Season One: Welcome to the Commonplace Circle

Hello, friend.

The time has come for us to begin our shared commonplace practice together! This has been a thought in my head and desire in my heart for a few months now, and as I become more comfortable on this platform, I only grow more excited to connect with all of you with similar values to do something as radical as creating space for our intellectual and creative lives in community and resisting distraction.

Before I get into the practicalities, I want to share my “why” so that you can perhaps think on yours or be inspired to reflect on why you are joining this community, and why you want to take seriously the practice of keeping a commonplace book. I try to get my why straight before I commit to anything because without it, there’s little hope for consistency.

If you are completely new to commonplacing, make sure to first check out my post below for basic information:

How to Start a Commonplace Book

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May 23

Since I’ve started creating content I’ve received dozens of questions about how to start a commonplace book, and I don’t even know how to convey how much that excites and activates me. This essay is my attempt at answering and making the barrier to entry less intimidating because everyone should experience the delights of commonplacing, truly! My own t…

As I age, I become increasingly aware of how important what I do with my time is. Cultivating curiosity, wonder, and the habits of the woman I want to become won't happen if I stay on the conveyor belt of productivity culture — doomscrolling, rushing, living on autopilot without an intentional practice of presence at all.

Distraction is the great enemy of a life hungrily pursuing knowledge, beauty, and truth — the cornerstones of what philosophers have long called the good life. Leisure is becoming harder to make time for, yet leisure is where we learn to notice and be moved by beauty. If we keep drifting on autopilot, we’ll look back one day and realize we never did what we always meant to.

Slowing down to create and notice is simply a beautiful way to live. Commonplacing is a fun, structured way to do that by filling our minds with beautiful ideas that inspire us, while feeding both our desire to make beautiful things and our desire to stay intellectually engaged. A creative life is easier to sustain with accountability and friendship around it, so why not do it together? (See: C.S. Lewis and the Inklings.)

Now that I’ve shared the “why” of it all, let’s look at how this season’s practice together will look like, and I’ll share some suggestions for supplies, and other practicalities.

About half of you voted on our first theme, and as a result we will be focusing on the theme of Joy: its history, habits, and color. Our first season will run for roughly eight weeks. That will give us time to savor our ideas before moving on to the next, but not so much time that we lose our momentum in a lull. Each week I’ll drop a new prompt here to guide our research and give our commonplacing a little direction. My hope is that through our shared discussion in the chat, you will be encouraged to show up in your commonplace book consistently, no matter what that looks like for you.

Throughout the week we will be gathering in the chat (located within the substack platform), where you can expect the following:

1. The week’s prompt: a direction for our research and entries.

2. A little something to spark curiosity: a question to discuss, a film to watch, a poem, or a rabbit hole.

Sharing is completely optional. If you’re inspired to post a photo of your spread in the chat, I would be delighted to see it, but if you prefer to keep your entries private, I understand! There’s no pressure here!

Week 1: What does joy mean to you?

Before we research anyone else’s ideas of joy, we will start with assessing our own. In week 1 we will start by pulling three or four images that feel most like joy to you (I shared some of my own above, and they might overlap with yours so feel free to share them again. You can pull them from Pinterest, Google, old magazines and print and paste them onto your first spread. For the writing portion, share what you came up with and don’t overthink it!

For the chat: Introduce yourself and share what you came up with when thinking on your own ideas of joy, and what images you found! This is where we can find a treasure trove of images to print for inspiration in our own entries so share away!