This is the fourth and final installment in a series of winter prompts to inspire creativity in the cold (or even not-so-cold). If you’re just finding us, here is the first installment, second installment, and third installment. Thank you so much to paid subscribers for helping to support this work.

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I have a sticker made by at my desk that says, “It’s a good idea to be an artist.”

I have a commitment problem with stickers, so I actually have it taped on an empty glass jar with a piece of washi tape. It’s front and center though, just to the right of where I place my laptop—positioned so that it’s always in my peripheral vision. On bad days I read it aloud to myself while glaring and respond, “really??” But on better days, the days when I am more open and receptive, when I feel inklings of hope and a sense of potential, then I read it and respond emphatically, “well, yes, of course it is, absolutely!”

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the physical act of making art. Partially because of writing guest pieces for the first week of , which were meant to encourage getting people into a habit of the act of making. Also because of our series of winter prompts right here all month. We’ve gone out into. the cold, we’ve talked about listening, connection, and friendship, and we’ve had coffee outside. This final week was intended to be a call for creativity, and the words that initially came to my mind were, “make the art.”

Make the art.

It’s a nice prompt. Simple, direct. But it’s such an imperative isn’t it? What if you don’t want to make the art today? Or tomorrow for that matter?

I like coming up with prompts. They’re fun, and I know that they’re often helpful, especially when we need a little bit of a creative push. But the thing about prompts is that they can also come off as demanding calls to action.

When it comes to creativity, I don’t know what you need. Just like you don’t really know what I need. And while a prompt can be a catalyst for getting us to start in a certain direction, these imperatives aren’t always helpful. It’s why I tend to prefer questions over statements. A statement gives a conclusion, but a question offers an opening.

Make the art?

I ask myself that question and then look over at the “it’s a good idea to be an artist” sticker. “Is it?” I ask myself in a very sarcastic tone that causes my head to tilt a a bit and my eyebrows to raise. Then I sit with it for a minute, trying to come up with an answer. I go to my notebook and write the following:

It's a good idea to be an artist because it’s a good idea to work at something that expands our capacity for curious receptivity. It’s a good idea to be an artist because it’s a good idea to engage in the activities that keep us open to possibility. It’s a good idea to be an artist because, what else is there?

I don’t mean being an artist in the “I make money from selling my art” sense or even in the “I paint paintings” sense. I mean being an artist in the sense of being alive and awake in this world, of taking things in and translating them into something new, of being open and curious and expansive. I mean it in the sense of reading between the lines, of knowing that beauty and joy have a purpose, of understanding that wisdom doesn’t come in the form of certitudes but is instead planted in the form of questions.

Art is a matter of asking questions. Even in the most direct forms— with slogans and graphic visuals—what we’re really asking is, “what if things were different?” The capacity to create is a reminder of the capacity to change. And if change is possible, then nothing is inevitable. Everything is in flux, everything is impermanent. That space holds the unknown, but it also holds possibility.

The cold can feel like that too. To go outside on a cold day, to be in the cold, is a sensory experience of the unknown, but also the possible. There’s the bite of cold on your skin, the way the wind sounds in the trees. There’s the stillness that cold offers, but also the sense of movement. How snow and rain fall, how bare branches scrape together, how birds flit across the ground and up into the sky. There is a physicality to this, a way of encouraging a connection, a way of presenting the constant change that nature is always involved in.

Creativity has a physicality as well, both in how we conjure it and how we react to it. A good walk will almost always help forward the thought process behind a new idea—movement carves a path for creativity. We have physical reactions when we engage with creative work too. Did you know that it’s essentially impossible to stand still when listening to music? Research shows that even if we’re not actively moving to it, our body is engaged in all kinds of “micromotions.”

There’s the mind/body connection as well. When we look at art, our brain’s pleasure centers light up, and there is strong link between how we emotionally feel about a piece of art, and how our body physically responds to it. Reading fiction can cause us to feel more empathy, and can even cause our brains to respond as if we we’re engaged in the activity that we’re reading about. We can have physiological reactions to movies, scary ones will spike our heart rate. Art is sensorial.

This all makes me think of fascia, the connective tissue that essentially holds everything in our bodies in place. When it’s healthy, it’s supple, flexible. When it’s unhealthy, it’s tight, restricted. We can’t see it, but it holds us together, essential for our movement and wellbeing, connecting every single part of our physical body. That’s what creativity feels like to me sometimes, this energetic thing full of spark and life, but that lies underneath the surface. Difficult to see and feel, but essential all the same—the thread that ties everything together. When we’re creatively healthy we too are flexible, more open, more curious. When we haven’t taken as much time to invest in it, we’re more closed off, restricted in our ideas and our connections.  

Creativity is our human connective tissue. To create is a way of asking, “what is in our human capacity?”

Another visual that sits near my desk is a papercut that I made of Jane Goodall a few years ago, on the heels of my Women’s Wisdom Project.

“Can we overcome apathy?” asks Goodall. “Yes, but only if we have hope.” Art is a form of hope, and creativity sustains it. We need the ability to think beyond what we know, to make connections that go backwards and forwards in time, to say to ourselves, “I don’t know what the outcome will be, but I will try anyway.” We need the capacity to step into someone else’s world—through words, through song, through dance, through sound—and in the process, feel our own empathy muscles grow, strengthen. We need access to all kinds of creative works, so that we can read something that inspires us to dig deeper, look at something that that helps us feel less alone, listen to something that resonates all the way down into our cells. Art is an antidote to apathy because art requires us to care, to learn, to engage, to feel.

I’m using a wide definition of “art” here, much like how I read this week defining walking and engaging with nature in a more expansive way. “When A Walking Life was being published, I told the marketing people that I’d wanted to write a book for the ‘everywalker,’” writes Malchik. “I was tired of reading about philosophers and writers wandering through pristine woods and up remote mountain peaks. This is our world, I’ve said. We have the right to walk it, in all its glory and grit.”

This is our world. We have a right to make the art. The words, the songs, the drawings, the scribbles: all of it. The everyartist.

As someone whose job is dependent on “The Art,” in many ways, it is easier for me to do the marketing part of my job (ie selling the work) when I tune out from what is happening in the world. But the artist part of my job (ie making the work) only really happens if I pay attention, if I allow myself to feel, if I listen. The artist part is the human part. I acknowledge that yes, it does feel like the broader world is falling apart, there is so much pain, so much that is broken. Art arises from that place, from being in the world, not avoiding it. Or sometimes, being in that world, and wanting to craft something different in response to it. To create a space of joy and beauty.

I’ve been reading Letters from Tove this month, a collection of Tove Jansson’s letters to a variety of friends and family, and thinking a lot about how much World War II impacted her as an artist. In October of 1944 she writes to her friend Eva Konikoff:

“…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 painting to be something that springs naturally from myself, preferably from my joy.”

The war took a toll on Jansson, emotionally and creatively, particularly as her city of Helsinki was repeatedly bombed. In a letter several years later, she references the moment when she started to write the first Moomin story:

“…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 used to tell me stories). I crept into an unbelievable world where everything was natural and benign—and possible.”

Jansson dreamt of something different, and her entire universe of Moomin was in part spawned by that desire. It allowed her to create a world that felt hopeful for herself, of course, but just think about how many people have been drawn into that world, how many people found joy in it.

