions, to include and expand the meaning of what it is to be human.

Posted early to invite you to something … If you’re free, I’d love for you to join me on Saturday, March 29, for a moving meditation & intention-setting practice on Insight Timer.

On the church of art & story - week 46 of 52

Artist: Mark Carter

As a young kid, I drew my cat, Ouija (which I grossly misspelled), and gave it to my father’s good friend, Mark Carter. He later used it in this collage piece, which he gifted to my father. If you look at the upper left-hand corner, you can see my signature.

The fact that he kept this drawing of my perpetually annoyed cat speaks to the mind of a true artist.

Mark’s commercial work can be found at the Thomas Dean Fine Art Gallery. He, like my father, is incredibly gifted and was a favorite of my parents’ friends because he was hilarious. He’d leave long voicemails in cartoon-like voices and make up telenovela-worthy stories about who he was and why he was leaving the message—all just to say, “Call me back.” I’d listen to them on repeat.

I grew up going to the church of Art & Story. My parents both read to me, and our bookshelves were full. We were not globe-trekking to museums with fancy art connoisseurs, but we had the stories and art at home. Our home smelled of old books and pencil dust. I loved holding my father’s large, bendable gray erasers to my nose and taking a deep inhale.

My sister and I helped my father collect old discarded mufflers and twisted tree branches for his sculptures. We found items on the side of the road, in the parks, and at a shuttered penitentiary where O. Henry wrote twisty fiction.

I saw artists revitalize the neighborhood I grew up in (before it was gentrified), and I read books that slowed my anxious mind enough to wrap me in a blanket of hope.

Nothing is more powerful than the distinct resilience of an artist or writer’s mind. Nothing.

And while I rebelled for a while, denying myself expression, art followed me. As I faced intense challenges (as we all do), I began to remember how powerful it can be to funnel pains and disappointments into words and stories, which appeared haphazardly, but mercifully, on the page.

Over time, they began to make sense. Over more time, they began to make some sense of the world.

Subscribe now

“This is the power of art: The power to transcend our own self-interest, our solipsistic zoom-lens on life, and relate to the world and each other with more integrity, more curiosity, more wholeheartedness.” —Maria Popova

I am lucky. I saw how my father and other artists could take anguish and turn it into color and resonance and empathy through artistic expression. I saw my father’s untold stories released in stained glass and sculpture.

It feels as though we’re slipping into a Dark Age of suppression and conformity, driven by bullying, propaganda, and technology, but I believe it will be the artists and writers who save us.

We will save by combining efforts and remembering that, together, our narrative is stronger than any suppression.

AYTL Experiment #46: Collect any pain you feel. Use it. Funnel it all, all of it, into art this week.

Find a piece of art that is not in a museum or gallery. Find that drawing that someone left on a napkin in a diner or the graffiti near a creek. Find a child’s old drawing or a piece of a poem left unfinished, and write a homage to it. Or, repurpose it into the larger story of us, those who desire to connect with our words and expressions, to include and expand the meaning of what it is to be human.

Posted early to invite you to something … If you’re free, I’d love for you to join me on Saturday, March 29, for a moving meditation & intention-setting practice on Insight Timer.

Meditation: strength and confidence through stillness

This is part of a 3-part series on Insight Timer. Offering the first session to paid subscribers. Access the course here (or click the image).

Subscribe now

Share

On grabbing the mic & week 45 of 52

I want the young woman in the third row of my class to share her opinions. She’s brilliant and curious, but these things only come out if she’s invited. If she isn’t asked, she doesn’t speak.

Jen Knox reads at Busboys and Poets, DC, Photo by Octavio Quintanilla

This girl reminds me of myself when I was her age.

A poet once told me I should never pass up the opportunity to speak into a microphone. This stuck with me, but I wasn’t sure why. My first thought was argumentative: What if I don’t have anything to say?

But the more I’ve thought about this over the years, the more I realize that there’s a difference between having something to say and thinking our words matter. Perhaps my true thought was What if I say something others won’t like?

For some of us, the mic is the page, and I want to acknowledge every person who speaks up when it’s uncomfortable or when their mics are muted or grabbed.

It’s funny because after I wrote this blog about why I write and how I’ll carry on whether I get published or not …

… I got an offer on my essay collection. I think this is often how it works. We are reminded of our purpose and, suddenly, the thing we’d let go of arrives.

I’m thrilled to work with the University of Wisconsin-Sterling Point, which has a long-standing and highly respected publishing house that folds in students who support promotions and book cover art. The fact that my manuscript will be part of the curriculum as it transforms into a physical book and is hoisted out into the world makes my heart swell. And the good news is so welcome. A description of the book is below.*

I’m also humbled and slightly terrified that it will be my last book because, friends, I am not entirely sure what I’ll do next. But I realized this week that I have to do something.

