"Just do something"
poet, essayist & teacher Catherine Pierce on "woods medicine," the power of specificity, and starting again & again ✨✨
This is a Beginner’s Mind interview, a series that explores the intersection of creative practice and mindfulness. Zen master Shunryū Suzuki Roshi said, “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind, there are few.” This series shines a light on the practices that sustain people in their daily lives and open the path to new possibilities. Subscribe for free below to make sure you don’t miss any future interviews. ✨
Today, I’m very excited to share an interview with Catherine Pierce, a writer whose work fills me with the good kind of envy. The kind of envy that makes me want to write—to go back into a draft I’d abandoned and start playing with language again. For years, I’ve been following Catherine’s work and teaching it to students of all ages. She has an impeccable ear for sound and voice, and her writing always surprises me and leaves me with the delight of having learned something new (like that there is an actual jellyfish on our planet that is immortal!?*!).
I’ve been greedily reading not one but TWO! of her recent books of late: her fifth poetry collection, DEAR BEAST (Saturnalia Books, 2026), and her memoir-in-essays, FOXES FOR EVERYBODY (Northwestern University Press, 2026). Whether she’s writing in poetry or prose, her language absolutely sings. Maggie Smith says it well, “Catherine Pierce’s Foxes for Everybody is a pitch-perfect rendering of early parenthood, and the writing is so gorgeous it made my throat catch.” And, January Gill O’Neill says of Dear Beast, “These poems are survival manuals for living where school lockdown emails arrive alongside nature documentaries…Pierce writes the poems I want to read—and the poems I wish I had written.”
I’ve long suspected that Catherine has practices in her life that help her pay close attention to the natural world and to the inner life, and I’m grateful for the peek we get behind the curtain here. She also offers a brilliant prompt that will get you outside and looking at the world in a new way. So, read on, friends… 🦊🌺
What are your writing/creative practices? Do you have any rituals or habits that help you in your daily life?
It’s so boring to say it, but I’ve come to really rely on a cup of coffee in the morning. I like the routine of it—the boiling of the water on the stovetop, the grinding of the beans, the slow pour over. (This makes me sound like a coffee connoisseur, which I’m not—the beans are from the discount grocery store down the street and the whole process takes about five minutes—I just like doing it.)
I also really enjoy having the physical tools that help make doing the work a pleasure—a pen with good drag, a very sharp Blackwing pencil, the right notebook.
I have a couple of practices I employ when I’m trying to get words on the page. Reading is a key one—I love sitting down with a book of poems and just slowly wandering around inside it. More often than not, spending time with someone else’s words will help unlock my own. Walking is also an important part of my creative practice—if I’m feeling stuck or sluggish (and if the weather allows), I’ll go for a brisk walk around my neighborhood or head into the woods behind my house for a slow exploratory meander. It’s remarkable how powerfully being outside clears and focuses my brain.
What are your mindfulness practices?
Maybe not surprisingly—because they’re both centered in paying attention—my mindfulness practice overlaps with my creative practice. For me, walking and being outside are how I stay rooted in the world and my body. A phrase that pops into my head a lot is “woods medicine”—when I step into the trees, the immediacy with which I can feel my heart rate slow and my shoulders lower is truly astounding. I like to touch tree bark and inspect lichen and watch the ground for mushrooms or bones. I also like to take pictures of small treasures I come across. My camera roll has a lot of cool moss.
Do you have a mantra or motto related to your creative/mindfulness practices/life? What piece of wisdom do you have on a post-it note to help you remember it?
I don’t have it written down anywhere (probably I should), but the phrase that runs through my mind every day, multiple times every day, is “Just do something.” When I think it, the emphasis is on the word “something,” not on the word “do.” This is how I remind myself that anything is better than nothing—in writing, in mindfulness, in activism, in parenting, in putting away the laundry. The world is overwhelming (how can I possibly do everything that needs to be done?), and the relentless crush of technology makes it easier than ever to slip into the relief of distraction (it’s so pleasant to watch clips of dogs being funny).
“Just do something” is my daily reminder not to give in to the inertia of overwhelm—to write for fifteen minutes, or call one rep, or unload the dishwasher, or step outside to look at the daffodils starting to bloom. It doesn’t have to be everything. It can’t be everything. But I can always do something.
What helps you when you get stuck with your creative/writing or mindfulness practices?
I’m a huge fan of prompts. I like specificity—so, not “sit down and write for an hour,” but “make a list of everything red in your yard” or “free-write for fifteen minutes about seagulls” or “write ten lines in the voice of a blizzard.”
I sometimes apply prompts to mindfulness, as well—last night I walked on a new (to me) path and set myself a task of taking pictures of everything surprising that I saw (it was a wacky little stretch, decorated by the people who lived along it, and this was a total delight). Or I count how many turtles I can see in the pond at one time, or keep my eyes on the woods’ leaf litter to try to spot mushrooms. Anything that keeps me rooted in my creative brain and/or in the world around me.
What does the phrase “beginner’s mind” mean to you? Does it connect to your creative/or mindfulness practices?
Over the last five or so years, I’ve become increasingly comfortable with beginning. For a while, I was professionally on a clear trajectory—I was an assistant professor of English at Mississippi State University; I got tenure; I got promoted to Full Professor. I had a community of friends and taught classes I loved and published poems and books. Things made sense and I understood the world I was in. Then the pandemic hit and—as they did for a lot of people—my priorities shifted and refocused.
