I’m just superstitious enough to buy into deaths coming in threes. When Dolly Parton died, I braced myself for who was next. Sure enough, it was one doozy followed by another: Tim Curry & Yayoi Kusama.

Revisiting their work, I see vibrancy. I see ebullience. I see joy. And also underneath the light, I see a lesson in how to creatively engage with what is scary, with what is dismissed, pushed aside, buried.

joy / grief

hilarity / terror

light / shadow

When I close my eyes and imagine these three artists together, what I feel is longing. That longing takes the shape of a body reaching towards something just out of its grasp.

or: the desire to push creative edges

I imagine Dolly, Tim, and Yayoi understood the longing in that reach, the need to do right by their art and not abandon their creative desires—the song, the sculpture, the the immersive performance—even if they didn’t yet know how to create the thing that was asking to be born.

The longing I feel is also about having the time, the resources, the emotional and physical capacity to create the things that I’m meant to bring into the world. The reach is about the work, both the joy of it and the frustration of knowing I need to reach further because I don’t know yet how to give birth to the creative desires demanding my attention.

Maybe showing up for your creative desires is what makes you an artist.

and also…

There’s that potential next step, if you feel the urge to take it: sharing your work with the world.

For Jenn and me, that looks like spending the tale-end of summer in the weeds with a long-ass-book-related-to-do-list. We’re finalizing the Joyful Practice website/online shop and getting things ready for fulfilling (i.e. shipping) our Kickstarter rewards.

We’ll pick up the books from the printers in a couple of weeks, just in time for our first two book launch events this fall (which include an author’s talk at the Olympia library on 9/23, plus round two of Olympia Arts Walk with Heart of the Deernicorn and Studio Golden on 10/2 & 10/3—you can buy a copy of the book, along with other Joyful Practice-related objects, at both events).

Whew-eeee—we’re still tired, y’all, but holding a proof of the book in our hands is giving us a little boost.

We want to share a few pages from the first proof of the Joyful Practice Handbook with our Substack community first, so here you go, a random selection that offers a taste of what is to come:

Share The Scrap Heap

and here’s a re-post from 2025 that features Dolly Parton…

What If You Followed Your Creative Impulses?

(prompts for playfulness)

Last week, I wrote about Baubo, goddess of the absurd and the sacred fool who followed her creative impulse to flash Demeter and brought about spring by re-energizing Demeter’s search for Persephone. Inspired by Baubo, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it might look like to follow my creative impulses, especially the silliest and most absurd ones. So far, I haven’t flashed anyone, but as far as creative impulses go, I think it’s solid.

A few creative impulses I’ve felt this week:

Turn everything into a song. This impulse comes from what I call the Granny DNA (or, like my cousin says, that’s some June Rose shit). I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel the impulse to turn everything into a song. My granny (and also my mom and aunties) had the habit of taking the thread of a conversation and turning it into a song. For example, if someone stopped over unexpectedly, Granny would sing in a shaky falsetto, If I knew that you were coming, I’d have baked a cake.

When my daughter was potty training, I’d sing her that Eddy Murphy song ‘My Girl Wants to Party All the Time,’ except I’d sing, My girl want to potty all the time, potty all the time, potty all the tiiime. I still sing it to my littlest nieces and nephews, and sometimes I sing it really loud when I pee just because I can.

When he was in his early 20’s, my son called to tell me he’d just discovered that the crossing-the-street-fast song from his toddlerhood (Run ‘Mitri ruuun; go ‘Mitri gooo!) was actually ‘Bullet’ by the Misfits (if you know the lyrics to this song or have ever seen a photo of Danzig, you will understand why my son was so surprised when he first heard the not-made-up-by-his-mom version of the song and realized I’d toddlerized the refrain for tiny him.)

Back in my Orca Books days, my granny’s voice came to me in the form of a Dolly Parton & Kenny Rogers country/pop song from the 80’s. Did you know that many book titles can be sung to the tune of ‘Islands in the Stream’? Gorillas in the Mist; that is what they are. Olive Kitteridge; that is who you are. And on and on. Try it out next time you’re looking through your bookshelf, or better yet, pull a Granny and ask your friends out for a drink a la Dolly and Kenny: Sail away with me to the Brotherhood, and we’ll buy drinks for each other, ah haa, from one brother to another, ah ahh. (I’ve tried many versions of this with my sweetie–it’s fun how annoying it can be).

Lay under the maple tree and watch the adolescent squirrels play at mating. I didn’t follow through with the laying under the maples part but only because I have a scalp full of staples from a particularly deep basal cell carcinoma that was removed from my head last week. (I might be a little stoned from pain killers as I write this.) (Also, my right eyebrow is temporarily pulled up a titch higher than the left, which makes me look comically quizzical or slightly skeptical, depending on the tone of the words coming out of my mouth.) Instead, I watched the squirrels play-screwing from the dining room table. They fell from the tree. And also off the fence. It hurt my head to laugh, which made me laugh harder. (Sidebar: My sweetie says laying and watching squirrels practice getting it on is not following a creative impulse—its voyeurism. I say that one person’s voyeurism is another person’s artistic observation).

Interpretive dancing in my underwear to The Pixies ‘Monkey Gone to Heaven.’ Possibly a painkiller fueled creative impulse, although I do dance in my underwear often but never to the Pixies (yet). I also did not follow through with this one–turns out jumping up and down with staples in your head is not just absurd, its stupidly painful.

I think Baubo (and Dolly Parton) would approve of these impulsive creative acts, and in her honor, in the back of my journal, I’ve started keeping a list of creative impulses I want to explore. These include things as complex as creating a series of ceramic vessels that ‘hold’ my experiences of walking the Camino, to thinking about ways to incorporate chance and play into my creative process (my current favorite is pulling a card from a tarot deck every morning before I write and letting the card set the theme for the writing).

Here are some prompts and practices I offered to our joyful practice virtual workshop a few weeks ago when we talked about Baubo and following our creative impulses. I offer them to you now as inspiration. Try them out and play with them–make them your own and let them evolve in the ways they want as your relationship to your own creative practice changes:

Baubo-Inspired Free-Write

• Make a list of creative impulses that are popping into your brain right now–it doesn’t matter if they seem silly, unrealistic, or absurd (see above list). Honor these creative impulses by writing them down.

• Write for five or so minutes about what it might look like to follow your creative impulses? What might happen?

Joyful Practice Habit

Keep an ongoing list of creative impulses. They might come in handy! See if you can follow one creative impulse a day or a week or a month–whatever fits into your life. The point is to try and create a habit–a joyful practice–of following your creative impulses.

Joyful Practice Challenge

Set aside a morning or an afternoon (or one hour if that’s all you got) (or an entire day if you can swing it). Follow your creative impulses. You may or may not want to track them by jotting each impulse down as you go. You may or may not want to take notes of your experience during, or write reflections after, this joyful practice challenge. Do what you want! If you have a hard time getting started, look at the list you made (or choose something from my list to get you going).

