Choosing Our Own Programming

Last month’s Marathon Cowrite was supposed to end on Sunday.
It didn’t.

I extended it a few days and turned it into a quiet, self-directed writing retreat. No extra programming. No added structure. Space. Staying.

I’m a fan of working deep and am always surprised at how time with the page infiltrates the subconscious so the real story can emerge.

Solid revision progress is the immediate benefit of longer sessions, but often the real insights arrive in the days after. It’s bigger than the container in which you type. Once your neurons start firing, they don’t shut off because you sign off.

In my Brevity Blog essay last month, I described how the practice has helped me but didn’t talk about what follows. What followed this expanded cowrite was more than I imagined.

Earlier deep writing sessions allowed me to see that the religion I dedicated myself to for decades functioned more as a publishing empire than a path to God—despite its claims.

In the days after my writing marathon, I attended an 80th birthday party for an ex-JW. Other former Witnesses were there. As we talked, I began to hear echoes of my own story — the same embodied fear, the same embedded confusion that lingers decades later. Even When I Stayed tells my experience. That night, I understood it was never only mine.

A few days later, I visited my son at the state psychiatric hospital — a place of safety in a society that has little room for men with psychosis.

Sometimes he rambles. Occasionally he surfaces something precise enough to pierce you.

“Ya remember those programs they gave us at the assemblies — they were free?”

Of course I did. Each large gathering provided a printed schedule of lectures, breaks, songs, Bible dramas, interviews, experiences. Whether it was a smaller assembly with a thousand attendees or a stadium gathering with sixty thousand devoted JWs, the programs were a mainstay.

As a kid, I scanned them for the next break — when I’d finally be freed from the bondage of butt in the seat. Unknown to me, my son had been reading them differently.

He said, “OK, so the point of that was for us to choose our programming. Get it? Like which items we wanted to program our minds.”

A year ago, I might have dismissed that as a clever play on words — one more byproduct of delusion. But after months of sustained revision, I heard it differently. Not as invention. As recognition.

The programs were real. The repetition was real. They outlined material and presentation that retrained our minds to equate loyalty with faithfulness.

Only now am I beginning to see how thoroughly we were rewired — how something coercive hid beneath language we were taught to revere.

If I hadn’t opened sustained space for this work, I might have discarded those moments in self-protection. Now I see them for what they are — not digressions, but design.

Deep writing doesn’t create meaning. It creates the space to recognize it.

That’s why we’re simplifying the next Marathon Cowrite — less programming, more room. Fewer instructions, more sustained time with your own pages. A true do-it-yourself retreat container, where what surfaces after the session may matter more than what happens inside it.

You’re welcome to join us.

This weekend, February 21-22, we’re holding space for writers who want to work together in sustained time and collective stillness.

For more information and Zoom link: Marathon Cowrite