The Chain

Write fearlessly with me over four weeks starting again in mid-January 2026

✨#18 Rising and Global Top 100 Substack Publication✨

Asking “What Now?" as we rattle roughshod over the peaks and troughs of perimenopausal post-therapy midlife.

Facilitating your therapeutic journaling + memoir-writing journey in joyous community.

Hi friends,

Last summer, we got curious about what happens when we simply play on the page; challenge our tolerance for imperfection and just see what comes leaning into Rick Rubin’s philosophy that:

“The work unfolds as you go.”

Well, I want to know what new work will unfold as we go again.

The Chain is back this January and February…

Yes, like the song. Like the BBC 6 Music feature you might hear on your radio each weekend morning. The Chain will run again in a four-week-long experiment of co-creation where — next January and February — we take a creative leap of faith to write together. We’ll work quickly — with ferocity and charge — in four live Sunday sessions with a choice of morning or evening to produce up to four slices of personal narrative each.

The Chain is for you if…

• You’re struggling to generate new ideas for your life writing

• You enjoy using others’ writing as prompts

• You love discussing the craft of memoir

• You work best in community with an element of accountability

• You want to challenge perfectionism in the work you share

• You have ambitions to create a body of work and want a manageable way to kickstart it

• You’d like the chance to be edited by me and have your work published here to my readership of 2K+ subscribers

Imagine getting to mid-February having met the challenge to create your own collection of four pieces. Pieces you might polish up, redraft or develop or even use as material for your own publications at the project’s end. If you don’t yet write for a readership, this project offers the opportunity to write for mine.

How will it work?

It starts with one piece of life writing published on Sunday 18th January 2026 chosen from week six of the summer run of The Chain. Writers in The Chain will read that piece then meet online for an hour either later that morning at 11am or that evening at 8pm to share reflections before setting off for 40 minutes to craft a brand new piece of writing that speaks in some way to the prompt piece. It doesn’t continue the narrative: the prompt sparks you to write from your experience.

“Reading someone else’s words before I write always stirs something new in me… Someone else’s words awaken a different train of thought; a new energy. A synapse fires that, moments earlier, was dead asleep.”

Suleika Jaouad

, The Book of Alchemy

Then it’s up to you. You’re welcome to keep what you write to yourself or you can submit it at the end of the hour in the comments (which are closed to the Membership, so the whole internet isn’t reading!).

The first draft is a level playing field.

In those short submissions, I’ll be looking for the next week’s prompt piece. A spark of something that will offer writers in The Chain the next, rich opportunity to respond. The chosen piece will then benefit from a light edit from me and one final pass from the writer before it’s published to my full subscriber list the following Sunday.

After which we begin again…

Last summer, it was incredible to witness how the pieces spoke to one another. How they looked and felt alongside one another, each another link in the chain…

It’s the power of co-creation. The magic of writing on the fly. The confidence that writing together affords us. Letting the first idea be the best one. Trusting the creative process and writing into uncertainty. Without a plan.

Look back over the summer’s contributions and see how we played with form, genre, voice. Crafted slices of life to form an impression. There was no need for a traditional beginning, middle and end. Instead, we were dipped into writers’ internal logic and landscape then hauled out again before we got too deep.

“Sharing art is the price of making it. Exposing your vulnerability is the fee. Out of this experience comes regeneration. Finding freshness in yourself for the next project and all the ones to follow.”

Rick Rubin, The Creative Act

Writers don’t have to come to each session but this is the best way to get four pieces of writing done across the four weeks.

The Chain is open to annual and founding Members so if you’ve been considering upgrading this is a great time to do it. Lock in a year in the Membership for £65 plus the entire archive, my memoir, comments, my courses and our monthly group chat. Speaking of which…

Lindsay x