I Write Out Loud: Wry Cultural Memoir from a Life in Mid-flight
Storytelling as an audacious act during trying times.
Welcome to I Write Out Loud
I Write Out Loud is my home for cultural memoir and personal essays exploring relationships, feminism, parenting, media, music, modern dating, politics, beauty, aging, and the strange, brave process of becoming yourself into midlife.
Through lived experience, I examine the larger cultural forces shaping the world around us.
I’m drawn to the nuance edges where private life collides with shared cultural experience, and the conversations that emerge from that tension.
Some essays are new.
Some are revisited years later through different eyes.
Together they’re forming an evolving body of work in real time, a home for my flavor of layered storytelling.
Every piece also includes audio I narrate, because voice matters as much to me as written language does.
I also host Sunday Salon, a weekly intimate live gathering for paid subscribers. It’s a smaller room where we slow down and unpack the deeper cultural threads behind the week’s essay and conversations.
The rhythm of I Write Out Loud:
The essay: Every Monday at 8am ET
The live conversation: Wednesdays at 8pm ET
Sunday Salon (paid): A deeper conversation Sundays at 1pm ET
My work has appeared in more than 20 publications, including TODAY.com, Business Insider, MSN, ParentMap, Seattle Weekly, Human Parts, Age of Empathy, The Memoirist, and more.
If you like essays with a point of view and a pulse, you’re in the right place.
I Write Out Loud is that place.
One voice.
Many stories.
Out loud.
Subscribe to I Write Out Loud.
Most essays and public conversations are free and accessible to everyone. Paid subscriptions support Sunday Salon and help sustain this ongoing independent creative practice.
If this work resonates with you, I’d love to have you here — whether as a free subscriber, a paid supporter, or simply someone reading along and thinking out loud beside me.
Your support helps make this work possible. 💜
Hi @Dana Dubois, I am a recent fan of yours and a new subscriber, and yesterday you said something that has stuck with me. I started writing around December 2024. My work is really personal, more of a memoir, and how I see the world through my lens of experiencing multiple career paths, developing my own spiritual journey of sobriety, returning to school to become a mental health therapist, which culminated in discovering and fine tuning my current road as a witch and a psychic medium. I have always been a keen observer of politics with a strong sense of right and wrong. With the return of Donald Trump, I felt that my style of writing as a memorialist did not fit in our current political state that has become a national and worldwide crisis. When you talked about this yesterday, I finally felt that I understood my desire to step back, and as an empath and a bit of an introvert, I felt like my purpose was to bear witness, but some of your spoken words have made me realize it’s time to really get back into the game. I cannot just write about my inner world without talking about the current outer world. I don’t have to be a political writer who is in the chase for the next biggest scoop, but I can certainly talk about how it has screwed up my serenity and what I do about it. (Newsflash, not very well). I feel a moral obligation to figure out WHAT I can do, instead of letting horror paralyze me. So I want to thank you for being a catalyst for me right now, and I look forward to reading more of your writings, and watching your podcasts. And writing more of my own!
Dana, loving both reading and listening to your articles. I first caught you on your GenXy show and fell in love with both you and Lawrence. I feel so honored that I can use my birthday money to pay for a year to access your work. I continue on this gratitude journey as it is said that gratitude cancels out fear. I know if I found the money I had to join as a paid follower. I asked the universe to tell me where I could get the money. I have two others that I have been able to join paid for a year and with that I am grateful. I literally did not have the money, and it showed up and I knew exactly how to use it. I had set my intention to use that money wisely to do something to benefit my soul and so far, I have benefited more than I can express. Thank you, Thank you, thank you.