Why I'm retiring my online courses

let's all lie on the lawn

Last year, I ran an online course called The Map to Inspiration. It was about how to disentangle and disengage your habits and thoughts from the endless scroll of the internet, so you could finally focus on the creative work that has been calling to you.

I got some old magazines (from 1970 and 1979), so I’m going to pepper you with random images from them. You’ll have to decide for yourself what these images have to do with this newsletter.

It was the culmination of many years of reading and information-gathering as I worked to shift my own habits, and rely more on the voice of my inner guidance.

I am so grateful to the people who took that class (and its follow up, Unfolding the Map), a group of supportive and empowered writers and illustrators who trusted me to guide them and cheered each other on.

I planned on running it again, and maybe creating some more classes to go with the ones that you could take any time. Why not, I thought. I had ideas. I had figured out the course software. Why not create and market every course I could come up with?

But that intuition, which I’ve been working so hard to be able to hear, kept saying no.

Anyone can make an online course these days (or a podcast, or a newsletter, or a curated Instagram feed). Not everyone is good at it. I was ok at it. Not particularly great.

“Susan is an eye-smasher.”

The fact is, so much has changed since January of 2024, when I first ran The Map to Inspiration. That intuition that’s been telling me it’s not yet time to rerun the course is not just telling me “not now,” but is saying “maybe not ever.”

I am a strong proponent of trying things to see how they feel. I don’t regret making online classes. I learned a lot. One thing I learned is that when I’m making online classes, I don’t get any writing done.

Which might be ok if I was raking in the dough, but the truth is, 2024 was my lowest income year by far. And it’s not so much because the online courses didn’t make much money, but because they distracted me from what I’m really shaped for, which is writing.¹

I want to be clear that I’m not anti-online class. I think they’re amazing, actually. I love taking them. I don’t love giving them.

One reason I don’t regret making online classes is because of The Map to Inspiration. It was worth it all to be able to work with everyone who took that class. Thank you to those writers for continuing to inspire me, even a year later.

Sometimes I do a meditation that asks me to imagine myself acting out my soul’s purpose. And I always picture, like, lying on the lawn, looking up at clouds. Not that I think that is my soul’s purpose necessarily, but my mind is supplying me with an image that’s roughly the opposite of sitting at my desk making an online class.

I think it’s so important for us to tune into our intuition, and feel into what’s right for us. Try making a class! Try taking a class! Try writing science fiction! Learn to watercolor! Go to Omaha! Try all of these things that are whispering to you, and then pause and see how they felt. And then try the next thing. And the next.

Thoughts and Links

• In addition to retiring my online classes, I put my out-of-office reply on my email, at least for the rest of the summer. I recommend this. It takes all the pressure off feeling like I need to reply to people in a timely manner.

• If you do want to take one of my on-demand classes before they’re gone, you can do that here.

• I made the Smitten Kitchen Zucchini Potato Focaccia for dinner last night. I doubled it. She says you can bring squares of it to a picnic. Sounds good to me. I added red onions. It’s vegan!

Books I read recently and loved

Disclosure: book links in this newsletter are affiliate links to Bookshop.org, a site which supports independent bookshops.

• Friend of Do the Work Dorson Plourde has a new picture book out, Unnaturally Blue, illustrated by Byron Eggenschwiler, and it’s phenomenal. It’s a picture book that handles sadness with grace and empathy, in Dorson’s usual poetic, slightly-trippy way (you’ve gotten Garbage Gulls, yes?).

• I am such a fan of Whitney Gardner’s graphic novels. They’re all terrific. Her newest, Free Piano (Not Haunted), is as great as you’d expect from that title.

1. Many of you probably know that writing isn’t a great way to rake in the dough either, but I do make more money writing than I do with online classes. Part of that is the price for the course software, but mostly it’s that I’m better at writing than I am at teaching.