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Hello friends,

I spent last weekend prepping the raised beds in the garden. Shoveling mushroom compost out of the truck and into a wheelbarrow, then trying to maneuver it through the narrow space between the beds.

It’s good this early spring work. The kind that leaves you sore, feeling it in your arms and legs. Proof that you did something. Moved earth, moved your body, let your mind tag along for the ride.

Small shoots appear from the ground, hard to identify in their early stages. One of them seems to be a bachelor button, but it’s unclear.

I text a knowledgeable gardener friend. Leave it, we decide. I push the compost carefully around it, try not to smother it. In the end, a bucket is a better solution than the wheelbarrow, a little easier to manage and more control over where the compost goes.

I start looking at all the other signs of life emerging from the soil. What to leave, what to cover, what to pull?

In a few weeks or a month I’ll know more. For now, I have to leave them. Give them the time they need in order to emerge, show themselves, before I decide if it should stay or go. I can’t help but see the metaphor. Pruning, cutting, weeding—all essential to the creative process, of course. But maybe we shouldn’t be so quick to remove what seems to be getting in the way.

We need to let the unruly and unexpected grow for a bit, see what develops with a little time.

Emerging from winter, I find the urge to cut back, tidy up, get rid of the detritus that went unseen during the darker months. The proverbial spring cleaning. It’s an act with old roots. During Norwuz for example there’s the tradition of khāne-takānī or “shaking down the house.” Pre-electricity, a winter of lighting lamps with kerosene or whale oil would leave a layer of soot and grime in the home. Spring offered more light, more energy, the opportunity to remove the layer of winter grime.

Even as someone who isn’t prone to a pristine and minimal space—and certainly wouldn’t put cleaning at the top of the list of life priorities—I can feel the urge. I start opening the doors and windows to let the warmer air in. All of a sudden even the most beloved objects start screaming at me that they want to be moved. The stacks of books that felt full of cozy potential in the winter now feel like unfulfilled expectations—reminders of all the things I haven’t gotten to.

I feel a need to digitally clean house too. I swoop into the inbox to do a mass removal. Delete, delete, delete.

There’s too much in here. I need space for my own ideas.

Back in the garden, I look over all the dead stalks and pods that were left for the birds. Here too it’s all shouting for a refresh. And yet, I find this craving to pull everything, tidy it all up, turn the garden into some kind of manageable, pristine, organized blank slate a bit odd.

The volunteer plants are always going to emerge. The weeds are always going to take root. Too sterile and too perfect isn’t the sign of something well managed, it’s an indicator that the wildness has died off. What am I after here: something manageable or something that’s alive?

A line from Casey Salerno’s poem The Weeds (Accidentally on Purpose) that lands when I read it:

“When faced with all that overgrowth, doesn’t some large part of you want to

watch it manifest more, just a little bit, to see how wild things really can get”

“Accidentally on purpose” is a strategy I can get behind.

I put some seeds in the renewed beds. Even if I know it’s early. A little act of hope at least.

Radish. Arugula. Nasturtiums. As I push them into the earth, I make a little wish.

Let it all emerge.

Let it be abundant.

Let it offer something unexpected.

Let it grow wild.

-Anna

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Thank you for reading Creative Fuel. This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog.

I believe in sharing creativity, so most of this newsletter is free and accessible to all readers and I am grateful to everyone who reads and supports it.

You can do so by sharing this with a friend, buying something in my shop, or becoming a paid subscriber.

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Last weekend for the spring shop sale: 20% off all orders // DIVE Seasonal Writing Group spring session starts next week! Sign up for a season of writing and creative support with and a bunch of like-minded souls: choose Tuesday or Thursday cohort.

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Hello friends,

I’ve been thinking a lot about art and money lately.

This is a topic that takes up far more bandwidth than I would like to admit to anyone outside of my writer and artist group text chains.

A lot of artists land in their careers because they’re not interested in a life where money is the main focal point. Yet, as an artist (as always, I’m using the term very generally here) you spend a lot of time thinking about money: how much you have or don’t have, where it’s coming from, what you need to do in order to get more of it, etc.

I don’t know any artist who isn’t thinking about money.

“I think artists are trying to do work according to values outside of the marketplace,” , author of the newsletter and the new book Making Art and Making a Living: Adventures in Funding a Creative Life told me. “But you can’t live outside of the marketplace.”

In his book, Currey helps to shine a light on the often fraught relationship between creativity and finances. As he writes:

“… I can’t be the only one who feels alternately baffled by the economics of art-making. The dumb truth is that there is no cultural production without financial support. It is simply not possible to become an accomplished painter or musician or novelist or poet without spending a lot of time experimenting, making false starts, starting over, starting over again, absorbing criticism, thinking, reading, talking and mooning about the house aimlessly. All this time has to be purchased, one way or another.”

Money Thoughts

Despite this reality, money is one of those taboo things we’re not really supposed to talk about as artists.

It’s even beneficial to flaunt that you don’t care. “…images of artistic purity are themselves deployed as marketing strategies,” writes William Deresiewicz in The Death of the Artist: How Creators Are Struggling to Survive in the Age of Billionaires and Big Tech. He cites the artist Hans Abbing, who says that “It is often commercial to be a-commercial. Expressing anti-market values can add to one’s success in the market.”

God forbid you attach monetary value to your work and lose your soul!!! Deresiewicz calls this a “conspiracy of pious make-believe.” You can be sure that anyone on a soapbox about making art for art’s sake has the security of a trust fund.

In my mind there are essentially two states related to creative work and money:

• I need to make money now (or yesterday, as the case may be)

• I need to make money soon (“soon” is defined as anywhere from 90 seconds to several years depending on your current situation and projects)

Yes there is a third state which is “I don’t need to worry about money” but since I don’t know anyone in that category, I’m disregarding it.

These two states elicit what I like to call “Money Thoughts.”

Money Thoughts are like an annoying roommate who keeps odd hours and lives an unpredictable lifestyle. Sometimes, they’re fast asleep, or gone for a bit on some excursion. In their absence, you get to revel in a peaceful, quiet calm. The experience is momentary, you never know how long it will last.

Inevitably, the roommate will wake up or come back home, belligerently stumbling into your space and disturbing it with their chaotic energy. It could be in the afternoon or in the middle of the night. You never know.

You do know what to expect though. The music will be turned on full blast without them asking, everything will be pulled out of the fridge to make a meal. Dishes will be left, cabinet doors will stay open.

All you can do is politely ask them to pipe down and try to retreat to your room, where hopefully their sounds are muffled enough that you can think straight.

The problem is, to make creative work, Money Thoughts need to be put aside, at least for a short while. “You have to step into this other room. It’s not where the marketer lives,” says Currey. You need a mental space where you can go, “wherever your instincts are leading you, and keep that other stuff at bay while you’re doing it.”

This is no easy task.

But there’s at least freedom in knowing that you’re not the first to navigate the situation.

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf wrote not just about a woman’s need for space in order to write, but also money. She claimed that £500 a year was enough to make a go at writing (a little bit more than what she had from her inheritance). As she wrote, “intellectual freedom depends upon material things.” This was an amount that would “keep one alive in the sunshine.”

According to the Bank of England inflation calculator, £500 at the time of the book’s publication in 1929 equates to around £27,000/$37,000 today. I don’t know if Woolf was thinking before or after taxes, but even if it’s after taxes that’s not an exorbitant amount that offers a lot of wiggle room.

$37,000 comes out to $3,083 per month. Factor in that the average US mortgage payment in 2025 was $2,3291, and don’t forget that if you’re in the U.S. and you’re self-employed, you’re going to need to cover healthcare. Have kids? Add that in. Oh and have you considered putting money into retirement? Let’s make this money strettttttch. If you don’t have enough, it’s probably you and the avocado toast’s fault, not to mention your awful career choice. Right? Yes, let’s definitely victim blame the creatives and not the system.

Woolf’s amount sounds almost dreamy compared to the financial reality most authors face today. In a survey done by the Author’s Guild, the median income for full-time authors from their books was $10,000. With the addition of other author-related income (editing, blogging, teaching, speaking, etc.) the median income bumped up to $20,000.

That means that half all full-time authors earn below minimum wage from all of their work related to writing.

Most of the artists I know aren’t on a path to yachts and private jets. As a friend told me recently about a financial conversation he was having with his wife about how much additional money they wanted to make in a year, “we just want to be able to buy the nice cheese at the grocery store.”

It’s a spectrum after all, but why do artists always get shoved down at the bottom end and then scolded if they ask for anything more? “I cannot think of another field in which people feel guilty about being paid for their work—and even guiltier for wanting to be,” writes Deresiewicz.

Amongst my writer friends, the main goal for books is usually something along the lines of “enough that I can keep writing.” Not that we should be required to justify our own wants and desires and keep them at a bare minimum in some kind of creative martyrdom. But you know, it’s what we’ve been told to do.

“I just want to make enough money to keep doing this work that I find valuable. I feel so lucky to be able to do that, and connect with people,” says Currey. “But it feels more and more like you have to be a millionaire to live a semi comfortable life in an American city and do work that is not extremely commercial or extremely profitable. That’s the thing that’s frustrating, and I’m concerned might be frustrating for years.”

You want to be an artist? In this economy?

I would argue: yes. The more that I circle these questions, the more awful that the state of the world feels, the more I think to myself you might as well be an artist. Even amongst my friends who have what I call “real adult jobs” there are struggles, whether it’s because base costs have gotten so exorbitantly expensive or because an actual comfortable paycheck often comes with significant corporate burnout.

Everything feels precarious right now. Might as well be making art.

The working artist’s dilemma

Do you get a day job? Do you apply for grants? Do you get big sponsorship deals? Do you exclusively work for the wealthy? Do you pretend you’re an NPR station and ask for donations/patronage? Do you come up with a lucrative yet scammy 5 Step Method? Do you get affiliate money from hustling products?

This is the professional artist’s dilemma—an ongoing exercise in navigating through creative and financial block, always figuring out how you’re going to fund the work you want to make.

“I feel like I’m living the dilemma,” Currey told me. As he notes in the book, he had originally budgeted 18 months to write it. It took more than 50. You do the math.

If you’re in the dilemma yourself then you know that there is no one solution. Except for maybe an entire societal re-calibration of morals and values, tackling systemic inequities, and ensuring universal healthcare… I know it’s a lot to ask but a girl can dream!

“It’s really hard to make a living as an artist,” Currey says. “It has always been really hard. It takes all your resourcefulness, all your creativity, all your tenacity, and it takes a lot of luck.” Look back across history and “you see that over and over again… Just knowing that other people have gone through this kind of thing, or felt the same feeling, is so comforting. It makes me want to keep going,”

You’re not alone in your creative money conundrums. Many have walked this path before.

“Sometimes I think, ‘God, what the fuck am I doing? I don’t know what I’m doing. This is a disaster,’” Currey told me. We both laughed in a knowing kind of way. “And then I’ll read a writer’s diary.”

In the pages of the past, you can often find a similar sentiment, enough to think, “oh, you know, I’m not so weird and alone in this.”

Making art vs. consuming art

Sculptor Louise Nevelson knew from a young age that she wanted to be an artist, and she was practical about it:

“Who in this absurd world of ours becomes an artist with the expectation of making money? Only the naïve. To survive, most need a job or private income or a rich lover or husband, or something.”

She did in fact land herself a wealthy husband, but while he was supportive of her creative endeavors, his family wasn’t. As she recalled:

“My husband’s family was terribly refined. Within their circle you could know Beethoven, but God forbid if you were Beethoven. You were not allowed to be a creator, you were just supposed to be an audience.”

Needless to say, the marriage didn’t last. Her words ring particularly true in the modern era of mass media consumption. Consume, scroll, take it all in, yes! But make the work? That’s still viewed with a certain kind of skepticism. Say you want to be an artist at a young age and you’ll have people trying to sway you pretty quickly.

That tension of making art versus consuming art that Nevelson experienced still exists today. Just look at the global art market, worth $59.6 billion in 2025. In an article for Contemporary Art Magazine2, Julien Delagrange noted that within the art world system (which is already an elite group) only one in twenty artists makes more than $100,000 per year. One in six is making more than $25,000.

It’s far more lucrative to be a seller or investor of art than it is to be a maker of art, much like Vincent Van Gogh’s Uncle Cent who was an excellent art dealer but as Currey writes, “was only really interested in art as a commodity… he showed no interest in his nephew’s art career and certainly no interest in funding it.”

Art has a commodity hasn’t changed much since Van Gogh’s time. Last week a friend told me about someone she knew making a decent living as an art consultant for companies and wealthy individuals who want art on their walls but don’t know what to choose. I like the idea that someone cultivates a relationship with artists and can be a good advocate for them, but there’s still something that rubs me the wrong way about this potentially being a more lucrative option than the actual creation of the art.

Yet another sign of the “taste economy,” where you don’t have to bother actually making something. Just decide what you like and don’t like and make decisions accordingly. In the new frontiers of AI, taste is now branded as “the most valuable skill.”