My experience is that when I practice following my creative impulses, one leads to another. Like turning on a spigot, they just start flowing. The point of this challenge is to not judge, to be playful, and to indulge in the absurd.

Last week, I asked if absurdity is a necessary agent for change. I think the answer is yes, but I also think that we can’t begin to take absurdity seriously until we begin playing with it. Now is the time to go get in touch with your inner Baubo.

Comments are open below.

Please feel free to share your own list of creative impulses and the experience of following them (no matter how absurd, Dolly-Parton-bling-fueled, or potentially annoying they might be–we want to hear about all of them!).

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18+ meant that you didn’t even need a fake ID. You could show the bouncer some random card with your name on it, and they’d just nod like they knew better, but whatever. You could see the show, you just couldn’t get a wristband for liquor. We weren’t there for the liquor.

We were fifteen and we were there for the Breeders.

We were fifteen and we had no curfews, but also we had no rides home. To get home, we had to get on the subway in time to catch the last bus home, the 71, which left (let’s say) at 12:41. We were fifteen with no curfews, but also hyper vigilant and responsible, and so we knew going into it that we wouldn’t catch the whole show.

In my memory, this is what I saw.

In my memory, the first song was Glorious, the first song on Pod, which I owned on cassette tape.

I don’t remember what the second song was, only that we had to flee when it ended.

That I caught two songs of an early Breeders show as a teenager is a little story I’ve carried with me like a piece of unresolved history. I like my dedication. I’m sad that I was so responsible that I couldn’t take a risk and watch the whole thing. (Why didn’t I take the subway to Harvard Square and simply walk the 5 miles home? Oh, because I worried for my body walking alone at night?)

There’s a chapter in our forthcoming book where I write about what I call the Time Seam—the ways that we can move back and forth through time with ease and fluidity; the ways that we can use this fluidity to mend rips.

When I saw back in February that The Breeders would be playing in Seattle this summer, I wasn’t thinking of the time seam. I just wanted to go. I bought tickets and held the date on my calendar. In the days leading to the concert I remembered my attempt 33 years ago to see the Breeders. Every time I did, it felt like an itch. I didn’t realize I was scratching it—not until the Breeders took the stage and played.

My companion had gone to the bathroom and so I sat alone (but surrounded) and the first song was Doe which is, as those of you who know will know, the second song on Pod.

And I had nowhere to be, no bus to catch. My companion returned. He was also my ride. I could listen to every song. I was healing the time seam.

It only worked because the songs still held energy, for me and for the band members. It worked because there were old songs and brand new songs and the new songs sounded as good as the old songs but also different from the old songs, like they didn’t have to pretend they hadn’t lived the 30+ years between then and now.

I didn’t have to pretend either. I wasn’t at a dark Boston club, I was outside. There were trees and birds. It was barely dark when the concert ended. I was home by 10:30.

I kid you not, though I now live on the other side of the country, and though I’ve never once paid attention to the bus routes here, on the drive home I passed a bus and on it was the number 71.

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Birthing is like that: books. babies. businesses. projects of any sort. When we grow something with love and attention, there reaches a point where its time for it to get released into the world.

Next week, we’ll do a big ole book cover reveal, and until then, I thought it might be nice to re-visit the Joyful Practice manifestos Jenn and I wrote last February, when we were at the very beginning of this Fool’s journey. I’m re-posting Jenn’s manifesto today, and you can find mine here.

But first, a couple of upcoming events in Olympia:

• This Friday evening (the 21st), I’ll be hanging out in the Orca Books parking lot, participating in a book release for the late Leijia Hanrahan’s book, Like Songs About Airports. We’ll be reading poetry and essays from the book.

• Monday, August 24th, 3:30-5:30pm, Jenn and I will offer a Collective Art Project at the Olympia Library. Its drop-in and free! All ages welcome!

• Wednesday, September 23rd, 6:30pm, also at the Olympia Library, we’re having a launch event and authors’ talk for The Joyful Practice Handbook. The book will be available to buy (along with other fun stuff like tees and greeting cards), and if you are a Kickstarter backer in or near Oly, you can pick up your rewards while attending the event.

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Here’s Jenn’s Joyful Practice manifesto, originally published in February 2025:

What is Joyful Practice

a personal manifesto

Last week, at the age of 48, I earned an ADHD diagnosis. Arriving at a new understanding of my brain has been transformative, and I wanted to write about that here, but I’ve been having trouble finding the words for it.

Next week, Sarah and I will begin our 8-week virtual workshop, Joyful Practice for Dark Times, and as we’ve fine-tuned our planning, I keep telling myself lean into the Joyful Practice part of the title. (The Dark Times part is taking care of itself.)

I realized that to lean into Joyful Practice, I had to define it for myself — to wrap my hands around the shape of this thing I’ve been trying to grasp.

Joyful practice, for me, has been my life’s project over the decade broadly and over the last two years in particular. Two years ago, on a dare to myself, I traded my stable, full-time job for a flexible part-time role. I quit because my kids needed me, but the deeper truth is that I needed me. To put it another way, there was room in my life for my kids and my job, but there wasn’t much left over for me.

I wanted to trust that I could cut back on work, live close to the bone, and a new path would emerge. Saying I wanted to trust is different from saying that I trusted. I was scared. I’ve been scared. The new path didn’t emerge quickly. But luckily a magical stubbornness emerged in me. I did the following things:

I took out a loan and bought a tiny house from a friend. It immediately became my sanctuary, a place for me to have restorative quiet. I’m in here now typing and looking around at my favorite things. I didn’t know how much I needed my very own space until I had it.

I’ve worked steadily on my own volition, putting daily energy into things I want to do. I’ve sent out pitches and submitted essays. I’ve built a small portfolio of picture book drafts. For some strange reason, I haven’t worried or lost heart when my work lands in the void. The void is a hungry place, I guess. It needs feeding. I’ve not concluded that I’m on the wrong path or unworthy. I just keep returning to the work I want to create. I keep believing in it.

Sometimes I encounter opportunities that, practically speaking, I should pursue—things that don’t inspire me but would provide some measure of security. I watch those opportunities gather dust. I notice that I’m not pursuing them, that I feel solid about not pursuing them, and I think, Wow, okay. That’s new.

I don’t believe in grit anymore. I don’t believe in discipline. I don’t believe in making people do things. My Autistic kids have taught me that. My own neurodivergence, now that I’m listening, has taught me that. I don’t believe in forcing myself do things.

I do believe in hard work when it’s driven by the heart and the body. I believe in slowing down and showing up. I believe in noticing what’s hard and letting it be hard.