The mic is there, so to speak, and whether or not I think I have something of value to say, I’m grabbing it.

Beginning without assurances is the order of the day. It means revisiting the spirit of every journey I’ve ever taken—the curious wonder of life. The awe that comes with noticing and trusting.

The platform is not guaranteed. But as an educator and woman who is morally opposed to much of what is happening in her home country, I have decided to begin to zoom in, rather than out. Because I know that to be spiritually and morally fit, I need to do something resonant.

I think about the girl in the third row. I think about all the students like her. I think about them a lot, and not just because they remind me of me but because they remind me of so many good people who do not trust themselves.

We need good-hearted people to share ideas even if they get smashed or ignored. Our work is a gift. We can share and celebrate and still be present for those around us, even if the mic is not there waiting for us.

All of us have something to say. So say something this week that you might otherwise not.

Writing prompt: Write about a time someone (fictional or real) on the right side of justice didn’t speak up or share an opinion. Now rewrite as though they had—what might’ve changed.

At Work, a collection of interconnected essays, traces a young woman’s journey from anxiety to curiosity as she seeks to identify herself through the lens of myriad working-class roles in the 90s and early 00s. Her experiences, from bussing tables to working factory lines, weave a tapestry of magic from the fibrous normalcy of repetitive tasks—so many clocked hours in such quiet corners of Ohio. It will be out in 2027.

On emotional nourishment & week 44 of 52

I wanted to walk to the small park near my house, maybe sit on one of the Leopold benches by the creek and write; instead, I responded to buzzing notifications on my phone.

When I glanced down, I saw a story about radical (and seemingly enthusiastic) cuts to inclusivity programs and investigations at my workplace where I am the president of a women’s leadership organization (with the redflagged word “woman” in the title no less).

This organization is mentioned in the very first of the 52 Weeks: AYTL post. At the beginning of this challenge, I had the idea that I wanted to live with more purpose. Writing, teaching, and leading were my aims this year, along with reconnecting with myself and my community.

Who could’ve imagined we’d have the world we have now? The dominant emotions in my life a year ago were excitement and enthusiasm. In March 2025, I’m finding more confusion and anger laced with sadness. I find myself reaching for hope.

While I believe deeply that we can find radical joy at this moment, I also feel compelled to acknowledge, that we should feel ALL THE THINGS. And if we deny ourselves our rage, sadness, and worry, we are not truly living.

Emotions are human, and emotions are supposed to move .

In emotional intelligence training, we learn that suppressing emotions means feeding them. They get stuck if suppressed or ignored, and over time make it feel like everything around us is stuck, too, or that we are stuck in whatever fate the environment is handing us.

We are not stuck.

So what is the role of negative emotion, and why not anesthetize it at every turn, rationalize it away, or say that we’re happy until we are?

“I hope you will go out and let stories, that is life, happen to you, and that you will work with these stories [...] water them with your blood and tears and your laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.”

―Clarissa Pinkola Estés

How can I be creatively nurtured with each experience, each emotion?

AYTL experiment: Find a way to nourish yourself with difficult emotions through physical release (scream, run, dance, pound the ground with your fists), or by reflecting on them in writing and deepening your meditation.

Subscribe now

Imagine we have 8 weeks to live and must see everything before us as enhancing our life right now, nourishing us.

Try, just try, to think of all experience—even pains—as an offering, a teaching.

Feel so you can let the thing move. Feel so you don’t numb out. Feel so you can take action.

I felt numb when I first saw programs that support marginalized populations being slashed. I felt angry and sad, then absolutely enraged. The injustice felt so axiomatic that it was difficult to articulate. There was nothing to explain, it just was. I didn’t have words, even though I know silence is worse than over-explanation.

So I journaled. I did scream. I processed and wrote and walked and meditated with more dedication, feeding my emotions into my explorations, which, in turn, began to feed me. I am engaging in meetings over the next few weeks and will likely hear the fate of my program. I will also have to communicate with people who think nothing is wrong.

Do it with me.

Let’s look at the hard stuff today—the pains and heartbreaks, the fears and anger.

The short writing prompt is a follow-up to a course I offer on Rewriting and Redefining Reality. It speaks to the way we can work with anger.

Pick it or any “negative” emotion as your catalyst this week, and let’s live with it, explore it, and learn from it, not despite it.

Subscribe now

Writing prompt: How can emotions that hurt, actually feed you? Answer in any genre or art form.

On timelessness & week 43 of 52

Timeless : not restricted to a particular time or date, Merriam-Webster

I was celebrating my sister’s birthday in a hibachi restaurant in Chillicothe, Ohio. We were sitting at a table in the middle of the room, and we were quite loud as we reflected on the state of the world and the pains many were feeling, including us. We settled on the idea that the pendulum must swing.

