Ten places at a time
The same twelve questions, the same six weeks — and a person on the other end of it. Not more content. Someone reading.
You do the digging privately. What you send me each week is a dispatch — what surfaced, what surprised you, what you are avoiding.
What this is
The Excavation already asks twelve questions across six weeks, two at a time, each with a plain-language framing. This is that programme with me attached. Your answers stay yours — I never see the journal itself. What crosses to me is a short account of what came up, and what comes back is a single question.
The writing carries the work. That is not a cost-saving; it is the method. You already have the answers, and a weekly call is a very good way of quietly relocating them to me.
The dispatch
Once a week, by Sunday, by email. Three prompts, the same every week, four hundred words at most:
Deciding what surfaced is itself the reflexive work. By the time I read a word, you have already done the harder half.
What comes back
One question. Not feedback, not encouragement, not a summary of what I noticed. The question the dispatch was asking for.
If something arrives that a question will not do justice to — real distress, something that should not wait a week — we move it to a call rather than handle it in writing. That is designed in, not improvised.
How the six weeks run
We open with The Conversation, usually around an hour, to agree what these six weeks are for and what would count as them having worked. You dig. I read on one fixed day each week and send one question back. We close with a shorter call on what the digging turned up and what holds now.
Week one · Naming the actors
Who is still in the room
Who are you still arguing with who isn’t in the room? · Whose voice do you hear when you call yourself an idiot?
Week two · Seating the parties with a stake
The two of you
Name the voice in you that wants everything to stay as it is — now the one that’s desperate for it to change. · You said yes when you meant no: which one was talking?
Week three · The two dictionaries
What “I’m fine” covers
“I’m fine” — write the true one. · What do you only admit when there’s no one else to hear it?
Week four · Interests, not positions
What got filed under “doesn’t matter”
“I keep pretending I don’t mind that…” · What did you want at sixteen that you’ve talked yourself out of needing?
Week five · Inherited conflict
The paperwork you never signed
What are you still waiting for permission to do? · What argument did you inherit that was never yours to have?
Week six · The ceasefire
What you stop paying
What is it costing you to go on carrying this — and what would let you stop paying? · What’s one true thing you could write today that would change tomorrow?
The terms, plainly
That last one does more work than it looks. A week with nothing in it is the most interesting thing you can bring to the closing call — a treaty that did not hold usually means a voice wasn’t represented when it was signed. You are responsible for your own change. The structure says so, so that I never have to.
Places
Six weeks · ten places at a time · by invitation
Ten is not scarcity invented for a web page. It is the number above which the reading day stops fitting in a day.
There is no button on this page, and that is deliberate. It begins with The Conversation — $75, around an hour. If the six weeks are right for both of us, I will invite you and we will settle the terms then. If they are not, you have still had the conversation, and I will say so plainly rather than sell you six weeks you don’t need.
If you would rather dig alone, everything here is in The Excavation at $27. This page is only for the version with someone reading.