I think that’s the lesson from winter for me: creating, while often an individual, and sometimes even inward-focused act, is always part of something larger.

Even on the loneliest, coldest days, it has the potential to make you feel connected. To all the artists who came before, to those today, and to the ones who will come after. To the humans who came before, to those today, and to the ones who will come after. The connective tissue that binds us.

Make the art?

Make the art.

-Anna

Thank you so much for being here this month. And hi to so many new readers! If you enjoy reading Creative Fuel and exploring some of the themes here, the best way to support this work is to become a paid subscriber. I’m planning a few fun things for paid subscribers next month (you just might be seeing more of Tove Jansson for example), and I’d love to have you be a part of that community.

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CREATIVE PROMPT

Every week this month we’ve explored a writing prompt in conjunction with Freeflow Institute, all dedicated to connecting to the the cold. This is the final prompt for this series, if you want to support Freeflow and the work that they do, you can do so here. They’re putting on an amazing Grand Canyon trip next year with Rebecca Solnit and other incredible creatives.

Just like experiencing the cold can heighten our awareness and our attention to the world around us, so can our creative practice. Because art offers us something: it is a way to keep us grounded in our humanity. To be in our senses, to be in our bodies, to be connected to each other.

Creative thinking and problem-solving are of course things that we do in our brains, but creativity also lives in the body. It is engaged through movement, through taste and touch. It is a sensory experience. As you’ve challenged yourself to take your bodies into the cold these past few weeks, consider how that sensorial connection impacts what you create.

• How do your senses inform your art?

• How do you stay curiously receptive?

• How is your creativity sensorial?

• How does your art keep you engaged in the world around you?

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UPCOMING WORKSHOPS

February 29, 2024: Papercut Lettering, 5-7pm PT [VIRTUAL]

Register here.

March 9, 2024: Exploring Positive and Negative Space, 11am-12:30pm PT [VIRTUAL]

Register here.

March 19, 2024: Spring Papercutting, 5-7pm PT [VIRTUAL]

Register here.

Like what’s happening in this newsletter? You can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, ordering something in my shop, attending one of my workshops or retreats, or buying one of my books.

This is the third installment in a series of winter prompts to inspire creativity in the cold (or even not-so-cold). If you’re just finding us, here is the first installment and the second installment.

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It’s a gray morning in February. Rain doesn’t fall, but it hangs in the air as if it’s not quite sure whether it’s coming or going. I guess that’s how this month kind of feels in general.

It’s not bitingly cold, but it’s not really weather in which you’d like to spend the entire day outside either. The Scottish term dreich comes to mind, meaning “dreary, cheerless, bleak” weather, but also applicable to other things that feel dull and monotonous. I wonder why we don’t have similar vocabulary in the Pacific Northwest to name this endless humid gray that hangs on for months, both in the weather and sometimes in our moods too. We certainly have other terms to employ, like “liquid sunshine” and “fake spring.”

Looking at the weather prognosis for the next weekend, it appears that fake spring might in fact be coming. While I never hold my breath for a weather prognosis too many days in advance, I wouldn’t be opposed to a few days where I could close my eyes and extend my face towards the sun.

The all-gray sky outside my window doesn’t feel particularly inspiring to get the day started. I decide there’s one thing that could pick this morning up: get out into it. This isn’t a matter of excitement or allure—it is after all much easier to stay inside. But winter upon winter in this part of the world has taught me that it’s easier to get through if I give in on occasion, instead of just resisting. To be physically in it, instead of just passing through.

I don my rain jacket and pull on a pair of wool socks, then put my feet into a pair of rubber-soled wool slippers. I take my coffee mug with the hand painted blue stripes and walk out the door.

On the way, I grab an old white towel to wipe down the Adirondack chair that sits on the deck. This piece of outdoor furniture came into my possession last winter when I found it floating in the water after a king tide and I awkwardly transported back home on my paddle board. For a moment there, I forgot about the reality of where I live and dreamed about all of the crisp, cold mornings where I would bundle up with a wool blanket and sit outside in my cozy perch for a few morning breaths. How quaint, how lovely!

A year later and it’s certainly more of a summer chair. Turns out that gray, cold, and wet mornings aren’t so motivating, even for those of us who know we need to rug up and get outside if we want a mood change. I use the towel to wipe off all the water so that I can sit down without getting soaked. Streaks of brown and green moss come off with the moisture, a true Pacific Northwest sheen.

I sit down, place my coffee cup on the wide arm of the chair. I take a moment to feel my way into my surroundings. The air feels cool, and when I move my arm to take a sip of coffee, the slightly stiff waterproof fabric of my rain jacket makes a rustling sound. There are a few drops of rain, enough to create an artistic look as they drop onto the words penned in my notebook.

A flicker flies overhead, and I wonder if it’s the one that I think has made a home in the rafters, sometimes sounding likes the bird is investing in major renovation projects. I haven’t found a feather in a while, but with their orange streaks, the discovery always feels like a gift. The sound, less so. Although I like to remind myself that the drumming that flickers do (which sounds a bit more like jack hammering) come spring is an audible love letter of sorts.

A lot of birds seem to be chirping and making calls this morning, and I wish that I was better at identifying them. Better at knowing them, understanding their language. What might it be like to be as responsive to the bird calls as we are with the sounds of our phone notifications?

I see an Anna’s hummingbird perched on a faraway tree. I marvel at how you can spot such a tiny organism off in the distance. There are some pine siskins too, which I happen to love because of their size. So much energy in such a small body. Much like a hummingbird I guess.

The beauty in this moment is in the contrast: bundled up, cold air, warm drink. I drink some more coffee, and realize I should have thought to put it in an insulated mug. As the coffee cools, the glorious moment of contrast gradually wears off.

But at least my attention has been drawn elsewhere for a bit. The morning feels different, I continue with my day.

Back in 2021, I partnered up with Alastair Humphreys for a monthly series called Coffee Adventures Outside. Essays and art devoted to bringing in a little sense of adventure into the everyday, breaking up a regular routine and using it as a catalyst to go about our day a little differently.

The challenge was simple: to take your coffee outside. Maybe on its own, or paired with another activity, or with a friend. As we wrote, this slight shift in habit might offer up “an espresso sip of mental space in which to allow difficulties some time to filter, sift and sort themselves, as well as the uplifting space to allow our creative ideas to unfurl and reveal themselves.”

That was a year that felt smaller in many ways. A time when we mostly kept to our backyards, when the promise of elsewhere wasn’t really on the table. I don’t miss the anxiety, or the stress, or the isolation of that time, but I do find myself missing the smallness, the slowness. The hyper-attention to what was happening in my immediate surroundings. Nowadays, so often my attention feels immediately pulled so far elsewhere, in so many scattered directions. I have to work at drawing it back in. Back to the morning gray, back to the bright green mossy branch, back to the rain, back to the snowdrops that bloomed early this year, back to the nettles, back to the heron, back to the cloud formations.

On a walk last week I found a dead bird right on the side of the road. So tiny, so vulnerable. She was right at the edge of the asphalt. I didn’t know what my response should be, but leaving her right there so close to the road where the cars pass at shockingly fast speeds didn’t feel right. I moved her further over into the thick bed of brown, aging maple and alder leaves that blankets the ground in the winter—a little nest in its own state of decomposition.

