I love being a writer because it’s one of the few places where I don’t feel the need to tone myself down, and let’s be honest, I can be pretty dramatic when I let myself be: verbose and energetic.
I feel everything intensely, both pleasure and pain, awe and despair, and every nuanced twang in between. It’s as if my mind operates many different cameras at once, seeing the world from my own perspective but also seeing myself from the corner of the room, from outside the house, from a nearby bird, from a passing cloud.
I see alternate universes, too. Lives I almost lived, lives I can barely imagine, and so many paths that fork into an infinite set of possibilities. I can give myself existential vertigo if I’m not careful. I suspect many of us creative-types feel this way.
It’s a lot to navigate without a way to untangle the layered images, and writing gives all that speed and intensity somewhere to go.
This September, I’m creating a two-week image and intuition studio for paid subscribers, with four creative letters, a live workshop, and space for feedback. I’ll tell you more below, but first I want to explain why I keep returning to photography whenever my writer brain begins to overheat.
But photography and visual art do something else;
they slow
my mind
down.
Photography is even better than meditation for me when it comes to returning my attention to the present moment. It allows me to come out of the cognitive and existential jumble and back into my body, the world, the soft light filtered through the bedroom window, the sweet curl of the cat’s paw against her face, the shadows dancing on the green velvet of the living room sofa.
Instead of spiraling further into space, I become focused, clear, attentive.
Of course, writing poems involves both layered writing and images (at least metaphorically speaking) and I am always on the lookout for new visuals to spark my meaning-making mind.
The creative mind craves novelty and pattern, the small shock of encountering something it didn’t quite expect. When I lose the flow of my writing, I turn toward art, dreams, photographs, strange objects, and changing light.
I feel for resonance.
When you find an image that vibrates inside you, that is resonance. That is poetry, heat, electricity, gold. Do not ignore that moment, go right inside of it as you would a beloved cave you found as a child. Build a fire there and waste the entire afternoon inside it. Meet yourself again and again inside these pockets of spacetime. In this way you will begin to know the shape of your own voice from within.
Sometimes resonance gathers slowly, one image calling to another across a few weeks. And sometimes the vibrations cohere quickly and create an urgency that only creative flow can release; an unstoppable building toward an unknown ending.
When I feel that rise inside, I know I have found my own frequency. I know I will not be led astray, and that the words will fall into place like sure hoofbeats on a wide path, a galloping glory of image and motion and release.
In those moments, I try not to be afraid of the speed or the heat. I try not turn away from the language that comes. I do not edit or ask whether it is useful, I simply let the words bend and break in the wake of intuition.
The mind knows how to make meaning before the conscious self understands what it is making.
The beginning of September is one of my favorite times of year.
I get that back-to-school, new-notebook, get-organized, new-shoes feeling. It is the beginning of the year for academics and UU churches, and therefore always feels like a kind of New Year for me creatively.
Everything is still humming with life and as ripe as it gets.
With all this in mind, I would love to invite you to come play with me for a couple of weeks in early September and refill your creative well with collage, image, and poetry.
The Waning Garden is a two-week creative studio included with every paid Earth & Verse subscription. There is no additional registration fee and the letters will come as usual through Earth & Verse!
From September 1–15, I will bring you into my methods for finding, creating, and using imagery for poetic inspiration, as well as for use in your publications and newsletters.
We will explore collage, photography, visual art, color, graphic design, strange objects, and evocative images. We will use them to loosen the mind, interrupt familiar patterns, and generate new creative material.
By the end of our two weeks, I hope you will have a small body of visual and written work to continue exploring through the fall: collages, photographs, fragments, unexpected connections, and the beginnings of new poems or essays.
More importantly, you will have a few new ways to find your way back into creative flow when language alone feels tangled, depleted, or difficult to find.
Join The Waning Garden by choosing any paid subscription.
(Free subscribers will still receive a taste of the studio through the regular weekly letters, so if you’re new here, do hit that subscribe button even if you’re not quite ready to upgrade.)
If you become a paid subscriber before Sept 1, you’ll receive:
Four lush, prompt-filled letters
Creative invitations for exploring collage, photography, visual art, color, graphic design, and imagery to enhance and inspire your work.
A live Scrying the Photograph workshop
Sunday, September 6, from 3–4 p.m. Eastern.
Together, we will use strange and evocative photographs as portals into story, intuition, and new creative material.
This workshop is in addition to our typical monthly circles.
A recording of the class
The recording will be available for anyone unable to attend live. I almost never do this!
Q&A and feedback from me in the private group chat
This is a generative studio rather than an editorial workshop, so feedback will focus on resonance, possibility, and where the images might lead you next.
When you become a paid subscriber, you are joining an ongoing creative circle, not simply registering for one class.
Paid members can attend regular live workshops, gain access to the paid library of posts, the private group chat, and special seasonal experiences like The Waning Garden.
If your writing has begun to feel a little stale, repetitive, or difficult to enter, come spend two weeks gathering images with me.
The Waning Garden begins September 1. Upgrade by August 31 to receive the entire experience from the beginning.
I’m excited about this, friends. Please don’t hesitate to ask me any questions in the comments, or feel free to message me.
Know someone who needs this kind of thing? Your shares are how I get my work out into the world. every one is deeply appreciated.
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