From the Compost Heap header. A pencil style illustration of a compost heap with flowers and plants growing around it. A bee buzzes by and a white rabbit hops by.
  • From Where You Dream

    by Robert Olen Butler

    “Please get out of the habit of saying that you’ve got an idea for a short story. Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white hot center of you.”


    The concept of this book is that storytelling comes from your unconscious and not your logical mind. This tracks with the writing process of Ray Bradbury, Dorothea Brande, even Terry Pratchett. It also maps onto the concepts of “day brain” vs. “night brain” writing explored on the podcast Writing Excuses.

    But the farther I read into this book the more rigid and didactic Butler’s approach seemed. He needlessly used plot examples requiring a content warning.

    I can’t say I wholeheartedly recommend this book, but I do find this concept of taking space to “dream” a story before you write it both liberating and extremely challenging. After setting an intention for more reverie in 2025 I have instead completely rebuilt my website and migrated my newsletter. 🤷

    But my best fiction has come from that place of the unconcious. So this is a technique I want to explore.

    If you do read this book, take it with a grain of salt. Artists often sound as if their way is the only way because it is the way that works for them.

    For their creative ecosystem.

    What you or I need may be completely different.

    With those caveats here are some passages I found interesting.


    “Voice is the embodiment in language of the contents of your unconscious.”


    Most artists spend a lot of time and energy trying to find / discover / hone their artistic voice or style. Whereas this suggests that leaning away from analysis and toward the unconscious may bring you closer to your true voice.


    “What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination… in a compost heap, things decompose. Your past is full of stories that have been composed in a certain way; that’s what memories are. But only when they decompose are you able to recompose them into new works of art.”


    Love a creative compost metaphor of course. He is paraphrasing British novelist Graham Greene here.


    “The organic nature of art is such that within the process everything must be utterly malleable, utterly fluent, so that everything ultimately can be brought together; and if there’s anything in there that will not yield, is not open to change, you cannot create the object.”


    This is something I’m finding in my own process. I come in with a concept for a story, but the more closely I hold myself within those bounds the worse the writing is. This past year my writing started to enter this dreamspace for the first time. I found the story was moving like shifting tetonic plates.


    “Rewriting is redreaming.”


    I think the most radical idea in this book is that even editing (normally considered an analytical process) can come from the unconscious.

    And should in Butler’s opinion.

    As a literature professor he has all the tools for analysis, but claims not to consciously use them. He rereads his books looking for “twangs” and redreams them until it all “thrums.” Even his rewriting process coming from the unconscious.


    “The compost heap of the novelist, the repository that exists apart from literal memory, apart from the conscious mind, is mostly made up of direct, sensual life experience.”


    More creative compost. Butler has an obsession with sensory details and decries all explanatory words (for emotions, etc.) and here is where you can fall into the trap of taking on his style for your own. Centering on sensory details can certainly make a text richer, but to use them exclusively feels extreme.

    It’s a stylistic choice not “good” or “bad” writing as he frames it.


    “[Fiction and technique] must first be forgotten…before they can be authentically engaged in the creation of a work of art.”


    He’s basically explaining here that all of that analysis (of stories and literature and writing technique) goes in the compost heap and he doesn’t trust it until it’s filtered through dreamspace.


    “Desire is the driving force behind plot.”


    I think this comes to the heart of his dreamspace technique. Rather than plotting a work analytically (something I am apparently allergic to) he let’s the objective of a character drive the action. This prevents the awkward situation where a character simply does something because the plot requires it.

    It’s a bit chicken and the egg.

    I don’t think one way is right or wrong. But when you’re done your character had darn well better have a drive for what they are doing. But doesn’t it sound more fun to let character drive your writing rather than the other way around.


    “Writers who aspire to a different kind of fiction— entertainment fiction, let’s call it, genre fiction—have never forgotten this necessity of the character’s yearning.”

    He is a straight up literary snob here. 🙄

    But it’s worth mentioning because this chapter reminded me of musical theatre structure.

    Something strongly present in my personal compost heap.

    There’s always an “I want” song in Act I.


    “[The artist] doesn’t know what she knows about the world until she creates the object… the writing of a work of art is as much an act of exploration as it is expression, an exploration of images, of moment-to-moment sensual experience.”


    I think a lot of writers sit down to “write a book” not to “discover a story.”

    For all of my criticisms of this book I do think I’ve added some rich humus (with a pile of horse 💩) to my compost heap.

    That said, I hesitate to give Butler too much credit. The reason I bought his book was that I was already curious about a more intuitive approach based on Ray Bradbury’s Zen and the Art of Writing.

    I gave up marking quotes because I wanted to quote every other line. And ended up too intimidated to write about it at all. Which now feels silly because I’m writing about this book that is a dim reflection of it.

    Bradbury very much wrote from this dreamspace and drawing images and characters from his unconcious. I just need to find the fortitude to do it justice when writing about it.

    Maybe next month.


    Photo Credit: Patrick McManaman

    Read more: From Where You Dream
  • Love this concept of artist publishing (versus self publishing) from Amelia Greenhall.

    Putting a mental pin to come back and write more since I’ve finished two of her zines about it.

    Read more: untitled post 156077965
  • Test

    Read more: untitled post 485
  • Draft no. 4

    by John McPhee

    Cover of John McPhee's Draft No. 4 simple cream cover with typewriter font

    This book is half writing craft / half memoir. Here are some of his gem’s about writing.

    First, one of the graphs that inspired me to buy the book. I am fascinated how he thinks so visually about his structural process.

    Flatlay of book showing shapes like circles on a line and a spiral


    (The book was second hand and dog eared when I bought it.)

    Notes on Structure

    Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins.

    McPhee is talking about non fiction here, but this is doubly true for novels.

