How These Words Get Made

A note on how the words in this newsletter come to be.

I want to tell you something about how I write, because I think you deserve to know.

Here is the truth: I don't sit down and type these poems and reflections from a blank page the way you might picture a writer doing. I talk. Sometimes for twenty minutes, sometimes for closer to thirty. I bring whatever I'm sitting with — a question, an image that won't leave me alone, a knot I can't untangle — and I say it out loud, messily, the way it actually arrives in my head. Then AI helps me take those threads and weave them into something you can read in five minutes instead of the forty-five it took me to find it.

If you're going to invite me into your inbox every week, I think it's only fair that I invite you into my process too.

Here's what that actually looks like.

A while back I went down a spiral about whether my dog will be in heaven. It started small — a comment somewhere, a stray line about animals and souls — and it did not stay small. I found myself reading about Thomas Aquinas, who argued fairly definitively that animals don't have the kind of soul that survives death, and then about Francis of Assisi, who pushed back with something closer to we don't actually know that. That conversation started before I even clocked in for the day and was still going when I clocked out — I went back and forth with those two for hours. It became about my dog by name. It became about my brother, who isn't a believer, and the terrible arithmetic that thought put in front of me — a man I love, gone from me, and a dog with no capacity to choose faith one way or the other, and whose fate to trust with which of those men. I was in tears at my desk at work over this. That is not a hypothetical. That happened.

What came out the other side wasn't an answer. It was a decision to stop grasping for one — to trust, following the hope I found in Francis's way of seeing creation, that God has never been careless with what we love, and to let that be enough even though it isn't a proof. That became the article some of you read. I wrote that thinking. I lived that afternoon. What I did with AI was ask it to help me gather the threads — Aquinas, Francis, Daisy, Robert, the exhaustion of trying to map something that was never meant to be mapped — into something with a shape, instead of the sprawling, circling mess it actually was in my head and in my voice memos.

The poem about goodness and mercy came from a similar place. I'd heard a preacher describe goodness and mercy not as trailing behind us politely, but chasing us down — actively, urgently, refusing to let us outrun them. I had my own image already forming under that: not a gentle idea, but horses. Fast ones. Arabian horses racing across the sand. I told AI I wanted the poem to carry the feeling of that image — evocative, heart-first, more like ancient Hebrew poetry than tidy Western logic. What came back went through several rounds of me reading it and saying this stanza — don't touch it. It's exactly right. And this one falls flat. We need to try again — the way any writer edits a draft that isn't quite there yet. The image that sparked it was mine. The conviction underneath it was mine. The words I kept and the words I threw away were my decisions. That part was never up for negotiation.

I think what makes this hard to explain is that most people picture two categories: a writer alone with a blank page, or someone typing "write me a Christian poem" into a chatbot and posting whatever comes out. I'm neither. My brain moves faster than my hands — I've known this about myself my whole life, in every kind of writing I do, not just this. I've sat down to write dialogue for a novel because I could hear two characters talking clearly in my head, gotten it down as fast as I could type it, and then read it back to find it was just words on a page with no breath in it — no gesture, no silence, no weight. Getting the feeling onto the page has never been the part I struggle with. Getting my hands to keep pace with what's already fully alive in my head is. That's the gap AI helps me close. Not by inventing what I don't have — by helping me get down, intact, what I do.

So if you're wondering whether what you're reading is real — whether there's a person behind it who actually wrestled with the thing she's writing about — the answer is yes, every time. The questions are mine. The curiosity is mine. The hours of reading are mine. The tears at my desk are mine. The convictions I walk away with are mine. AI didn't live those moments for me. It helped me find language for what I'd already lived. That's true of this piece too—it was made the same way I've just described. I'd rather you know how these words get made than wonder if they're real.

I don't have a tidy line for what to call that. Ghostwriter isn't quite right. Editor isn't quite right. Maybe there isn't a word yet for what a lot of us are doing now, and maybe that's okay. What I know is this: I have never once asked for something to say just to have something to say. If it isn't mine — if it didn't come from something I actually thought or felt or wrestled with — I don't put it out. That part hasn't changed, and it isn't going to.

The words may arrive differently than they would have ten years ago.

The questions, the faith, and the heart behind them haven't.