Hi friends,

On Sunday, I hosted our monthly creative gathering for the first time in far too long—and what a soulful, inspiring hour it was. Over 600 of you showed up (!), and I had the great honor of sharing the hour with one of my favorite living writers, Melissa Febos.

Melissa is a luminous thinker, a prolific journaler, and the award-winning author of five books—most recently The Dry Season. In our hybrid conversation-workshop, we explored journaling as a kind of labyrinth—how, unlike a maze (with its false starts and dead ends), it always leads you to the heart of things. We talked about how writing can return you to your body, soften your grip on the unloved parts, and help mend your relationship with them. We also discussed how prompts—like those in The Book of Alchemy—can narrow the frame just enough to let the truth shimmer into focus.

Paid subscribers can find the full video replay below—just click to watch. I hope you do. And if it stirs something, I’d love for you to share a snippet of what you wrote or a flicker of insight in the comments. The call and response of this community is still my favorite part.

Not yet a paid subscriber? You can upgrade here to watch the video (and write alongside us, if you choose!), join future gatherings, and unlock a trove of other good things—essays, workshops, events, surprises. The door is open.

With love,

Suleika

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What a very special gathering this month’s Hatch was. I mean, they’re always special, but with this one, there were particular synchronicities and connections, particular beauties and kindnesses, and so much creative alchemy.

We talked about the power of art to transform despair to laughter, the way we can create ourselves through words, and how all of this is more necessary now than ever. Then we practiced following our intuition—toward our own insights and meaning-making.

If you missed it, we’ve posted a video replay below, along with a written transcript. You’ll also find the poems we read, a few images we used for inspiration, and some prompts for inspiration.

As always, we love to hear from you, so if you wrote something you want to share, please do so in the chat or in the comments section below!

Happy hatching,

Carmen (& Holly!)

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Hi there!

In this month’s Hatch, we read and wrote about laundry (and the surprising multitude of stories it can contain), read a passage from Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence and three poems, and made lists of potential memoir titles. It was by turns poignant and joyful and tender and fun, and we’re so grateful for to the hundreds of you who joined us.

If you missed the Hatch, or just want to revisit it, you’ll find a video replay of the hour below, along with the readings and prompts, links to playlists and coffee shop sounds, and, of course, a link that will take you directly to the Isolation Journals chat.

As always, we love to hear from you, so if you wrote something you want to share, please do so in the chat or in the comments section below.

Happy hatching!

Holly + Carmen

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Hey y’all!

It’s Carmen here. I’m the managing editor of the Isolation Journals, and I hosted the May meeting of the Hatch, our virtual creative hour for paid subscribers.

During our gathering, I talked about Austin, Texas, and two-stepping, we read a passage from Samantha Harvey’s strikingly poetic and philosophical novel Orbital, and we reflected on astronauts, the overview effect, and a home away from. Below you’ll find a video replay along with a written transcript, as well as the reading, three creative prompts, the Isolation Journals chat, and more!

As always, we love to hear from you, so if you wrote something you want to share, please do so in the chat or in the comments section below.

Happy hatching!

Carmen

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Hey y’all!

It’s Carmen here. At this month’s gathering of the Hatch, we meditated on one of our core tenets here at the Isolation Journals: how a creative practice can turn isolation into creative solitude and connection. I shared a century-old letter by Virginia Woolf written in the throes of grief and a conversation between two contemporary poets, Natalie Diaz and Ada Limón, where I saw both happening simultaneously.

On a personal note, I myself was having a grief-y morning on Sunday, and this dose of community and celebration of poetry was just the balm I needed. If you missed it, or you’d like to revisit it, you can find a video replay as well as a written transcript below.

Much love,

Carmen

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Hi everyone,

During this month’s gathering of the Hatch, our monthly creative gathering for paid subscribers, I talked about the overwhelming power of a blank space on a page—how it can simultaneously represent a moment of equilibrium and work as an invitation to unspool.

If you weren’t able to make it, you can find both a video replay of the hour and a transcript, along with the reading and prompts below. My hope is that it helps you slow down, reconnect with your creativity, and uncover something new.

If you haven’t yet, head over to the Isolation Journals chat to introduce yourself and share some of your thoughts about this month’s creative practice.

