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Winding down from another breathtaking retreat week.

Another week of river water, jungle rain, damp notebooks, shared rooms, big laughs, small realisations, stories told with wet hair, and women arriving with one idea of what they came to write and leaving with something far less obedient. And every time, this is the part that gets me.

People arrive wanting to organise the work before they’ve even met it.

They want the story to make sense before it comes out.
They want the idea to justify itself.
They want the essay to have a five-year plan and a landing page.

But then we get halfway down the Pacuare River at the end of the week. And suddenly everyone is just a damp mammal in a helmet, floating through a place so wildly, offensively beautiful it makes the spreadsheet look deranged.

There are ancient rocks. Trees growing out of impossible places. Water moving with absolutely no interest in your content pillars. Birds screaming. Rafts spinning. Someone laughing because they almost fell out. Someone crying because they finally said the thing. Someone realising their “messy idea” was not messy at all. It was just alive before it was organised.

And I swear, the river does something to the part of us that keeps trying to make everything neat enough to deserve existing. The pressure comes off.

You are here, in this ridiculous body, in this ridiculous world, for such a short and ludicrous amount of time.

Must every creative impulse really arrive pre-approved?
Must every piece of work be impressive before it’s honest?

At some point, maybe the work gets to be muddy first. Maybe it gets to have river water in its shoes and no idea where it is going. Maybe that’s how anything good begins.

Again and again, I watch women come to the retreat trying to optimise *into* the thing they want to say. And again and again, they leave realising the key is opting OUT of the rules. They leave bursting at the seams with heat. And the memory of what it feels like to stop managing the work long enough for the work to move.

And that, for me, is literally the whole damn point. Not to become more efficient with your aliveness, but to stop abandoning it before it even has a chance. taken in Pacuare River, Costa Rica by @loismac_

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a month ago

This is a part of Costa Rica that has not been flattened by tourism, and I hope never will be.

Nobody is selling you a retreat package out of a beach hut where they’ve never actually spent any time.

Everything we buy, every business we work with, every plate of food on the table, every transfer, every guide, every coffee, is a Costa Rican person being paid properly by another Costa Rican person.

That’s just how we want to run things, that’s where the idea for Writing Wildly came from, to bring more people to this place we love and has given me and my creativity so much. Because these are our people and we just aren’t interested in any other way.

These people, and this place, have made my creative life what it is. The river taught me to write differently. The mornings here taught me to think differently.

Diego taught me what slow actually means, and it took me about five years to understand it 🤣 the biggest reason I do this retreat (bigger than my own enjoyment of running it) is so that I can hand a piece of this special special place over to other writers and watch what it does to them.

When you come to Writing Wildly, you are in the hands of the best team I know.

Most of whom I am related to, married to, friends with, or have eaten approximately a thousand dinners with.

This place, this land, is theirs. They are just, very kindly, letting us in. taken in Turrialba, Cartago, Costa Rica by @loismac_

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a month ago

Happy Earth Day to this floating rock we have impossibly inhabited and tragically abused.

Happy Earth Day to the rivers older than the mountains they run through, the toucans whose faces function as radiators, the leaf-cutter ants who have been farming since the week the dinosaurs died, the spiders spinning gold with a pigment palette tuned to the eyesight of bees. To the fig trees older than your grandparents. To the water in your coffee, which has been, at some point, inside a dinosaur.

And most of all, happy Earth Day to this place I am lucky enough to call home. Costa Rica, a country that has reminded me, in its small but outrageous glory, over and over and over again, how unhinged and how beautiful it is to be briefly alive on a planet this extravagant.

Thank you for everything.
I hope we do better.

@writing.wildly

🦋 taken in Turrialba, Cartago, Costa Rica by @loismac_

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3 months ago

You’re far too cool to be careless.

I wrote the beginning of this in the middle of the night last year after my second miscarriage in three months.

I felt like my body was screaming at me.

Right now, we’re watching the world be brutalised by people who may never face consequences for it.

The grief and rage and collective desperation often feels all-consuming and impossible to bear.

And it would be very easy to stop. To go quiet. To feel too small and too tired to matter.

But I refuse.

I know an Instagram post doesn’t change foreign policy. I’m not that delusional. But one of the most radical things you can do when everything around you is loud and ugly and violent is make something honest and weird and yours.

Because the people dismantling the world are not having a crisis of confidence about whether they’re allowed to. They are not wondering if it’s the right time. They are not waiting for a sign.

So why are you?

Sometimes the only way I can access what I actually think and what I want to do is to pretend something bigger than me is saying it. To write from a voice that isn’t trying to be liked or understood or correct and can just be fucking weird.

I don’t know if the universe sends signs. I don’t know if time is a field or a line or a lie we all agreed to believe. I don’t know if there’s a plan or if we’re all just making it up as we go and calling the patterns meaningful in retrospect.

But I know there is so much mind-blowing mundane magic that is inexplicable and impossible and miraculous about you.

I know that the mundane magic is what makes really great poetry. I know poetry heals. I know that the feeling of waiting for permission is a cage with no lock. And I know permission is what stops a movement in its tracks.

