“PERFECT”

MAY 2026

Lovelies,

"Make yourself perfect, then write naturally."

Bruce looked around the table at a bunch of wide-eyed teenagers on the first day of Harvard Summer School, Creative Writing: Poetry.

"Alternately," he narrowed his eyes, "you could do what the rest of us do and just begin."

Even as we giggled I savored his words like sugar on my tongue: This attempt to disarm us. This invitation to consider ourselves poets, too.

This permission to be imperfect on the page.

But really I'd let myself be imperfect on the page for quite some time.

This week I'm back in my southern Maine hometown, going through deep bins of old possessions. Well it turns out everything in a bin is a piece of paper covered in words. Poems and short stories and creative nonfiction and first drafts of expository essays edited in red pen. Thirty journals that somehow missed my initial purging of hundreds of journals. Literally a thousand letters from various friends and teachers, implying I sent a thousand letters prior and another thousand after.

Most of all pages upon pages of loose leaf paper covered to the millimeter in my barely legible script — free writing too free even for binding.

Actually how have I had time to do anything in my life except write?

I'm not reading much of it. A letter, here. A paragraph of a story there. It's naive. It's a fever-pitch of drama. It's self-deprecating to the point of self-eliminating. It's in love with everything. But what enchants me is how messy it all is. Sentences trailing to nowhere. Three options for adjectives left hanging in a sentence, as if to let the paper, itself, decide.

Childhood: In every interaction I was eminently composed. In my writing I was chaos.

Which isn't to say I wasn't reaching for something. Every time I write, I'm an asymptote — ever closer.

But what I approach is not perfection. If I had to sum it up I'd call it meaning.

And at the end of this messy week in Maine I've come to suspect meaning is the messiest thing of all.

With all my love,

For my Muzis and the Muzi-curious! Please enjoy this newly revised Inspiration Mission!
 

Unsent Letter

Get creative ideas from the things you don't say.

So many things get left unsaid. We sense someone doesn’t want to hear us. Or we’re afraid to change how someone thinks of us. Or we recognize our feelings are irrational.

So our thoughts remain our own. Stowed in our cave of secret longings.

And oftentimes we are wise to stay quiet. Not every statement is constructive. Not every situation is safe for expression. Not every conversation we rehearse in the shower should actually happen.

But our unsaid words don’t just disappear. They remain, if only peripherally, in our awareness. They affect our self-perception and even the course of our lives.

And they have the power to play a huge role in our creativity.

Scan your past. Scan your present. Where have you turned the other cheek? Where have you stifled a scream? Where have you hidden an affection?

What aren't you saying?

Imagine each time you bit your tongue is an unsent letter. 

And then look at the fascinating trail of unsent letters that extends behind you. Is it not a straight line to your most fascinating content? Your most honest content? Your most compelling, relatable, incisive content?

Is it not immediate access to your heart? A clue to the mystery of what really matters to you? A brief history of what has truly affected you?

Is it not the eau de you?

What we’ve said is interesting. What we haven't said is intriguing.

In UNSENT LETTER you will harness the creative power of the unexpressed.

Write everything you thought, everything you felt. Pick words that are hot in your chest. Emotions you've tapered in service of another. Thoughts you've buried for the greater good. Statements too frayed for public consumption.

Be unabashed. Be outlandish. Stray from the facts if that’s what you feel. Be true only to what clamors up and out of you.

Use this Mission to discover a new source of creative fodder.

And delight in each bit of human truth just waiting to be alchemized with creativity.

To do this and more Missions download Muzi for free in the Apple App Store

“A TALE OF TWO NEWSLETTERS”

APRIL 2026

Lovelies,

A history of newsletters in two parts.

Part 1

For ten years I sent a newsletter with my music news.

It was boring, promotional, tedious for me and, I assume, for you.

Then four years ago I did the unexpected: I approached my computer and with a wildness reserved for art wrote exactly what I felt like writing. Thus was reborn my newsletter as a thing more worth reading: an ill-advised level of revealing narration of my creative life.

Part 2

Last year I created Muzi, a mobile app that helps you access greater creativity. Muzi needed a newsletter so I dutifully pulled one together. It was boring, promotional, tedious for me and, I assume, for you.

And I thought to myself, I know better! I promptly recalled my wildness and started writing the newsletter from the volatile, cringy, saucy small true things of my creative life.

Actually there's a Part 3

The better these two newsletters became, the more they side-eyed me with an obvious truth: THEY ARE THE SAME NEWSLETTER!

I consider this great psychological news! I'm cohesive!

And thank goodness. Because let's be honest. 1, No one needs to hear from me twice a month. 2, I have but one idea worth sharing per month. 3, I'm not over here trying to die of newsletters.

So!

Like freshwater rivers flowing into a salty, sparkly sea we arrive at MUZINGS, the new site of my creativity cogitations. You'll hear what's up in my creative life: music productions, songwriting, collaborations. You'll hear what's up in my Muzi life: creativity coaching, talks, app developments. Truly these things have never been separate – which reminds me of my most favorite creativity soapbox: EVERYTHING we do flows into the same creativity sea.

Incidentally, even as my newsletter looks a little different, I hope you'll keep doing what you've been doing... that is, writing me back.

I am so very happy to write to you all.

“BIG POEM”

MARCH 2026

Lovelies,

Every once in a while, life demands you stop creating poems and start creating it.

I mean this:

You're writing a poem. You're in deep. It's vexing you. It's delighting you. You're dizzy but holding on, at the very least to a pencil.

It's all that's real, and in that realer-than-real poem way. 

(What are poems but life experiences distilled to the hyper-real?)

And then you get a call.

LIFE calling. The normal-level-of-real version.

And LIFE would like to take its turn at vexing and delighting you. Life would like to make you dizzy with loss or love or failure or crossroads and no, a pencil won't help.

What a mess.

And yet.

I've come to understand creativity is uncertainty training. A creative project is 1,000 questions you don't yet know the answers to. Also a creative project 999 questions you don't yet know the QUESTIONS to, since the questions only get parceled one per creative step. 

I think at this point I've created so much it's altered my disposition: now when life presents me with uncertainty, I end up treating it like just another poem. 

Life calls and I think, that's a Big Poem. 

The difference, though, is that I cannot (for the life of me) sit down to work on it. The Big Poem is too bright. It's like the sun. Even as I feel its warmth on my skin, even as I sense it raising the seeds to sustain my next chapter, I cannot look directly at it.

And so I turn all the way away. I return to my little poems. I give myself permission to do this.

And I trust that between lines three and four of mussy villanelle, my mind slips upon something it direly needs.

With all my love,

Rachel