Warmly,

Holly

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Hey y’all!

It’s Carmen here. During this month’s gathering of the Hatch, our monthly creative gathering for paid subscribers, I talked about joy as a revolutionary act and a righting of the scales, read a poem by Ross Gay, and shared three writing prompts to help us cultivate some glimmers of light and hope.

If you weren’t able to make it, you can find both a video replay of the hour and a transcript, along with the reading and prompts. Hope it brings you a sense of joy and connection and gives you a little strength for the fight.

Much love,

Carmen

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Suleika Jaouad: Hello, everyone, welcome, welcome, welcome! We’re doing things a little bit differently today, given our guest of honor, Michael Bierut, and so we’re going to be using the chat in the zoom this time, rather than on Substack. So please tell us where you’re joining from and anything else you want to share today.

Vicki, I’m loving the towel on the head. You look fantastic. That’s what I want to be doing. Hi, Pat Taylor, I’m assuming you were able to dust off your solar panels from all the snow and to join us. Who else do we have here? Hi, Linda. Rhonda, I see Linda Wolfson waving too, and of course, we have Carmen and Holly here with us. Okay, I’m going to give it another minute or two.

Wow. We have already nearly 600 participants. Is this a record for us? Carmen and Holly? Yeah, possibly. I love scrolling through and seeing everyone’s faces. It never gets old. Okay?

All right, I think I’m going to get started. We have someone joining from Baghdad, from San Francisco, Portland, Maine, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, not too far from where I am. Los Angeles, Charleston, Spain, Albuquerque, South Africa, Nashville, Dallas, Bristol in the UK. Okay. In addition to record numbers, this may be our most international gathering yet, I think.

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Hello everyone,

During this month’s gathering of the Hatch, our virtual hour for paid subscribers, we read two passages—one from Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert and one from The Writing Life by Annie Dillard and reflected on the many ways creative inspiration can appear and how to catch it (by the tail, if need be) when it does.

Below, you’ll find a video replay of the hour, along with a written recap of my talk, the reading, and a variety of prompts. If you watch it and spend the hour journaling, will you leave a comment and let us know how it went? We love nothing more than to hear from you.

Warmly,

Holly

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Hey y’all!

It’s Carmen here. During this month’s gathering of the Hatch, our virtual hour for paid subscribers, we read a poem by Eavan Boland, reflected on the Buddhist concept of tonglen, and went through a guided meditation to awaken compassion.

But rather than just giving you a written recap, we’re doing something a little different this month. Below, you’ll find a video replay of the hour, along with the reading and prompts. If you watch it and spend the hour journaling, will you leave a comment and let us know how it went? It’ll help us know if this is something we should do again!

Many thanks and much love,

Carmen

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Suleika Jaouad: Good evening, good evening! I’m Suleika Jaouad, and I’m the founder of this newsletter that’s been going for five years now, which is hard to believe. And we’re so excited to welcome you to our second virtual Journaling Club. It’s so wonderful to have you all here. This is my favorite hour of the month and such a beautiful opportunity to actually get to see your faces.

And we’ve got our whole team here again today, Carmen Radley, who just celebrated her birthday, is going to be moderating, and we have Holly Huitt, who’s running all things tech. So if you have any issues, you can write to her in the chat and she’ll get you sorted.

Thank you to each of you for being game to brave this new time slot. We’re trying to play with the timing of things. I know it isn’t perfect for everyone, but we thought we’d go for a Monday evening gathering, and to anyone who’s here for the first time—thank you so much for coming! And I’m going to start by giving you a little overview of the hour, so that you have a sense of what to expect.

Today is going to be a little unorthodox, in that we’re going to start with a Q&A. We wanted to have a Q&A last time we never got to it, so we thought we’d kick things off with that first, and then Carmen is going to take over and lead us through a warm-up exercise, and I’ll be sharing an essay and prompt. Again, as always, the prompts are just here to light a spark, so feel free to interpret them however you want. Feel free to ignore them or to journal about how much you hate the prompt—I’ve found that to be fruitful too. This is your hour. We want you to use it in any way that feels most nourishing and creative and generative to you.