I don’t know exactly what finding that bird meant, but it certainly felt heavy. A physical reminder of the weight of things. Or maybe just a reminder of life cycles, of the beginnings and endings that are always taking place. As I walked home, I thought about what it means to pay attention. What it means to not just pass through, but to be in. Kind of like sitting outside on a wet, gray morning with a cup of coffee in hand.

I think that’s what shifting an everyday habit into a new place does for us: gives us the space to pause, to contemplate, creates a moment of the unexpected.

It might seem a silly, simplistic thing to take your daily cup of coffee outside. It is not a grand adventure, it is not an act that will solve the problems of the world. But it might cause you to change perspective, a shift in attention. It might encourage you to see and feel a little more.

-Anna

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CREATIVE PROMPT

Every week this month we’re exploring a writing prompt in conjunction with Freeflow Institute, all dedicated to connecting to the the cold.

We tend to view adventure in grandiose ways—the draw of faraway expeditions and long journeys. But what’s on offer in our everyday lives? That’s what taking a cup of coffee outside does: it asks us to challenge our own habits, and hopefully, carve out a little sense of adventure in even our most everyday routines. A little spark of magic in the midst of the well-known.

If you’re feeling up to it, when you take your coffee outside this week, take your notebook too and explore these prompts:

• In a place you know well, how do you maintain a sense of curiosity?

• Where do you find your everyday moments of wonder?

• What comes alive when you take a routine from inside to outside?

UPCOMING WORKSHOPS

February 29, 2024: Papercut Lettering, 5-7pm PT [VIRTUAL]

I've taught this workshop a couple of times and it's always fun. Come learn how to incorporate lettering into a papercut piece. We will work on experimenting with creating different lettering styles and cover how to transfer text onto paper so that it can easily be cut. Register here.

March 9, 2024: Exploring Positive and Negative Space, 11am-12:30pm PT [VIRTUAL]

In a world of color, we often forget to pay attention to one of the simplest ways to create visuals: positive and negative space. As a papercut artist, positive and negative space is my main tool, and it has changed how I see and interpret the world around me. In this workshop with Case for Making we’ll engage in an exploration of shapes and space, and challenge ourselves to think outside of our usual ways of seeing. Register here.

March 19, 2024: Spring Papercutting, 5-7pm PT [VIRTUAL]

Come learn the basics of papercutting by taking inspiration from the season. We'll cover the fundamentals of papercutting, and work on creating our own spring-inspired designs while building up papercutting skills. Trilliums, ferns, and dandelions galore! Register here.

JUNE CREATIVITY RETREAT

I am excited about my creative retreat June 6-9, 2024 hosted with fellow artist Sarah Uhl at the beautiful Maple Grove Hot Springs in Idaho. There are still a few spots left, in particular, a couple of shared units in the stone shelters. We’re doing a special offer through February 28th: book a stone shelter with a friend, and save $100 off your registration/per person. Use the code BUDDYSYSTEM at checkout.

June Creative Retreat

SUPPORT

Essays and prompts like these are made possible by paid subscribers. I am working on another special seasonal offering for paid subscribers to come next month, and if you like this newsletter I’d be thrilled if you want to support.

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Like what’s happening in this newsletter? You can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, ordering something in my shop, attending one of my workshops or retreats, or buying one of my books.

Subscribe now

As regular readers know, I’ve devoted a lot of words these past couple of months to the topic of creative winter, thinking about what a darker, colder time means for the creative process.

Part of that seasonal process is retreating inward, sinking into more space for rest, finding the quiet that serves as a background for contemplation and rumination.

This retreating makes it so easy to take an individual view of this season. I know I do. I want to rest and retreat, pull back, not engage as much. Even as spring peeks its head out over the horizon, planting little reminders for me that things are shifting—the first nettles appeared last week, it’s not pitch black at 7am anymore, I am dreaming about putting nasturtium seeds in the soil—I still feel tired. Still in need of more rest, more hibernation. Maybe some of you feel that as well.

I’ve noticed in recent online workshops that people don’t quite participate as much as before, at least not on camera or with their voice. But they want to be there, be with other people, even just virtually. It could be induced by the season. Or it could be another cycle of our post-pandemic world, in which we still crave a deep sense of community, but often, feel too tired to show up.

Back in November I was reading an old issue of the Country Living magazine (UK edition, clearly), and there was a page with a picture of a farmer on a tractor in the snow, being followed by a border collie. Please cue “All Creatures Great and Small” emotions. There was some line about the value of a “winter friend.” I didn’t write it down, and I didn’t take a picture, so I have no memory of the sentiment that was penned, but the term “winter friend” stuck with me.

For me, winter friends are friends who can be together in the quiet. Friends who allow you to be, and don’t demand that you do. There is no performance to the act of being winter friends, you simply are. Winter friends weather the fallow periods of friendship, they listen, even if all you have to communicate is silence. Winter friends are rooted, weathered. Even just the knowledge that they are there can help to ground you.

“A winter friend knows my greys, my perennial complaints, vain woes, and does not paper over my doldrums. Knows my laments and stands beside them—a contrast, a reprieve,” my friend Gretchen wrote to me when I asked her what came to mind when she heard the term. “A winter friend puts tea in my cold hands and believes I’m good even when my thoughts are harsh like a scraping storm or hard like frozen ground. A winter friend is dependable, here again and here again. A companionable candle when the days are short.”

A winter friend is a friendship you can sink into. It is reliable, makes you feel tethered.

“We are good winter friends, because we know how to have fun in the snow or rain, or general bleakness,” Roshni texted back to me when I asked her. A winter friend helps you find light in the darkness, not in the offering of advice or the suggestion of how a situation might be remedied, but by simply being there. Warmth and support held in the same moment as the bleakness, the light offered without the burden of demands.

A winter friend knows how to be comfortable in doing nothing.

It’s no surprise to anyone that we struggle with friendship as adults, particularly those of us in our 30s and beyond. A decade into that “beyond,” and I certainly feel that. For one, several close friends are physically far away, which really has no easy remedy. Closer to home, it’s difficult meet new people, to create the kind of connections that can allow the space for that kind of easy and supportive coexistence. Despite the amount of connectivity that would seemingly make it easier to do, it often feels like you need an administrative assistant to coordinate schedules. Or you feel like the one always saying, “I can’t.” It’s difficult to gather when people are pulled in all directions.

Above all, it’s difficult to gather when we’re tired. As wrote in her excellent piece on friendship: “We are so burned out by the process of staying afloat in a globalized, connected world that we simply don’t have the energy for the kinds of in-person, easy interactions that might actually give us some energy and lifeforce back.”

A newsletter from The New York Times dropped in my inbox recently with the headline “Why don’t we hang out anymore?” and I was immediately annoyed—mostly at capitalism and work culture and the American structure that has always prioritized work and productivity—but also maybe even a little annoyed at The New York Times too. I took offense at this claim.

“Really, we don’t know how to hang out anymore??” I shouted out my computer screen.

“I do plenty of hanging out with fr—

…

Oh. Wait. Ok fine.”