I believe in resilience insofar as it means staying alive and attuning to the self. I reject any notion of resilience that means conforming to the demands of a broken system or coming back for more abuse.

For me, joyful practice has meant letting go of things I’ve clung to out of fear. It has meant understanding that things can go wrong, but still taking risks.

Joyful practice means that in the morning, when I put on Democracy Now and Amy Goodman reads the day’s horrific news, I dance to the funk music that plays in the background (the track is “Need to Know” by Incognito and I swear it was designed for this), not because the news itself is joyful, but because I need that information to move through my body rather than festering in my joints.

Joyful practice means celebrating queerness, rejecting the gender binary, and inhabiting forbidden spaces.

Joyful practice means remembering that laughter is a tonic.

Joyful practice means pursuing friendship with animals and honoring their sovereign intelligence.

Joyful practice means plunging into the cold sea.

Joyful practice means attending to the energy of money, noticing where it feels good to give and receive and where money gets stuck in entropy. Joyful practice means withholding from the oligarchs.

Joyful practice means seeking out stories and music by elders who have endured and claimed claimed their space in the world. It means watching this clip of Patti Lupone:

and this performance by Big Freedia:

Joyful practice means seeking stories and music by those who are younger than me and driven by the wisdom of youth:

Joyful practice means witnessing myself claim space where I once would have hidden.

Joyful practice means that when I sit down to write, I ask my brain what it wants to work on and I listen to its answer. We have a daily dialogue (my brain and I) about which projects feel exciting and generative, which ones are asking to go on the shelf.

Joyful practice understands that “pushing through” is overrated, that when you’re tired it’s better to rest and restore than to try to keep driving on an empty tank.

Joyful practice is the liberation of my ADHD brain: the unbridled enthusiasm and curiosity I experience, the every-which-way my brain wants to go, not because I have a deficit of attention, but because I have a surplus of curiosity, because I’m wired for hypervigilance, and therefore I require some extra quiet time, some stillness, some gentleness in my life.

Joyful practice is a way of being that has slowly been coming into focus for me. I want to practice it in solitude and in community.

Yesterday morning, I sat on the couch with my partner and told her that Joyful Practice was the name of my new philosophy. Like me, she’s a little scared of the word joyful, because there’s nothing more vulnerable than joy. But I’ve come to see it as an expansive word—adjacent to happiness, yes, but also to the whole range of human emotions. Joyful practice means letting your body be a conduit. It means letting life move through you rather than happen to you.

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These the pages were once I made about a year ago, trying to envision what the book’s front matter might look like. But the book’s style has evolved since then. So I thought I’d share them is as a sort of UN-preview. Here’s a taste of what’s not in the book

What is Joy?

A Story About Joy & the Body

We asked folks to think about the small wonders they encountered in their daily lives, those things that were compelling enough to turn curiosity into fascination. There were accounts of bioluminescence at the ocean, scraps of dreams, adult experiences of childhood landscapes, quiet encounters with animals or beloved dead, and old photos that popped up unexpectedly.

What struck me most about this workshop was how so many of our wonders were intertwined with our losses, which made me think of this Joyful Practice Principle:

We built our accounts of wonder using newsprint and colored paper, typewriters and collage materials, oil pastels and crayons, markers and colored pencils. Here are some images of accounts of wonder in progress:

Librada

This week Jenn and I are working on the connective tissue for the Joyful Practice Handbook (It goes to the printers in just over a week, ya’ll!) Yesterday, I grabbed a book off the shelf in the front room where the dusty, mostly ignored books I keep meaning to read live. I was seeking inspiration for front matter design for our own book.

I happened to grab Leanne Shapton’s Guestbook. When I opened the title page, I realized I’d forgotten the subtitle of the book: Ghost Stories. Cool, I thought.

Then I turned to the dedication page:

I’ve only known one Librada, and her name is tattooed across the inside of my left forearm.

Ask Your Beloved Dead for Guidance

Last week, while watering the garden, I was listening to Pam Grossman’s podcast, The Witch Wave. In her interview with Rachel Drack, Grossman gives Drack a homework assignment: ask your beloved dead for guidance about something and pay attention to how they choose to communicate with you.

In that moment, my interpretation of Grossman’s assignment was loosely Jungian–what if the symbols we associate with our beloved dead, and the synchronicities we experience that lead us back to those symbols, offer guidance and support–ways to pay attention to how our psyche is communicating with us.

While deadheading the calendula, I decided I’d reach out to Mom and Granny and my sister, Lily:

Hey, ya’ll. I’m starting to feel kinda anxious about putting this Joyful Practice book into the world. I could use some support to help keep my fears in check.

Then I forgot about the podcast and my request.

Until I opened that book a week later and saw my sister Lily’s name on the dedication page. I couldn’t believe it. Even in places like Mexico and the Philippines, where you’re more likely to come across the name, it isn’t common. I’ve only ever seen it written down in two other places–the remembrance card from Lily’s funeral and in my own writing about her.

Here’s what happened next:

First my stomach clenched and I felt nauseous.

Then my skin got really cold and tingly.

Then my throat got tight and my breath short.

All of this speaks to PTSD. I know what it feels like when I’m triggered by memories of my sister’s death.

Here is the wonder:

I felt her, my sister, right there with me.

The way I felt Lily was different than how I feel my mother when the sound of her laughter falls out of my mouth. Or when I look at someone I love, and I feel the muscles in my face transform into a smile that belongs to my mother, not to me.

Yes, it’s a coincidence, the request I made in the garden and seeing my sister’s name in a book a week later. Yes, what happened to my body matches a physiological response to a trauma trigger.

But try explaining that to my body. It knows what it felt.

When I told Jenn about it, she said, “a trigger but with love.” I like that description for my account of wonder. I’m choosing to interpret the experience as a sign of support, whether it’s from Lily or my own psyche.

Of course, everything is going to be okay.

Be scared, but also trust.

So that’s what I’m gonna do: I’m gonna lead with trust, even if I feel–no especially because I feel–vulnerable.

When I told Yme about my experience, I found myself shaking and crying. I felt like I was sitting between joy and grief, right in the place where the work of Joyful Practice lives.

(I said the words leggy mint while recording and now I can’t stop saying it.)

leggy mint: a slow housekeeping prompt

what is a space in your life that wants attending to?

move slowly through that space and center pleasure.

clear what you are called to

ask: what feels alive?

what wants attention?

see if there are things from surrounding areas that want to move into this space.

when you’re finished be sure to take some time to enjoy the space.

Accounts of Wonder Workshop, Wednesday July 29 at Community Print, Olympia 6 - 8 pm, $35, register at link

More on Accounts of Wonder here. If you’d be interested in doing a virtual version, let us know—we’ll schedule one if there’s interest.

