the life-giving consequences
of creative rest
MY FIRST SELF-PUBLISHED ESSAY ZINE
From that announcement and into the unexpected life disruptions that followed, so much was revealed about the resistance to slowness and softness many of us still hold. Especially when it involves a Black woman focusing her creative life and full existence on ease instead of urgency, productivity and survival.
Finding ways to move my grief and my rage, I cried and wrote. Buried my dear Granny and wrote. Death-cleared my childhood home and wrote. Walked through wintered woods and spring renewal and wrote. I gathered a stream of questions and divine downloads captured in my journals, on sticky notes, and in digital documents. I let words weave together the way they wanted to be written.
It became the life-giving consequences of creative rest: a personal essay on reckoning with what happens to creative practice when choosing slowness and softness. After noticing how my life, work and relationships have changed since taking a breath amid grief and turmoil, this essay captures a glimpse of what it feels like to resist systems of exhaustion while centering care.
Fall of 2021 when taking an extended 3-month pause, I called for my communities to celebrate my creative rest as much as (or more than) my creative labor.
PUBLISHER
Self-published
PUBLISHED ON
March 2023
DESIGNED BY
Denise Shanté Brown
PRINTED BY
sense of press
celebrating short essays
This essay zine (special limited edition of 50 copies, sold out) was the beginning of an unfolding body of publications. As I nurtured the dream of publishing more of my writings in the day-to-day through newsletters, connecting with publishers, staying in trusted community, reading, taking care of my creative body, and seeing the essence of creation in everything—I also allowed my smaller works, like short essays, to be celebrated in the process.
close up of the front cover, celebrating the experience of writing and designing my first self-published essay zine.
interior pages that carry a burst of yellow light at the center to remind us of our radiance through decay and transformation.
back cover, highlighting the amazing printing by sense of press, an independent publishing and risograph printing studio based in Baltimore, one of the places I call home.
a few of the “what if” questions inside
What if we imagined our capacities showing up as Care Guides from the future, revealing what we need to rest and recover?
What if we released capitalistic, white supremacist patterns that pull us away from our presence so we can become portals of possibility?
What if we explored what’s powerfully potent in our creative bodies and wants to be channeled and built through us, untethered to production and perfectionism?
The felt experience of one's rest being valued throughout a creative process and/or creative life, as much as (or more than) creative labor.
Rather than focusing on urgency and productivity, creative rest emphasizes ease and is spacious and protected.
It extends continual permission for creative beings to focus their full expression on the practices of slowness and softness while honoring life's natural cycles of decay and transformation.
What is creative rest?
A living, breathing definition.
a breathing bibliography
People, places, and practices I returned to while writing the essay:
Take Care of Yourself: The Art and Cultures of Care and Liberation by Sundus Abdul Hadi
Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey, The Nap Ministry
The Artists’ Grief Deck, a project of the Artists’ Literacies Institute (producer) and Adriene Jenik (creative producer)
yes, please: a bookhouse and carespace an intentionally curated collection of books by Black women and gender expansive writers for purchase and lending