How is taste developed in the first place? Engaging with art. You read books, listen to music, go to galleries, the theater, a concert. All things that are 100% dependent on a person having made the work in the first place.

Writing about the new tech obsession with taste Kyle Chayka notes that A.I. companies want to be seen as having an “aura of artisanality, even as their core products promise to automate all that is human into obsolescence.”

Of course the tech bros want to co-opt taste without actually having to dip their toes into what’s required to bring the work into the world in the first place. Or even live in a world in which that kind of work needs economic support. Just let the robots do the work and sit back and relax while the billions roll in.

Do we actually value art?

All of this is underpinned by our complicated modern cultural relationship to art. “We devalue it, and at the same time, we worship it,” says Currey, “but we don't want to support people who are doing it.”

This happens on an individual and a societal level. Aside from the tech platforms stealing copyrighted work which just leads to copies of copies of copies, programs that support the arts have been massively defunded. Sweeping cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities reduced the agency’s budget by over $100 million, cuts that were largely determined by ChatGPT searches3. Arts and cultural organizations have been deeply impacted, often overnight.

By 2028, UNESCO estimates4 that artificial intelligence will result in global revenue losses of 24% for music creators, and 21% of people working in audiovisual. Even creative professions in even the most lucrative of industries, like advertising and market, are on the chopping block.

We’ve been sold the “starving artist” trope for so long, that it’s often expected that artists should be underpaid. When these industries are in decline, it can lead to not much more than a general shoulder shrug. If you knowingly chose this path, then it’s on you, right? And if you’ve managed to make at least the utter bare minimum, shouldn’t you be satisfied? Are artists even allowed nice things?

It then falls on the artists to do the heavy lifting. To take a stand, to remind people that yes, we all need it art. And to the artists: yes we’re allowed to ask for more.

I like how Currey summarizes this:

“…there is at least one audience that will always understand and empathize with artists’ funding pleas, no matter how far-fetched, and that is their fellow artists. And some of the most successful instances of patronage in art and literary history have come not from powerful rulers, wealthy industrialists, enterprising heiresses, government programs, or internet strangers but from other artists who have recognized a need and stepped in to meet it.”

The system isn’t made for us. But together, we work at figuring out a different one.

A lifelong improvisation

So what do we do with all of this? How can you make your art and make money? Truly, there’s no one answer. But it’s worth trying.

“I think you should start with what’s calling out to you to follow. That’s what I think I learned from this book. I need to follow an idea where it leads, and not try to figure it out in advance,” says Currey.

As a young aspiring writer, Currey says that he was very much focused on the how of writing. “How am I going to do this, how is this going to work? I need to have it figured out.” But the real truth he has found over time is that “you can’t figure it out in advance.”

“I think that’s the message of the book,” says Currey. “You have to do it without figuring it out, and you’re probably never going to be able probably to figure it out. It’s always an improvisation.”

There is no template. Knowing that makes me feel a little better, because at least I can get rid of the fear that I’m doing wrong.

Artists across history have flailed and failed, struggled and sold out, gone bankrupt and been bankrolled. But no matter what, they kept making their work. Regardless of money, regardless of public perception, regardless of their own fears, and regardless of even their own better judgement. “I want people to feel like they can find a way to do it, even if they don't have the right conditions or don't feel like they know what they're doing,” says Currey.

There’s power in knowing that you’re part of a longstanding tradition of people pursuing a life that’s different from what society dictates. I like to think of all of them giving us a pep talk. Yes it’s hard, yes the system is rigged, yes we need your art anyway.

“That’s what I hope to do by writing in this way, create that feeling in other people, a kind of permission,” says Currey. “It’s very hard to get permission to be an artist. No one’s going to give it to you. You have to decide for yourself. You have to make it up for yourself.”

Let’s keep making it up. And supporting each other along the way.

-Anna

Support an artist: go buy Mason’s book from your local bookstore.

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DIVE Writing Group: SPRING 2026 Session

The spring session of DIVE, the Creative Fuel Collective seasonal writing group, starts next week! Three months of weekly prompts and check-ins, and monthly meetings with and fellow creatives. Choose between the Tuesday and Thursday session.

—> Spring 2026 TUESDAY Cohort - Meets April 7, May 5, and June 2, 4-6pm PT

—> Spring 2026 THURSDAY Cohort - Meets April 9, May 7, and June 4, 4-6pm PT

DIVE Seasonal Writing Group

Thank you for reading Creative Fuel. This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog.

I believe in sharing creativity, so most of this newsletter is free and accessible to all readers and I am grateful to everyone who reads and supports it.

You can do so by sharing this with a friend, buying something in my shop, or becoming a paid subscriber.

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Hello friends,

Black bugs have been everywhere, crawling all around the house. In the kitchen. On the window. On the back of the couch. Crawling across a book, a lamp, my arm.

At first glance, without really paying attention, I thought they were stink bugs, emerging from their winter hibernation. But upon closer inspection, these ones were longer, more slender. Up close, bright reddish orange lines crisscrossed along their back.

Annoyance was the initial reaction. Isn’t it usually when you have insects crawling all over the house?

I did a little bit of searching online. Boxelder bugs. Felt better to at least know what to call them. Ah, I see: related to stink bugs and cicadas! No wonder the internet defined them as a “nuisance.” Although the more I read, I couldn’t entirely determine why. They don’t injure you or your pets, they don’t bite or carry disease. Worst case scenario if you squash one on the couch, they might stain the fabric. In other words: a housemate that hangs around a little unexpectedly but that’s essentially harmless.

They’ve even been called “accessible ambassadors for nature.” As Chris Helzer of The Nature Conservancy writes, “Boxelder bugs make themselves easily available to us, but we have largely failed to take them up on their obvious offer of friendship.”

Knowing their name at least felt like a step in the right direction. The more I looked at them, the more stunning I found the black and red pattern. A striking contrast, a little bit of flair and flourish.

Sitting on the couch one morning with my computer on my lap, I noticed one on the sleeve of my sweater. I placed my pointer finger directly in front of the bug, encouraging it to walk onto my hand.

The boxelder bug crawled along the backside of my hand, until I slowly rotated my wrist and the bug followed my movement, inching its way over to my palm. There on the couch with the digital world at my fingertips, it was as if the bug was saying, “hey you, take a little time to pay attention.”

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago in the newsletter that I had decided to put my phone on grayscale mode, an attempt at making the device a little less desirable. First popularized by technology ethicist Tristan Harris (you may recognize his name from the docudrama The Social Dilemma, or his phrase “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.”). Originally inspired by an experiment at Google where M&Ms were placed in opaque containers instead of clear ones, in turn reducing snacking habits, the idea with grayscale is kind of the same thing. By changing the color, you cut out the tempting visual candy.

It worked far better than I had anticipated. A screen in pure black and white with a lot of contrast might have been one thing, but the assorted variations of gray? It just looks like one brain numbing jumble. I pick it up to send a text, and do so as quickly as possible so I can put it away again.

When I’ve shown my screen to friends they vigorously nod in agreement, “oh yes, that looks terrible.”

The awfulness has a payoff: my screen time is down by two hours a day right now, and without really feeling like I had to make any effort to do so. “What are you doing with the extra time?” my husband asked me.

“I don’t know, staring at trees?”

There is plenty of screen time in my life. The emails on my computer, reading on my iPad, texting on my phone. But at the very least it feels like I have gotten small windows of time back. Certainly the ones in between activities. On a rainy day waiting in the car at the post office, I watched the patterns emerge in a rain puddle.

This grayscale business is nothing new. Harris told a reporter about it a decade ago. And the idea that screens and devices are a sinkhole for attention? Also nothing new. But lately, I’ve found myself on a more intentional search for a way back to my own attention. I am sure that many of you have some version of this.

The desire stems from a combination of things, but I think a big one is the intensity of the current moment. There are so many horrors for my brain to comprehend and process. I don’t just want to have an emotional reaction, I also want to be able to formulate a thought. This gets more complicated the more that I take it. Things get muddled. It doesn’t feel good.

I picked ’s On Tyranny back up again the other day, and chapter 9 stood out: “Be kind to our language.”

“The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.”

A collective trance. Sound familiar?

He reminds us that:

“More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought.”

Our attention is a finite resource. We must wield it wisely. If we don’t, there is a significant cost.

I have found myself in multiple conversations lately where it appears that everyone is struggling to make a point. These conversations aren’t short on words—there are lots of assorted thoughts and opinions shared—but it seems impossible for anyone to ever land the proverbial plane. A kind of conversational slop.

I’m not immune. There have been times when I’ve had an almost out of body experience, watching myself from the outside as I get sucked into a spinning vortex when I’m not really sure what I’m arguing or what I’m referencing anymore. Just words, phrases, and unintelligible half sentences.

It’s a chilling feeling. Makes me want to immediately find my way to a notebook to be able to map out a solid thought, write my way through what I am actually thinking to ensure I am not just regurgitating snippets of what I have consumed.

“Human attention is the stuff out of which we care for ourselves, our communities, and our planet,” write the authors of the new book Attensity: A. Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement, which I picked up and read this week. “When it is fractured and polluted, all forms of life suffer.” Like oil companies digging deep into the earth to extract energy intensive resources for great profit, our attention is also being fracked.

Reading the book, I couldn’t help but feel that the authors were intentionally playing with my own screen-influenced attention habits. There were plenty of words in all caps, a lot of italicization, some lines in bold. The product of people who know how our brains have been molded by the attention-grabbing forces.

In the digital age, it’s the ONLY way we stop and pay attention.

My eyes actually have a difficult time with that on the printed page, but I understand the drive, particularly in a book that is written as a manifesto.

The authors argue that our current understanding of attention is narrow, largely informed by scientific research which turns attention into a specific, quantifiable, measurable thing that we do. In this line of thinking, attention is our ability to focus, our ability to stay “on task.” Of course, attention is more than staying focused on screen-based endeavors.

“…giving your mind and time and senses to the world and using your mind and time and senses to receive the world and other human beings, properly understood, that’s human attention,” co-author of the book D. Graham Burnett said in an interview. “It also involves daydreaming and taking care of a child and burying your dead—those are attentional activities.”

Attention is care, attention is curiosity, attention is connecting. Attention is human.

There is a growing amount of literature on attention. Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing is one I know a lot of you have read. Just yesterday at a bookstore I spotted another one with a bold cover shouting at me—funnily enough titled, The Sirens’ Call. Are we at a tipping point? Could we go so far as to be hopeful about our own attention?

The authors of Attensity! (the “Friends of Attention” as they’re known) project that by 2040 “attentional wellness” will be understood as a basic good. In their words, this “attentional wellness” is defined as “the training and conditioning and maintenance of one’s diverse attentional capacities.” Just like we exercise in order to maintain our physical health, our attention requires the same.

But this requires our own investment in “the kinds of attention that are not engineered not maximize digital advertising revenue.” In other words, the moments spent looking at the boxelder bugs crawling along your wall, or the time spent in a conversation with a friend, or staring out the window because the sunlight is hitting at a beautiful angle.

Artists of course are well-poised for the task.

“They are a little like the cavalry in the joyful, peaceful army of Attention Activism. They can move fast, scout the terrain, and close quickly and wickedly on the enemy. They draw on a rich and deep set of traditions—critical play, heightened sensitivity, fierce and irreverent independence, a preoccupation with craft, the libidinal fellowship of making and sharing—that align powerfully with the work of fighting the human frackers. Moreover, there is a long-standing streak of maverick idiosyncrasy in the world of the arts. A longstanding willingness to pin value on things other than money—plus a happy vigor in showing the middle finger to much of what passes as convention.”

When I read that paragraph, the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles came to mind. In 1977, she became the first Artist-in-Residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, an intersection of artist and public agency that “transformed our notions of public art,” as Queens Museum Curator Larissa Harris and Art Historian Patricia C. Phillips put it.

Sitting down at a typewriter in 1969, Ukeles wrote her famed MANIFESTO FOR MAINTENANCE ART, 1969! outlining her own experience as an artist and mother and that of the city’s sanitation workers. As she wrote in the manifesto:

“The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?”

C. Maintenance is a drag; it takes all the fucking time (lit.). The mind boggles and chafes at the boredom. The culture confers lousy status on maintenance jobs = minimum wages, housewives=no pay.

Ukeles deeply understood that there is so much labor required to make our world go round, and so much of it goes unnoticed. But as an artist, she could take on these maintenance tasks “and flush them up to consciousness, exhibit them, as Art.”

Her first piece as the official Artist-in-Residence was called Touch Sanitation Performance. From the summer of 1979 to the summer of 1980, Ukeles shadowed sanitation workers, joining them at their 6am start time, keeping up with them through the workday and eating together on the curb when restaurants refused to serve them. As a part of this process, Ukeles committed to what she called a “Handshake and Thanking Ritual.” Over the course of the year, Ukeles shook the hand of every single sanitation department employee—all 8,500. As she shook their hand she said, “thank you for keeping New York City alive.”

One handshake and a thank you may not sound like much, but as then Department Commissioner Norman Stiesel noted, the simple act “opened up a hurt that each one was still carrying from when he felt humiliated.”