Collective Art Project at the Olympia Library, Monday, August 24, 3:30 - 5pm. drop-in, free, all ages welcome! (scroll to bottom for more info)

this week’s prompt

transcript

Welcome to the Prompt Portal. We’re playing hard this summer getting the Joyful Practice handbook print ready, so this week we wanted to offer a little preview of the book, along with a prompt for exploring your creative hedgerows.

What’s a creative hedgerow?

Hedgerows, which are often planted to mark the edge of a farmer’s field, are a type of gap edge, or a place where two different ecosystems bump up against each other and create a microclimate. Gap edges are full of biodiversity and an abundance of wildlife.

Now imagine your creative process as a hedgerow, a place where different types of ideas, mediums, and genres all mingle together and create new forms of creative exploration. We can call that interdisciplinary, sure, or multi-modal, but I like the metaphor of the creative hedgerow.

Before we get into this week’s prompt, let’s have a little share and tell from the Joyful Practice Handbook.

Ecotones, Homes of Tension.

In her newsletter, The Overview, Willow Defenbaugh wrote an essay about ecotones. She explains the etymology of the word:

“Their name combines eco from the Greek oikos, meaning home, environment, with tone from tonos, tension. They are homes of tension and potential.”

An estuary is an example of an ecotone. In the swirling tension of brackish water, a dynamic and abundant ecosystem flourishes. Crabs and coots and sandpipers and seals and eagles and falcons, even jellyfish and nudibranchs. Estuaries are wild and wacky convergent zones.

May your body be a home for creative tension and potential. May your body be an estuary, creatively dynamic, a convergent zone for wild ideas and abundant collaborations.

Gap Edges, The Edge Effect.

My understanding is emergent, but from what I’ve learned, gap edges are not synonymous with ecotones. They’re more like close relatives. Many gap edges are human-made. Hedgerows come to mind.

Aldo Leopold came up with the term edge effect. When the edges of two habitats meet, we get a gap edge, a place where biodiversity flourishes.

I’ve started thinking about my body’s experience of analog creative practice as a gap edge because I move between modes of creating with more ease than when I’m working digitally.

Mind the gap edge.

What if the body is the gap edge and creativity is its abundance?

When I say mind the gap edge, I’m saying pay attention to your creative edges, those places where one idea, mode, medium ends and another begins. Let them merge, overlap, Inform one another.

When I say mind the gap edge, I’m asking you to play in the hedgerow of your creative process. Taste all the genres and mediums. Take advantage of the in between.

Most borders are made by humans to contain and control.

May your creative play be borderless. May you ride the tension of discovering something new. The gap edge will hold you. It is, after all, inside of you.

A prompt for exploring your creative hedgerows

Who lives in the hedgerows of your creative playscape?

How do they want to play with you?

What creative mediums are calling to you from the safety of the hedgerow?

Choose the medium. Choose the playmate. Explore together.

see also

From The Scrap Heap Archive:

• Estuaries, Borders, & Gap Edges: The Necessity of Creative Disruption

• Estuaries are convergence zones for creative disruption.

• swimming in the analog+digital estuary

• the body is an estuary

Accounts of Wonder Workshop, Wednesday July 29 at Community Print, Olympia 6 - 8 pm, $35, register at link

More on Accounts of Wonder below. If you’d be interested in doing a virtual version, let us know—we’ll schedule one if there’s interest.

Collective Art Project at the Olympia Library, Monday, August 24, 3:30 - 5pm. drop-in, free, all ages welcome! (scroll to bottom for more info)

Some time ago, I encountered these 16th century prints on The Public Domain Review:

I’ve not stopped thinking about them. The accompanying essay explains,

Unexplainable events happened so frequently that they were christened Wunderzeichen, wonder-signs. Between 1550 and 1559 alone, there were more than four hundred broadsheets and tracts published that recorded these prognostic events.

In my understanding, these accounts of wonder (wunderzeichen, wonder-signs) were a way of collectively bearing witness to what could not yet be understood. Imagine a newspaper with no photos, analysis, or fact-checking— just drawings from memory and testimonials.

In fact, every time I think about the 16th century accounts of wonder, my brain free-associates to a “newspaper” I hand-wrote as a child called Animal News. It features only one story. A beloved neighborhood dog had disappeared. I’d heard a rumor he had died. I’d seen a wound on his forehead a few days before his disappearance. Apparently, I was seeking a format to communicate about such things. Animal News.

The accounts of wonder have also reminded me of the very first pages Sarah and I made for our forthcoming book, where we’d draw at the top of the page and then roll the page through the typewriter to add text. It’s hard for me to articulate what feels magical about that—but part of it may be that it feels like a way of expressing devotion to a single idea or moment or memory. When Sarah and I talk about working the book, we talk about “making pages.” Each page is its own sovereign object. When I write essays or stories in a digital document, the pages are incidental.

Sarah and I have talked about leading an Accounts of Wonder workshop—and now we’re going to! (July 29 at Olympia Community Print) To get ready, I played around with what a 2026 account of wonder might look like. Below are my results and my thoughts:

Three little moments of wonder from the day before presented themselves to me: something I’d seen in the morning, something I’d seen in the evening, something I’d dreamed.

I decided I’d give each one a go, and as I entered the project I realized I would need to draw from imagination and memory. In the 16th century, you couldn’t go on the internet for reference. I find that drawing from my mind’s eye is scary and exhilarating. When I draw from memory, I must reckon with what I don’t notice. For instance, I know there’s a traffic light on East Bay Drive, but I can’t for the life of me picture how it’s mounted. As I went, I learned that the more I embraced my limitations, the more dream-like the image was. I felt very connected to my younger self who made Animal News, leaning into writing and drawing as a way to hold space for uncertainty and wonder.

I thought about the digital era, and how quickly I can answer most questions, but how maybe it’s worth it to not answer them right away—to instead make space for wondering why the crows were flying with the starlings or why the clouds make stripes sometimes.

When Sarah and I teach the Accounts of Wonder workshop, we’ll have art supplies, typewriters, and a clear set of steps that are, as always, invitations and not demands. We’re excited to hold space for wonder with whoever shows up.

And, as noted above, if some folks are interest in trying a virtual adaptation of this workshop, let us know and we’ll get one in the calendar!

Description of Collective Arts Project at the Olympia Public Library, 8/24, 3:30 - 5pm

Drop in to the Olympia Timberland Library and take some time out of your day to play with typewriters and art supplies. Visit our Snail Mail Station and write a note to a loved one on a manual typewriter. Experience the fun of collective collaboration at our interactive art station where we ask you about your favorite books and your most memorable animal encounters. You’ll be invited to make a small piece of art and add it to a community art project that will be temporarily displayed at the library.

All ages and abilities are welcome. Sarah Tavis and Jennifer Berney have developed an approach to artmaking that centers joyful experimentation, and are excited to collaborate with library patrons.

