The Hard Prune Is Back!
The Hard Prune is back with practical tools for dystopian times, and this time we're building a community.
Dear friends,
If you’re receiving this in your inbox, then you subscribed to The Hard Prune when it launched in late 2022. As you’ll know, I sent out a handful of newsletters and then disappeared. I owe you an explanation.
When I launched The Hard Prune, I’d spent the previous three years writing and polishing a book manuscript that I couldn’t find an agent or an editor for. Out of frustration with literary gatekeepers, I turned to Substack, where writers don’t have to ask permission to publish. As luck would have it, the day after I sent the first newsletter, I heard from back from a great agent who was interested in representing me! I signed with him, turned all my writing energy to a new project, got a book deal, and quietly put The Hard Prune on hiatus. I kept thinking I’d email you all to officially shut things down, but it never felt quite right to do that.
Now I know why it didn’t feel right. I needed The Hard Prune to be here to pick up again now, in February 2025, with American democracy disintegrating and the world order falling to pieces around us. The scale of suffering and injustice, already intense, has been dialed up to incomprehensible. Uncertainty and fear are off the charts. People are absolutely reeling, each in their own way. What to do?
One of the few ways I can contribute in this moment of exponential crisis, from my home in a little, provincial city in the northwest of England, is to open up my toolbox and share what’s inside. I have practices, resources, perspectives and concepts that have helped me and others find ease in the midst of difficulty. Many of these tools come from my thirty years of practicing yoga and meditation, including becoming certified as a meditation teacher. Others come from what I’ve learned through creative practices that include writing, gardening and weaving; through intense personal experience with uncertainty; through incessant reading and reflection; and through conversations with the most brilliant clients any coach could be privileged enough to have.
I am relaunching this newsletter today with the same title as before – The Hard Prune – and a new tagline: Practical tools for dystopian times. I promise to do the very best I can to share useful, clear and insightful offerings that may be of use to you as you make your way through these mind-boggling days. I won’t (knowingly) repeat what you can get elsewhere; I won’t bang on about how you should meditate (I know it’s not for everyone); I will avoid trends and platitudes; and I will unapologetically speak not only to your head but also to your heart. I probably won’t manage to meet you exactly where you are on every given day, but what doesn’t land at first might be useful later, if only to keep in your pocket to share with someone else. We’re all in this together.
For now, I’ll send newsletters out once or twice a month. I hope to publish more frequently, adding features like interviews, discussion threads, and virtual events, and to that end I’ll be adding a paid subscription option soon. If you are able to, I’m asking you to help me buy the time to build The Hard Prune – I am self-employed, so there’s no salary keeping me afloat. If you aren’t able to, or if you’d rather wait and see more of what I’m offering before deciding, that’s absolutely fine. I’m not going to paywall anything on The Hard Prune or create VIP rooms; all content will be available to everyone, regardless of means. I’ll trust readers to help as they can.
Finally, what about that title, The Hard Prune? A hard prune is a gardening term. It means to cut a plant back nearly to the ground. Why would you do that? The plant might be too big. It might be diseased. It might simply be failing to flourish. When my forsythia were covered in hard brown burrs like walnut shells and flowered only at the tips while the rest of the blossoms died before they opened, like tiny tissue tears, I pruned those forsythia back so far it was as if they’d never been there at all. I missed them.
But, after a few years with bare spots in my spring garden, the forsythia have grown back bigger, wilder, and yellower, with nary a burr in sight, exactly as I’d hoped. Sometimes what feels like destruction is in fact the very opposite: a chance for regrowth. A bud forms, a shoot emerges, a branch extends, a full row of flowers blooms.
In the garden, there are no endings, only cycles.
I’m so glad to be back here with you,
Laura
Postcard from my garden
Here are the crocuses in my back garden this weekend, smiling at the sun.