In an interview Ukeles recounted the story that one sanitation worker shared with her after she shook his hand and thanked him:

“17 years ago it was very hot, very humid… We stopped for break, and sat down on some lady’s porch steps after we had dumped her garbage. She opened up the door and said, “get away from here, you smelly garbagemen. I don’t want you smelling up my porch.”

That stuck in my throat for these 17 years. Today you wipe that out.”

As Ukeles said, “that was the best thing that ever happened to me as an artist.”

A work of art—whether it’s a dance, a song, or a book—is a request for our attention. Something that says, “hey you, stop here and stay awhile.” As artists and writers, we have the power to wield that attention, use our medium to point out what we see as important, what we want to ensure does not go unnoticed. We point and say, “this thing over here? yes this thing deserves your time.”

That continued act of attention is a way to unmuddle the pieces. Figure out what is important, do your research, connect the dots, make the argument.

One of my favorite part of Ukeles’ manifesto is her line “Everything I say is Art is Art.” We all get to decide where our attention goes, and I like this lens. Art is paying attention to the unseen. Art is choosing where our attention goes. Art is being receptive to all of the unexpected ideas and illuminations that happen during the in between moments, when we remember to honor them with our attention.

In this world where everything has the power to be art, the boxelder bug crawling along the window isn’t a nuisance, it’s a performance piece. Maybe that’s a stretch, but why not aim to see the world in this way?

Life is not an accumulation of minutes and moments that can be quantified, and either is our attention. We deserve to be more vigilant about it. Attention, after all, is what makes the world more alive, more vibrant. Attention is what feels our days full of meaning. Attention allows us to connect and understand.

You can’t track that, quantify that, turn it into a metric. But you can feel it. Know that it’s worth protecting.

-Anna

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SHOP SALE

It’s time to do a little spring cleaning in the studio! 20% off all orders in the shop between now and April 4h. Buy all the art! Gift it to your friends!

shop sale!

DIVE Writing Group: SPRING 2026 Session

The next session of DIVE, the Creative Fuel Collective seasonal writing group starts in April! Join Kerri Anne and make spring a season of writing. Three months of weekly prompts and check-ins, and monthly meetings with fellow creatives. Choose between the Tuesday and Thursday session.

—> Spring 2026 TUESDAY Cohort - Meets April 7, May 5, and June 2, 4-6pm PT

—> Spring 2026 THURSDAY Cohort - Meets April 9, May 7, and June 4, 4-6pm PT

DIVE Seasonal Writing Group

Thank you for reading Creative Fuel.

This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog.

I believe in sharing creativity, so most of this newsletter is free and accessible to all readers and I am grateful to everyone who reads and supports it.

You can do so by sharing this with a friend, buying something in my shop, or becoming a paid subscriber.

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Since we’re finally to trillium season, a great reminder to be part of the trilliumaires not billionaires club. // Spots are now open for the DIVE Seasonal Writing Group spring session — this is a beloved seasonal offering led by . Earlybird pricing if you sign up by March 25th.

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Hello friends,

If spring had a soundtrack, it would be the patter of rain woven with the song of the robin.

I took a few minutes yesterday morning to just stand and listen.

Yesterday marked the equinox. Another season, another cycle. I went out in the rainy morning to inspect the local trillium spots. Despite the mild winter, they have been slow to emerge, probably hampered by last week’s snow too. When I found the first one it was almost a sign of relief.

The world is spiraling, but the trilliums are still here.

Earlier this week, I turned in my book draft. There will still be a few more rounds to go, many edits to be made, but this was the big and consequential delivery. The first time that the scaffolding of the book held everything in it without crumbling. At least good enough to get other eyes on it, fresh perspective that can see the gaps and what is missing.

When I turned it in on Monday night, I felt a sense of elation. Almost two years of work sent off with one little email. I printed a draft to read myself, mostly so I could just hold in my hand. The weight a physical reminder of all the work that had been done.

I woke up on Tuesday feeling like I could breathe a little lighter. It was nice to not wake up at 3am thinking about how to restructure a chapter. The sensation quickly wore off, replaced by the kind of flatness and mediocre mood that I know is the result of exhaustion. I texted a few writer friends. Normal response they assured me. You’ve been working on a big project for a long time, it takes a bit to recover.

In the last few weeks I had pushed most things to the side, news included. There are times when you have to block everything out in order to hear your own thoughts. In the car on the way to take a risograph printing class, a smart and very politically savvy friend gave me a long news recap of the past week. By the time we arrived at the community printing studio, the conversation had wandered through war, impending economic and global oil crisis, and all the way to a dark discussion about Peter Thiel’s aspirations for what the world and our lives should look like1.

“We really need to go make some art,” I said as I parked the car.

Never have I been so happy to be surrounded by a bunch of strangers learning how to use a machine. Here in this studio was the best of humanity: people wanting to learn, make, and share with each other.

There were anti-war posters on the wall. There was a beautiful mural dedicated to native plants. There were free flyers to take that said “protect our library workers,” made by a local artist.2

The kind of things that make you feel a little bit better about the world.

I also looked at photos by photographer Dr. Elliot McGucken this week capturing the superbloom in Death Valley. It was the first time in a decade that the area burst into such color, all thanks to a rainier fall and winter. Dormant in the ground for a decade or more—what’s known as a “soil seed bank”—seeds wait patiently for the right temperature and precipitation to emerge.

“All blooms are super,” ecologist Tiffany Pereira reminds us (in perfect ecologist humor), but of course when a landscape is covered in the oranges, yellows, pinks, and purple at that scale, it’s hard not to feel a sense of awe. Even if you’re just looking through a screen.

I couldn’t help but think of the community print studio as a kind of flourishing ecosystem too, where vibrant ideas coalesce, where bold colors and statements are encouraged, where everything is part of one larger cycle.

Even amongst the desolate and destructive realities that we live in, there are still so many people continuing to plant seeds to bring something else to life. Sometimes they take ages to take root and bloom.

We keep planting them anyway.

“We need to go and check in with the real world through our own senses… it disrupts the human narrative and allows the ravens and the oak trees and the spring beauty wildflowers to have their say and to show us things in the moment that perhaps we need to pay attention to,” says biologist and writer David G. Haskell. “And some of those are sad things and other things are actually quite full of hope.”

I always find that spring symbolism often verges on the cliché: we emerge from the darkness, there is renewal, and promise, and rebirth. The kind of deep truths that can quickly get whipped into platitudes. But I like Haskell’s point.

We’re not just out here looking for beauty and reminders of what can bloom, we’re reminding ourselves of what the full cycle actually entails. Life and growth but also dormancy and decay.

As if nature knew that we needed a little brightness, by the afternoon of spring equinox the rain had been replaced with sunshine. In the forest, I heard an owl, listened to the creak of a tree in the wind.

I went back to inspect the trillium. I looked down at the ground, at the bright green plant pushing up through the duff of wet, brown maple leaves. There the trillium was with its tightly curled leaves, not quite ready to unfurl, but definitely on its way to something.

I could have sworn it had already grown a little taller.

-Anna

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• Yesterday marked Nowruz, the Persian New Year. Meaning “new day,” the holiday has been celebrated for over 3,000 years. Certainly the holiday has a more somber tone this year. In honor of the holiday, you might want to explore the poems of Forugh Farrokhzad. As novelist Jasmin Darznik writes about Farrokhzad’s poems, “In those poems I found proof of everything America was telling me Iranian women were not and that Iran was telling Iranian women they shouldn’t be. Bold, brilliant, lustful, angry, difficult. Those poems saved me. They still do.”

• “When they keep you from breathing through your nose, you open your mouth to breathe. For me, art photography was necessary to be able to breathe again.” Newsha Tavakolian via National Museum of Women in the Arts

• Thank you to for sharing Louise Glück’s poem “The Doorway.” I needed it, and you might need it too.

• We need to do more connecting with each other. has some excellent thoughts on the science of saying “oh hello there.”

• “The business of acting as a medium between the spoken and the typewritten word was at first as alarming as it was fascinating.” via Public Domain Review

DIVE Writing Group: SPRING 2026 Session

The next session of DIVE, the Creative Fuel Collective seasonal writing group starts in April! Join Kerri Anne and make spring a season of writing. Three months of weekly prompts and check-ins, and monthly meetings with fellow creatives. Choose between the Tuesday and Thursday session. Earlybird price: $200. Sign up before March 25, 2026.

—> Spring 2026 TUESDAY Cohort - Meets April 7, May 5, and June 2, 4-6pm PT

—> Spring 2026 THURSDAY Cohort - Meets April 9, May 7, and June 4, 4-6pm PT

DIVE Seasonal Writing Group

Thank you for reading Creative Fuel.

This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog.

I believe in sharing creativity, so most of this newsletter is free and accessible to all readers and I am grateful to everyone who reads and supports it.

You can do so by sharing this with a friend, buying something in my shop, or becoming a paid subscriber.

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In case you missed it: Made With Artist Intelligence stickers. I’m behind on shipping this week but if you ordered last weekend they are going out soon. Paid subscribers: there’s a discount code for one here.

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Hello friends,

The main item of note from my part of the world is that it snowed yesterday.

While March snow might be a usual occurrence in other places, this is quite uncommon here in Western Washington. As it turns out we had an atmospheric river1 to thank. Of course.

What I like about snow is how it can make a landscape look almost like it’s in black and white. Blue hour turns into gray hour.

I was reading Notes from an Island this week, Tove Jansson’s book about Klovharun where she spent many seasons with Tuulikki Pietilä (known as “Tooti”). This is Jansson describing being on the island in March:

“When we woke up, the whole ocean was full of broken ice. Unbelievable tabernacles floated by, driven by a mild south-west breeze, statuesque, glittering, as big as trolleys, cathedrals, primeval caverns, everything imaginable! And they changed colour whenever they felt like it—ice blue, green and, in the evenings, orange. Early in the morning they could be pink.

…

Tooti said something about how it’s all very well to go all technicolor nineteen times a day, but the purest and most honourable colors are still black and white.”

You know that as a lover of black and white art, the sentiment rang very true.

Black and white allows us to simplify in order to also see what isn’t there. Black and white won’t distract you, it focuses you on the essential.

I discovered Pencil Magazine this week, a publication that features a variety of submissions, but all made entirely with graphite and paper. This issue in particular had the theme of “The Eraser.”

Erasers are “basic tools: fixers of small mistakes, creators of negative space, attendants to inevitable changes of mind,” writes editor and publisher Sasha Wizansky. “But when I think of erasure—nearly the same word—the visions are decidedly heavier. Erasure evokes disappearance. Personal, political, and cultural deletion on intimate and community-wide scales.”

Reading that I couldn’t help but think about the black clouds over Teheran, toxic swirls above the city, chemicals lifted into the atmosphere only to come back down in the form of toxic rain. As writes, “I find myself thinking how a world a world powered by renewable energy would be fundamentally better in so many ways. A world without petro-states and petro-dictators would be a much safer and less toxic world.”

When you work in black and white (or any positive and negative space) there’s so much nuance you can’t portray. That’s both a hindrance and a gift. Whenever I make a papercut, there’s often so much texture and moodiness I want to capture, and have to figure out other ways of weaving that in. The benefit lies in black and white’s simplicity. It’s an excellent way to distill down to the essential.

No wonder it’s a tried-and-true combo for posters and art made to carry a message.

When we see something as “black and white,” we mean two things in total opposition. No middle ground for questioning. A good or bad, a right or wrong. An obvious choice.

The world seems so much simpler when we view it as an either/or doesn’t it? I want to honor the need for nuance. Life functions on a spectrum, nature doesn’t exist on a binary. And yet there is so much that I want to pass through a “good and bad” lens these days. I can’t help myself. There’s so much to scream about. $1 billion a day war? Bad. Pedophiles? Bad. Men in power who don’t have to be accountable? Bad. Environmental destruction? Bad.

Maybe this is why I am drawn to black and white as a medium. Sometimes we want to simplify and speak in absolutes.

My friend has been working on a series called Second Person Cosmic Messaging System, all made with pencil. She told me that the draw to work solely in graphite stems from a deep craving for analog methods. I know the feeling.

Sometimes I’ll see an ad for different Procreate brushes, all made to look like pencil texture and I have a little moment of panic. I wonder what it would be like to never know what it feels like to pull a pencil across a page. To push a little harder to darken the line, pull back in order to soften. Or simply to go to your pencil stash and pull the right one for the project.

8B 6B 5B 4B 3B 2B B HB F H 2H 3H 4H

It sounds like a kind of code. Or a spell. The kind you can’t replicate with digital means.

I shouldn’t judge. I use an app to make photos black and white all the time. Add a little grain for some texture. It was a long time since I stepped foot in a darkroom.

Aristotle thought that all colors stemmed from black and white, an idea that stuck around for millennia. Dark crimson was said to come from a mixture of black with sunlight or firelight.

I like the idea of drawing with sunlight and fire, as if you could hold them both in your hand and use them to mark a page. Of course, we’ve been using fire for a long time to get us to black, burning all kinds of things in order to be able to create with the leftover soot.