Mostly I’m annoyed that “couch friend” is a thing on social media. Because, of course, everything needs to be a Thing these days. When you see How to Be a Couch Friend on the bestseller list 9 months from now in an airport bookstore, don’t be surprised.

In my twenties, my friend Rachel would often swing by the Thai restaurant down the street and show up at my house with takeout. I’d open a bottle of wine, and we’d sit there eating pad Thai (yes, on the couch, this was back when “couch friends” were just called “friends”) and discussing nothing in particular and everything of importance. We didn’t cram these dinners in between other things, and they didn’t require weeks of scheduling, they just happened. The casualness of a different age, a different era.

I actually put “casual hangs” on my “More” list back in January, after some friends invited my husband and I over on New Year’s Day for no other reason than to be together. There was laughter, a board game, a beach walk, and later a dance party—only allowed in the afternoon as I was instructed by my 4-year-old friend who spent the time aggressively dancing on the couch. It felt spacious, generative, the only time constraint the sunset which would mean biking home in the dark.

Part of our inability to prioritize this kind of space is cultural. We live in a country that resists idleness, and we frame so much—sometimes even friendship—through a lens of productivity. Think of how a “work date” is valued versus “hanging out.” (And yes, I love a good work date.)

But we are also burdened by our expectations of perfection, of putting on a version of our lives that presents well. I remember a discussion from many years ago with my friend Polina—a celebrated cookbook author, whose parents immigrated to the U.S. from Republic of Georgia during the collapse of the Soviet Union—about how rare it was with a lot of American friends to have casual hangouts. We talked about how “just come over,” felt like a big ask for people. There was no space for saying, “yes of course come by, I’ll see what I can dig up,” and finding a chunk of cheese in the refrigerator and putting it out with a bowl of nuts or some other thing that could be nibbled, calling it a day, and then just letting time extend.

Instead, gatherings around an American table often require elaborate meals and place settings, the exhausting act of putting on friendship instead of being in it with what you have. Just look at how many step-by-step directions and even books there are to make boards (cheese or otherwise): perfectly styled for social media, but instead of a catalyst for more socializing, a catalyst for the presentation of being social. If we’re tired by the thought of gathering, part of it might be the expectations that we’ve put upon it in the first place.

In my twenties, I had a group of friends who would regularly gather for some version of Ladies’ Night. We’d usually all bring something, so that the person hosting didn’t feel too much pressure. Regular hang outs, with snacks. The location would change, the support did not.

Eventually, I moved across an ocean for a few years, and couldn’t make it to in-person Ladies’ Nights anymore. One time I Skyped them early in the morning, the 9-hour time difference meaning that I had coffee in hand while they all had glasses of wine.

A few years ago, one of those friends, Jude, got divorced. She texted that same group, asking for in-person emotional support the day she was moving out of her cherished home and into a new apartment by herself. “Of course we’ll be there,” was the resounding response. I made the three-hour drive early in the morning. I remember two things about arriving: it was foggy and the first thing we did was hug. No words, just a hug.

The collective strength that day wasn’t required to move the physical load, it was for the emotional one. Afterwards, thanks to an early spring day when the sun decided to shine, we sat outside at a Mexican restaurant and cheers’d to whatever would come next. “To low maintenance, high yield friends,” exclaimed Jude, raising her glass.

It’s like my Executive Board1. We live many miles apart, but there is no question that we’ll show up when need be. Our text chain is a lifeline. We will brainstorm and approve ideas. We will challenge each other. We will plot and scheme. We know we’ll hang on the couch eventually, and while I’m currently late on getting back to them about when we can do our next in-person hang, I know they don’t hold it against me. The simple knowledge that the social scaffolding is there is sometimes enough to feel supported and held.

Which is not to say that work and maintenance aren’t required, that everything is always smooth and easy. After all, “friendships are, by their very nature, made of friction,” writes Spinks. It is the process of friendship that sustains us, not the end product. Sound familiar to creativity anyone?

I moved back to my hometown a little over eight years ago. It’s a rural town, there aren’t many places to go and gather. Without children, making connections with people in my age group has not always been easy. It has taken nearly a decade to re-establish some roots, create friendships that feel like they could be on their way to becoming winter friends.

What a small town lacks in events and amenities, it makes up for in “weak ties,” a concept I intuitively felt but didn’t know the term for until wrote about it. These are the social connections that sustain us beyond our immediate family and closest friends. These kind of ties were significantly impacted during the pandemic, yet they are an essential part of our social connectedness and wellbeing. It’s why a smile from a stranger does us a lot of good and why social isolation comes at a significant cost.

For me, that’s the conversation with the people who work at the post office, the librarians who know my name and therefore do not need to scan my library card. Now this is my version of luxury.

It’s making a little joke with the person working at the checkout at the grocery store. It’s sitting at the outdoor table at the local café every Sunday after a bike ride, inevitably running into someone I know. None of these feel like work, they tend to serendipitously take place, woven into the daily schedule. Sometimes when a conversation at the library goes longer than anticipated, I’d even go so far to say that I feel like I’m… wait for it… hanging out.

Last year, a few fellow friends and I decided to establish a little creative “salon,” a very specific space to come and talk about creative ideas and projects. A container for showing up with our creative selves. Something we were craving in our small town. We have only done it a handful of times so far (after all, scheduling comes with a lot of friction), but when we do, the parameters set around our gathering allow us to enter into a more vulnerable place. One where we can share, yes, and feel heard, and seen. But also, and maybe more importantly, a place where we have the time and space to deeply listen.

I was thinking of that space when I read a Rebecca Solnit quote recently, from her essay “We’re Breaking Up: Noncommunication in the Silicon Age,” in the 2014 book The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness.

“Previous technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it. The eloquence of letters has turned into the nuanced spareness of texts; the intimacy of phone conversations has turned into the missed signals of mobile phone chat. I think of that lost world, the way we lived before these new networking technologies, as having two poles: solitude and communion. The new chatter puts us somewhere in between, assuaging fears of being alone without risking real connection. It is a shallow between two deeper zones, a safe spot between the dangers of contact with ourselves, with others.”

A decade later and it doesn’t feel like things have gotten much better, we seem to have little time for solitude or communion. We’re stretched thin in the unsatisfying space in between the two.

I think about this a lot, particularly in a modern age when we spend our days sharing, projecting, chattering, but it often feels hard to find deeper modes of connection, whether that’s to each other, or even to ourselves.

To listen is an act of attention. To listen is to be with the world around you, to be with someone, to be with yourself. Or as Kate Murphy writes in You’re Not Listening: What You’re Missing and Why it Matters: “listening is about the experience of being experienced.”

Maybe that’s exactly what a winter friend is. Like the quiet and dark of the season that beckons to us to listen to the natural world, a winter friend is one who can be in the quiet right along with you, attuned to something deeper. A friend who meets you wherever you are in your experience of being a human, who calls to you to pay attention.

Someone with whom you can listen, together.

-Anna

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CREATIVE PROMPT

Every week this month we’re exploring a writing prompt in conjunction with Freeflow Institute, all dedicated to connecting to the the cold.