And I know that the fear doesn’t dissolve. You just eventually get tired of letting it decide.

Wherever you’re standing. Whatever you’re waiting for.
This is the sign.
This is the permission.
This is the door.

Incase you needed the reminder 🫶🏻 by @loismac_

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4 months ago

Maybe Someday.

Maybe Somebody.

I have spent years circling things like a cautious animal.

The essay I rewrite eleven times.

The Book that sits in my chest like a held breath, too scared to live out there in the world where people have opinions about things.

Every single thing I’ve ever been proud of started with a half-baked idea and a racing heart and only got better with every fumble in the right direction.

I think we need more origin stories that start with “I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing, but I started anyway” and end with “I still don’t know shit, but, look, it’s a bit better now”.

Because that’s the truth for most of us. We don’t arrive. We fumble our way forward. We shape the path by walking it. We get clearer by doing, not by sitting in planning purgatory hoping to be struck by divine instruction.

So if you’ve got a Maybe Something.

A book. A business. A sentence. A conversation you keep rehearsing in the shower.

A draft in a folder called Maybe Someday.

This is your sign to begin it badly. Maybe Today.

Maybe Somebody needs it.

Maybe Somebody is you. by @loismac_

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5 months ago

I created this experience because I needed it first.

I know what it is to write in the margins. The hour before everyone wakes up. The notes app at 11pm. The half-sentence that thrusts itself through your fingertips, mid-cutting of the kids’ strawberries. The idea that startles you in the shower & dissolves before your hand finds a pen. The way you learn to hold things loosely because you’ve lost too many of them to the current of ordinary life.

Something changes me a little differently each time. I clamber up into a truer version.

This time, I’ll never forget sitting on rocks on the Pacuare river, body tired, cheeks sore from laughing, watching fourteen women write like the world had stopped requiring things of them. Every “should” drowned out completely.

Behind us, on a literal upturned raft, a crew of men building lunch. A whole meal, assembled, in the middle of the jungle, with the kind of quiet care that seems almost absurd in this context. But this is who they are. They care, deeply.

These are the men my husband grew up alongside, on this river. Who know it the way most people know their route home. Every current, every rock, every mood it carries, depending on the rain. When I bring people here, I’m borrowing something from them. They let me every time and I will never stop being grateful for that.

Every person takes something unique from this place.

There’s no moment where the music swells and someone reads their masterpiece aloud and everyone weeps in unison.

I mean. Sometimes there’s weeping.

But it’s usually because someone laughed so hard at dinner she couldn’t breathe, or because the thing she wrote in five minutes was truer than the thing she’s been trying to write for three years.

What actually happens is smaller than that. And bigger all at once.
It’s the open balcony at 6am, everyone writing, the birds outside losing their minds. It’s remembering women like this exist.

It’s the peace.

A place quiet enough, wild enough, that the “not yets” sitting at the bottom of your belly finally get their moment to be heard.

There are just a couple of spots left for June + September. Comment “wild” if you want the details straight to your inbox. taken in Turrialba, Cartago, Costa Rica by @loismac_

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5 months ago

Inspired by literal comments I saw underneath a recent @lucassjoness poem.

“Keep politics out of art” is what people say when they want you to stop making them uncomfortable.

When they want you to write about pain without naming who caused it.

When they want you to write about hope without saying what we’re hoping for.

When they want beauty that costs them nothing.

But your rent is political. Your healthcare is political. Your safety is political. The fact that you can afford broccoli or can’t is political. Who gets to exist freely and who doesn’t is political.

Politics isn’t something you add to art. It’s the condition under which art gets made.

A gifted poet writes about power and people say “too political”

But complaining about immigration, about the cost of living, about waiting times at the GP?

Apparently that’s just... conversation.

You don’t want “no politics”

You want politics you don’t have to think about.
Politics that doesn’t challenge you.
Politics that lets you stay comfortable.

That’s not how this works.

Art without politics is decoration.

And artists are not simply here to decorate your life whilst the world burns.

If this makes you uncomfortable, good.

Discomfort is where change begins. taken in Costa Rica by @loismac_

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7 months ago

You don’t find your niche by choosing a box.

You find it by noticing the ideas that refuse to leave you alone.

But, having a solid worldview or core philosophy isn’t a replacement for strategy. It’s the only thing strategy can actually hold onto.

Your way of seeing, the questions that shape every conversation, every offer, every piece of writing, that stuff’s the throughline.

But strategy is what turns that throughline into something people can recognise, value, believe in and gather around.

Your niche is not “I help X do Y”

It’s the territory your mind keeps mapping, even when you’re not trying to.

Strategy asks: What’s this for? Who’s it for? What change does this work make possible?

Your worldview answers those questions with lived insight instead of guesswork.

It’s why some people build audiences that feel accidental and seem to bounce around never really knowing what they stand for and others build communities that feel inevitable.

Because once you understand the lens you’re here to offer, you stop shrinking your work to fit the market
and start shaping your strategy around the meaning that’s already present.