In a piece on lamp black—a color she calls “a bit of a trickster”— cites Michel Pastoureau, writing in his book Black: The History of a Color:

“Ancient cultures had a more developed and nuanced awareness of the color black than contemporary societies do. In all domains, there was not one black, but many blacks. The struggle against darkness, the fear of night, and the quest for light gradually led prehistoric and then ancient people to distinguish degrees and qualities of dark, and having done so, to construct for themselves a relatively wide range of blacks.”

Even black and white is a matter of nuance.

When color film hit the market, allowing photographers to go beyond black and white, there were books devoted to helping people not only take pictures, but also help them “see” color. Photographers warned against “color for color’s sake.” If not, you risked ending up with “a veritable ‘color hash,’” as one Kodak editor put it.

Skeptics of color film were grappling with the question: what does the world really look like?

We’re still grappling with that question, but now we have tools that make the distinction between the tangible world and the real world even more complicated. What is real anymore?

“The ubiquity of digital cameras, especially smartphone cameras, would seem to simplify this project, enabling immediate comparisons between pictures and the things they depict. Already the work is fraught, however: smartphone screens are two-dimensional backlit displays, while things in the natural world are illuminated by reflected light,” writes Kim Beil. “Yet, as weekly screen-time notifications make painfully clear, we spend more and more hours in front of our phones, making its saturated glow seem more and more natural.”

I changed my phone to grayscale the other day, in order to make the screen a little less flashy, a little less appealing. It is supposed to work wonders for you screen time. Removing all of the the color is said to dampen your urge to stick around. I haven’t had it long enough to make any true assessment, but the change is wild.

Forget playing Wordle for starters. Now all of my photos are in black and white. But more importantly, it’s hard to distinguish between the icons, everything just looks so flat. Which maybe is the truest expression of the digital experience.

I pick the phone up and quickly put it down. There’s more color in the real world to hold my interest.

Black and white photography is said to be making a comeback. Add this to the assortment of articles recently all about the analog resurgence. You guys, did you not know, analog is on trend!

I feel like I’ve read all these pieces before, circling back to the need for analog again and again. It always seems to correspond with global crises. Now it coincides with AI backlash too.

When so much feels out of our control, we want to come to what is right in front of us, what we can touch with our hands.

Might as well start with a pencil.

-Anna

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• Analog project: make some boxes.

• Rebecca Solnit, always.

• Speaking of things stark, black, and white, I just finished Burial Rites.

• And then for a pop of color: wool felted sea slugs.

• on screen time.

Thank you for reading Creative Fuel.

This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog.

I believe in sharing creativity, so most of this newsletter is free and accessible to all readers and I am grateful to everyone who reads and supports it.

You can do so by sharing this with a friend, buying something in my shop, or becoming a paid subscriber.

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I finally made this papercut into a sticker. Paid subscribers: scroll down for a little discount code to get a free one.

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Hello friends,

Before we begin: go pour yourself some coffee to have with this one. I need you to join me in caffeinated rage, and you’ll want something to sip on during this slightly longer piece.

While I was I helping a friend with a kids art project recently, one of the parents asked me what my definition of the difference between art and craft was. Great question. I gave some wandering initial thoughts and said I would keep mulling it over. One of the other parents said, “I would just ask ChatGPT.”

“Absolutely not!” I blurted out without thinking, absolutely zero sense of self-control. An emotional chord had obviously been struck. I felt bad about my delivery. I don’t want to be the person who judges how someone else explores their own curiosity. If that person is reading this, consider this my official apology.

I didn’t feel bad about the sentiment however. I tried to cover for myself, honor that for this person maybe that was the best way for them to consider a question that didn’t have an easy answer. In the same breath, I also tried to make my opposition clear. This of course led to being asked about my opinions on the AI controversy in art compared to the AI controversy in other industries.

Meanwhile the kids drew beautiful posters about trees and how we should care about the natural world.

I am not a technophobe. One of the places where AI has been really helpful for me is transcription. The amount of hours that would have been required to transcribe all the interviews that I have done over the past two years for book research, or even interviews featured in this newsletter, is incomprehensible.

In this case, that AI software has allowed for more time to go into other elements of creative work—writing, thinking, making art—and I am thankful for it1. I also still furiously scribble notes in my notebook while I am interviewing someone. Not surprisingly, these are often the things that stick the most in my head and that I remember weeks later. Writing by hand is great for memory after all.

With my own AI resistance (I’ve used ChatGPT once in my life, and only as an experiment), I often wonder if I am an analog stick-in-the-mud. Am I slowly creeping into that age where I don’t want to learn something new and end up stuck in a kind of fever induced nostalgia for the past while the rest of the world moves on? Should I just get on board and move on with it?

A few weeks ago I attended an online conversation between Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil and the topic of AI came up. Gay started out with talking about loss. “The loss of our capacity to ask one another questions, the loss of our capacity to get recipes from people we love, the loss of our capacity to read a map… we have to do those things,” said Gay. “Know that at every turn, there’s going to be stuff… trying to interrupt our capacity to be with one another.”

He continued:

“We need to be together. We need to be in rooms together. We need to ask for directions. We need to be beholden to one another and practice being beholden to one another. To not be “independent”—you know, that miserable fantasy—but to in fact be interdependent.”

Nezhukumatathil pointed out that when it comes to the things she loves, “it’s always the opposite of what AI can do.” “I want nothing to do with that world,” said Nezhukumatathil, “I guess I’ll be one of those cutesy old ladies sitting on the porch, still writing with my pencil.”

I too want to be that woman gripping tightly to my freshly sharpened pencil which still smells of a world where real, tactile goods and experiences mattered.

“There’s nothing for AI that I want to even consider because I know how destructive it is to the environment. Here in Memphis, less than an hour away, is one of the biggest plants of it, and it’s—surprise—an economically depressed place full of African-Americans. That’s no coincidence that it was placed there,” said Nezhukumatathil, referencing Colossus, the AI supercomputer that fuels and trains Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok. “It’s poison, it’s just poison. Spiritually, physically, mentally, creatively a poison.”

The methane gas turbines (unpermitted, again: surprise!) of Colossus alone are responsible for a 30-60% increase in Memphis’ smog, and the facility uses enough electricity to power 100,000 homes. As journalist Ren Brabenec wrote, “these neighborhoods are beginning to look like ‘sacrifice zones,’ or poor, predominantly Black communities that are willfully poisoned and polluted for the interests of power and wealth.”

Nezhukumatathil’s most powerful response—which I wrote down in huge letters in my notebook and underlined so much that I could see the indentation from the pen on the other side of the page—was simple: “I refuse.”

This is a line from sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, who spoke about her refusal at a panel hosted at the Urban Consulate in Detroit last year:

“When people try to sell you on the idea that the future is already settled, it’s because it is deeply unsettled. I think that, y’know this promise of an artificial intelligence future, is really just a collective anxiety that very wealthy, powerful people have about how well they’re gonna be able to control us.

If they can get us to accept that the future is already settled, AI is already here, the end is already here, then we will create that for them. My most daring idea is to refuse. The proposal for a post-human future is one where there will be human beings who will just be treated inhumanely. We’re not going to stop making people or humans. They’re just saying we are not going to treat you as humans. And I refuse.”

Four of my books are part of Bartz v. Anthropic, the historic copyright infringement lawsuit that was settled last fall. Around 500,000 books are involved, and the company is now forced to pay $1.5 billion as part of the settlement. It is the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history.

“The excitement of such a victory among those who write for a living is understandable,” writes Dan Cohen, in an excellent piece about the settlement and what it means for writers. “The AI industry is perhaps the most skilled player in Silicon Valley’s game of moving fast, breaking things, and not asking for forgiveness.”

It feels good to see one of these big companies get push back from the small guys and win right? Yet it’s a drop in the bucket. $1.5 billion might sound like a lot to a writer or an artist (that amount is basically monopoly money) but Anthropic can probably scrounge up that cash from under the couches at its San Francisco HQ. The company was recently valued at $380 billion, and for artificial intelligence companies, a couple billion dollars here and there, “may quickly become a marginal additional cost of doing business” writes Cohen.

A billion dollar slap on the wrist so to say, something you can simply turn into a line item in your enormous budget. But this isn’t just about money:

“The issue with AI is not that it uses the text of writers to train its models, which are, after all, just a bunch of inscrutable numbers and math that only AI researchers can appreciate. It is that these models are then used to generate new text that competes with the work of authors, whether they are writers of novels, news stories, or blogs, and worse than that, without crediting them. Human writers are used to other writers digesting and incorporating their work, and even adopting their ideas, but in return, they expect attribution. This is a long tradition that AI breaks. The Bartz settlement will allow this experiment in competing artificial authorship to continue apace, and perhaps even safeguard its future.”

Yup, like Cottom, I refuse.

I refuse to take part in a system that is actively destroying the human elements of our lives. I refuse to use something that slowly erodes my own mind and thinking skills. I refuse to wade around in entertainment slop. I refuse to view creativity as having one idea, plugging it into software, and seeing what comes out of it from the other side.

I asked around to some fellow writer friends for their opinions.

“AI is soulless,” says . That’s because “writing is an inside job,” a kind of collaboration between you and the ether/source/universe, or whatever you want to call that energy that we’re all constantly trying to channel. She has spent a lot of time thinking about this topic in particular, as it’s the theme of her new book, Creative Compass, out later this year. Creativity is “deeply spiritual,” she says. “Working with AI/robots misses the whole point.”

Any artist or writer knows that creative work rarely begins with an elaborate and highly detailed idea. You usually start with a glimmer, something that sparks just enough curiosity to lead you to think, “hmm, that’s interesting, let me explore that.” Then you chase it. You get to work, making your way from that idea and into the murky terrain that lies between you and the unknown—often unexpected—outcome on the other side.

There are obstacles along the way. Plenty of blocks. Usually some crying. But there are also revelations, new things learned, epiphanies, moments of flow. This whole process with all its ups and downs is where the good stuff lies.

As puts it:

“I want writing and creativity to feel fun, nourishing and joyous. However - I think we get to fun, nourishing and joyous by travelling through passages of panic. I was just talking to a friend about Michelangelo saying ‘I am no painter’ while he was in the middle of painting the Sistine Chapel. I ached for him, I felt as though he’d reached across centuries to squeeze my hand because that’s exactly how I feel in the middle of a novel draft, if you swap out painter for writer… the magic, and the deliciousness, of all art is in the unknowing, the stumbling, discovery and the strange. AI smooths a path that shouldn’t be made smooth. It’s a motorway/freeway in the middle of a forest. It may make it easier to get to where we think we want to go, but we can’t get close. And we can’t be surprised, or decide to change our destination on a whim.”

“I just don’t understand the point of using AI,” told me. “Creative work is a thought process, and if you skip that, you’ve skipped the chance to think. It not only breaks the unspoken contract between the writer and their readers; it breaks the contract between the writer and the writer. We got into this because we wanted to make work! Not because we wanted to be word factories.”

This week as I worked on my book draft, I printed out a chapter and physically cut it up into pieces, then used washi tape to put it back together in a different way. For my brain, this was easier to do by hand and in more of a collage way than moving things around on the screen.

That kind of activity is fun, but it also feels like a tiny act of rebellion. Like Katherine, I refuse to be a word factory. I refuse to be an art factory. The creative work takes the time that it takes. It has to go through the slow process in order to get wherever it’s going. I refuse to have the process optimized.

“Writing is about actually writing, not trying to skip over writing. If people want to skip the writing process, maybe try another art form?” told me. “I feel like AI is often an attempt to be a writer without actually writing, but this is never satisfying. AI should not be a way to avoid the mechanics of writing, other than perhaps grammar and spellcheck. If AI is replacing imagination as an ideacheck, we will have nothing meaningful to read in the future.”

I also like how writer Tochi Onyebuchi puts this:

“The lie I hear spoken by every image-generation or video-generation or text-generating Gen AI app is the lie of instantaneity. That the most important thing is having produced. Not the living that precedes the act of art-making, not the living that occurs during the art-making itself.”

Or this line: “So much harm feels and is so immediate right now. Fascistic creep bubbles like lava through the crevices of America’s political and cultural substrata.”

This isn’t just about some artists and writers clinging to their beloved creative process. This is also about an entire restructuring of society.

I refuse to use something that disconnects us from our humanity, that helps to make war attacks go “faster than the speed of thought.” I refuse to accept a system where we erase a significant chunk of the workforce, all in the name of wealth at the top and a “just figure it out” for everyone else.

Sam Altman and his “little group chat with my tech-CEO friends” is betting on the date where a billion dollar company survives with just one person. They’re pretty much lusting for when that day comes. You don’t need to be an expert at economics or math to understand that on a societal level, where everyone needs to be housed, eat, and have healthcare, this equation does not play out.

We are going to have to entirely rethink and restructure the labor and labor training market. There are already signs that white collar workers are increasingly eyeing skilled trades as a fallback plan for when their jobs evaporate. I had this exact conversation with a friend yesterday, who has decided that becoming an electrician might be the way to go.