Last week we focused on getting outside and writing a sentence a day. Today we’re shifting our focus a little bit, as the Freeflow challenge for the week is to explore the cold with a friend, which is what planted the seed for the essay above.

The cold and dark can make us feel the pull of hibernation, to retreat from the world around us. While we may go inward in the darker months, cold has always been a collective affair—humans need each other to be able to survive, particularly in frigid temperatures. As much as winter may ring of solitude, it’s a call for connection. To reach out to a friend, to check in, to gather. To not go through the darker days alone. We’re not the only ones who need each other—many animals huddle together in winter to stay warm, like penguins.

Our prompt last week was for immersing in the cold and using it as a catalyst for paying attention. Today’s is similar in nature, a challenge to not just pay attention to the world around us, but also to each other and the connections that sustain us.  

As you explore the cold with a (winter) friend, here are some writing prompts to get the juices flowing:

• How does going inward allow us to extend outward?

• What does connection generate?

• Can we listen, together?

HARMONY OF OPPOSITES CREATIVE WORKSHOP SERIES

This month’s offering for paid subscribers is a two-part creative workshop series: The Harmony of Opposites, taught in collaboration with .

We had such a wonderful time gathering together, and I am looking forward to doing it again. Next session is Sunday February 18, 10-11:30am PT. You can still sign up, and you can catch the video replay of the first session on Light & Shadow.

Harmony of Opposites Workshop

COMMUNITY SUPPORTED ART SHARES!

I am doing another Community Supported Art share this year, basically like a CSA except that I send you art instead of fruits and vegetables. There will be two shipments, around the spring and fall equinox, and each one features a variety of printed art goods made by yours truly! This is the last week to sign up, deadline is February 16.

2024 CSA Share

SUPPORT

Essays and prompts like these are made possible by paid subscribers. I am working on another special seasonal offering for paid subscribers to come next month, and if you like this newsletter I’d be thrilled if you want to support. Sharing it with a friend (winter or otherwise) helps too!

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Like what’s happening in this newsletter? You can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, ordering something in my shop, attending one of my workshops or retreats, or buying one of my books.

High fives and notes of inspiration are also accepted, or you can share this newsletter with a friend.

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I have a lot of swimming-related photos on my phone. Scenes of early morning plunges, in all seasons, in all weather. One of my favorites is from last winter: a shot of my blue and white striped swimsuit.

The air temperature had been so cold that after I hung the swimsuit over the back of an outdoor chair, it froze it into a v-shape. A stretchy and pliable material frozen entirely solid.

We’re not in a habit of getting those kind of gelid temperatures where I live in western Washington. When it happens, for me it feel exotic and a bit thrilling. A taste of the unknown. Although now we’ve had two years in a row where winter has offered up the kind of frigid temperatures that freeze swimsuits and cover beach rocks in a sparkle of ice. This year’s version was followed by an unseasonably warm week. The alder branches now have green buds. All of which is, well, jarring.

The swimsuit photo in question was taken last February, during a retreat that I led with Freeflow Institute. The weather for those days felt perfectly timed for a retreat called “Pause,” devoted to taking a cue from winter and reimagining what a more cyclical relationship to creativity could be.

The cold became a catalyst for clarity—everything felt heightened, more clear. The comfort of a blazing woodstove after every brisk walk providing the warm indoor cocoon where ideas could marinate and be born. All to say, winter is excellent time for regenerating creativity.

Around lunchtime the other day I stepped outside. Temperature-wise it wasn’t a particularly cold day, but there was a light rain, making for a kind of damp cold that quickly settles into your body. I hadn’t put on a sweater before I stepped out, and my body immediately induced a shiver. “Ugh, it’s cold,” I said to myself aloud, you know, in case the trees were listening.

I pondered that response, the automated resistance to cold, even from a person who actually likes to be cold. My time in cold water has taught me one thing: you can sit with that discomfort. It’s not about conquering, it’s about being with it, moving through it.

With that in mind, instead of immediately going back inside to the warm and dry studio, I remained standing there. I took a few breaths, looked up at the trees, wished I had put my wool sweater on. Despite my initial resistance, the cold was in fact quite tolerable. Wet and humid yes, but I could stay there for a bit. It felt nice to get a little break from looking at the computer, to breathe in fresh air. I knew I could go back in and warm up.

In the Northern Hemisphere, where January and February usually boast the coldest temperatures, February probably counts as very few peoples’ favorite month. It doesn’t have the coziness of the festive season, or the sheen of the new year, and can often feel like just a bit of a slog.

Many even cite February as the worst month of all. You may remember the reporter from a few year’s back who went viral with his summary: “February is the worst month of the year. But it's an honest month. It's a month that doesn't hold up life any better than it really is.” 

Which means that for a lot of us, the tendency in February might just be to hole up. To retreat. To bide our time until spring sunshine decides to show up.

But what if we took it as an invitation instead?

An invitation to step outside. To feel the wind on our cheeks. To turn our head to the rain. To investigate how the natural world is coping and moving through the season. To immerse ourselves in the cold (safely, of course) even for just a short moment. Not to break a record, or to prove something, or as a hack, but as a way of being. As a way of existing.

That’s what my friends at Freeflow Institute are doing this month, running a campaign called Connect to the Cold, a collective mission to connect—physically and creatively—to the cold season. They asked if I would partner with them to put together some weekly creative writing prompts for the month, and I’ll be sharing them here every Wednesday for the next few weeks.

I’m hoping that the cold, in whatever way you find it, can provide some creative inspiration and connection.

-Anna

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CREATIVE PROMPT

How can we capture a snapshot, a moment, a feeling, a thought, an interaction? 

So often with creative practice we’re focused on grand manifestations of creative work, but the simplicity of a regular practice to hone in on a small detail focuses our attention on what’s taking place in front of and around us.

This week for our prompt we’re taking inspiration from . Chris has a beautiful ritual of writing a sentence a day, a practice that led to his book One Sentence Journal.

Every month, Chris compiles these in his newsletter too. Here is one from last month that I find myself sitting with:

“2024_0114: A reminder that, without reciprocity, what do you have?”

As Ernest Hemingway is known for saying: “All you have to do is write one true sentence,” a guiding principle of ’s 5 Things prompt (which is also great for getting the creative juices flowing).

One sentence a day. That’s the prompt for the coming week.

One moment of cold a day, one sentence a day.

As you step into the cold, what do you feel, what do you see, what do you hear? 

What can you capture in a single sentence?

Try this practice every day this week. See what you find, and see what it builds to. See what it tells you about the world around you. 

Please share what you come up with! If you want to share one of your sentences, email it to hello@creativefuelcollective.com, and I’ll compile some of them here next week.

SUPPORT FREEFLOW

Freeflow Institute is dedicated to helping people take their craft outside, providing opportunities for creative development, space, and access to wild places for writers, artists, and leaders of all backgrounds. The Freeflow Foundation was set up to ensure that Freeflow Institute programs are available to all, regardless of background or current economic means.

If you want to donate to help support the work that they’re doing, and help to get more people outside, please join me in doing so.

Support Freeflow Foundation

A percentage of paid subscriptions this month will be donated to Freeflow Foundation, so if you’ve been debating on becoming a paid subscriber, now’s the time.

