Strange Returns
A recurring forum devoted to thinking about creativity in all its many forms.
Welcome to Strange Returns
A Substack about creativity across artistic disciplines.
I’m Michael McNally-Costello—a poet, writer, and creative director with two decades of experience at the crossroads of artistry and deadlines. My work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2004, The Incredible Sestina Anthology, and other literary journals.
Beyond the résumé, I’m a husband and father. I’m sober. I live with ADHD, type 1 diabetes, depression, anxiety, and complex trauma. Writing and creativity have sustained me when everything else buckled. They’ve been my way back into the world.
And speaking of lifelines—my wife, Marissa, deserves more than a shoutout. She’s supported me through a decade of collapses and rebuilding. She deserves her own newsletter and forum. But this one? This one’s about creativity, and my relationship with it.
A year ago, I began organizing the ideas, insights, and practices I’ve collected over 20+ years into a working theory of creativity. What emerged is Leap-and-Loop: a fractal-based framework for staying generative through recursive return, divergent movement, and sensory anchoring. It’s a philosophy of creativity built not on inspiration or productivity hacks—but on what ideas do under pressure.
That theory is now becoming a book. This Substack is where it lives, breathes, mutates—in real time.
Here’s what you can expect:
Essays on the creative process and the theory behind Leap-and-Loop
Deep dives into art, music, poetry, film, and design—through a recursive lens
Visual breakdowns, metaphor fieldwork, associative leaps
Real talk about making things while neurodivergent, sober, and human
Tools for staying inventive when your process breaks, your system glitches, or your muse just burns out
New posts will land every 1–4 weeks. All of them free. But if you subscribe, you’ll help me grow this space. If you want to pledge support—even better. It helps fund the time, labor, and research behind this work.
Let’s get recursive. I promise each post will offer a leap you’ve never taken—until now.
Photo by Yuriy Vertikov on Unsplash