It’s called Beyond the Pull of Gravity, and it’s part of Cosmographia Books’ Famous Orphan series.

Here’s the synopsis from their official announcement:

Beyond the Pull of Gravity by Sarah Tavis

(coming Autumn 2027)

Max is dead. The baby growing in Stella’s belly is Max. Her daughter Wren already knows this. Organized alphabetically from Absence to Zero-sum, this hybrid lyric novel mixes reality, fantasy, dream, and memory to explore grief, single motherhood, drug abuse, and the space occupied by a lover/parent after suicide and before rebirth.

This book has a wild backstory that I’m excited to hear Sarah tell us someday. For now, I want to celebrate this news!

summer break at the scrap heap

If you’ve been here for a while, you may know that Sarah and I run the Scrap Heap in 8 - 10 week seasons, and then take a breather where we revisit older posts.

You might also know that we’re working on a book: The Joyful Practice Handbook: analog play for dark times, and that we’re in a bit of a push to finish it this summer. With that in mind, we’re embracing the idea of editorial chaos. We’re in the work and have fun stuff to share, but want to unlock from scheduling rigor. So, in other words, we’ll post weekly at irregular times and in irregular formats. We might randomly post a prompt portal video or a page-in-progress from the book, or a short podcast episode that strays from the normal format. This is one version of the principle: PLAY!

We’ll get back to the regular format and schedule sometime in August.

this week’s small thing

I’ve been thinking a lot about the word devotion this week as I work on pages for the book that deal with drawing and our experience of time. I’ve got two things to share.

1. This is the back of a page in progress. I’ve been making pages out of chicken feed bags (one of my favorite materials) and I’ve been hand stitching them for decoration. I’ve become interested in the backs of the pages as their own little process document.
   
   In this one, the final page is on the other side of an earlier draft. (The sizing is specific and I didn’t feel like cutting a new one.) When I pulled off a decorative element, several layers of paper came off with it, so I created a repair patch.
   
   I kind of love the accidental art of this rejected draft / backside.

2. Sitting on my floor stitching pages has me thinking about devotion. I think about how little devotion AI-generated ‘art’ requires and it makes me sad. I think about how enriching it has felt to have to slow down and work with physical materials. Below is a little meditation I typed out, trying to put some thoughts together. I’m not sure yet if it will go in the book.

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this week’s prompt

Transcript

A prompt for working with accidents and chance.

This is a new version of a prompt I’ve used before called whacko revision.

Step one is a scavenger hunt.

Find or make two images, they can be images you clip from something in your home or drawings you’ve made, drawings you make specifically for this activity— only don’t work too hard. Ideally there images that evoke a little something for you, but you’re not too attached to them.

Next, find a text maybe an old journal or a letter if you have such a thing. It could even be an email. Grab whatever calls you, but it might be good if it’s from a different era of your life or if it’s fraught or haunting in some way.

Ask the text: what is your essence? and write down its answer.

Step two: “Revise” the text as if the two images you chose are the illustrations.

A reminder, this is wacko revision so feel free to actually get up to whatever shenanigans you want.

If you want instructions, though here are some options.

-Choose sentences from the text at random and pair them with the images, see where that takes you. You can revise the sentence add more— whatever you like.

-Or just copy the original text via handwriting. You can start at whatever point in the text you want and change and elaborate as you go.

Again you don’t have to try too hard. You’re just kind of listening to the text and how you feel like changing it. There is absolutely no way to do this right or wrong. My main advice is to go slow, listen to what intrigues you and have fun.

Post-script: if you complete this, it might go great or just okay or it might leave you frustrated. (A luxury of the analog world is creative frustration.) You might find, though, that the text starts talking to you over the following weeks and months. It wants to tell you more about its essence. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

see also

This week’s Scrap Heap essay: Analog is the body’s friend

This week’s Joyful Practice podcast: Analog Practice as a bridge between the mind and the natural world

We start by talking about rabbits and aspen groves and seasonal cycles, and work our way to laughing about teenagers. Jenn tries to use the word copium, and if her 13-year old found out she’d never hear the end of it, but it’s okay—he doesn’t listen to the podcast.

We get into the nitty-gritty of trying to sort out a personal ethos on where digital tools do and don’t belong in our work. If Sarah takes a picture of a blue dress and matches it to a color in Canva, does that color now carry the the essence of the dress?

links & resources

• The Scrap Heap essay: Analog Is the Body’s Friend: aspen grove vs. digital toolbar

• The Prompt Portal: Wacko Revision

about the show

At the end of 2024, Jenn and Sarah decided to design the workshop we needed for our own creative growth. Together, we wanted to build a creative community centered around play and exploration. We called it Joyful Practice for Dark Times.

As we continued to lead workshops, we tracked the ideas and values that guided our work and assembled a set of (ever-evolving) principles: the emergent philosophy of Joyful Practice. Those principles are the vertebrae of this podcast.

We offer this podcast as an antidote to grind culture and digital imperialism. We hope it helps you to reclaim your time, your joy, your rage, and find refuge in creative practice.

how to find us

• Substack: The Scrap Heap

• Apple Podcasts: The Joyful Practice Podcast

• Spotify: The Joyful Practice Podcast

• Instagram: @joyfulpracticeanalog

Thank you for joining us. Tell your friends, and visit us in the comments.

I guess/

I guess—

I want my work to know what it’s about before I know what the work is about—

which is to say I want to follow the trail of my own breadcrumbs,

or to start picking up the shiny objects the crows left behind, to make them into a necklace, to trust that

if I assemble the shiny objects as I find them,

if I listen to my inner sense of what goes where,

the shiny objects will become something more precious to me than

gemstones.

I guess I’m saying I want to collaborate with crows.

TWO

I’ve never seen an orca in real life, but I have dreamed about them, drawn them, written about them.

I spend plenty of time in orca habitats. I swim and paddle year-round in Budd Inlet, a place where they’re regularly sighted, but always on a day I’m not there.

It might be that I’m not ready for them.

I long to see orcas, but I’m not interested in going on a whale watch. I’m not interested in watching for updates and then chasing them down. (No shade on either activity.) I want to continue my slow courtship of the Salish Sea, to learn over years their routes and their culture. I want to trust that eventually I’ll see them. Or not. My life is meaningfully enriched by the process.

The process includes, if I’m open to it (or even if I’m not), other sustaining encounters.

THREE

In another era, I had a cabin in the middle of nowhere. A few hundred yards from the cabin was an aspen grove. My partner put a bench there, and I joked that it was my office. I’ve always loved to watch a stand of quaking aspens, the way their leaves flip sides and shimmer, the way they sound like whshwshswshswhshwhshsh…

If you let yourself sit in an aspen grove for a while, you might start to believe that everything is all right—for the moment, at least. In the aspen grove at least.

In that aspen grove, there were standing dead trees among the living, snags stripped down to their silvery bark and pointing to the sky.