Speculation on what this all could actually look like in the near future was covered in an essay last month that went viral enough that it led to a tech sell-off in the financial markets. As wrote this week, “This is just a thought experiment and there are all kinds of variables that could prove it off base. But I find it notable that these authors caused such a ruckus simply by plainly articulating what the logical end point of this extractive system is. This really isn’t some big plot twist.”

No, it’s not. Some of us have been reading this book for a while now and would love to just put it down without getting to the end, crossing our fingers that it goes out of print soon and is never sold again.

While thinking about my own resistance to AI, the term “luddite” came to mind and I was reminded that “what concerned the Luddites about technology was that it was going to cut their wages.” Sound familiar? Even in the industries where AI has been promised to lighten the load, some workers are now suffering from what’s being called “AI brain fry,” basically AI exacerbating mental fatigue instead of helping with it. As one engineer called it, “cognitive overload masked as productivity.” So it will make you feel worse before it inevitably takes your job? Great.

I’ve always joked that whenever I hear “LLM” (large language model), my brain interprets it as MLM (multi level marketing). For the most part, AI does feel like a pyramid scheme.

Or as puts it:

“Generative AI, at best, is like eating frankfurters. So smooth! So featureless! So easy! But we don’t see the true horror of what makes the frankfurter so smooth, nor where the “meat” comes from. Using it, at best, is lazy, shortsighted, and a betrayal of true creativity. At worst? Criminal. It’s stolen material squished together to make a hotdog garnished with planetary destruction (let’s call it the ketchup) and the support of monstrous power mongers (mustard?).

Leave it to a visual artist to give the best description.

I take comfort and solace in my fellow artists and writers who are adamantly refusing this world. “Writing is to think and discover and create something new and surprising both to writer and reader,” told me. “AI is just churning out what’s already been said. There isn’t any real discovery or creation or thinking involved. if we’re not thinking for ourselves what are we doing?”

Unlike Altman’s, my little group chats are filled with links to articles about how you can’t be sexy if you use AI, simple yet radical inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin and Tove Jansson, and how much we love any kind of unhinged creative project that’s done just for the pleasure of it (I am looking at you lobster onesie).

Can’t we all just “move slow and make things?” Or fix things, tend to things, grow things, collaborate on things? What about “move slow and be human”?

As I was putting the finishing touches on this piece, ’ newsletter landed in my inbox, titled “I’m Interested in Being a Person,” poetically covering a lot of the same anger, rage, and frustration that I’ve been feeling brewing lately. Which is to say: if you’re feeling it, you’re not alone.

AI is all around us, I know that it will be a part of our lives whether we choose it or not. But that makes it all the more important to actively resist it when I can.

Carve out the spaces where AI doesn’t get to enter. Preserve our humanity by continuing to do the things that we have done across our entire human lineage: be together, share stories, knowledge, and wisdom, take time to make things.

-Anna

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I finally turned the “Made with Artist Intelligence” papercut into stickers! They’re my little way of taking a stand against AI, or at least embracing a different kind of AI.

I keep almost all of this newsletter free and open to everyone to read. This only happens thanks to paid subscribers who allow me to take the time to write and make art. Sometimes you all need a little thank you and this is it!

You will find a discount code below for a free sticker (well free-ish, I still need you to pay shipping). And because I don’t ship internationally, I also made you all a little pdf that you can download, print, and hang in your studio as a poster.

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In the shop: cards and prints and all the reminders that yes, you have permission.

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Hello friends,

What are we paying attention to?

This is a question I spend a lot of time thinking about. Attention isn’t a renewable resource because time isn’t a renewable resource. We only have so many hours in the day, we have to decide where our attention goes.

But as we all know, attention is easily strained. Pulled across channels and networks, co-opted and monetized, yanked in all kinds of directions, it barely feels like attention is ours anymore.

I am always drawn to artists who are finding a way to reclaim their attention, and in turn, help us to do the same, so I was very excited when I came across ’s analog newsletter project The Cloud Report. These monthly newsletters are dispatches from the corner where Christine spends her time as a crossing guard in Burlington, Vermont. As she calls it, a newsletter about “nothing and everything.”

When she applied for the job through the Department of Public Works, Christine had just started freelancing. She figured the routine would be a good way to ensure there was some structure in her day, and that she got outside first thing in the morning. Returning day after day to her morning shift has not only ensured she gets to help kids walk and bike to school safely—as she told me, “I’m happy to be a human traffic cone if it helps!”—the act of being in the same place and paying attention to all of its ins and outs has opened up a new world.

As Christine puts it, “the intersection is a liminal space–everyone is on their way somewhere else, briefly pausing at a red light before rushing off. The intersection isn’t a destination.”

“On the surface, nothing happens there. But when you stand there from 7:30-8:20am every morning, you see it all: a parent beautifully answering their child’s question about why bees buzz while they tenderly grab their hand to cross the street; Black-eyed Susans pushing up from a crack in the sidewalk and swaying in the breeze; an elderly woman collecting cans and loading them into an overflowing shopping cart; a pitbull in a sweater happily trotting down the sidewalk; a professional looking man behind the wheel of his Buick, screaming on his cell phone, veins popping out of his neck; a Rav-4 with a bag of doggie doo pinned under the rear wiper. This is life! It’s messy, it’s gorgeous, it’s sad, it’s beautiful, it’s everything.”

She took to reporting on these “little nothing moments” and all the assorted interactions on her Instagram stories. Taking a picture of the sky, Christine would add a simple line of text on top: The Cloud Report. The newsletter project is born out of those daily findings.

I was reminded of my friend who many years ago would regularly share a photo of the sky viewed from his apartment. Same view every time, different sky, different weather, different light. It was far more compelling than any weather report I could look at.

Even in the midst of a world that constantly demands new, new, new, most of us still have some kind of a routine to our daily lives, a schedule that keeps us coming back to the same thing day in and day out. It’s good to have artists remind us that even in the most well-known places there is always something new to be found.

For the past year artist Barbara Bosworth has been keeping a weather journal, not just taking a daily photo but also printing them and collecting them in a notebook.

“The fact that commenting on the weather is a cliché of small talk is actually a profound reminder of this, since the weather is one of the only things we each know any other person must pay attention to,” writes Jenny O’Dell in How to Do Nothing. On a sketchbook page, day after day, attention to weather becomes far more than just noticing if it’s rainy or sunny out. When I saw Bosworth’s work I envisioned a collection of sky paint swatches.

In an attention economy, where all of our time and energy could go to what is taking place on a screen, these kinds of projects feel like radical acts. And clearly people want them.

“People like an invitation to narrow their attention,” Christine says. “Our smartphones have us receiving incredibly consequential information from all over the globe at all hours. Maybe totally inconsequential information from a street corner in Vermont, in print, is a pause from the overwhelm.”

In her own practice, Christine has often drawn digitally. But The Cloud Report is illustrated with analog materials, then risograph printed, a print style that embraces its imperfections. When I got The Cloud Report in the mail, I loved that Christine had designed it to be sent as-is. With no envelope, the stamp and postal markings were part of the piece. This too feels like a reminder to be in the here and now, to appreciate the slower, textured world.

“I think the advent of AI has people craving art made by humans, and art that people can hold and touch. There’s a turn towards the analog,” says Christine, whose analog newsletter has attracted almost 2,000 subscribers. “I’m stapling, labeling, and putting a stamp on each one. It’s a very handmade project, and I think people want more of that in their lives.”

Yes, I couldn’t agree more! What I find so inspiring about Christine’s project isn’t just that it’s beautiful or that it’s a cool project, it’s that it inspires me to go out and apply similar creative lenses to my own world.

What can I pay attention to? What art can I make about it? What new ways can be explored if I let texture be at the forefront? What am I not seeing that’s right in front of me?

For the February issue, Christine set out to identify the four trees closest to the corner she works at. This was something she had wanted to do for years, but, “The Cloud Report gave me the reason to finally do it,” says Christine. “The centerfold of the issue includes scans of the twigs I harvested, watercolor paintings of the trees, a map I drew, and a little graphic showing my confidence level in my identification.”

In my mind, this is what good art has the capacity to do. Takes you somewhere else for a bit, but also challenges you to pay attention to your own surroundings in a new way. I asked Christine if there was something surprising that she had discovered working on this practice of attention. The answer was simple: “The personal really is universal.”

Christine’s work may be about her one small corner of the world, but we all have a small corner, and we all have a capacity to create deeper connections with those small corners. In the micro, we discover the macro.

Don’t we all need more of that?

“My creative practice is rooted in the belief that my life is immeasurably improved by being in touch with the ecology and people in my immediate vicinity,” says Christine. “Everything is insane right now, and I think I despair less than the average person… I feel hope when the Red Maple on the corner buds out once again in the spring, or the Asters bloom again in the fall. I feel hope when I wave to my neighbor on their way to teach music to elementary schoolers, and I chat briefly with another neighbor who’s running for city council, and another who helps low-income Vermonters winterize their homes… there’s hope everywhere if you know where to look for it, and I’d like to help people find it wherever they are.”

When so much of our world feels out of control, these creative efforts are a balm. Not only do they remind us of where we are, and what we’re connected to, but these practices of attention help us to feel more deeply about those places and people. Christine cites a Rumi quote as words of inspiration: “Where you are, and whatever you do, be in love.”

“I feel in love with the world when I’m bike touring, or on top of a mountain, or sharing a meal with friends...” Christine says. “But even if I’m on a streetcorner next to a puddle of dog piss on an overcast morning, I can always find something that makes me fall in love with the world. Paying attention makes me feel alive.”

There’s always something to make us feel alive, no matter where we are. But first, we have to choose to look.

-Anna

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More Creative Attention Resources from Christine

—> Corita Kent and her viewfinder–I’ve been wanting to make one and take it to the intersection forever, maybe I’ll do that for the March issue.

—> Jenny Odell, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Hannah Hinchman.

—> How to with John Wilson.

—> Right now, I’m reading Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (thanks to a recommendation from a The Cloud Report subscriber). He spends a weekend sitting in a cafe window overlooking a single intersection in Paris and records every single thing he sees–that’s the whole book. I sorta cherry-pick my favorite things from the intersection for The Cloud Report each month, but I’m inspired by his approach to include it all.

• is doing a year-long series exploring wool. If you are a lover of textiles, check out her first installment.

• For paper lovers (or anyone who just wants a challenging creative project): Kelli Anderson’s assortment of cut/fold templates.

• is hosting another edition of Essay Camp in March. I’ve participated several times and always really enjoy it.

• If you’re near Portland, Maine —> sign up for Women’s Wave next weekend and dip in the ocean with thousands of women.

Thank you for reading Creative Fuel.

This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog.

I believe in sharing creativity, so most of this newsletter is free and accessible to all readers and I am grateful to everyone who reads and supports it.

You can do so by sharing this with a friend, buying something in my shop, or becoming a paid subscriber.

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Trillium season is just around the corner, which means it’s a good time to commit to being a trilliumaire // What We Bring to the Table writing workshop with starts next week. Sign up here.

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Hello friends,

I’ve been at a creative residency this past week. Hosted by friends, the idea is fairly simple: we work on our projects over the day, gather together for communal dinner in the evening, then share what we’ve been working on, getting input and brainstorms from everyone else.

I am quick to forget how essential it is for your creative work to get this kind of feedback. It’s not that I don’t want it, or don’t think it’s important. I’m just bad at prioritizing it. So often it’s just easier to put your head down, crank away on your own, not ask for help. In those moments of working through an idea or a concept with someone else—the ones that get you to a new place you hadn’t expected or planned for—I am reminded of how much we need this collective creative web. The independent mindset really doesn’t serve us.

I love being around other artists and writers deep in their own projects. That energy is infectious. It feels radical to all be dedicating ourselves to making things, to bringing things into this world.

I haven’t looked at email all week, or much of the news. I keep thinking about how easy it is to fill our headspace with all of those things instead of our art, tell ourselves that somehow it’s more important. Perhaps because we’re always struggling against that nagging suspicion that art is somehow indulgent, not as necessary as all the rest. We’ve heard this message from society for so long, that even if we know it’s not true, it requires continual unpacking. Burn it with fire horse energy I say.

What I feel this week is a kind of realignment, more focused, more present. These last few days have slowed me down, given me permission to push the rest of the world aside for a bit, work on my book in a much deeper way than I usually feel is possible. Writing is thinking, and if you need to think you really do need the space and time to do so.

No links or anything this week, because I really have been diligent about taking some time offline. But I thought I would share some snippets from the week with you, the little things that caught my eye as I focused my attention to what was right in front of me. Little postcards from residency…

We celebrated the lunar new year together and I made a papercut for the table. The only visual work I made all week!

The water. Always the water and the daily morning swims taken with a good friend.

I spotted the first nettle of the season.

And an emerging rhododendron. The snowpack is incredibly low this year, it has been mild and dry. When I left my house last week, the daffodils were just starting to poke out. Too early. Too early. It all feels off. I try not freak out about it.

The golden light of afternoon sun shining through what I always like to call “a forest chandelier.”

Little trumpety lichens on a piece of driftwood. I like how they look like a little community gathering.