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Like what’s happening in this newsletter? You can support my work by becoming a paid subscriber, ordering something in my shop, attending one of my workshops or retreats, or buying one of my books.

High fives and notes of inspiration are also accepted, or you can share this newsletter with a friend.

Just a note that this will be the last Weekend Edition for a little bit since we’ll be moving into 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being instead. Can you believe that starts next Friday?

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Here we are: the last weekend of November.

In my part of the world, all of the bigleaf maples are now bare, and the water has officially changed to what I would define as “winter swimming.” Cold temperatures yesterday covered the ground in frost, the brown bracken ferns and dark red blackberry leaves particularly beautiful in a glittering layer.

As I was working on yesterday’s essay about holiday consumer season, I wrote something in all caps in my notebook. I decided to use it for today’s creative prompt.

This question of consumption is at an all-time high this time of year. So perhaps there’s no better time to reflect on our relationship to it. Not just the consumption of “things” but the consumption of the world around us.

If you’ve taken a workshop from me or been a reader of this newsletter for a long time you know that I often talk about the in/out of creative process, treating this process like breathing. We can’t only take things in, and we can’t only produce and put things out. We have to have both.

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As a reminder, in December we will have 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being instead. Click here to learn more.

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“Once you find something that you are curious about, you will start to see it everywhere,” my friend said the other night in a workshop.

She and I have been making jokes for a while now about being in the “Shapes Business,” both of us drawn to a variety of simple shapes and forms and trying to incorporate them in our work. We’ve both been seeing all kinds of shapes in all kinds of places, picking up on a visual language that surrounds us.

It reminds me of a Brian Eno Oblique Strategies card that I like a lot: “Once the search is in progress, something will be found.”

A different way of asking:

• What do we notice in the world around us?

• What’s pulling at our interest?

• What connections are we making?

I read this week about Julia Child’s notes from , and her “things to investigate” list. It was a list of things that she needed more information on, differences between French and American ingredients. For example: “More water in salted butter?” and “Big typewriter?”

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If you’re new here, this is the Weekend Edition of Creative Fuel. These Saturday newsletters usually include some ponderings, some links, and a prompt of some kind. Just a heads up to everyone that we won’t have these in December as we’ll be doing 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being instead. If you’re thinking to yourself, “Anna, I don’t know what that is,” click here to learn more.

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Earlier this week I attended a virtual conversation and workshop with and Steve Almond.

In talking about how she managed to finish her first novel, Torch, Strayed noted that she had to reset her expectations of what the novel was going to be. While she wanted to write an amazing novel, a meaningful novel, a bestselling novel, those expectations were holding her back from finishing it. And what was worse than potentially writing a novel that didn’t meet those expectations? Not writing one at all.

If we’ve embarked on a creative project, or thought about embarking on a creative project, we probably know this sentiment. Strayed’s advice? “Surrender to your mediocrity.”

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These weekend missives are intended for creative inspiration, sometimes through prompts, sometimes through other means. Paid subscribers have full access to the archive of weekend prompts + inspiration.

Starting December 1st paid subscribers will be getting 24 Days of Making, Doing, and Being! If you don’t know what that is, we’ll leave it with the allure of mystery for now.

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I wrote yesterday about the constrictions that can be felt when you do creative work for business.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the balance between play and professionalism when it comes to taking your creative work seriously. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle, which is why there can be a lot of tension in doing that work professionally.

I remember reading ’s book Big Magic many years ago, and her talking about how long it took before she stopped doing “other” jobs. She didn’t want to put the pressure of needing to make money on her creativity.

I found this excellent quote from that book when digging around:

“…to yell at your creativity, saying, ‘You must earn money for me!’ is sort of like yelling at a cat; it has no idea what you’re talking about, and all you’re doing is scaring it away, because you’re making really loud noises and your face looks weird when you do that.”

This visual is hilarious, and reminds me of another creativity/cat example, this time from Ray Bradbury:

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I was driving the other day during the end of the afternoon NPR broadcast, and there was an interview with the executive director of the World Food Program. Maybe it was because I was driving and didn’t have a way to distract myself, but there was something about her words and descriptions of humanitarian crisis that lodged themselves in me in a very heavy way.

I’ve found myself in the past few weeks starting to feel desensitized to horrific images, most likely some kind of coping mechanism that I find disconcerting. The scrolling through just becomes a mindless habit, no place for the emotions to sit or develop before we move to the next thing, no nuance necessary. For me, hearing words and stories lands very differently. It’s harder to turn away when you’re hearing the gravity in someone’s personal story. Reading is the same, whether it’s a reported article or a poem. Art too carries that power, finding its way in along a different path.

There’s a large sense of overwhelm to feel right now. Pick your crisis, it’s out there. What do we do in response to that? How do we communicate? How do we talk about the things that we care and feel deeply about? How do we see our own role in this complicated, messy, interconnected world?

Ann Friedman had a great newsletter this week, tackling the easy and convenient phrase that I am sure a lot of us have written at some point: with everything that's happening in the world right now.

“‘It's one thing to be exhausted and upset about overlapping crises,’ wrote Dahlia Lithwick in 2021, ‘It is quite another thing to be expected to embody pitch-perfect emotional responses to each one of those things instantaneously online.’ Silence is violence, we have been taught by this point. And also we are acutely aware of the limits of our own knowledge and firsthand experience, We can't move through the crises one by one and have the correct empathetic response to everything. It's simply not possible. And yet we are trying not to lose touch with our humanity. And so we just write ‘with everything happening in the world...’ and hope it's enough for now.”

We’re trying to show that we’re paying attention, trying to show that we feel. Which is a way of expressing our humanity, but it can also be a kind of posturing. As wrote recently, “I often think about the world 15 or 20 years ago, when we were not able to broadcast our state of mind at any given moment, and so we felt no pressure to simplify complex and fragile feelings.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot in the past weeks. This aspect of what to say, what not to say. That balance of acknowledging the weight of what happens around us, while at the same time focusing on and showcasing the pockets of beauty that exist in the everyday. Understanding that we’re all part of a larger, very unjust system, and also: needing to run an art business, wanting to create things that bring joy to people.

When I read’ excellent piece titled “How to be online right now,” I found it helpful and clarifying, both because of her own words and the words and wisdom of various other writers cited.

“I think a lot of us are grappling with this relatively new expectation: That to know about what’s going on in the world means to publicly state nuanced opinions about events as they unfold.”

She continues a little later:

“I’ve written before, at the start of the Ukraine war, about how I personally think it’s okay not to post at times like this — which, I’ll note, is not the same thing as ignoring what’s going on in the world. I personally can’t help but grapple with the inherent issues of the platforms themselves: What their for-profit structures and the men who run them try and steer me to view, interact with, and post — and more importantly — what to think and feel.”

This is a newsletter devoted to creativity. Yes there are creative prompts and there’s art and I’d be more than happy to have a chat with you about how creative process works, but for me there’s also something deeper at play. Creativity is a core component of being human, and as such, this is really more of a newsletter about the human condition.

And if we’re talking about the human condition, then we can’t separate ourselves from events both near and far that make us feel something, that makes us want to scream, that make us lose a sense of hope, that make us want to turn our emotional receptors off.