I learned from that aspen grove that if you sit quietly for long enough, something happens.

By long enough, I mean just long enough for your breath to calm and your body to settle.

By something happens, I mean that a bluebird pops out of a hole in the snag, or a woodpecker arrives, or a wind travels up the hill and wshswhshWHSHWHSHwhsh…

FOUR

I didn’t write in the aspen grove because I only wrote on my computer, a clunky Dell laptop. Writing was a practice separate from my body.

Yes, the brain is in the body.

But where is the mind?

FIVE

Microsoft Word is an interface.

In that interface, there are rulers and toolbars.

Your words come out in a row.

Many decisions about how you navigate the page have already been made. An entity made them.

You can clean your mistakes as you go. You don’t have to reckon with them by scribbling over a phrase you didn’t quite mean or typing Xs over a word.

Now AI1 offers—aggressively!—to remove elements of struggle from your writing.

As if frustration is mere inconvenience.

As if frustration isn’t the work making itself.

As if frustration isn’t God.

(As if AI2 were anything but the completion plan for settler-colonialism.)

SIX

An aspen grove is an ecosystem.

In that ecosystem there are living things and dead things supporting living things. There are leaves and roots, and bluebirds, and insects and woodpeckers, and grasses and wildflowers and rocks and a bench and possibly you.

To show up daily to an ecosystem feels different than showing up daily to an interface.

(Writing this now [hi!] on the Substack interface, because I do show up to the internet daily. I try to bring the ecosystem to the interface; or maybe I try to make the interface part of my ecosystem.)

I still don’t write in an aspen grove, but my workspace is right next to one. As I type, I can hear them, whshwhshwhsh.

More importantly, my workspace feels like an ecosystem. I’ve got a baby cactus going nuts, and jars filled with tiny bouquets. I’ve got candles and feathers and objects from childhood.

More importantly still, the work itself is part of the ecosystem. I’ve got shelves spilling over with sketches and materials and typewritten notes. I spend half of my creative time attempting to curate and organize them. I’ve come to understand that spending time with the materials is part of the work. It’s part of learning to listen. It’s part of learning to be.

Some writers can get all the way there with the computer as their primary tool.

I cannot.

For me, there’s no greater feeling than walking towards my workspace and leaving my laptop behind. I get to put words and images on paper (not the digital illusion of a ‘page’). I get to make messes. I get to mess up. I get to make things I never intended to make.

I find this to be the best of all joys, when the work doesn’t start with an idea, but an idea starts to form within the work.

Like this afternoon, when I made these circles with our Joyful Practice principles because I knew I would need them for this post. And then on the floor there was this mermaid I had drawn without thinking a month or two ago. I had half-ripped-half-cut her off of another page of doodles, and I thought I might want to use her for something, but I had no idea what.

I’d also been setting up a little altar with a small glass plate awaiting a candle.

And then suddenly these things wanted to be together, so I let them.

I can’t tell you what it means, but I know it means something (if only to me) because I felt a little click when I put it together, and then a sense of expansion, like in the aspen grove when the birds show up and for a minute everything thing feels aligned.

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Note to reader: Every week, we’re writing about a Joyful Practice principle. These principles offer guidelines for approaching creative work. This week’s principles are: Analog is the body’s friend and Accidents are ideas.

On Fridays, we release a podcast (The Joyful Practice Podcast) available here (on Substack), on Apple Podcasts, and on Spotify.

Also on Fridays, we offer an immersive prompt for creative exploration. This feature is called Prompt Portal, and you can find it here on Substack.

1

2

I’m hoping to take the next few days to get really serious about summer. I haven’t figured out what that means yet, but I know that summer can blaze by if I don’t commit to it, which is why Sarah and I thought it would be nice to design a little magical summer portal as an offering to our paid subscribers and Kickstarter backers, whom we’re very grateful for.

(Paid subscribers, you’ve truly helped the shoestring we’ve been operating on for the last few months. You’ve helped us buy art supplies and coffee as we’ve worked on the book and prepped for ArtsWalk.)

So, we made you a little something. If you’re a paid subscriber, you can open it below. If you’re not a paid subscriber but you backed us on Kickstarter, click here.

What is it? Well of course we hope you’ll open it and see. But I can tell you it’s about 15+ pages of little thoughts and prompts, typed out on our typewriters, illustrated by hand, and then laid out digitally.

Read more

(featuring the bunny who lives under the garden shed)

Here is this week’s prompt:

Prompt Portal

The brackish water

where the past & the future converge with the present

is teeming with the silver-scaled thrust of something new.

part one:

• imagine your creative self in the brackish water of an estuary. Imagine that estuary is your body:

• what stories are swimming with you?

• what are the old stories that are asking to be re-imagined, so you can embrace the silver-scaled thrust of something new?

part two:

• what is converging right now?

• what explosive abundance, what creative eruptions might get birthed?

see also

This week’s Scrap Heap essay: swimming in the analog+digital estuary: a Joyful Practice experiment

This week’s Joyful Practice podcast: Estuaries are convergence zones for creative disruption.

Ideas, art forms, cultures, bodies of water: when two or more things converge, they meet in the estuary — a place of ingenuity, adaptation, and abundance.

In this week’s podcast, we consider estuaries as a metaphor for collaborations and creative disruption, specifically, the analog+digital estuary where we hold experiments in turning our analog creations into digital images.

links & resources

• The Scrap Heap essay: swimming in the analog+digital estuary: a Joyful Practice experiment

• The Prompt Portal: the body is an estuary

• Sarah’s Scrap Heap post Estuaries, Borders, & Gap Edges: The Necessity of Creative Disruption

• Kate Hutchinson’s podcast/substack: The Last Bohemians. We didn’t discuss this, but it fits with many of this week’s themes. Kate Hutchinson interviews “maverick and radical women in arts and culture” who embody creative disruption.

about the show

At the end of 2024, Jenn and Sarah decided to design the workshop we needed for our own creative growth. Together, we wanted to build a creative community centered around play and exploration. We called it Joyful Practice for Dark Times.

As we continued to lead workshops, we tracked the ideas and values that guided our work and assembled a set of (ever-evolving) principles: the emergent philosophy of Joyful Practice. Those principles are the vertebrae of this podcast.

We offer this podcast as an antidote to grind culture and digital imperialism. We hope it helps you to reclaim your time, your joy, your rage, and find refuge in creative practice.

how to find us

• Substack: The Scrap Heap

• Apple Podcasts: The Joyful Practice Podcast

• Spotify: The Joyful Practice Podcast

• Instagram: @joyfulpracticeanalog

Thank you for joining us. Tell your friends, and visit us in the comments.