We’re going to spend much of this hour working silently. You can write in your journal, or if you feel called to doodle in the margins or paint a watercolor—that’s what I’ve been doing all day, painting little watercolors. Use this time however makes the most sense to you. So with that, I’m going to hand it over to Miss Carmen. Hello!

Carmen Radley: Hi everyone! It’s so good to be here with you today. As Suleika said, we really, really love this time together. It’s so warm and connected, despite the fact that we all have zoom fatigue, it just really works so beautifully. So thank you for coming. We are going to start with a Q&A, so if you have a question for Suleika and you want to drop it in the chat, you can do that. We also have gathered some from the last post we sent out, and I’m going to start with our beloved Pat Taylor, from the wilds of British Columbia—she has a question for you, Suleika, about consistency in journaling. She asks, “After journaling for years, I find myself resisting putting pen to page, and I’m curious: Have you ever stopped journaling for a time? What was the reason for stopping and what brought you back to the pen and page?”

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Hello friends,

A couple of weeks ago, I had NPR Tiny Desk concerts playing in the background while I worked–if you don’t know, NPR is National Public Radio and they invite musicians into their office space to play a handful of songs among cluttered desks and onlooking office workers. It’s great. The first concert I chose was Feist who said the following between her third and fourth songs:

“I consider [this song] to be the grandmother of the first song. There’s a DNA throughline through records you make, where there’s a little thumbprint that ends up fifteen years later on a different song.” 

I stopped what I was doing and reached for my journal. I thought about how every piece of art sits within infinite webs of context, both for the creator and for the viewer. When you’re studying literature or writing in school, there’s a lot of talk about this—it can, at times, seem like a sort of contest to be the one who is best able to list all the things a piece of work is “in conversation” with. But what would this idea look like if freed from academia? What would it look like, I wondered, if I diagrammed my own relationship to a piece of art? And then, what if, I turned that into an essay? 

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Hey y’all!

It’s Carmen here. Usually, in the weeks leading up to the Hatch, I flag a few poems or passages of prose that I think will make good subject matter for our gathering—either something that feels thematically timely, or seasonally timely, or just weird enough for this extraordinary community of seekers. But this month, when I went to look for something, I came up short. No poems saved in my bookmarks bar, no passages flagged with a post-it in my stack of books. 

I was surprised by this. I have been reading a lot lately, and journaling quite a bit, too. Usually those two go hand in hand—as I shared in our gathering of the Hatch exactly a year ago, I often use reading as a springboard to journaling. I like to be provoked out of my own way of thinking, to see what thoughts or feelings another writer’s words bring up, or what insights I can glean, or to find parallels with my own experience, however oblique. My go-to for the last couple of years has been Virginia Woolf; I’m reading her diaries and letters in tandem, though at a century’s remove (so I’m currently working my way through 1924). 

But there’s a limit to how much of dear Virginia I can inflict on this community, so I thought of another book I have close at hand—it’s called Practice by Rosalind Brown. I’m reading it for a book club with friends who are involved in the literary world in various ways, as writers of everything from poems to young adult novels to commercial fiction, as editors, as literary agents, and so on. We all have wildly different tastes and interests, and it makes for wonderful, if at times heated, discussion. When my poet friend Molly chose this one, she texted me and said, “I can’t wait to hear everyone complain about how nothing happens in this book. But so much happens!”

And I completely agree, though at times the action is very interior. As an overview, the book is about a young woman who is studying literature at Oxford, and the routines she uses to mark her days and to regulate her mind, which at this moment is supposed to be writing a paper on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The passage I’ve selected is from early in the book, on page 27. As a little note of context, what has happened so far is that she has gotten up very early and has spent the morning wrestling with what she wants to say in this paper, not making much headway. And so:

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Hello lovely people,

Holly here!  I’ve been really craving lightness lately, and so when I started looking for a way to bring a sense of play to the Hatch, I knew where to look: my kids. And an Andrew Wyeth painting. But first things first!

Several months ago, my seven-year-old asked me to do a “Draw Along” with him, which is when someone (in this case, a podcast host) dictates a drawing to you. We stretched out on our stomachs with blank sheets of paper and a tray of markers and obediently listened to the speaker as he told us to draw a field, then a tree and a sun, some flowers. After a few moments, my curious four-year-old asked for his own paper and joined in. I found it so fun, so freeing, such a RELIEF to have someone hold my hand through a creative exercise. I didn’t have to think, I just had to execute. And the results were completely charming—our individual creative choices were on full display. No one’s was better or worse, only different.