A few years later, my family and I moved to my home state of Delaware, where my husband and I could be close to parents and sisters and nephews, where our kids could be close to their grandparents, and where we could see the beach every day. So a lot of things happened in close succession: selling a house, buying a house, leaving a beloved job and place, moving to a new beloved place, making new friends, building new community, figuring out the location of the cheese and granola and frozen waffles in a new grocery store, etc. It was a lot, to leave a place and job where I felt established and comfortable and to open myself intentionally to mid-life upheaval, and one of the ways I was able to navigate all of it with my sanity intact was by practicing beginner’s mind (though I wasn’t thinking of that term). I tried to look at everything as an adventure—which it was. I had to be okay with not being an expert in most things, with asking a lot of questions, with many people not knowing about entire parts of my life. It was hard at times, but also liberating—to see that I could surprise myself that way, write into my own narrative a twist I hadn’t seen coming.
Last year I launched an online poetry community called Studio & Craft, through which I teach workshops and generative sessions and offer manuscript consultations. A lot of the sessions I teach are rooted in ideas of play and flexibility—coming to the page with an openness to surprise. This, too, is beginner’s mind, I think—this willingness to try and experiment and find delight in discovery—and this is something that I try to bring to my own writing, as well.
What advice would you give someone who is trying to start or restart a creative or mindfulness practice?
My advice—for both endeavors—would be to remember that we almost never start just once. We start again and again, especially with regard to both creativity and mindfulness. If you’re aiming to write every morning and then Day 3 goes entirely to tending to a house repair or grading a stack of papers or scrolling Instagram, that doesn’t mean you failed, or even that you lost ground. It just means you start again tomorrow. If you’ve promised yourself that you’re going to stay off your phone all night and suddenly realize you’ve been watching movie clips for the last fifteen minutes, it’s okay—just turn off your phone and start again. Start again and again and again. Like anything worth doing, creative focus and mindfulness take practice—and nothing that requires practice is easy. (I’m saying these things with authority, but I’m really reminding myself of this—every day, again and again.)
A Prompt from Catherine: Above and Below ✨☁️
I absolutely adore prompts—love writing them and love working from them. Here’s one that starts in close observation and then opens up to imagination and invention.
Take a few minutes to look at the sky (great if you can step outside, but you can also simply look out a window). Describe the sky with five different metaphors. Think about accuracy, and let these descriptions get as ranging and hyper-specific as you like—what does the sky *really* look like or remind you of right now?
The sky today is a blue glass bowl filled with water from the Aegean.
The sky today is the underwing of an indigo bunting. Etc…
Now let things get a little weirder and more imaginative. Begin your next five (or so) lines with “Above the sky, _______.” What is above the sky? This might be literal (depictions of space), invented (“Above the sky, all light is gold. Above the sky, silver dragons”), or a combination of the two.
Finally, bring the poem back to yourself or to a specific person you choose:
Below the sky, I am ______.
Below the sky, I ______.
See where this locating leads you.
Catherine Pierce’s fifth book of poetry, Dear Beast, is newly out from Saturnalia Books. Her memoir-in-essays, Foxes for Everybody, was published by Northwestern University Press in January 2026. Pierce served as the Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2021-2025. She is the author of Danger Days (2020), The Tornado Is the World (2016), The Girls of Peculiar (2012), and Famous Last Words (2008), all from Saturnalia Books. She is a three-time winner of the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Poetry Prize, and her first book, Famous Last Words, won the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize.
From 2007-2024, she was professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program at Mississippi State. She recently moved with her family back to her home state of Delaware, where she runs Studio & Craft, a poetry community, and continues to write, teach, and spend as much time outside as possible.
More from Catherine 🦊🌺
Order your copy of Catherine’s fifth poetry collection, DEAR BEAST (Saturnalia Books, 2026)!
Order your copy of Catherine’s memoir-in-essays, FOXES FOR EVERYBODY (Northwestern University Press, 2026)!
Check out the offerings at Catherine’s online poetry community, Studio & Craft!
Follow Catherine on Instagram & Facebook!
Read three of Catherine’s recent poems in Poetry Magazine!
Your turn: Do you have any other questions or thoughts to share with Catherine?
This Sunday, March 29th @ 11 am EST, I’m teaching a virtual workshop for paid subscribers. Details below—come write with me! 👇🏼
Catching up with Beginner’s Mind Alums
Christina Rivera (Author) published this moving essay, “From the Middle of It: on wonky time & wandering through a new uterus-free body”
Maia Duerr published this beautiful piece that will give you a lift: “Art is Medicine: a curated list for the new moon”
Sarah Kokernot & Ryan Rose Weaver (she/hers) are co-teaching a virtual workshop on “Tending Your Spiritual Truth” on Wed, April 8th @ 9 am. 🔗 Highly recommend: register here!🔗
Before you go, will you take a moment to hit the heart button or leave a quick comment about what strikes you here? This one simple action is incredibly effective at helping to spread the word about Catherine’s work! Or, send it to a friend that you think would love what she shared. ✨
✨Be Where You Are is a newsletter for anyone who hears the humming underneath it all and wants to create spacious time on this planet right now.✨ To reply to this newsletter, just hit reply. I’d love to hear from you! You can also find me on Instagram/Facebook/Bluesky or find more info at my website.
Loved this interview! Catherine Pierce's poems (specifically: her book Danger Days) are one of the things that got me through the pandemic, and I pledged my fangirl loyalty to her ever since. I find so much inspiration and solace in her work. Both Dear Beast and Foxes for Everybody were so excellent!
What a beautiful interweaving of writing, being and mindfulness. I love the practice of prompts and have fallen off of it myself. Thank you for the reminder! ---> “make a list of everything red in your yard” or “free-write for fifteen minutes about seagulls” or “write ten lines in the voice of a blizzard.” I'm off making some prompts for myself!