my first self-published essay zine
the life-giving consequences of creative rest
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.
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. 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.
This lil’ essay zine (special limited edition of 50 copies, sold out) is just the beginning of an unfolding body of work. As I nurture that dream in the day to day through daily writing, connecting with publishers, staying in trusted community, reading, taking care of my creative body, seeing the essence of creation in everything ~ I also allow my smaller works, like short essays, to be celebrated in the process.
INTENTIONAL TOUCHES throughout
🍃 interior pages that carry a burst of yellow light at the center to remind us of our radiance through decay and transformation.
🍃 "what if" prompts with open space for responses
🍃 riso printing by sense of press, independent publishing & risograph printing studio based out of Baltimore, MD, 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?
WHAT IS CREATIVE REST?
my living definition and attempt to “define”
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, productivity and survival, 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.
A BREATHING BIBLIOGRAPHY
CREATIVES, EXPERIMENTS, WORKS AND SPACES WHO EMBODY CREATIVE REST
🍃 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
🍃 bless our breath deck initiated and designed by Kimi Hanauer and organized in collaboration with Gas
More inspirations will be added overtime. If you have some you’d like to contribute, I’d love to know about it! Email me at design@deniseshantebrown.com