So! That’s what we’re going to do now. I’m going to dictate a drawing to you. Some things to know beforehand: first, no one in the entire world ever has to see this drawing if you don’t want them to. Second, it isn’t possible to make this drawing “good.” The order in which I’ll give you elements to draw will mean things will overlap, your proportions might be off and you might make a mistake or two. It truly doesn’t matter.

A guided drawing exercise—

1. Flip to a blank page in your journal.

2. Draw a large rectangle, on the page, leaving a slim border between the edge of the page and the edge of the rectangle. This is a wall in a room.

3. Now, draw a window on the wall. It can be any shape, but make it large enough to see through. Draw some trim around the window, or a ledge along the bottom, or panes inside of it if you wish. 

4. Draw floor covering. A rug, wooden planks, stones. 

5. Draw a curtain rod. Draw curtains. Make them long or short, ragged-edged or symmetrical. Give them a pattern, a texture, a color.

6. Draw a place to sit. It can be a stool, a chair, an overturned bucket or box. 

7. Draw a plant somewhere in the room. 

8. Finally, draw a view in the window. It can be detailed–a pebbly ocean beach, a tree on a distant, sun-dappled hill, or as abstract–a wash of a color, a shower of leaves.

9. Now, take as much time as you need to add color or detail.

You did it! I had the idea for this particular guided drawing after I stumbled across the painting Wind from the Sea by Andrew Wyeth. I think you’ll agree that there’s an entire story encapsulated in this painting, and while our quick journal sketches will come nowhere close to this masterful work, I feel confident in saying that each and every one of you has captured something worth writing about, which is what we’re going to do next.

Scroll down to choose from a selection of journaling prompts that will hopefully lead you down a path of imagination and play. Happy hatching!

In gratitude,

Holly

P.S. By the way, if you’d like to share your drawing (no pressure, but it really is so much fun) please put it in the Isolation Journals chat, where you can find dozens of drawings already, done in real-time during the Hatch.

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Suleika Jaouad: Hi, everyone, welcome! It's been a very, very long time since I joined one of these, and I'm so happy and excited to be with all of you. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Suleika. I started the isolation journals at the very beginning of the pandemic, and we've had the joy of keeping this going for several years now—and this is our monthly virtual creative hour. If today is your first time, welcome. I'm so happy you're here, and it's going to be an extra special one.

Our community manager, Holly, is helping behind the scenes. Hi, Holly! If you have any tech issues, you can write to her in the chat.

And so I'm going to start with a little rundown of what we're doing today. We typically begin by reading a poem or a passage of literature. Then we give you a few creative prompts to choose from, and we spend the remainder of the hour writing or drawing or painting. But today, in honor of our very special guest, things are going to look a little different. We have the brilliant writer Melissa Febos joining us, who also happens to be a dear friend. In a minute, I'm going to ask her to turn her camera on and to unmute herself. But we're pretty much going to follow the same format. We're going to chat a little bit. I'm going to ask Melissa to read something. We're going to all write to a prompt, and then we're going to leave some time at the end to talk about what came up and to answer some questions. So if you have any questions, please leave them in the chat. We'll be keeping an eye on them. We'll try to get to some of them. We might not be able to get to all of them, but I look forward to hearing from each of you.

Okay, without further ado, I'd like to introduce Melissa, who is the author of five books, who is one of my very favorite living writers on Planet Earth. Most recently, she published The Dry Season, which, if you haven't read it, please order it. Please read it. I had the privilege of reading a very, very early excerpt of this book when it was an essay in our writing group. But it's a book that explores her year of self-imposed celibacy and the knowledge and wisdom she gained from it. She won a 2022 Guggenheim and a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, and her bestselling essay collection, Girlhood, which is one of my top essay collections, won the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She's been awarded many other prizes and many other fellowships from places like Ucross and the British Library and the Black Mountain Institute and McDowell. She is also a professor at the University of Iowa, and was also a professor at the Bennington Writing Seminars, where I had the immense privilege of having her as my advisor during my very first semester. I admire her so much. I admire her as a scholar, as a teacher, as a writer. I admire how she reveals what others might feel inclined to conceal on the page, and she does that in a way that I think invites us as writers to see ourselves more clearly. She's one of the very best humans I know, and I'm so honored to have her here today. So hi, Melissa, welcome!