Daily routine. The feeling I always want to be able to bottle up and take with me through the rest of the day.

Thank you as always for being here. Keep making whatever you are making. It’s time well spent.

-Anna

ps: don’t forget that 100 starts tomorrow. Anyone participating? I guess I am making a personal commitment to at least start. Will report back next week.

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Thank you for reading Creative Fuel.

This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog.

I believe in sharing creativity, so most of this newsletter is free and accessible to all readers and I am grateful to everyone who reads and supports it.

You can do so by sharing this with a friend, buying something in my shop, or becoming a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

You’ll keep forever! // What We Bring to the Table: A Writing Workshop About Food, Memory, and Meaning writing workshop with starts on February 25th. Sign up here.

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Hello friends,

How many times have you drawn a heart shape in your life? Do you even remember learning how to draw one? I certainly don’t. It was a long time ago, and I have drawn many since.

We may not give the heart shape much thought, but it’s one of our most common shapes and symbols, part of our collective visual repertoire.

Here’s a pretty famous one:

The idea for the iconic I ♥ NY logo famously came to Milton Glaser while he was riding in a taxi cab. He grabbed what he had on hand—an envelope and a red crayon—and sketched the concept for what would become one of the world’s most recognizable slogans. Glaser said that he took inspiration from hearts carved into tree trunks with initials of lovers.

Looking at his original sketch, I couldn’t help but wonder how many times he had drawn this shape before. You don’t just sit in a taxi cab and bust this out without having done a few in your life.

In the lead up to Valentine’s Day every year, the heart shape is seemingly everywhere and it certainly has been for the past few weeks. So. Many. Hearts.

Like many of you, I watched Bad Bunny make a heart shape with his hands during his performance last weekend. A shape that doesn’t require any translation. You see it and immediately know what it means.

All of this got me wondering about the shape’s creative history. This is our visual cue for love and affection. The heart shape transcends age, culture, and language. But it looks nothing like an actual heart. How did we end up with this ubiquitous symbol in the first place?

Let’s go back in history a bit and how we used to think about hearts.

In the Middle Ages, a person’s heart was believed to be like a book: a place where thoughts, feelings, and memories were inscribed1. The heart was a place of documentation, the encyclopedia of someone’s inner world. Even further back in ancient Egypt, the heart was not only seen as the center of emotion and intelligence, also believed to hold one’s memories.

We may not view the heart in this way anymore, but remnants can still be found in our daily language. If we learn things “by heart” it means we’ve committed them to memory. To record something is to document, make note, and even this use has a link to the heart, in the Latin root cor. I like this view of the heart as the “metaphoric seat of memory.”2

The heart is a place of inscription, one we’re constantly working at underlining, highlighting, and even erasing and re-writing again.

Heart shapes have been used since ancient times as decorative elements, but the shape and meaning of today’s “logo of love” surfaced sometime in the medieval or renaissance periods.

It probably wasn’t difficult to find inspiration for the shape. Spend time looking around in nature, and you’re likely to find a heart somewhere. Cyclamen, catalpa, philodendron, and all kinds of other leaves. An open mussel shell. Two courting swans as their beaks touch. An occasional heart-shaped rock found on a beach. There’s even a heart-shaped surface on Pluto.

One theory is that the heart shape was an interpretation of the silhouette of an ivy leaf, often used as a symbol of fidelity. Some argue the shape is inspired by some of the rounded curves of human anatomy (think: breasts and buttocks).

It may also be linked it to the ancient plant silphinium, a species of giant fennel that was often used as birth control and therefore symbolically connected to love and sex. While cultivated into extinction (its contraceptive powers were that popular), the plant’s heart-shaped seedpods were printed onto silver coins in the ancient Greek city of Cyrene.

The first illustration of a heart done for non-medical purposes is believed to have been drawn for the medieval French love poem Le Roman De La Poire by Thibaut, written around 1255. This is believed to be the first time that we see someone “giving” a heart to someone.

Less than a century earlier, in 1184, poet Andreas Capallenus had written about courtly love as “the pure love which binds together the hearts of two lovers with every feeling of delight.” With the heart as the focal point of affection, it became common practice for European kings and queens to have their hearts buried apart from their bodies3. While the body would be in a family crypt, their heart’s final resting place would be dug into the ground in a place that they loved. Scattering ashes in beloved places feels like the modern-day version of this.

No matter how we got there, the symbol is deeply rooted in our visual vocabulary. On our phones and our clothing, plastered all over advertising and marketing campaigns.

Even if it wasn’t Valentine’s Day today, I would guess that you have seen a heart shape in the last 24 hours. They’re cornerstones of our social media lives, where the heart serves not as love but as simple reaction.

I always think of the American tendency to say we loooove things. We’re as flippant and casual about the sentiment as we are about using the heart emoji. We love anything from chips to reality tv to pop stars. “Love you!” has become a quick and easy signoff, so much so that I’m often hesitant to use it at all. If I’m going to employ it, I want it to mean something.

All this heart and love business quickly becomes a little cliché, a little cringe. If you can love a tv show, what does that mean for your friendships? If you can double tap to add a heart to any digital image, what does that mean for when you stand in front of a piece of art and actually feel something?

I’m reminded of a friend who used to work in a cafe and one time overheard two sorority girls saying goodbye to one another. As they walked out one said to the other “love you, mean it!” You have to read this out loud and really emphasize it in a Valley girl accent for full effect. In my household this has jokingly turned into using “LYMI” in texts.

You could argue that the heart symbol is overused. Too many of them and the visual becomes too saccharine. Like overdosing on a box of conversation hearts. But when a symbol is that ubiquitous, it begs to be reclaimed. This simple symbol can stand for nothing or everything. It all depends on the intent we put behind it.

After all, we all have access to it. You don’t have to be an expert to draw one. It can be done in one single pen stroke if you want. It does not need to be perfect, or symmetrical. Even the wonkiest drawn hearts look good, no matter what age you draw them at. And even with no art supplies, you can still make one with your hands.

No matter how often the symbol is used, it still represents the most powerful human emotion. A visual that allows us to tap into the universal, whether we’re sending a note to a friend or making a bold creative statement.

And aren’t we in a time when we need more love? I don’t mean the saccharine kind. I mean the deep kind, the radical kind. The kind that radiates outward, connects us to each other. It’s so easy to say we believe in love, it’s another thing to put it into practice.

Today, draw a little heart somewhere. For you, for someone else, for all of us.

LYMI ❤️

Anna

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ANALOG INSPIRATION: PUZZLE PURSES

I made quite a few Puzzle Purses this week. These are very cool folded pieces of paper that were often made for Valentine’s Day during the Victorian era. But they don’t have to have hearts on them—you can use these for all kinds of things.

The folding pattern makes for a pinwheel shape that you then fold up into a square. It took me a few versions before I got the hang of the fold, but I promise the effort is worth the payoff! If you want to make one yourself there are good instructions here, here, and here.

• All you need to do is open the blinds.

• “Done with the compass- done with the chart!” Emily Dickinson’s “Wild Nights” poem

• Make a collection of paper rocks.

• We really need to be thinking about heat.

• “In high school, I learned how to write research papers using the index card method – record one idea or quote per card, then lay out all the cards and put them in an order that makes an argument (which is a version of telling a story). That’s collage.” Lesley Finn on the writing process as collage.

• Bog snorkelling.

Thank you for reading Creative Fuel.

This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog.

I believe in sharing creativity, so most of this newsletter is free and accessible to all readers and I am grateful to everyone who reads and supports it.

You can do so by sharing this with a friend, buying something in my shop, or becoming a paid subscriber.

Subscribe now

Remember: art makes life better. // Salish Sea garlands are back in stock // is leading a three-part writing workshop centered around food and memory. More info here.

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Since I am in my early 40s, every single piece of wellness advice the algorithm serves me has to do with protein and lifting weights. Protein I am not convinced by (most of us are already eating too much of it), but the weights I know are good for me. Strength and brain health and all of that.

When it comes to healthy living, we all know we need to eat well and move our bodies. Not to mention spend time with our friends. Universal healthcare would also help—healthcare should be a human right, not a luxury pursuit. But in all of our wellness efforts and attempts at living healthier lives, as a society we have missed an essential component: art.

In her new book Art Cure: The Science of How Art Saves Lives, Daisy Fancourt takes us on a deep dive exploring why art is good for us, arguing that art is as essential for our health and well-being as sleep, food, and exercise. She calls it the “forgotten fifth pillar of health.”

Fancourt is a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London, and for more than a decade has been working with governments around the world to “prescribe” art. Why should we consider art as prescription? Engaging with art and creativity, even for just a few small stints every week, can have powerful effects on our physical and mental well-being.

Those of us make and engage with art probably already intuitively know this. I know I do. Art is a place to come to when I don’t know what else to do with my emotions. Making something with my hands almost always has a calming effect.

What we intuitively feel and know also has an extensive and growing body of research to back it up, and Fancourt’s book helps to give us the how and why behind the power of art to make us feel better. Amazingly, there is no physiological system in our bodies that art doesn’t affect. Our brain, our breathing, our movement—they can all be activated and impacted through engaging with the arts.

Let’s start with the most obvious link between art and well-being: it makes us feel good. Art activates regions of the brain that are essential for our pleasure response, the same parts of the brain that light up thanks to food and sex.

That sense of pleasure in art can come from the “peak moments”—like a chorus that comes back repeatedly in a song, or the climax in the plot of the novel. But it’s not just those moments that activate our brains, it’s also the anticipation of those moments. When we expect that moment of resolution to arrive and it doesn’t, we keep wondering when it’s going to happen, causing our brain to feel a bit of tension—it keeps waiting for that hit of dopamine it’s expecting to get. Fancourt writes, “the higher the discomfort during the tension phase, the higher the pleasure when we finally get to our resolution.” Consider the twists and turns that happen in a good murder mystery, when you think things are going to be solved, but there’s yet another unexpected plot line. Or a “drop” in dance music. When the clue is finally found, or that drop finally hits, it’s incredibly satisfying for your brain.

Art also helps us process and understand our own internal worlds better. Consider how good and cathartic it can feel to a really sad song. This is known as the “tragedy paradox.”

“In real life, we tend to do everything we can to avoid negative experiences,” says Fancourt. “But in art, we’re paradoxically drawn to them.” Think sad songs, paintings full of anguish, horror movies. “We really seem to revel in those negative emotions,” says Fancourt. Experiencing this kind of art allows us to do a kind of simulation—feel and experience those emotions but without needing to act on them. This “allows our brain to kind of put those emotions on a pedestal and observe them, contemplate them, almost like in a museum,” says Fancourt. “It helps us to practice managing the emotions and even imagine how we might deal with things in our real lives.” A kind of workout for your emotions. Add that to your strength training routine.

Art has significant physical impacts too. It can help to boost immunity, even help keep us feeling younger. Fancourt and her team have found that adults over forty who engage in the arts every week—whether that’s making, listening, watching, or visiting—are about one year biologically younger than their counterparts. Tell that to the longevity tech bros.

In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron writes, “art opens the closets, airs out the cellars and attics. It brings healing.” Research shows that there’s a strong link between art and mental health, helping with depression, anxiety, and even helping to build brain resilience against neurological conditions like dementia.

Pairing arts with mental health treatment can have particularly powerful impacts. In a study in Finland, adults with clinically diagnosed depression received either standard care (psychotherapy, medication, and psychiatric counseling) on its own, or that same standard care with the addition of music therapy. After just a few months, the group that received the music therapy were three times as likely to have improved their depression and anxiety scores.

Art is an integral part of our experience of being human—creativity, art, and self-expression are things we have been doing since our ancient ancestors. As Fancourt writes, “we are a planet of 8 billion artists.” We have unfortunately pushed arts to the side, and to our detriment. Instead of thinking of art as a core part of our well-being, we see it either as luxury or entertainment. We’re “lapsing into a state of artistic passivity.”

Reading Fancourt’s book, it’s clear that there are so many health, social, and even economic benefits to having more art in our lives. Not only does the evidence show how beneficial art is to our health, it’s also enjoyable. There are plenty of not-so enjoyable things that we do for our health all the time. Which really leaves you wondering why as a society we don’t invest in it more.

I asked her this question. “I’ll be totally honest, I really don’t get it,” she told me.

For tens of thousands of years, art has played a central role in humans’ lives, but how we view that relationship has shifted. “In certain countries, particularly the US, the UK, the global north, we’ve started to create arts into a kind of leisure space that becomes associated with professionalization, institutionalization, and therefore needing money,” says Fancourt. We have turned it into “a paid commodity, rather than a day-to-day practice for many people.”

When it comes to maintaining health, a day-to-day practice doesn’t have the same financial allure as drugs and medication. There’s no great pharmaceutical industry profit to be made from arts classes. I can just see the ad: Feeling down? Have you tried ART? Side effects: a desire to spend more money on supplies.

Fancourt writes in the book:

“Can you imagine if a drug had the same catalog of benefits as the arts? We would be telling everyone about it, fighting to get our hands on it, paying premium prices, taking it religiously every day, investing trillions into further research and development. It would be revered as our elixir.”