I’ve noticed two distinct digital experiences: I’m either passively floating though the digital sea of social media and online news, or I’m actively engaging with a digital tool (like Canva) to make a video or turn an analog object into a digital image. When I’m making something in a digital space, there’s no pool noodle to keep me afloat while I scroll. I’m swimming hard. I’m gathering new skills and learning how to apply them to the thing I want to create, just like when I make analog objects.

Today, I’ve done a little of both, the passive digital floating and the active digital swimming. The first left me feeling spacey and out of sync with how the edges of my body interact with my environment. The second felt more energizing, but I still forgot my body was an object held in place by gravity and desire.

what happens to my body when it enters the digital sea?

I lose track of time. A few minutes ago, Yme came out to my studio to tell me he was leaving. “But your meeting isn’t until 3,” I said. When did 12:45 become 2:45? The digital sea swallowed the afternoon.

I ignore my body’s needs. I don’t get up to stretch my achy back. I don’t get up to go pee. There isn’t water nearby, so I stay thirsty. As I write this, the nerves of my left hand are tingling. I know I should step away from the keyboard and give my hand a break, but I don’t want to lose the idea I’ve been chasing all afternoon.

I play with ideas and sometimes have creative breakthroughs. It isn’t just when I’m in the digital sea that I lose track of time and ignore the needs of my body. This also happens when I’m messing around with watercolors or using my typewriter. Analog rivers also have strong currents, and like a dog that smells a deer in the woods, when I’m on the trail of an idea, everything else falls away.

An analog+digital estuary experiment

In The Serviceberry, Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “Disruptions create gaps, openings and edges between the new and the dominant…[I]ncremental change and creative disruption…are available to us as agents of cultural transformation.” Estuaries, with their brackish water, embody the gap edges of creative disruption. The ingenuity and adaptation of the creatures who live in estuaries (and other gap edges) makes them diverse and vibrant…

I wrote this paragraph in November in a post about estuaries. I also wrote an aside to Jenn:

(Note to Jenn: It just occurred to me that if creative disruption is our hypothesis, then Joyful Practice is our lab.)

At the time, that statement felt like a philosophical lodestone as we set off on this new adventure of creating The Joyful Practice Handbook. Our work still feels like a creatively disruptive and incredibly fertile experiment, and we’re swimming in a new kind of Joyful Practice estuary. We’re working on turning our analog-created book pages into a digitally accessible document.

We anticipate some pages will go into the book pretty much exactly as they were scanned, and we’re curious about what it might look like to play with turning scanned analog objects (like the one below) into pages that have been altered using digital software.

I call this space the analog+digital estuary. What new hybrid format will emerge?

Today, I experimented with an analog page about estuaries.

This is the original hand drawn and typed image:

analog+digital estuary experiment #1:

This experiment is closest to the original. I like the second image best, probably because the first image feels too claustrophobic, like my eyes need more space between the typewritten words and the body of the estuary. I’d like to figure out how to make the final two words (GAP EDGE) show up a bit more—I bet it could be an easy thing to do. On the other hand, I might sit in front of my computer screen until 1 am trying to make it look like the image I have in my head (also a reality when working in analog).

analog+digital estuary experiment #2:

These are fun because they remind me of something I could have made for a zine, cutting up an image to create space around each idea. I like how the estuary is broken up by the black background, but my eyes still follow the curve of its movement. I think the second image works better. It feels more textured and human than the first image.

Playing with a digital scan of the image is much more low stakes than actually cutting the original analog version. I don’t get to change my mind or play with size the same way I can with a digitally scanned image. The stakes may be higher when I experiment with the analog version, but its also a fun challenge because the mistakes I make create more constraints to work with. If I make a mistake in the digital version, all I have to do is hit the back arrow a few times.

analog+digital estuary experiment #3:

The first image in this experiment feels like a more honest version of what is happening in the analog+digital estuary. I think it’s my favorite. I love how the estuary looks fogged over, and you can see traces of typewritten letters smeared across the clouds. It is doing what the original image says an estuary will do: mingling before with after.

The second image in this experiment is probably my least favorite because it is hanging in space with no anchor. I tried adding a background color, but that felt too smooth, too digital.

Its possible none of these experimental pages make it into the book, but I’ve got lots more ideas to try out. I’ll keep swimming in the analog+digital estuary. Go deep, it tells me. You never know what you’re about to discover.

P.S.: I just looked at the time. Somehow 3pm became 6pm, and I really gotta pee.

Note to reader: Every week, we’re writing about a Joyful Practice principle. These principles offer guidelines for approaching creative work. This week’s principle is not actually a principle. Last week’s conversation about thresholds got me thinking about estuaries, so I decided to follow that impulse.

On Fridays, we release a podcast (The Joyful Practice Podcast) available here (on Substack), on Apple Podcasts, and on Spotify.

Also on Fridays, we offer an immersive prompt for creative exploration. This feature is called Prompt Portal, and you can find it here on Substack.

I recorded this conversation in the kitchen on Tuesday.

I’d been thinking of honeybee swarms as an example of a threshold state.

And then yesterday (Thursday), a swarm left the hive and rested in our apple tree.

Most of the footage is from that event.

My favorite phrase from our conversation is “coalesce in a direction.”

Here is the prompt:

What are you leaving?

What have you left without even knowing?

What is your honey?

Who (what) keeps you warm?

What are your scout bees looking for?

What is a threshold, and how is it different from a portal? How might we use the energy of the threshold to carry us into the portal of creative transformation? These are the questions that guide this week’s conversation.

Maybe a threshold is the thing we must cross before we enter a portal, and a portal is what channels us towards creative growth. Thresholds offer a choice: can we relinquish control of our creative process and step off the edge?

links & resources

• The Scrap Heap essay: we honor the power of the threshold

• The Prompt Portal: Leaving and landing: follow the swarm

• Jenn’s Scrap Heap post portals vs thresholds: the match of the century

• This episode from the podcast, Wonder Cabinet: David George Haskell: Flowers and the Revolutionary Power of Beauty (second week in a row recommending this because it keeps being relevant).

about the show

At the end of 2024, Jenn and Sarah decided to design the workshop we needed for our own creative growth. Together, we wanted to build a creative community centered around play and exploration. We called it Joyful Practice for Dark Times.

As we continued to lead workshops, we tracked the ideas and values that guided our work and assembled a set of (ever-evolving) principles: the emergent philosophy of Joyful Practice. Those principles are the vertebrae of this podcast.

We offer this podcast as an antidote to grind culture and digital imperialism. We hope it helps you to reclaim your time, your joy, your rage, and find refuge in creative practice.

how to find us

• Substack: The Scrap Heap

• Apple Podcasts: The Joyful Practice Podcast

• Spotify: The Joyful Practice Podcast

• Instagram: @joyfulpracticeanalog

Thank you for joining us. Tell your friends, and visit us in the comments.

