"Incurably Human" is Becoming "Wild Ground"

This post was originally shared on Incurably Human before that publication merged with 100 Poems to become Wild Ground.

Hello, lovelies! I am planning to make changes to this Substack in the week ahead and wanted to keep you informed.

If you’ve been with me for awhile, then you’ve seen this Substack move through a few iterations. We began as Corona Cafe, a newsletter and gathering space for Covid-19 long-haulers. Over time, though, it became clearer to me that whether or not someone has a chronic illness, we all live with the chronic condition of our own mortality and our own fallibility. Being human is hard—gorgeous, amazing, awe-inspiring, and so damn hard. I wanted to write for anyone who lives (or wants to live), awake and alive and aware, in that tension between the beauty and the brutality of the human experience. At the same time, living within that tension myself pulled me ever deeper into writing poetry. I launched a poetry Substack, 100 Poems, and that’s where most of my writing has landed since the beginning of 2024.

But here’s the thing . . . I miss writing for this community here at Incurably Human. I miss writing micro essays about the things I’m learning and the things I’m trying to figure out. I’ve been dreaming of a space where all of my writing can live, including mini personal essays, poems, bits of fiction, and musings on nature, creativity, and the writing process. I’ve been dreaming of a space that leaves me room to grow and shift course. I’d like it to be a space for community and connection—one in which readers feel supported in showing up to share, too.

My first thought was simply to merge Incurably Human and 100 Poems into a single Substack and give readers the option to opt out of posts they don’t want (for example, opt out of poetry and only read essays, or vice versa). Substack does allow this sort of opt-out option, which is great, but it turns out there’s no tidy way to merge two Substacks. So here is how I’m going to have to go about it . . .

In the next few days, I’ll save all of the posts and subscriber emails from Incurably Human, and then I will delete this Substack, and move the data over to 100 Poems, which will be renamed Wild Ground. There may be some shifting of URLs ahead, but unfortunately, it’s very difficult to reach an actual human for tech support these days, so I can’t give you full details on that just yet, but I’ll do my best to get you that info as soon as I have it.

So what do you need to do? Nothing, actually. Within the next week, you should get an email saying that you’ve been added to the mailing list for Wild Ground. That’s where all of my future Substack writing will land—mini personal essays, poems, and whatever else emerges. You can, of course, opt out at any time, but I hope it will feel like a place you’re happy to be. I look forward to sharing space with you there. The terrain beneath our feet is shifting every day, in ways that are both lovely and frightening. It helps to have people to walk with—kindred spirits with whom to traverse this wild ground. I’m so grateful for the steps we’ve gotten to take together—and I look forward to the steps ahead!

A photo of Yellowstone’s Grand Prismatic Spring, taken from a nearby hill. Wild ground, indeed!