After a brief silence, to close out the conversation, my sister said, “Time is just a flat circle.”

I didn’t have an immediate reference point for what she meant, though I thought I intuitively got it. I spun a noodle around my fork and wondered how many times I had done just that.

Upon researching my sister’s words, I came across Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence theory that states everything is always repeating to infinity.

As humans, we seem designed to replicate and alter, replicate and alter. But ultimately, we replicate. This, in a sense, speaks to the timelessness of our experience.

There are patterns that surface and resurface across culture, literature, science, religion and passing observation. The world freezes, the world melts. There are fashion trends that endure (my sister was a fashion/retail studies major) and those that fade away.

In 2025, we might see the same sentiment shared by two people on different social media platforms, with almost indistinguishable differences—a common and shared thought seen through two different lenses. Researchers make simultaneous breakthroughs (known as multiple discovery) while occupying different parts of the world. We share, rework, reimagine, and preserve existing ideas and stories—for better and worse.

There are story structures that show up in parallel to others across cultures and eras, as studied by Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Carol Pearson. When archetypes show up in slightly different forms, the familiarity brings us comfort. We think we might have an idea of how a story will end.

What is timeless in our personal, ephemeral, creative experience of life?

Perhaps it’s what repeats, what endures longer comparatively, or what was never different in the first place. Perhaps the “now” is timeless.

It’s a question worth pondering as part of our 52-week experiment, so this brings me to our prompt.

Meditate on these questions:

What is timeless in you?

What is timeless to you?

Writing prompt: Explore the idea that time is, in fact, a flat circle. It’s endlessly repeating the same events. You can explore the concept critically, place it in a fictional conversation (perhaps two characters debating the idea), or use it as a catalyst for a poem.

“The timeless in you is aware of life's timelessness. And knows that yesterday is but today's memory and tomorrow is today's dream.” ― Khalil Gibran

Your observations …

On defiant joy & week 42 of 52

During a celebration with friends a few weeks ago, we all picked a word we’d like to focus on this year. My word was Joy.

Doesn’t seem realistic, but I’ll try, I thought.

“Find a place inside where there's joy, and the joy will burn out the pain.” —Joseph Campbell

The word, Joy, came up again in another gathering. It seems counter-intuitive at a time when we are losing basic freedoms in America and being hurled toward an uncertain future.

Instead of worrying over "trigger warnings" in literature, we find that every news story is a trigger. The world feels triggering right now. So how do we find joy?

How does one even entertain the notion when we are all suffering?

The answer, I think, comes down to something we all knew in childhood and slowly, then quickly, forgot.

To steer clear of politics, I’ll stick with the writing and publishing process as an example. Since the beginning of 2024, I’ve been focusing on releasing expectations attached to my writing and rekindling my love affair with the process.

I no longer submit with the same urgency I used to, to rack up a list of fancy bylines. If they happen, they happen. I’m putting more effort into the creation and conscious sharing than the desire to get x, y, or z’s approval.

I no longer care. We all say that, but truly … I could give two fucks. My aim in writing is to a.) connect with those who connect, b.) release and explore, and c.) to find joy in the flow.

True joy exists beyond the narratives that are trying to destroy that joy. The narratives that tell us we should look, sound, or be like [fill in the blank] to get our esteem needs met.

When we release expectations and a desire to fix what we cannot control, however, we drop all that. Let’s find tiny joys tucked snuggly in life's offerings: connections, reflection, presence and unexpected moments of awe.

This is not easy, but we can find strength in each other’s authenticity and find ability to show up as our most complete selves even in impossible times.

Subscribe now

Releasing the need to wait or find acceptance means writing truths and speaking truths. Same goes for everything. True and authentic work endures beyond its creator’s time.

To find joy in 2025, I believe, we don’t need to look harder but rather look within. Stop trying to buy it or acquire it or imbibe it or numb feelings with perceived achievement. Simply feel it when it arrives, savor it, and savor the rest, too.

After all, sometimes in difficult times, we can see clearer how much we value what we love and, also, our ability to share what we value with unfiltered, unwavering truth.

So joy, to me now, means not being polite. It means being willing to be banned.

It means showing up with radical love and sharing messages accordingly. Joy is protesting in defense of freedom. Joy is writing to explore and express what all good writing does—the potential of love to radiate through the pain.

Joy feels defiant right now. And that's why it's necessary.

Give someone an unexpected gift, no matter how small; write an oped that focuses on defiant joy; then write a thank you to someone who is helping to keep you strong, whether or not you know them personally.

Write a story or poem that begins with a list of what you cannot control. Allow each thing to open up a dialogue. (Example: If I work hard, I expect success; if I give someone support, I expect a thank you; if I publish, people need to read — open up each one, explore it.)