About the Wild Garden
A place to arrive
as you are.
And belong without being asked to change.
What this place holds
Made from
real life.
The Wild Garden is a place for books, journals, stories, and other things made from lived moments.
It holds tenderness, humor, truth, mess, grief, trying again, belonging, and the strange little pieces of being human that do not always fit neatly anywhere else.
Why the Garden exists
It started with one thing.
The Wild Garden began during my fight with cancer—what I came to call the monster.
For a while, life became doctors, treatments, medicine, appointments, and getting through whatever came next. The monster was taking up entirely too much room.
My friend Jenn kept reminding me there was still a life outside of it. One night, she told me to find one thing—just one—that had nothing to do with the monster.
So I picked up a pencil.
And I wrote.
Eventually, I started writing about my granddaughter Penny.
Penny is autistic and, at the time, did not communicate with spoken words. But she had never been silent to me. I knew her sounds. I watched her. I learned her ways.
We were two peas in a pod.
There was a night during treatment when I wasn't sure I would make it. I wanted Penny to have something that would always tell her:
I saw you.
I knew you.
I loved you fiercely, exactly as you were.
And I wanted other people to see her, too—not as broken or waiting to be fixed, but as the funny, curious, wonderful little person already there.
That became Perfectly Penny.
I thought I was writing one book.
I had no idea I was planting a Garden.
Tending the Garden
Meet Mimi.
I'm Mimi Moffitt.
I didn't grow up dreaming of becoming a writer. I didn't have a grand plan to become one.
I just started writing.
And then I apparently forgot to stop.
In about fifteen months, one pencil became thousands of pages—books, journals, stories, fragments, ridiculous family moments, things that hurt, things that made me laugh, and enough unfinished ideas to keep me busy for approximately the next twenty-five years.
I learned as I went. I didn't know much about publishing or even that some of the things I instinctively did with words had names.
I just knew how I wanted them to feel.
Where they needed to breathe. Where they needed to stop. When something small deserved a line all its own.
And I remain somewhat unconvinced that punctuation is as important as everyone says it is.
As I kept writing, more of life wandered into the Garden—family, marriage, friendship, grief, laughter, ordinary days and completely ridiculous ones.
Eventually I realized what tied it all together.
I notice people.
Their quirks. Their stories. The ways they communicate and love. The little moments that look ordinary until somebody stops long enough to really see them.
I don't think we're supposed to bloom the same way or at the same time.
The Wild Garden is where I put the things I notice.
The tender things.
The funny things.
The unfinished things.
The beautifully human things.
It's a little wild.
So am I.
And there's room here for you.
Have a question or want to say hello?
Get in touchCome as you are. Stay as long as you like.
The Wild Garden will still be here when you’re ready.