Learn by Going

Everyone has a GO button. Mine was a drawer holding seven unpublished choose-your-path books I finally published under my own name. What happened after? On what courage actually is (a heart energy, not a head energy), what it isn’t (recklessness refuses feedback; courage subscribes to it), and why the unlived life is the one certain loss.In this episode:

* The confession: a decade in the drawer, three books shipped, and what the children’s book market taught me the hard way

* David Whyte’s Consolations on courage as “heartfelt participation”

* David Hawkins on courage at level 200 — the threshold where a life stops draining energy and starts giving it back

* Dr. Spalding’s cliff: courage without readiness is just another form of impulse

* Roethke’s permission: “I learn by going where I have to go”

* Readings from my forthcoming nonfiction book, arriving January

Bring us your book. Crossroads publishes serious nonfiction of the inner life—memoir, essay, contemplative work. Six openings remain for fall authors, and founding-author rates hold through September 30: $5,000 for a short book we call a Crossing, up to $7,000 for a full-length book, with the audio edition included in every tier.

→ Book the free 20-minute discovery call · See the engagement ladder · Tell us about your book in writing

The pricing on the site is the pricing.

On the horizon: our reissue of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (September 8) · Mirage and Tar, a numbered first edition of 100 copies, this fall · the book read from in today’s episode, January.