Creative Winter

A conversation with writer Katherine May on taking breaks, the need for shutting down the external and turning inward, and the intense bursts of production and rest required for creative work.

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Hello friends,

This is the first official newsletter of 2025. I am certain we can all agree that the new year is off to a shaky and uncertain start. I’ve been holed up in a writing cave at a residency, sticking to my resolution to not look at email on my phone and minimize distractions so that I can commit some devoted time to working on my book.

But it is hard not to dip into the news, difficult not to feel the weight of emotion. There’s a whole state in between me and California, but I think that for anyone on the west coast, wildfires have a particular kind of horror to them. Even if we haven’t had them directly in our backyard, we have smelled the smoke, we’ve become used to checking air quality apps on our phones in summer months, we all know the exact color of sunsets in smoke-filled skies. Many of us know of someone—whether it’s a close connection or a peripheral acquaintance—who have in some way been personally affected by fire.

I appreciated

Liz Plank

’s words this week, working at naming the collective grief that we feel in the face of this—and so many other—catastrophes:

What we’re all feeling is grief. Not the tidy, private kind, but a vast, collective mourning that binds us together. We are grieving not just the world we’ve lost but the futures we were promised, the ones we dared to dream of and expected to inherit.

In contrast, here in my neck of the woods, it feels very wet. We haven’t had a proper frost, making January seem more like early spring than winter. As usual, I’m treating January as an in-between month. Which the more I think about it, is kind of how a lot of months feels these days. Full of unknowns, uncertainties. We hang in limbo in the in-between.

For these coming weeks, I wanted to dive into the topic of creative winter—essentially, what this season looks and feels like creatively. If you’re going to talk about winter, then you have to start with

Katherine May

, author of books like Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times and Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age. We connected for a conversation in mid-December, but the lessons of that dark, midwinter time are still applicable as we move through this month.

What I am holding onto from our conversation is what’s required of us as writers and artists to do our work well: quiet time of reflection. It is in that space that we create our best work, but it is also in that space that we identify what is important to us. People, planet, community. It’s that time of removing the non-essential elements that allows us to rest, to connect, and to refocus our attention. To continue in our ongoing creative response.

These are topics that are near and dear to my heart, and in this little exploration of the season of creative winter over the next few weeks we’ll be exploring these themes.

-Anna

ps: I’ll be joining Katherine’s book club later this month as a special guest. We’re reading A Woman in the Polar Night, and I can’t wait to chat about it. Come join us.

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Anna Brones: You wrote a book on wintering, and now, you have a really intense winter season. How does winter feel for you these days creatively?

Katherine May: Yeah, I slightly curse what I've done to my own winter because, you know, I wrote a book about how lovely this pause is, and how luxuriant it feels to kind of hibernate. My Decembers are now so busy I could literally sit and cry most evenings. I've got that full body craving to rest, and it's my busiest time of year. I manage that in a couple of ways. One is I'm really aggressive about not working in summer. I really assert that space. It's not my ideal rest space, but I need a down time in my year. So now I have winter in summer, which is like dripping with irony, but there we go.

Maybe you just need to move to the southern hemisphere?

Yeah, New Zealand is my future. [laughs] I mean, it looks really nice from the Lord of the Rings films, right?

But actually, I do not work between the solstice and New Year, that's my absolute rule. I keep the long midwinter. I make the break with my solstice bonfire. That is the moment that everything stops and it's become so important to me. The hilarious thing is that I'm normally so busy that I run there, like, with a basket of wood and a flask of tea, and like, panicking. Then I get that massive exhale.

Are you strict with yourself about not doing any creative work during that time, or do you have some flexibility?

I’m strict about not doing external work. That's how my strictness lies. My creative work, I'm absolutely here for it, whenever it comes.

We need to think really hard as creative people about how we allow ourselves to actually be creative. It's so easy to do everything but, and to be doing all this outward, shiny, jazz-hands stuff. Books do not get written that way for me. I need to shut it down. I need to not be living in public for a while.

-Katherine May

Before Wintering came out, what did your creative seasons look like?

I don't think I was that aware of them before I wrote Wintering. I always had those intentions to do some deep work in the middle of the year. I think that is my natural creative season. I find it really hard to connect with creative work in the summer. I feel too restless, and I'm full of practical ideas. I get this kind of whole reforming wave that runs through me in the summer, like I'm going to reorganize everything. But in the winter, it's that lovely, cozy, creative kind of merging space between dreams, wakefulness, and dark. I find that really fertile.