People follow you because your perspective, stance, lens, offers them something different.

That’s what a real “niche” does.
It doesn’t limit your work.
It gives your work direction.

And direction is everything.

It’s how you make decisions others can join you in.
It’s how you create a body of work instead of a pile of content.
It’s how your ideas grow traction, language, momentum.

A worldview is the root system.
Strategy is how you grow the forest around it.

When those two meet, your work stops feeling like a guessing game and becomes a place other people can enter, recognise and really want to stay.

And then you get to build something better, together. taken in Costa Rica by @loismac_

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8 months ago

Marketing isn’t what it used to be.
Social media isn’t even social anymore.

You don’t get shown your friends, their likes, your network.

You get shown, most of all, whatever you find *interesting*

People aren’t looking for “the best one” or “the one with all the answers”. They’re looking for what feels alive.

Something that makes them laugh.
Something that makes them hope.
Something that changes their mind.
Something that makes them trust their own gut again.
Something that makes them feel seen.

If you’re performing certainty, you’re not being interesting. You’re just reading from the same script we were all handed — the one that says: be polished, be right, be the best.

And we all know, by now, that’s bullshit.

Who does that script even serve?
Not you.
Not the people who need what only you can bring.

And if you’re not serving someone, improving something, changing something, leaving something better than you found it, working in some way towards collective fucking liberation… what, exactly, is the point?

We really have no choice but to change the way we do marketing. Because the way we were taught, to posture as the expert, the answer, the one who has it all figured out, makes no fucking sense in the world we live in.

There will always be a cheaper, shinier, louder option.
You don’t win by being the “most certain”
You win by being the only.
You win when we all win.

We don’t want to watch you perform.
We want to watch you become.

Be interesting.
Be wrong.
Wonder in public.
Make someone laugh.
Demand more of yourself. Demand more of us.

There is no other option.

PROMPTS TO SAY SOMETHING INTERESTING ↓

Contradiction
→ What do you believe that totally contradicts the “rules” of your industry? Write that

Underbelly
→ What’s a truth you’d normally save for your closest friend? Post that (without softening it).

Curiosity
→ What question are you genuinely obsessed with right now, the kind you don’t have an answer to yet? Share it.

Laughter
→ What part of your work is objectively ridiculous? Call it out.

Dare
→ What’s the thing you secretly want your audience to do differently tomorrow? Dare them to do it. taken in Costa Rica by @loismac_

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a year ago

I created Writing Wildly because I was sick of watching brilliant women apologise for their words.

Apologise by diluting them.

By performing them.

By making them palatable enough to sell.

I know that move intimately.

I perfected it myself.

For years I called it strategy, professionalism, “knowing my audience.”

But it was something far older than that.

A fear of being too much.

Too loud.

Too contradictory.

Too honest.

A fear of being seen in the fullness of what I actually think.

And when you’re in that state, it’s easy to convince yourself you’re blocked.

You’re not.

You’re just self-censoring faster than you can even hear yourself think.

The jungle has a way of stripping that away.

At Writing Wildly, there’s no room for performance.

No space for marketing-approved messaging.

No incentive to polish your pain until it’s palatable.

Just you, your words, and the truth.

This last retreat was one of the most moving things I’ve ever witnessed.

A group of writers who refused to hold back.

Who let the river, the mountain, the birds and the quiet get under their skin.

Who wrote things they didn’t plan to write.

Who remembered what it felt like to tell the truth without the promise of approval.

It was an honour to hold that space.

An honour to be changed by it too.

I don’t run these retreats to teach from a podium.

I run them because I need these spaces too. I think it’s what we all need — community. Other creatives in a room, together. Witnessing, writing, thinking, feeling and becoming together. I wish we could do it every day. But I’ll settle for these groups for now.

To the writers who have joined me here: thank you.

You reminded me why this work matters.

Why I’ll keep doing it, over and over.

And to those reading:

If you’re craving space for the kind of writing you didn’t know you needed to write —

For the thoughts you’ve buried under deadlines and deliverables,

For the truth you’ve edited into something more acceptable…

You’re officially invited.

Come write it all down.

No disclaimers.

No apologies.

Just the words, as they are.

Writing Wildly.

Costa Rica.

Just 3 spots left ❤️ taken in Costa Rica by @loismac_

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a year ago

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a year ago

I remember coming to all of these places for the first time and feeling so much awe that my creativity would burst out of my fingertips the second I sat down to write.

And I remember thinking how cool it would be to bring clients here to experience that same magic, too.

Well, today was definitely one of those pinch me moments.

Hiking through the mountainous jungle to what can literally only possibly be described as one of the most majestic waterfalls, with a group of brilliant, creative women and writers, dipping in cold water under a blazing hot sun and coming home to write our hearts out.

Taking the name “Writing Wildly” quite literally.

Don’t ever forget that creating the conditions for your creativity to thrive is as important as the work itself.

❤️❤️‍🔥🫶🏻 by @loismac_

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a year ago