I think the resistance to arts may run even deeper. Self-expression and creativity are a powerful way to challenge the status quo. Artists are an unruly and unpredictable bunch. That doesn’t work well in political systems that want to control and subdue. De-vesting in the arts is a way of exerting control, ensuring not too many questions are asked, avoiding any pushback.

No wonder there has been great investment in AI and creativity, turning the creation of art into a soulless matter where it’s easy to control the outcome. In pursuing speed, optimization, and technology, we’ve pushed the human part of the creative process to the side.

If you consider the importance of art all throughout human history, that begins to look like a very failed approach.

“Surely AI should be doing the tasks that we don’t want to do. Surely our time should be for the fun creative tasks like art,” Fancourt told me. “But also, given that a lot of AI is using things like large language models that are about predicting what’s most likely to come next… that’s the opposite of what art does. Art is often challenging, it’s making us think in different ways, bringing new perspectives into society. Surely, we should be saving art for the humans. It’s one of the crowning achievements of our species.”

Fancourt notes that she sees a cultural pushback to some of this. Gen Z is embracing “granny hobbies” (yes, you can roll your eyes at this term). Craft and art events are growing in popularity. We have an inherent need to create, and clearly in an attempt to digitize, streamline, and optimize our lives, many of us are craving the more tactile, slow creative activities that actually make us feel good and give us a sense of satisfaction.

If we want the benefits of the arts, we also have to learn to savor. There’s a clear difference between sitting down to listen to an album as opposed to having music on in the background, just like there’s a difference between quickly scanning a piece of art in a museum instead of spending time with it to really look and feel. On average, people in museums only spend about 28 seconds in front of a piece of art, and much of that time goes to taking a picture of it. Attention is coming a scarce commodity. We have to take time to get more than just a surface impression.

In tough moments, art can offer respite. But it’s also not a quick fix, nor should it be. Arts deserve to be woven into our everyday lives.

“I don’t think we should be heading down the extreme spectrum of trying to kind of biohack our arts experiences,” says Fancourt. “I talk about companies that are trying to use AI to come up with the perfect relaxing music, but why? I don’t believe that is even possible. I think that’s actually completely flawed as an idea.” When we do that, “we’re trying to make art a pill that we swallow, but that completely undoes the point that art is such an enjoyable behavior.”

More art, more attention, more humanness.

That’s a prescription I can get behind.

-Anna

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ANALOG INSPIRATION: NATURE ART

I have assorted beach rocks in pretty much every pocket of every jacket, backpack, and purse that I own. There is a certain grounding feeling that comes with the weight and texture of a rock in your hand. Something to hold you in place for a moment.

I got to spend some time on a beautiful rocky beach last weekend, and I love finding rocks with lines in them and making them connect. You may not be close to a beach, but any kind of nature art is the perfect trifecta of making you feel better: being outside, paying attention, making art.

• Orion Magazine is hosting a conversation with Ross Gay and Aimee Nezhukumatathil on Thursday February 12th in celebration of the second edition of the publication Earthly Love. Sign up here.

• I will always read whenever it arrives in my inbox. This essay on immigration, power, and fear is essential reading.

• Children’s drawings turned into chairs.

• I finally read Lily King’s Heart the Lover. So good.

• Why zines are popping up at protests.

• I really enjoy Rebecca Solnit’s newsletter.

Thank you for reading Creative Fuel. This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog.

You can support by sharing this newsletter with a friend, buying something in my shop, or becoming a paid subscriber.

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Hello friends,

I spent last weekend with two good friends and on Saturday afternoon we went to the Portland Art Museum. This was on the heels of a heavy morning, reading about the death of Alex Pretti. I was happy to be with friends in that particular moment, to get to talk through our emotions, hold it all together instead of alone.

Our planned outing to the Portland Art Museum also felt like a balm. Last fall, the art museum opened after an extensive expansion and renovation, adding 100,000 square feet of new or upgraded public and gallery space. The museum was packed with people--all ages, all backgrounds.

I was struck by how energizing it was to be in a space that was dedicated to creation instead of destruction. Every single piece in that museum—just like in other museums, galleries, and even the art on the walls in our homes—represents a person making a choice to bring something into this world as opposed to destroying something.

Destruction is also part of the creative process. But even then, it is in the name of rebuilding. Artists destroy and dismantle in order to build something new, sift through the ashes and figure out what is salvageable, bring the broken, fractured pieces back to life in a new way.

The easiest creative actions during moments like the one we’re currently in are ones that take a stand. Protest posters come to mind, and also poetry that manages to find the words for the moment, like this one by . There is so much good stuff being made right now, visual proof of how rage can be turned into creative inspiration.

I think of all of this as reactive art. We are responding to a situation. For many of us, words and visuals are how we process what’s happening around us. How we seek to understand, make sense of a situation.

But we can’t reside solely in response. We also have to build. This is art as preventative care. Looking into the future and identifying what kind of a world and systems we want to construct. Investing the creative energy now in the name of the ripple effects it has in the future.

A friend brought this over the other night for a collage project:

The quote is from German playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht. He served as a medical orderly in World War I, and appalled by the effects of the war, he abandoned his medical studies and turned to writing and theater instead. He developed his theory of “epic theatre,” an attempt to “shock audiences out of complacency.”

Brecht’s plays ended up being banned in Nazi Germany, and Brecht fled the country, first to Denmark, then Finland. Like many German artists and intellectuals, he eventually ended up in the United States. There, his work drew the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he was accused of “a number of very revolutionary poems, plays, and other writings.” After the hearings, he fled yet again, this time to Switzerland. Eventually in 1949, he ended up in East Berlin, where he ran the Berliner Ensemble theater company.

Depending on your intention, a hammer can be used to both destroy and build, which gives it particular power here as a symbol. There is an undeniable physicality to a hammer—you can feel the effort required to nail a wooden structure together. A reminder that building something takes time, work, commitment.

This isn’t an AI formula, it requires the physical investment of the artist. We can dream and imagine, but we also have to partake in the physical process of moving ourselves forward.

I was reading a piece by Pranay Somayajula in yesterday, documenting what on the ground resistance looks like in Minneapolis. Instead of asking “what radicalized you?” Somayajula suggests asking, “what protagonized you?”

These last few weeks (months? years?), so many days have gone to thinking about what we’re against. Fascism. State violence. Removal of people. Trampling of first amendment rights. We work at opposing those forces, particularly in crisis moments. We need that resistance work, but it’s equally important to build and invest in the systems we are for.

If there was a theme to the weekly newsletter this month, then it was certainly creativity and action. In pressing moments, art offers an outlet. Both in what we make and what we take in. Art becomes an act of resistance. Even our fallow activities are a form of action, allowing space for thinking, learning, growing—the quiet space where we can cut the noise instead of consuming mindlessly.

I wanted to end this month in that spirit, with creative action that’s not just reactive, but also proactive. The act of preventative creative care. A push for all of us to be creatively proactive.

What are your values? What do you stand for? How do you commit to weaving them into your creative work?

I know, big questions! They are questions I often come back to. These questions help establish the ethos that underpins your creative work, the moral and ethical scaffolding that holds up the rest, no matter the medium or the outlet. The values show up, whether you’re making the most beautiful illustration you can, throwing paint at a canvas in rage, researching and fact checking to make sure you tell a story correctly, or dreaming up an imaginary world that’s created solely to offer someone a place to land for a bit and breathe.

I often return to Tove Jansson’s letters for creative inspiration and grounding. She writes a lot about how her art and creative spirit suffered during World War II, and in many ways, her words often feel like they were specifically written for us to read in this moment.

In a letter to Eva Konikoff in October 1944, Jansson writes:

“Before [the war], all that mattered was for my pictures to live on when I was gone. That’s important now too. But more powerful than the longing to be “great,” to be famous, is the longing for joy, for happiness. For a whole year, Eva, I haven’t been able to paint. The war nearly did for my desire to, in the end. It took me time to understand that it has to be a road, not a destination. What I want now is for my paintings to be something that springs naturally from myself, preferably from my joy. And I want to be, I will be, happy.”

The Moomin series was born out of a similar spirit—the desire for a world that stemmed not from what was broken, but what was possible. Describing the beginnings of Moomin to Konikoff, Jansson writes that she began crafting Moomin:

“…when I was feeling depressed and scared of the bombing and wanted to get away from my gloomy thoughts to something else entirely. (A sort of escapism, to the time when Ham [Jansson’s mother] used to tell me stories.) I crept into an unbelievable world where everything was natural and benign--and possible. Then I went on writing whenever I felt like it, for my own fun…”

What did Jansson stand for? Certainly joy and love. You don’t have to look far to see what kind of impact that has had on a global scale. She may have tossed aside the longing to be great and famous, but in honing in on her most human emotions, she did just that.

That’s good inspiration for us to do the same.

-Anna

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ANALOG INSPIRATION: CREATIVE MANIFESTOS

We’ve covered creative manifestos in this newsletter before, but I like to think of manifestos as living, breathing documents. Which means that even if you’ve made one in the past, it’s worth coming back to and revising. Manifestos offer the chance for clarity in your own creative values. Certainly needed in this moment!

For making your own manifesto: this is the how and why of what you create. What are you for? What do you want to build? What drives you?

I love the Cheap Art manifesto by Bread and Puppet, because it represents much more than just cheap art. It’s an entire ethos that can be applied to any project. Another favorite are the “Ten Rules” from Corita Kent and the Immaculate Heart College Art Department.

I haven’t a personal creative manifesto in a while, so I am excited to dig down into this as well. In the meantime, here’s a manifesto adjacent thing I did make this week., As always: handcut paper!

• “Artistic ego is the best chance we have of battling against the rise of AI in creative spaces.” via

• is helping to organize the Indigipalooza festival in Missoula. To raise funds they’re also offering an online workshop series called Native American Resistance for Everyone Class. There are lots of amazing people on the list of guest speakers.

• We Have All the Tools We Need flyer download from Christine Tyler Hill.

• A pep talk from

• “The first rupture of democracy isn’t really between people and power. It’s between language and what words are willing to acknowledge or betray.”An excellent piece from

Thank you for reading Creative Fuel. This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog.

You can support by sharing this newsletter with a friend, buying something in my shop, or becoming a paid subscriber.

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New prints and cards in my shop, like this one devoted to quiet, creative mornings and this one as a forever reminder. // Winter 2026 session of DIVE Writing Group. starts next week! Join for a season of writing—choose between the Tuesday and Thursday cohort.

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Hello friends,

I’m trying to hold on to Fallow January as much as I can this month, but it’s proving harder this year than in others. For one, I’m deep in my book project. The mental space required to write a long-form book is so entirely different from the pace the news cycle and the digital world sprints at. My brain constantly feels a kind of whiplash going back and forth in between the two.

I probably don’t need to tell you what the second one is. The extremism, authoritarianism, fascism, and absolute inhumanity currently on display is all encompassing.

One option of course would be to disengage entirely. Turns out, not an option. This current moment is not asking for disengagement. This is not the time to look away. It is the time to pay attention, to do more than we have done before. We are in an all-hands-on-deck moment.

As Albert Camus writes in Create Dangerously, “artists faced by their times can neither turn away from nor become lost in them.”

The other option—the only option—is to figure out how to pay attention and acknowledge the realities of the moment without letting our creative spirit be squashed along the way. We pay attention so that we can decide what we do with what we’ve learned.

At a Federal Oversight & Accountability Town Hall hosted by Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield’s office1 this past week, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison had a specific call out to artists:

“We need the poetry of now. We need the songs of now. We need the rap music of now. We need the symphonic orchestra of now. We need the powerful aesthetic that can do something that no politician can do, and that is to inspire people.”

In my sketchbook yesterday, I made a list: Things I Saw This Week That Weren’t On a Screen. Here were a few items:

• Lichen on a fern.

• A group of women connected by cold water.

• Stars and Jupiter.

• A child folding a salal leaf into a paper plane.

• A coral mushroom.

• Shadows of forsythia branches on a wall.

• Protest signs and posters in windows.

• Creative friends.

We see a lot on screens, we consume a lot on screens. We also learn, investigate, get a front row seat to what is happening outside of our immediate world. At its best—if we wield our attention with care—a screen can help to provide a larger context, give us a view we wouldn’t have had before.

But a screen only holds so much, and when we’re not careful, it quickly leads to the kind of overwhelm and stagnation that Camus cautioned about. Cultivating a practice of attention means directing that attention both near and the far. Not letting it be scattered, manipulated by the companies and platforms who so badly want to hold it there, keep us from doing the work on the ground, the connection building, the creative imagining that an alternative path requires.

At the end of a long and depressing conversation the other night—fascism! billionaires! AI! breakdown of social norms!—a good friend asked me, “ok, what’s one thing that makes you hopeful right now?”

It took me a second, because I was stuck in my negative spiral. But then once I started, there was clearly so much more than one thing. Mostly it came down to people: all of the people taking action in any way they can. The connections, the solidarity. And the artists, always the artists.