What you said about the external work, I feel the same way. The output that we have—the external facing part of our work—is draining for a lot of creatively-minded people. But it’s really required of us in this day and age. It's interesting to think about how we can feel like selfish to take that time away. As if we have to justify it, “I don’t have an external facing thing right now, but I'm working!” How do you think about that? Have you gotten better at that over time?

Yeah, I know how much I need it. That’s the truth of it. If I don't take a break, I can feel my cognition degrading over time, like I'm doing too much outputting. As winter begins to thaw, everyone forgets me for a while, which is great. And at that point I start to aggressively assert my space.

We need to think really hard as creative people about how we allow ourselves to actually be creative. It's so easy to do everything but, and to be doing all this outward, shiny, jazz-hands stuff. Books do not get written that way for me. I need to shut it down. I need to not be living in public for a while.

Because this time of year is so intense, and then you go into a proper break period, do you feel like it's hard to transition in and out of that?

I always think I work best in extremes. There’s a little bit of transition, but I am quite set up for that. I get to the point of exhaustion, and then I stop for a while.

A couple of years ago, I'd have hated myself for saying that. You know, I'd be like, “no, take every interview that's offered you. Always do it.” Life will teach you your boundaries as you go through it, and my boundaries in this phase of my life have got to be drawn in a really different way to how they used to be.

I have spent the last five years making myself increasingly hard to get hold of. Sometimes I get some very angry messages about that, and that tells me I'm doing it right. I will not work to the publishing industry's crazy timescales that they have to deal with. It's awful for them. I don't have to take part in it. I choose it. I know it's a privilege not to have to, but God knows, for the first half of my career, I did enough of it.

I mean, yes, it is a privilege on one hand, but on the flip side, it's also what's required for you to do your work. Which is not actually a privilege, right?

I’m trying to say it’s a “privilege,” but actually it led me into this repeated pattern of burnout that was completely debilitating. I dropped out of all kinds of jobs. It was not possible for me to do and I'm not doing it now that I get to choose. I think the more people like us set boundaries, the more possible it is for other people to start saying, “oh, wait a minute, I don't think I'm okay with this either.”

This word “burnout”… A lot of people feel it, but it's interesting in terms of creative process. You said something that I resonate with, which is that you're in the extremes, you have an extreme work period, and then you go int extreme rest, and then you come back. That’s my balance as well. I have heard a similar thing from a lot of artists and creatives who I know. Maybe “burnout” is not the right word, but it's almost like a hint of burnout is inevitable in the process.

Yeah, I think there's a difference between getting tired and burnout. I think the way that we probably work is that we work until we're tired and then stop. Whereas I think burnout comes when you push past that. That's the burnout territory. But I don't mind working really hard sometimes, I don't mind having intense periods. Partly because they buy me the quieter periods and I quite like that exchange.

But also, there's something about the intensity of creative work that requires those really long hours of hard work in order to fully capture it. Ideas fade really quickly once they come, and if you don't throw yourself at them, you've lost them. So it's part of what I need to do in order to pin down that big cloud of thought that happens.

I definitely feel that this time of year. In the summer, I want to be outside, and I don't want to be hunkered down working on my thing. What's interesting about doing a lot of work in this time of year, it's almost like the momentum encourages more momentum and more ideas. So this season feels super rich to me. I always joke that this the time when I have the most ideas, but I have zero time or energy to actually act on them. I've been thinking a lot about how you harness those ideas in a better way. Because you can feel like, ”there's this thing, but I can't do it right now.” And then sometimes I will get to the end of January thinking, “now I'm a concrete block and I will never have another idea again.”

Rebecca Armstrong

and I visited the house of Lucy M. Boston, the author of Children of Green Knowe, and we saw her quilt collection. In the summer, she didn't write at all. She worked on her garden, and in the winter, she wrote—she alternated between writing and quilting. And I thought, “oh, that is so relatable.”

This idea that she hunkered down in the winter but she didn't just write, she alternated with something that was more physical. That is exactly what I need to do. Then in the summer, she just let go of it. That is such a great way to work.