We don’t create in a vacuum—creativity is a constant collaboration with the world around us. Creativity is an act of perception, of opening up, of listening, of processing and that’s exactly why we’re impacted by what else is happening in the world at large. When you work at that perception, it gets harder and harder to tune things out. Harder and harder to build up the walls around you to not feel a sense of empathy.

That’s the beauty of art: it becomes a vehicle for accessing and strengthening that empathy.

A friend sent me a post this week about how an act of creativity was an act of self-care, noting self-discovery, improved problem-solving, and mindfulness as some of the benefits. I couldn’t agree more, and these are all things that we need to function as humans.

But you know what else I think creativity can be? An act of community care.  

Creativity binds us together. This is not just about making something and sharing it, or finding a way to express pain and rage in a different form, or using art to question and challenge, or to get someone to take action on something.

Creativity is a way of being, and that way of being requires listening, it requires learning, it requires sitting with questions, it requires thinking, it requires rumination, it requires making connections.

If we can make space for that, maybe we can start to make space for our own humanity.

-Anna

CREATIVE PROMPT

Feeling…?

This could be how you’re feeling or what you’re feeling. It could be the description of a feeling. It could be emotional, or it could be physical.

As always, just see where it takes you.

A nice prompt to pair with this might be the sensorial writing exercise I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Previous prompts can be found here.

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Last weekend I got to spend a lot of time with my friend Sara McMahon, who works as an applied improv facilitator. In other words, she uses improv techniques to teach essential skills like playfulness, empathy, connectedness, and overcoming fear of failure.

I’ve never done any improv before—or any type of theatre or acting for that matter— but doing some work with Sara has me thinking of how powerful the generative nature of this art form is. I wrote yesterday about coming out of our heads and into our bodies, and many of the exercises that I got to do with Sara were exactly that.

The other night my husband and I sat down with Sara’s Playdate Deck, a fun deck with all kinds of prompts for improv games and exercises, and found ourselves laughing hysterically as we made things up on the spot.

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Did you know that there is a strong link between biological diversity and cultural and language diversity?1

Where there are many languages spoken, where there is a rich cultural ecosystem, there is also a rich environmental ecosystem. I learned this earlier this week when I had the joy of hearing Robin Wall Kimmerer speak in Missoula. It was one of many seeds planted. My mind still feels full from that evening.

If you’ve read Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, then perhaps you have started looking at the natural world around you in a different way. You are perhaps looking at your own role in it in a different way. You are hopefully considering how we humans change our relationship to the land from one that’s based on a model of taking, of extracting, to one that’s based off of reciprocity. A relationship that’s not defined by taking something but taking part in something.

As Kimmerer said, land can be seen as “a source of belongings or a source of belonging.”

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Usually I write these weekend missives ahead of time and schedule them. But then there are those other times when my own schedule gets a little overloaded and things don’t go according to a perfectly dialed plan (when do they ever?).

When that happens, I get up on Saturday morning, make a cup of tea and sit and write for a bit. I actually really enjoy these moments. It doesn’t feel like catching up on something, or like I need to get the thing out of my way before moving on with the rest of my day. It’s a little pocket of time when the words get to flow, I’m a little less precious and critical about what I write because I know it just needs to get finished.

But when I woke up this morning the power was out. Hard to put together an online newsletter when the power is out. Instead, I went outside and looked at the soft colors of the morning sky, blended with the morning fog. I debated if I should go and track down the camp stove to make some tea.

It reminded me of the time a few years back in the advent calendar when the power went out and I wrote the entire thing by hand. By the time the power came back on, I just took pictures of what I wrote and sent it out. It was entirely different from what I had envisioned for the schedule, but it was one of my favorite things that I wrote and shared that December. If you’re curious, here it is.

In our modern lives, a power outage can be jarring, particularly if it lasts for a while. We’re dependent on power, and an outage usually has an immediate impact that alters your approach to what your time looks like.

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Welcome to the weekend edition Creative Fuel! These weekend missives are for creative inspiration, sometimes through prompts, sometimes through other means. If you’re getting this it’s because you’re a paid subscriber, and you have full access to the archive of weekend prompts + inspiration.

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The layering weather has begun.

A woman stopped me in the post office yesterday and exclaimed, “you match your bike!”

I looked down and realized that the orange and blue stripes of my down vest—which I only brought back out this week after its summer break—did in fact match the colors of my bicycle. Somehow I had never noticed.

“We all have our color palettes!” I happily noted.

I remember coming back to the Seattle airport one time when I was living in France. As I walked through the terminal, everyone seemed to look oddly familiar. I caught myself staring a little too long at several people, thinking that maybe I recognized them.

Then it occurred to me: they were just all dressed in PNW outfits. So many layers! It was a sartorial homecoming.

Layer. Such a beautiful word that can capture so many things.

Layers of a cake. Layers of an onion. Layers of the atmosphere. Layers of identity. Layers of reality.

There are the layers that we see, and the layers that we feel. There are analog ones and digital ones. There are layers that tell us stories of time—in trees, in rocks, and in the earth itself.

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Welcome to the weekend edition Creative Fuel! These weekend missives are for creative inspiration, sometimes through prompts, sometimes through other means. If you’re getting this it’s because you’re a paid subscriber, and you have full access to the archive of weekend prompts + inspiration.

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Today is the first day of fall. It’s also my birthday, and the first day of a new decade for me.

I love that my birthday has always corresponded with the autumn equinox. It’s the marker of seasonal change and a new year wrapped up into one, imbued with a sense of beginning.

These moments are cause for celebration. A little time to pause, to reassess, to move forward in a new way.

I was talking with someone earlier this week about the moment that you finish a big project. The feeling of pride and accomplishment that surfaces—with it a boost of joy and dopamine—but that can often quickly slip away as your mind moves on to the next thing, the next project, the next item on the to-do list.

How can we hold onto that joy, that moment of celebration, a little longer?

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Welcome to the weekend edition Creative Fuel! These weekend missives are for creative inspiration, sometimes through prompts, sometimes through other means. If you’re getting this it’s because you’re a paid subscriber, and you have full access to the archive of weekend prompts + inspiration.

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Earlier this week I found myself in the Seattle Library for a few hours. It was an afternoon in between a work-related event in the morning and an evening early birthday surprise. In other circumstances, I might have been tempted to bring my laptop to the city knowing I would have this afternoon chunk. There’s always some work to be done.

But the laptop had been shipped off a few days prior in need of a new battery—because apparently even computers experience burnout—so I was armed with nothing but my notebook.

I walked up and down the many aisles of books, in the hopes that some idea would jump out at me. I found one called GoatMan: How I Took a Holiday from Being Human1. I flipped through some pages of obscure literary journals in the extensively stocked magazine section.

Finally I made my way over to a desk and sat down. I had no laptop, but there were a few things that I wanted to write down a notebook was all that was required. I actively had to work at shaking the annoyance that arose when I thought about all the work related things that I could and should be doing if only I had my computer. If I’m honest, I felt very fidgety. I reminded myself, “isn’t this what you always want, a little unobstructed space to just sit and write and play with some ideas?”

Well, yes, of course. But in our distracted modern era where the mind is constantly jumping from to-do list to new project idea to newsfeed to “what if someone has emailed me about something important?” (they have not), it’s sometimes difficult to just settle.