Make yourself a list this weekend. All the things you saw that were not on the screen. The friends, the stars, the forest, the sea, the tiny, everyday social interactions that make up a web of living, breathing humans trying to navigate this world together.

-Anna

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ANALOG INSPIRATION

One of my commitments this year for my own work is more analog projects. Physically making things is always good for us, but in this digital era it’s really starting to feel more and more radical.

So I figured I would share a little analog inspiration this week: playing with shapes!

The idea is simple.

• Cut a bunch of shapes out of paper (bonus points for paper you have scribbled/painted on).

• Spend time arranging them.

• Glue them down if you feel so inclined.

That’s all. Far better than doom-scrolling, I assure you. You can block out 15 minutes, call your reps, and then get ten minutes of analog art in.

• The 100 Day Project starts on February 22! As many of you know, I start every year and never finish. Who cares! I’ve been scheming on what I am going to try to do this year and already looking forward to it. Sign up for the for more inspiration.

• Dorothy Waugh, the woman who created the first National Park Posters.

• Creative work as everything done “between the panics.” Oh yes, I know this feeling.

• “…be a part of a chain of creation, in opposition to destruction".” - (who started knitting the red resistance hat I linked to last week)

• Make a correspondence kit! These are so cool and I am putting this on February list of projects. Thank you for inspiration and .

• “Nostalgia is not a strategy.” - Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada

Thank you for reading Creative Fuel. This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog.

You can support by sharing this newsletter with a friend, buying something in my shop, or becoming a paid subscriber.

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My online shop is back from winter break! All calendars are ON SALE as well some other assorted things. // Need writing inspiration and a supportive creative community? Join for the winter 2026 session of DIVE Writing Group. Kicks off the last week of January, sign up now to secure your spot.

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Hello friends,

I went to Minneapolis last winter as part of research for my book (yes yes I am still working on it), and while I was there, I got to check out Art Shanty Projects.

This public, temporary art installation is only possible in winter. Imagine pop up structures, sculptures, and art performances on a frozen lake and you get the idea. It’s basically one big art installation on ice. Or as the organization calls it, “whimsical, weird and joyful winter art experiences.”

Taking inspiration from pop-up ice fishing villages and huts, frozen Bdé Umáŋ / Lake Harriet becomes a public platform for artists. There are few regulations and building codes—an artist’s dream!

The whole thing felt incredibly creative and collaborative. And yes, very cold. A joy for someone like me who spends damp, rainy winters often dreaming of the crisp, clear feeling of snow and ice on a sunny day.

Banned Book Reading Room was like a mini library of banned books. The books were stuffed with an assortment of neon yellow, orange, and red pieces of paper, calling to mind a flame. I learned that Charlotte’s Web was a banned book1, because of the death and talking animals apparently.

There was a pavilion where you could take part in a collaborative weaving project using naturally died fibers. A performance installation Ladies of the Lost Continent, where you could choose the name of a female Antarctic Explorer and the artist would bring her to life. An interactive, balancing structure called A Poem for Entangled Living by the artist network Spill Paint Not Oil. A show about pigeons.

In other words: so many good things.

Art Shanty Projects kicks off this weekend for those who are nearby, against the backdrop of the horrific federal escalation in Minneapolis. As the organization writes, “We firmly believe that art is never neutral, connection is an act of resistance, and gathering is community care.”

I’ve had this on my mind and much more this past week. I’m enraged, but I’m also thankful for the artists, for every single person who decides that an act of creativity is an act of solidarity. The puppets! The songs! The brass bands! The knitters making red resistance hats like the Norwegians wore in opposition to Nazi occupation!

What always fills me full of hope and inspiration in dark moments is watching creative response. Learning how to turn rage into something more generative.

Many of you may know the advice that Fred Rogers often shared about what to do in challenging times:

“When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”

Having grown up on Mr. Rogers, I can easily conjure up his voice in my head saying it. It’s excellent advice. I’d like to add an additional version: look for the artists.

Look for the artists. You will always find people who are singing, dancing, making things with their hands.

The artists are the the ones who know what loving, vibrant worlds they want to keep alive. They’re the ones creating. They’re the ones dreaming. They’re the ones who know how to problem solve. They’re the ones bringing people together.

They’re the ones who know that big projects don’t come to fruition by individual fortitude alone. They know it takes a village. They know they need to support that village, care for it, tend to it.

Look for the artists. They’ll give you the hope and inspiration when it’s needed.

-Anna

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Oh look, another zine…

After making my Winter Work zine last week, I felt the need to make another one. Documenting my own thoughts and feelings in an analog way feels important right now, both in the face of politics and the rise of AI. I want us all to be making more art, even if (in fact, especially if, it’s not for distribution).

“Look for the artists” was a phrase that came to mind as I was finishing this one. Proof that you never really know what you’re going to make when you start—it’s the process that gets you there.

I have a policy of not making any concrete decisions about projects in January, because I like to see what comes together, what builds. So I won’t say I’m at a “zine a week” project quite yet, but you never know. Sharing these at least feels like bringing a little more texture to your inbox, a way to cut through the digital noise. I hope that they serve as a little inspiration for your own work.

• If you want to help support people in Minneapolis, here is an excellent list of all kinds of organizations that can put your donations to good use.

• Like many others, I loved seeing ’s poem this week. If you like it, then go read her piece about the poem going viral: “Meanwhile, I am sitting here, giggling at the irony that a poem that is essentially about getting offline has fared so well online.”

• “I give myself over to the task of cleaning. I scrub my desk thoroughly with bleach and a rough sponge, toss the papers, put away the ink jars. As I perform these tasks, I’m percolating on my ideas, letting them bubble and stew, gathering the energy to make them real. It’s like I’m winding myself up, like a toy. When I finally sit down to draw, all I have to do is let go.” on the process of sitting down to make work.

• An extra spot opened up in my friend Isobel Coney’s Creating From Nature retreat at Singla in Northern Norway this summer! Someone should definitely snag this.

• A 65-year-old oak tree fell to the ground on account of a fungus. Artist Steve Parker sliced the trunk, and turned the pieces into vinyl, encoded with sounds of birdsong.

• I loved this prompt from this week.

• “What happens when political fear gets metabolized as personal inadequacy?” on January in America.

• “the more tools that become available to help us to stop the appearance of age (if not actual aging) the more visibly aging has become a radical, if not downright rebellious, decision.” on faces.

• Thank you to for helping me to discover Ora the Molecule.

Thank you for reading Creative Fuel. This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog. If you enjoy reading, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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DIVE Writing Group Winter 2026 cohort kicks off this month! Make winter a season of writing in this amazing group facilitated by . You can sign up for Tuesday or Thursday cohort. And there are a few other writing workshops to check out here.

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Hello friends,

It’s the first newsletter of the year, so I guess I should say happy new year. But I think maybe just “welcome to January” will suffice. As I write these words, I feel like I am dragging a bit. Maybe you feel the same?

I like the tradition of turning the year, marking the transition. But I don’t enjoy the expectations that come in the aftermath. January is too long, too grim for bold declarations.

Astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson reminded us that New Years Day is “cosmically arbitrary” and I’d argue the whole month of January is a bit arbitrary in terms of kicking off the year in full force.

I prefer to let January be an in-between month. A fallow period. This is a season of incremental movements as opposed to grandiose change.

For reasons beyond my control (sounds like life’s tagline doesn’t it?) I did not have a restful winter break. I feel like I am still working at recovering from the month of December. It’s always like this, but I think we can all agree that this week in particular has been ladened with heaviness and darkness. How do we continue to live and create in this world that’s hellbent on destruction and oppression?

It’s really easy to fall into “The Gap” as calls it, “the chasm that lies between how I want the world (both personal and collective) to be and how the world actually is.” Yes, yes, yes.

Right about the moment that I was on a downward spiral into The Gap, I came across a picture of a letterpress print with a quote from Toni Morrison. It seemed to find me in the exact moment that I needed it.

I think keep thinking about the idea of “winter work,” the kind of work our ancestors did in order to get them through the darker hours of winter. This was always a season of mending, sewing, spinning, whittling, storytelling. The preparation required to be ready for when the bountiful hours of sun and outdoor work returned.

Our modern lives may look different, but we’re still in need of that time. The creative acts of care and attention that carried our ancestors through the dark hours help us do the same.

I made a more/less list on New Year’s Eve and I wrote “analog” in big bold letters in the more category. I heeded my own words this week and made a little zine/book/collage devoted to the topic of winter work, and that’s what I wanted to share with you today. I made it as an accordion style book, so it looks far better horizontally than vertically. But hey, these are the constraints of sharing analog work in a digital space!

In the name of fallow January.

In the name of sticking with our creative work.

In the name of tending and mending in the darkness.

-Anna

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• Abolish ICE graphics from Justseeds - good for printing up and using as a poster or hanging in your window.

• I want more crow costumes and big puppets in my life like

• An excellent writing prompt from devoted to color.

• If you’re in need of some creative prompts this month, check out Wet January watercolor series. I’m looking forward to sitting down with my sketchbook and making some tiny people inspired by

Thank you for reading Creative Fuel. This is a reader supported publication made by a human. The words are mine, the art is mostly analog. If you enjoy reading, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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Welcome to 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being, a digital Advent calendar for slowing down and making space for presence, creativity, and gratitude.

This is the last day of the calendar. Thank you so much to all of you for being here!

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Hello friends,

Here we are. The final day of this calendar.

I am so glad that you’ve been here and followed along, whether you diligently read every single day or whether you dipped in and out. I hope that over the past few weeks, this digital space has felt calming and grounding. A place to land. Maybe it even offered up a tiny glimmer of brightness.

As I sit down to write this final installment, fog hangs in the evergreens outside my window. There is some quiet choral music playing, as well as the hum of the washing machine. The vacuum cleaner sits sprawled out in the middle of the floor. There are boxes leftover from last weekend’s market all over the living room that haven’t been put away yet. Nothing has been prepared or baked.

Things are as they are. I am working at letting them be.

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Welcome to 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being, a digital Advent calendar for slowing down and making space for presence, creativity, and gratitude. If you missed a day you can catch up here.

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Hello friends,

I’m sharing Robert Frost’s words today, an annual ritual in this calendar.

The annual sharing of this poem is intended to create a pause. A long deep breath before the coming days.

I grew up with the illustrated edition of Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, done by Susan Jeffers and published in 1978. We would always read it aloud around this time of year.

The words land much differently with age, much darker than my younger self was attuned to. But I still love coming back to them.

In reading about the poem, I came across the story of composer Eric Whitacre, and his rendition of Frost’s classic. During the winter of 1999, Whitacre was contacted by a professional mezzo-soprano who wanted to commission a choral work in honor of her parents. She wanted the piece to be set to her favorite poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.

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Welcome to 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being, a digital Advent calendar for slowing down and making space for presence, creativity, and gratitude. If you missed a day you can catch up here.

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Hello friends,

How are we all taking a break in the coming days?

I take a solid winter break between winter solstice and early January. A pause, a reset. If creative ideas come to the surface, I let them. There’s always a notebook to scribble in. If I feel like going into the studio, I am allowed. Creativity works on its own schedule after all. But I don’t give myself any demands or expectations. Certainly don’t do any external projects that I would consider “work.”

I try to let the process be still for a bit. All in the name of rest and regeneration.

But I’m already thinking of what things feel like after that period. We all know that creativity can often thrive on momentum. And after a break, it can feel difficult to pick things back up. So I like to ensure that my current self does all it can for my future self to be able to pick up where I left off.

My friend suggests hibernating your writing, and it works great for other big creative projects that you need to step away from for a bit. She recommends writing yourself a letter about your project that’s as descriptive and detailed as possible.

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Welcome to 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being, a digital Advent calendar for slowing down and making space for presence, creativity, and gratitude. If you missed a day you can catch up here.

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Hello friends,

Happy winter solstice.

Today is the shortest day of the year. The crescendo of the darkness before we start moving back towards the light.

We get two of these moments in the year, one in winter, one in summer. They are our extremes, both of them a kind of apex, a peak and a pause.

“Today is tied with its twin in the summer for the most powerful day of the year. Light a fire. Light a fire on this day. Let something burn. That is what the solstices are for,” writes Nina MacLaughlin. “Summer flames say, Keep the light alive (it’s never worked, not once). In winter, a more urgent message: Bring light back to life (it’s worked every time so far).”

Our celebration of light and life is a “universal impulse” as Susan Cooper writes in the afterword of her book The Shortest Day, her poem beautifully illustrated by 1. If you don’t know the poem, it’s worth reading it out loud today, in honor of calling the light back into being.

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Welcome to 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being, a digital Advent calendar for slowing down and making space for presence, creativity, and gratitude. If you missed a day you can catch up here.

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Hello friends,

At a winter solstice party I used to go to, there was a big bonfire. Standing around it, everyone was instructed to grab t…

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Welcome to 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being, a digital Advent calendar for slowing down and making space for presence, creativity, and gratitude. If you missed a day you can catch up here.

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Hello friends,

We made it to another Friday! A happy hour is in order. Or maybe you’re in need of hibernation hour? Hunker down, push off…

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