As a starting point for this discussion of thresholds, I submit for your consideration this once-viral video of Tom Holland on Lip Sync Battle in 2017.

Specifically, I’d like to discuss the way the crowd’s energy surges about 35 seconds in, when we enter a threshold space.

By threshold, I mean a space where we’re held between two states. Dawn is a threshold. Dusk is a threshold. A chrysalis is a threshold. The threshold is a space of power and transformation.

Though I’m not in the crowd, I feel that surge of energy in my own body when I watch it. Tom-Holland-as-femme isn’t a surprise to me since I’ve seen this before, but my body experiences it as a surprise—because it’s surprising.

The main threshold here is gender (though we cross spacial and musical thresholds simultaneously), and I want to be as precise as I can about how that’s functioning.

Is Tom Holland inhabiting a threshold, or has he crossed it?

I’d argue that once Tom Holland emerges from behind the umbrellas, he has fully crossed the threshold. The beauty and joy of this performance is his unironic embodiment of femme identity. This isn’t comedic. He’s not impersonating a woman.1 He’s inside this performance, connected and whole.

We, the viewers, inhabit the threshold as we watch. In other words, though TH has crossed the threshold, we remain suspended in it. We watch with the memory of who he was in the dimmer, dopey-er first 20 seconds of the performance, and we hold amazement at the transformation. There’s energy in the dissonance. Tom Holland = straight man. Tom Holland = beautiful femme. These are not in contradiction, though we’ve been told they are.

Here’s an even richer threshold space to visit:

Queen Diva Big Freedia is a threshold guardian in the sense that his/her work lives on the threshold. (Tom Holland was just visiting). Big Freedia’s energy draws directly from the threshold. To wit, I just discovered this factoid on his/her wikipedia page:

Freedia led a crowd of hundreds in New York City to set the Guinness World Record for twerking.

and also this quote from the Queen Diva himself:

How do I identify? I do not mind if you call me "he" or "she." Both are right! I was born male and remain male—physically, hormonally and mentally. But I am a gay male. Some folks insist I have to be trans, but I don't agree. I'm gender nonconforming, fluid, nonbinary. If I had known the "queen" in Queen Diva would cause so much confusion, I might have called myself the king!

Big Freedia, she’s a man. This is an accurate sentence.2

But gender isn’t the only threshold Big Freedia inhabits, especially in this video.

I can’t do justice to all of the exquisite convergences and transgressions happening here, but I can try and name some of the things I see.

I believe that Big Freedia, in his choice of dress, is evoking the Antebellum South, i.e. he is a gender fluid gay man wearing what slave owning women would have worn in the nineteenth century. (Reappropriation is a threshold crossing.)

Convergence (see also: estuary) is a threshold-adjacent concept, and there are multiple convergences here. Bounce music, a form of hip-hop that originated in New Orleans, is already a convergence of styles, and here it’s converging with classical music. This convergence includes dance. According to The Oxford Handbook of Hip-Hop Dance Studies (lol, what a convergence!):

New Orleans has been a focal point for the development and evolution of African American social dance since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries[…][D]espite its eroticized image, twerking, or p-popping, is not a product of strip clubs or the adult-entertainment industry but, rather, a dance with deep roots in the vernacular African American music culture of New Orleans.

More important is the dynamic of that convergence: an inversion of the typical (tired, racist) dynamic of black artists playing a supporting role to white artists, or Euro-American culture, or (and this is the worst) black artists playing a supporting role to white artists who have appropriated black culture. In this performance, a full orchestra supports Big Freedia. We, the audience, receive the blessing of a full string accompaniment to the lyrics

work it for Freedia
shake it for Freedia
clap it for Freedia
work it for your baby-daddy shake it for your baby-daddy3

I hope you will read my tone as earnest when I tell you that this moves me to tears.

That this feels to me like a gesture of the universe righting itself.

That no mater how many times I watch this performance, I am always overcome.

To (be) overcome = to cross a threshold

= to drop into the body

=to be awash with joy and grief

I have more I want to write about the threshold. I want to write about how sperm whales sleep, about the creative portal that opens between sleeping and waking and then waking and sleeping. I want to write about frustration as a threshold state.

But one feature of a threshold space is that you can’t control what happens there.

I started writing about Big Freedia and I didn’t want to leave.

One thing I want to return to: the Wikipedia factoid, the twerking record. It’s wrong. I just fact checked. You can read the Guinness World Records entry for Most People Twerking Simultaneously here. What’s wrong about the factoid is that it wasn’t New York City. It was New Orleans. But it WAS Big Freedia. Of course it was. And of course it was New Orleans.

Threshold spaces are energized spaces. Bodies dance and stay dancing. Entire histories unfold in one performance. We are made and remade and we thank the Queen.

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Note to reader: We’re wring about a Joyful Practice principle every week. These principles offer guidelines for approaching creative work. This week’s principle is: We honor the power of the threshold.

On Fridays, we release a podcast (The Joyful Practice Podcast) available here (on Substack), on Apple Podcasts, and on Spotify.

Also on Fridays, we offer an immersive prompt for creative exploration. This feature is called Prompt Portal, and you can find it here on Substack .

The story of Epstein, it’s like an alien form that keeps expanding and growing on itself. Just today, I saw an interview with an architect who had worked on the island, and he talked [about] how ominous the buildings were. The windows had light-blocking shades. There were bunk rooms for the girls. It was very sterile. So the poem “Dominion” was thinking about the plundering of resources that happens under patriarchy—but in this very specific place, Little St. Jeff’s—and then imagining what happens now.

How long does it take to recover? Because all of these invasive species come up, and they’re effective at breaking down what humans have done, if you let them. So by the end of the poem, I was imagining the species that are gone, especially the night blooming cereus, which is such a delicate and feminine flower. But now he’s gone. And it was satisfying to imagine the invasives coming back and taking over and reclaiming. That reclamation is something poetry can do.

Her answer made me want to learn more about night blooming cereus, but other things distracted me. I was excited for our conversation to appear in The Rumpus, but it sat in the queue for weeks and I waited. But now it’s out and you can read it!

Reminded of night blooming cereus, I looked it up and learned that it’s a “vine-like cactus” that blooms for just one night a year, often in early June.

This made me grateful for the waiting. I like knowing that our conversation came out as the cereus were blooming.

Yesterday, I drew one. They are delicate and fierce.

Diana and I also had a conversation about her previous collection, Dark Beds, in 2023. This was a winter conversation, and it appeared in Electric Lit: Writing Desire in Middle Age. It was an incredible nourishing conversation for me that I still think about often.

While I’m here recommending things, I’m excited to learn more about invasive species via Olympia author Clare Follmann’s book Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story gets wrong.

Olympia folks: Clare will be at Browsers Bookshop this Saturday, June 13, from 2- 3pm in conversation with Miranda Mellis. I hope to see you there!