With the notebook in front of me, I started where it made sense: I made a list of what work things needed to be done by the end of the week. This led to a list of what I needed to send to the printer next week. Which led to mapping out a newsletter calendar. Which led to a bullet point about a project launch in November I had entirely forgotten about. Which led to an asterisk about an idea for an essay and who I should interview for it. Which led to a tiny sketch of a composition I wanted to test out in a papercut. Which led to me putting down the pen, looking back up and out over the other people quietly working away and thinking, “I really love libraries.”

I hadn’t finished any big projects, written a grandiose essay, or checked off any tasks, but somewhere in putting pen to paper I had started to work my way through the cobwebs. My mind felt a little more open, a little less cluttered.

So when my friend Brendan yesterday linked to an article about the power of a to-do list, of course I clicked on it. “I come bearing but one life hack: the humble to-do list, written out on actual paper, with actual pen,” writes Amanda Mull, offering up a simple yet somehow radical response to the variety of optimization and time management tools that abound all around us.

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I was excited to return to the studio this week. To take some of the impressions of the last month and turn them into something.

I thought about all those things I wanted to take with me from summer and how I would implement them. So on Tuesday morning, still with a hint of jet lag, I reached for my notebook instead of my phone. Creative ritual success #1!

I went on a walk to get the ideas flowing. Creative ritual success #2!

I went to the studio and made a list of all the work things I needed to get done in the week so they would at the very least be out of my head and on paper instead. I resisted the urge to check my email for no good reason. Creative ritual success #3!

Then I got to the task at hand: make some art. At which point, I stalled.

I flipped through my notes and sketches from the summer for inspiration. I looked around the studio at the paper, the pens, the watercolors… in the moment I really didn’t know where to start. Instead of a flow of inspiration I felt stuck in a muddy return.

I texted a friend, “I’m in the studio for the first time today and now realizing I don’t know what to make or how to begin. HOW DO I MAKE ART?”

She of course gave me the advice I would give to anyone:

Scribble a big blob, see what it looks like.

Rip some stuff up, rearrange it.

Lower your expectations.

Even as I got to said blobs, I felt that immediate sense of needing to produce start to percolate back up. It had been so nice to be away from that for a few weeks. So freeing, so expansive.

I hadn’t been dreading coming back to work, in fact, it had felt like the opposite: I had some things I was excited to work on. But nonetheless, there was an incredible slowness in starting back up. I had a sense of stepping back into a routine that I felt entirely unprepared for, or had forgotten how to do. I was out of practice.

For me, like many independent artists and creatives, fall is a time of production. My main thing this month is making my annual calendar, and there is an assortment of other things to line up and have organized before “Elf Season” begins.

Creativity is a matter of process over product, but how do you stay in that process even when a product and outcome is required of you?

It’s all well and good to say, “Experiment! Play! Make what you want!” (which yes, I say all the time) but the reality is that those things are much harder to put into practice than we think. It’s not as easy as just saying them.

While we might come to these essential elements of creativity as children, as adults, they function as much as muscles as any other part of our creative practice. They require regular investment. They need to be constantly maintained. They need structure.

I won’t say that within just a few days I’ve entirely found my way back to my creative work flow, but I’m inching my way forward. I’m mulling this question of how to maintain a sense of looseness and experimentation not in spite of the constraints, but within the constraints. After all, the constraints may look different from person to person, but they’re always with us in some capacity.

offered up a great quote from Vincent Van Gogh in a recent edition of that I think fits here.

“[I]n order to write a book, do a deed, paint a picture with some life in it, one has to be alive oneself. And so, unless you never want to progress, study is a matter of very secondary importance for you. Enjoy yourself as much as you can, have as many diversions as you can, and remember that what people demand in art nowadays is something very much alive, with strong colour and great intensity. So intensify your own health and strength and life a little; that is the best study.

…

So don’t study and grind away too much, for that makes one sterile. Enjoy yourself too much rather than too little, and don’t take art and love too seriously—there is very little one can do about it, it is mainly a question of temperament.”

I know that not everyone who reads this newsletter is a working artist or makes a profession out of their art. But I do think that we all have a sense of understanding what happens when we’re holding onto expectations too tightly, when we’re overthinking what the next step should be, when we lose sight of why we started doing the thing in the first place.

We can be diligent about our creative work. But we need to be equally as diligent about the play in our creative work.

Don’t take it all too seriously.

-Anna

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CREATIVE PROMPT

Put your inner child in charge.

This craving for looseness, for experimentation, for being unattached to the outcome… these are things we used to do. Which means we can find our way back to them.

As you can tell, there’s a bit of a back-to-school energy happening here in the newsletter. But I really do believe that if we drop the baggage that comes with being an adult and abide by a more childlike state of curiosity, wonder, and play once in awhile, we do benefit.

To take the school framework: we all need recess. A little bit of structured time in our everyday where we can let go of the usual expectations and shake out a bit of energy.

And if you’re putting that inner child in charge, whether it’s with an art project, a poem, or some other creative endeavor this weekend, just be sure to give it some snacks and maybe a nap too.

Previous prompts can be found here.

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Welcome to the weekend edition Creative Fuel! These weekend missives are for creative inspiration, sometimes through prompts, sometimes through other means. If you’re getting this it’s because you’re a paid subscriber, and you have full access to the archive of weekend prompts + inspiration.

I woke up very early this morning (thank you jet lag) and watc…

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Welcome to the weekend edition Creative Fuel! These weekend missives are for creative inspiration, sometimes through prompts, sometimes through other means. Paid subscribers have full access to the archive of weekend prompts + inspiration.

Subscribe now

It’s the last weekend in August.

Autumn Equinox isn’t until later in September, which means that technically we have several weeks of summer left—we don’t have to say goodbye quite yet. But we all know that the end of this current month feels like the final chapter of the season.

Whatever happened in the preceding summer days will now come to a close.

Whatever expectations of how our summer days would go are tabled until next year.

Whatever intensity that summer has brought, we hope the cool air of fall will push it away.

Whatever dreams and desires that hung in the summer air might simply evaporate, or hopefully they’ll take new forms, imbued with their summer energy and ready for the next phase.

August exits stage left. We move on.

Last August I spent most of the month away from home, and this year has been the same. For adventure, yes, but also because it’s easier to take a proper break when your desk isn’t nearby, when the studio isn’t calling.

These stints away from home have meant that August has become a month of “taking in” for me. In other words, not one of production, but of opening up and being receptive to all the colors, sounds, and imprints that the world offers up.

This is incredibly essential to the creative process. I always think of The Oatmeal comic about creativity being like breathing.

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Welcome to the weekend edition Creative Fuel! These weekend missives are for creative inspiration, sometimes through prompts, sometimes through other means. If you’re getting this it’s because you’re a paid subscriber, and you have full access to the archive of weekend prompts + inspiration.

Subscribe now

I wrote a little bit about Singla yesterday. I could fill page…

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I mentioned last week that I needed a bit of a break from my own self-imposed constraint of writing weekend creative prompts.

But I also love sending little weekend creative missives out into the world, so today I thought I’d share a travelogue of sorts: a little dose of artwork and creative in…

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