Finding Resonance

Focusing on the details of your life makes your stories universally relatable

Dear readers,

Thank you so much for being with me on the journey these three years!! I’ve been pondering the purpose of a Substack, of this Substack in particular, and I’ve finally come to some answers.

So many authors write a Substack to tell everyone about their writing. I read Substacks because the subject matter fascinates me. Or the writing. I assume others do, too. They choose Substacks that resonate with who they are, what they think about and do, what they want to be better at. Or maybe it’s just entertainment.

I don’t want to write the Substack for writers as much as for people. People read my essays (I think) because they are interested in my experiences and revelations that come from those experiences. My very personal details translate to universal relatability. It’s like I tell my writing students: the more specific you are in your writing, the more your reader can relate to your story.

So this Substack is going to pivot a bit going forward and be about my personal and writing journey, and not just how to be a better writer. I hope you’ll stay. I hope you’ll still find it interesting.

Do All Stories Hold Up?

When I was in middle school, I sat on the top bunk in a musty cabin in the northwoods of Wisconsin, poring over the pages of Marjorie Morningstar, a novel by Herman Wouk. It was a thick book and a long story, and I loved it. Eleven-year-old me with frizzy hair and still air in that little cabin. My next-door neighbor Missy on the next bed over, and we woke to a clanging bell from the center of camp, bleary-eyed and tired and made our way under evergreens to the lodge, where we ate cereal in hard plastic bowls and sang songs when we’d finished our food.

I couldn’t put the book down. In my 50s now, I didn’t remember anything about the story but when my local Hadassah chapter promoted an event to revisit this book over dinner, I jumped at the chance. Pulled the thick tome off my shelf, where it had sat for decades growing dusty, and peeled back the cover to start the story over.

I remembered none of it, in fact. Written in 1955 about a young Jewish woman in New York City in the 1930s, the story uses the word fat way too often for my comfort and the word gay in a whole other context. It’s dated and cloying, but I kept reading so I could discuss it at the event.

It got me thinking—which stories hold up over time, and which do not? Will mine? Will yours?

I’ve been rewatching ‘80s and ‘90s movies to explore the same question. Beautiful Girls is still a fun story. Fast Times at Ridgemont High not so much. But rather than erase the less politically correct approaches of earlier eras to pretend they didn’t happen, I believe it’s important to understand our human evolution.

This summer, my son is running a full marathon in Duluth, Minnesota. I spent six years as a camper and then counselor in the northwest of Wisconsin, and on days off as a counselor, I went with my friends to Duluth. Back then, it was a small city on the lip of Lake Superior. Once, I bought a batik Grateful Dead shirt with purple rosettes and a skeleton with a flower crown. I loved that shirt. I kept it for years until it literally fell apart. Lately, I’ve been wishing I still had it, but what garment lasts for decades? Only memories do.

At Camp Birch Trail in the 1980s

One summer, between sessions, when the first round campers had gone home and we had a day or two before second session began, we went to Duluth for an outdoor concert festival. I don’t remember who was playing, only that I was young and had a crush on a counselor from one of the boys’ camps and the summer day stayed light late that far north and the air was thick with humidity. We had Tombstone frozen pizzas at a bar on the edge of the lake and drank Leinenkugels. The moments were poetry then, or maybe it’s just because we were young.

I told Asher I’d come to Duluth to cheer him on. For years, I’ve wanted to take my kids to visit the camp I went to, show them the town of Minong with a population of 550 where I called my parents collect from a pay phone. Where I needed deer whistles on my car to drive fast through the wooded roads.

But you can never go back, really. Because you’re different in time, too.

All the hotels in Duluth and towns within an hour’s radius are sold out already, and the marathon isn’t until June. We found a room at a casino hotel an hour south, and we’ll stay the night before to have a shorter drive in the dawn before the race begins. But then we’ll head back to Minneapolis where my son lives.

It’s just as well. I wonder what I’d find if I ventured along those wooded roads to my little summer camp in the northwoods. Surely not the me who got lost in a story about a flighty young woman who dreamed she’d be a Broadway actress but only ever ends up as a suburban mother with a bad memory. (Spoiler alert, sorry. Were you really going to read Marjorie Morningstar?)

Now Booking Book Clubs

With my 11th book, Forest Walk on a Friday: Essays on love home, and finding my voice at midlife, now out in the world, I am booking opportunities to speak to book clubs. If this book is of interest to yours (or one of my novels—Woman of Valor and Cave of Secrets), let me know! I can come in person or via Zoom, and we sell books at a 20% discount when purchasing 7 or more at once. Also, audiobooks for Woman of Valor and Cave of Secrets are coming April 1st!

You can watch the virtual launch of Forest Walk here.

Thanks for reading! Love, Lynne

PS My January 2026 writers retreat in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico will soon be open for applications! Stay tuned for details in the next newsletter.

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