I walk a lot more in the winter than the summer. I'm not great in the heat. But also, I need that contrast, and it really helps me to think, it helps me to get those ideas processed. I often voice record them into my phone. Wintering is a great notebooking time as well. Just capture all of that, and then you have to remember to read it in the summer, when you've got some brain space.

That’s right. I think this gets to the stupid thing that we do with creativity all the time, which is to think about it as we think of regular, industrial work. The model doesn't fit, and I think we struggle more if we're trying to apply that model.

I still have this in-built notion that I should be working a 9-to-5 at a desk. Rationally, I know better than that, and I know that's not how my best work is produced. But there's always a bit of me that feels like I’m slacking, not following that pattern. I continue to remind myself that is not how my best work is done. But I always slip back into, “other people are at work. I should be at work.”

This time of year I'm mostly working seven days a week, so I try to find the breaks in between. The mindset of this is so hard. Even when you've devoted your life to a creative career, and you're definitely trying not to buy into it, it just it creeps back up on you. It’s so easy to overwork in this kind of role.

To your point, about working on a book: it’s a really long time before you have anything to “show” for all of your thinking and processing. I think that it's easy to try to fill that space with other things, like a newsletter [laughs], which is what I do, because then it’s easy to say “look at everything I did!” right? There’s a dopamine thing there too, because you finished something, you felt success.

Yeah, that’s exactly why I love doing the newsletter. The writing is so much lighter than book writing. You can say something that is for now, it doesn't have to be relevant in six month’s time. But when you write a book, it's not even going to be published for a year after you hand it in. There's this hideous sense of writing to the reader of the future who you don't know.

I work with an editor, Rebecca, who helps to keep me on track. She always says to me, “every time you say that you're going to calm down your schedule and write fewer posts to make it easier for your readers to keep up with you, something bursts out of you.” And I think you're really similar.

Oh yeah. I will say that I'm taking a break sometimes, but I've tried to be a little less strict about it, because if I say that up front—that I'm not doing anything for the next month—then all of a sudden, two days later, I'm like, “I want to do something!”

Yeah, as soon as you make space, the ideas come.

I think in the newsletter space, maybe we're coming to that a little bit more, because most of us are so overwhelmed that we just need to do what works for us. Maybe we communicate that and maybe we don't, but we can have a little more looseness around it.

It makes me think of my good friend Roshni, who's an artist. We are always trying to remind each other, “maybe we just have fun?” To not take things so seriously, but to take that energy itself seriously. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, I totally agree. I interviewed Andy J. Pizza about his podcast, and one of the things that he said—that I fully agreed with but I always forget—is that most often, the most simple thing you do is the most beloved thing by your audience. That’s because it's the water you swim in, so you don't value it. But it seems wonderful to them. I wish I could absorb that lesson.

We need a huge poster with that on the wall next to our desk as a reminder. Again, I think that is also largely because of, the capitalist model, where it's only good if it's hard. We don't trust what is easy and fun and simple.

It's so true. I really keep swearing that the next book I write will be something simple, not this big, complex meandering through social anthropology. I don't know if I'll ever pull it off.

But the question is, how you do that? How do you do that and not overcomplicate it? I think it's our inclination to overcomplicate because we're so trained to feel that way.

I have a very complicated, meddling brain that likes lots of weird things, and I just can’t. I'm writing books for me. I want the books with the weird kind of theoretical perspectives. But I'm possibly the only person that actually wants them.

Well, and I think about the “simple” stuff resonating, it's also the stuff that is the truest for you. It’s the stuff that you probably express the best, because it’s in you, and it just comes out. That’s an act of trusting ourselves.

And I think there's something about direct conversation with your reader. When you stop looking away, and you just get in their eyeline and go right to the center.

It matters that we talk to each other like that.

Thank you so much to Katherine for doing this interview! If you’re not already subscribed, check out her newsletter The Clearing. Katherine mentioned Rebecca in this interview, and I’m also a big fan of Rebecca’s newsletter Art Nest.

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UPCOMING CREATIVE FUEL WORKSHOPS

DIVE Seasonal Writing Group // Winter 2025

The seasonal writing group DIVE kicks off this month and there are still some spots open. If any of you want to make winter a season of writing, this is a great way to do just that. Three months of weekly prompts and check-ins from facilitator

Kerri Anne

, and monthly meetings with fellow creatives. There is a Tuesday cohort (starts January 21) and a Thursday cohort (starts January 23). You can pick which one works best for you!

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