Melissa Febos: Hi, Suleika—thank you for that introduction. I'm glad I got to have my camera off while you were giving it! I adore you. Same, same, same, same thing. I love you so much. You're such a beautiful writer and a beautiful person, and I'm so glad to be here with your community.

Suleika: We were very lucky, for those of you who don't know, to have Melissa share her Journaler’s Routine with us very recently. You are a prolific keeper of notebooks and journals, like many of you here. And there was one line in particular that I was so interested in. You said, “Most of the meaningful changes and revelations in my life have begun as conversations with myself in my journals. I think best when I externalize my thoughts, and it's difficult for me to integrate experience without writing about it, which is one reason why I am a serial memoirist.” I relate so deeply to that sentiment, and I'm curious what that active integration looks like and feels like for you.

Melissa: Sure. Thank you for that. I know it's so funny, isn't it? Like you must get this too. Being a memoirist means that people often make the assumption that I am in therapy voluntarily, five hours a day, and I'm constantly doing body scans all day, every day, I'm meditating super regularly all the time—no! I'm a memoirist because I want out. I am an avoider. I am pretty dissociative, very ADD. My instinct is to not want to know how I feel, and that instinct has gotten me into all sorts of trouble, and so I have basically had to build a life around practices that bring me back to myself.

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Hey y’all!

It’s Carmen here. For this month’s gathering of the Hatch, our virtual creative hour, I shared a poem by Dean Young. I knew Dean well—he taught at the University of Texas in Austin, and though I never studied with him, he was a mentor to several beloved friends. Stylistically, he was influenced by the New York School of Poets; active in the 1950s and 1960s, their poems were conversational, humorous, and surrealistic. All three descriptors can be applied to Dean’s work.

Dean had a degenerative heart condition, and when I met him, he’d been in congestive heart failure for more than a decade. However he’d recently taken a turn for the worse, and he’d moved to the top of the list for a heart transplant. Within a year, he got the call—that a young man in Oklahoma had died in a motorcycle accident, and his heart was on the way to Austin. The transplant successfully extended Dean’s life by eleven years. It’s an impossible calculus, measuring the young man’s tragic loss against Dean’s gain.

The transplant and the strangeness of chance was something Dean wrote about again and again. As he said in interview with NPR, “Everything in life is molecules bouncing against molecules. Somebody had to die; it had to be a fit; my blood and his blood had to not have an argument; the heart had to be transported; I had to get it.”

We had a glorious hour of meditating on Dean’s poem and the idea of magic and mystery. Below you’ll find the poem and a few of my thoughts on it. You’ll also find three journaling prompts and a link to the community chat where people wrote about their own moments of magic and chance encounters and how this poem shed new light on them. May it do the same for you.

Much love,

Carmen

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Hello friends-who-Hatch,

I’ve been stewing on this month’s Hatch topic for some time, ever since I found a comment from a lovely community member in one of our newsletters about being her own worst critic, knowing it, and continuing anyway despite concrete evidence to the contrary (two published books with great reviews). “You would think then that I'd be over this,” she writes.

It made me think about my own lessons I’ve had to learn, over and over again and how, instead of feeling bad about that fact, I’ve decided to revel in it. Before I was the Community Manager at the Isolation Journals, I was an admiring follower, proud of my former classmates and friends Carmen and Suleika and deeply inspired by them. One day, I scrolled to the TIJ Instagram account and saw a simple pencil-drawn graphic that stopped me in my tracks.

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Hey y’all!

It’s Carmen here, with our Notes from the Hatch: On Universal Love—in case you missed it, or you’d like to revisit.

Below you’ll find the poem we read, on love and friendship, along with an assortment of prompts, the link to the Isolation Journals chat, and even some sonic accompaniment.

It was a glorious love fest of an hour; hope this piece leaves you feeling as uplifted as I did!

Much love to all my stranger friends,

Carmen

Today’s reading—

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