I spend so much time and energy on the work I share at Sunderland University, one or two sessions, out of their social work studies that I’ve decided the share what I create over on my Patreon in a special collection.
It’s just the power points for now. I’ll go back in at some point and share the resources as well. But I just thought it might be of some use for someone else. I’m not expert either. And my style and message has changed over the six years of doing it. I’m mighty please withy last one, November 2025, because I just centred blackness all the way. I was unapologetic and intend to stay this way.
This was quickly followed with the writings and (re)drafts of Darkling, my poetry/hybrid collection published in October 2024.
After this 2025 has been a period of extended rest and refusal.
But something has been niggling me. The desire to create with paint again. the desire to play without expectations and outcomes/ products.
I’ve just scratched the itch through scrolling through Pinterest. Adding another abstract or landscape painting to a board that I’ll probably not look at again.
But it satisfied this niggling feeling. Until it didn’t.
It was going back into the classroom. Completing a few days of supply that pushed me over the edge.
The time I gave away for money. The time I’d lost pursuing my own pursuits. And realising that I wasn’t pursuing all the pursuits I wanted to pursue in the time I had/have.
So out came a creative sketchbook, inspired by the 30 days sketchbook challenge created by Cheryl Taves over at Insight Creative.
This is as much as I’m willing to share for now about the challenge, my creative sketchbook, processes and insights.
One of my rules is that it’s just for my eyes only. I want to see how this rule changes my practice. I want to create without fear but with curiosity. I want to give myself all the freedom without worrying about what others will think or say or comment on.
It’s not like I’m hanging on other people’s responses and reactions but I have gotten into a habit of just sharing anything and everything on my blog and I’m curious to see what happens when I keep things to myself.
Just for my eyes, heart, and soul only.
So far I’m enjoying the process of the challenge and I’m reflecting and paying attention to what makes my heart sing, what’s my creative vocabulary, what pushes my energies.
Do doubt whatever I explore within my creative sketchbook will be showing up in everything that I create. In everything who I {BE}. For sure.
sometimes i’m writing. my body is writing and she doesn’t know . she doesn’t know what / how/ where. the body just doesn’t know yet what to say. how to say it.
my body writes what is doesn’t know yet.
what is put down on the page, the words and language doesn’t know either. what is it trying to say?what does it know? what doesn’t it know?
i was going to say that things become clearer in the process. but that’s not true. in the process more questions are raised. not answers. but more curiosity, wonder and play.
here, i’ve cultivated a safe space. a safe container where i can be intimate and vulnerable. i can experiment and play to locate my voice, my knowledge and wisdom.
i embark on another journey with my body writing what she doesn’t know after completing an amazing commission/ gig/ assignment. i’ll share soon. i feel depleted after fullness. i’m tired but also lost.
i know i need to rest before anything else. so i rest for now. i rest in the not knowing.
Letting my brain catch up with the happening, I allow my heart to stop for an instant. Feeling unmoored to make sense, far too soon.
If only I had saw it coming. If only someone had thought to talk to me before this. Maybe things would be different, maybe the wound wouldn’t cut so deep.
Needing to rewind the clocks, to go back to that ignorant bliss, that season of love and acceptance, is a fool’s wish.
Under the avalanche of words, I move silent into the dark night, to piece myself back together following a different schema, charting an undiscovered course.
March is nearly over. I spent a lot of it getting ready for a trip that didn’t happen. I’m still sore around the wound but will share here at some point.
The journal above which I share is the journal I created for my travels. It’s an Elle Decorating Magazine which I’ve repurposed. I pulled out the images and text I wanted to use in my visual journaling and then painted over the remaining pages.
It’s rough and ready. Messy and grungy and in the process I didn’t realise how much it has reflected my mood.
It’s not perfect.
I’ve been all over the place in terms of my moods these past few weeks. Serene and blissed out to stressed and anxious and angry.
And this messy, at times ugly, journal has captured it all. And I am grateful for its space and non-judgmental welcome.
I’ll be back here over the coming days to share the spreads that have been created in this journal. Just so you can see a bit more of my process and practice.
One more thing. The back of this journal was converted into a mini guide book to take on my travels with me. Since I didn’t make that trip, I haven’t been back into the back of the journal. I was also contemplated chucking the whole thing and start a new journal as I felt it would be painful and annoying to continue to use the journal as its purpose was for my time away.
