Creative Living Diaries
Exploring What it Means to be Human
I think about New York, my twenties, colored lights in liquor store windows, sitting on a dusty velvet sofa with a notebook, standing on a crowded subway platform, watching people I will never see again. I think about being sixteen, wearing wide-knit sweaters and a bad perm, listening to music with a religious devotion. I think about the bees that come in the summer to burrow into our flowers and how, when they are old, they curl up there, covered in pollen dust, to sleep and sway in the wind.
I catch these glimpses of the invisible lining within the visible world. I brush my fingers across it.
That is the feeling I write toward.
Creative Living Diaries is a Substack about the interior life, the currents that move beneath the surface of everyday experiences. I write personal essays and creative nonfiction rooted in memory, the body, and moments of transition and recognition that shape who we become. I pull oracles, share my spiritual experiences and metaphysical philosophies, and make art. You’ll find my paintings, readings, and illustrations woven through here.
I’m a writer and an artist with an MFA in fiction writing and a background in studio art and theology. Which is to say, I’ve spent most of my life in hypersensitivity, trying to figure out what is really going on in a room, in a relationship, in a self. I’ve always been more interested in my inner guidance than the expectations of the dominant culture. Maybe that describes you, too.
The people who find their way here tend to be other creatives, people in the middle of their lives, people who feel a little sideways in the world they were handed.
I write for people who have a voice they’ve been afraid to use. People who have been told they are too much, too intense, too weird, or too sensitive. Through philosophy, honesty, story, and spiritual exploration—including this Substack and a YA novel set in the decade that shaped most of us—I hope to help you stop waiting for permission to be yourself and claim your identity as a creator and human being.
What you’ll find here:
Free essays that land in your inbox whenever I have something to say—personal essays and creative nonfiction that follow memory, the body, and the moments that change us. On the last day of every month, I send a love letter: what I’ve been reading, watching, making, thinking about, and doing.
If you want to go deeper, the Diary Unlocked is the inner room. Paid members get live events and reflections that feel too close to the bone for the open internet—where we talk about creativity, meaning, and whatever is pressing on us, and pull oracle cards.
My creative life is intuitive and exploratory. The impulse behind my writing and my visual work is to express what insists upon being expressed and to tell what is mine to tell.
If you’ve been looking for a place that takes the inner life seriously, you've found it.
-Lori-Lyn
About Me
If we were meeting in person, I’d tell you I live in a slightly haunted house with my beloved. We make our morning coffee in a percolator and grow native plants for the pollinators.
I was born in 1969 with my sun and moon in Aquarius and Capricorn rising.
I’m an aunt. My nieces are my very favorite people.
I think about the clothes in Pretty in Pink and Desperately Seeking Susan more often than is reasonable.
Even though I’m in Kentucky, a big part of my heart and soul is in New York, and I fantasize a lot about moving to the Hudson Valley.
You can read my story here.
To find out more about the company that provides the tech for this newsletter, visit Substack.com.