But instead of avoiding the pain and frustrations and disappointments, continuing to use the journal has meant I haven’t run away from the feels but have allowed myself to sit with the feels.
I’m not sure if that means I’m a glutton for punishment or if I’m just all in with this life, my life of attempting to thrive rather than just survive.
Still showing up in this journal, just created from a magazine man, has given me the time and space to work through my feelings and come through feeling grateful for my life and the people I have around me who care about me and love me.
Visual journaling, it kills me in how it’s such a powerful tool for staying present and connecting with the self. Amazeballs!
It’s been a while since I’ve taken you on a photowalk. With the nights getting lighter, and being away in Kiwi, I felt the urge to watch the sun go down over Loch Morlich.
When Kiwi and I were coming back from Glencoe in the New Year, we planned to stop off at Loch Morlich on route but it had snowed and more forecast. I’d never been to the loch before so I erred on the side of caution promising myself that we would return some other time.
That’s a practice of mine. To not run around like a blue arsed fly trying to fit everything in/ see/do everything but to leave something to come back for. A reason to return.
We were due to return to Loch Morlich in January but after my fall, I postponed it till this week.
So here we are parked up at Glenmore Campsite nestled in Glenmore Forest and kissing Loch Morlich.
Of course I’ve already been in the loch and it was fucking cold. I was tingling with renewed life afterwards though.
Enough energy therefore to take you on a photowalk as the evening draws in.
What do you do when you’re practicing self-love and have a whole selection of rituals to support this practice and have been following them each day for the year of 2025 so far and then one day you are just so tired that you don’t have the energy to muster the right move in the moment to demonstrate said self-love instead of self-harm?
You create a blog post about it all as a reminder as well as a source of inspiration to motivate yourself to make that self-love gesture or movement which is needed in that moment instead of continuing down that oath of self-harm and self-neglect.
I share my new poetry collection Darkling, come 7 November, 6-7.30 pm (GMT). I’m excited about speaking these words aloud in company. There’s something magical happens when we give voice to our creations. Allow the words, language to reverberate through our bodies. We come to the words almost anew, a fresh and feel all the emotions and meanings as they enfold again and for the first time.
I know it’s going to be an emotional session to share as this book was a long time in the making. I’ve changed so much in its creation. But I’m ready.
I’ve just started a new course with Lighthouse Writers Workshop called Manifestations—Reading and Writing Speculative Nonfiction! with Kanika Agrawal. It works out that it’s early morning for me at its run on mountain time. This might help my speculative imaginings but maybe not. We’ll see.
After waking late this morning, I went to the page to complete my morning pages over coffee. And this is what came out:
Good morning, good morning. ( This sentence ran into the date I’d just wrote moments before).
Wowat least I’m just doing mistakes on the page & not in real life. Do I avoid real life? I know when I’m off social media or when I shy away from the news, it is to protect me from the real world because the ‘truth’ they are peeling is direct & fake and flawed. (And hurts me. My soul.)
But it’s still facts & information & journalism & biased & not ‘for real.’ I mean we say it’s a fact about the time and the date. But ‘time’ is a construct. It was a construct to make money – colonial time. I took it as a fact but really it’s all fake or a mechanism of control. The same for ‘race’.
I was thinking it was a given but again ‘race’ is a construct. It was created to justify the exploitation & extraction & brutalisation of one group of people by another. “They can’t feel pain right so what we’re doing to them doesn’t matter”, they said. “They don’t exist on the same plain, the same level as us. So chill your boots. It’s okay. They’re not human.”
All this musing feeds into what I’ve been reading of late, especially Fugitive Feminism where Akwugo Emejulu who argues that because humanity is tied to whiteness, Black Women, who I am interested in, will never be human. So why bother? Why engage with society on their terms/ these terms hoping one day you’ll be accepted when you know that label, that status of being human will never be attained? Instead, why not speculative about alternatives, about other ways of being, other ways of knowing ( conjuring) which do not depend on being human?
What possibilities could I begin to conjure?
This is where I’m at this morning. Tired and drinking my coffee but already allowing my imaginings to run wild. To be fugitive.
After a busy and brutal period of being out in the world working for the man, I’m resting. But already just after a couple of days rest, I’m coming back to myself. Coming back to what floats my boat, and gets the creative juices flowing. Thank you.
Living Wild Studios 