    Readers are not supposed to notice the structure. It is meant to be about as visible as someone’s bones.

    a basic criterion for all structures: they should not be imposed upon the material. They should arise from within it.

    This is a very actionable step.

    Often, after you have reviewed your notes many times and thought through your material, it is difficult to frame much of a structure until you write a lead. You wade around in your notes, getting nowhere. You don’t see a pattern. You don’t know what to do. So stop everything. Stop looking at the notes. Hunt through your mind for a good beginning. Then write it. Write a lead.

    I would go so far as to suggest that you should always write your lead (redoing it and polishing it until you are satisfied that it will serve) before you go at the big pile of raw material and sort it into a structure.

    I wonder if writing a novel that is underpinned with research and note making could move forward similarly to the process of writing non fiction. I’m curious about this as I am someone who is more comfortable writing non fiction and trying to find my feet with novels.

    The lead—like the title—should be a flashlight that shines down into the story. A lead is a promise. It promises that the piece of writing is going to be like this. If it is not going to be so, don’t use the lead.

    More stunning imagery. I love the idea of the lead as a flashlight shining down through a story.

    Another way to prime the pump is to write by hand… get away from the computer, lie down somewhere with pencil and pad, and think it over. This can do wonders at any point in a piece and is especially helpful when you have written nothing at all. Sooner or later something comes to you. Without getting up, you roll over and scribble on the pad. Go on scribbling as long as the words develop. Then get up and copy what you have written into your computer file.

    Another actionable tip. And yet acknowledging what works for him is not universal:

    Alternating between handwriting and computer typing almost always moves me along, but that doesn’t mean it will work for you.

    Finding Your Style

    Young writers find out what kinds of writers they are by experiment.

    If they choose from the outset to practice exclusively a form of writing because it is praised in the classroom or otherwise carries appealing prestige, they are vastly increasing the risk inherent in taking up writing in the first place. It is so easy to misjudge yourself and get stuck in the wrong genre.

    You avoid that, early on, by writing in every genre. If you are telling yourself you’re a poet, write poems. Write a lot of poems. If fewer than one work out, throw them all away; you’re not a poet. Maybe you’re a novelist. You won’t know until you have written several novels.

    This is so interesting. Particularly the bit about getting stuck writing in a way that was praised in school.

    Young writers generally need a long while to assess their own variety, to learn what kinds of writers they most suitably and effectively are…

    “Though a man be more prone and able for one kind of writing than another, yet he must exercise all.” Ben Jonson

    One of my favorite quotes in the book.

    No one will ever write in just the way that you do, or in just the way that anyone else does. Because of this fact, there is no real competition between writers. What appears to be competition is actually nothing more than jealousy and gossip. Writing is a matter strictly of developing oneself. You compete only with yourself. You develop yourself by writing. An editor’s goal is to help writers make the most of the patterns that are unique about them.

    On omission and selection,

    Writing is selection.

    … You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out.

    … Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way. Ideally, a piece of writing should grow to whatever length is sustained by its selected material—that much and no more.

    Drafting

    McPhee on the difference between drafts and a ratio of how long each draft takes that he observed in his own writing over time.

    First drafts are slow and develop clumsily because every sentence affects not only those before it but also those that follow. The first draft of my book on California geology took two gloomy years; the second, third, and fourth drafts took about six months altogether. That four-to-one ratio in writing time—first draft versus the other drafts combined—has for me been consistent in projects of any length, even if the first draft takes only a few days or weeks. There are psychological differences from phase to phase, and the first is the phase of the pit and the pendulum. After that, it seems as if a different person is taking over. Dread largely disappears. Problems become less threatening, more interesting. Experience is more helpful, as if an amateur is being replaced by a professional. Days go by quickly and not a few could be called pleasant, I’ll admit.

    I’m intrigued to see him using the same metaphor as Neil Gaiman [[Throwing Mud at the Wall]]. I wonder who said it first and if one is referencing the other or if it arose naturally because it is so fitting to the task at hand.

    The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once. For me, the hardest part comes first, getting something—anything—out in front of me. Sometimes in a nervous frenzy I just fling words as if I were flinging mud at a wall.

    And in a letter to his daughter (writer Jenny McPhee),

    You finish that first awful blurting, and then you put the thing aside. You get in your car and drive home. On the way, your mind is still knitting at the words. You think of a better way to say something, a good phrase to correct a certain problem. Without the drafted version—if it did not exist—you obviously would not be thinking of things that would improve it. In short, you may be actually writing only two or three hours a day, but your mind, in one way or another, is working on it twenty-four hours a day—yes, while you sleep—but only if some sort of draft or earlier version already exists.

    In another letter to Jenny,

    Dear Jenny: What am I working on? How is it going? Since you asked, at this point I have no confidence in this piece of writing. It tries a number of things I probably shouldn’t be trying. It tries to use the present tense for the immediacy that the present tense develops, but without allowing any verb tense to become befouled in a double orientation of time. It tells its story inside out. Like the ship I’m writing about, it may have a crack in its hull. And I’ve barely started. After four months and nine days of staring into this monitor for what has probably amounted in aggregate to something closely approaching a thousand hours, that’s enough. I’m going fishing.”

    Fiction

    Art is where you find it. Good writing is where you find it. Fiction, in my view, is much harder to do than fact, because the fiction writer moves forward by trial and error, while the fact writer is working with a certain body of collected material, and can set up a structure beforehand.

    “Fiction must stick to facts, and the truer the facts the better the fiction—so we are told.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

    Editing

    An editing tip he uses himself and taught his students at Stanford,

    You draw a box not only around any word that does not seem quite right but also around words that fulfill their assignment but seem to present an opportunity.

    While the word inside the box may be perfectly O.K., there is likely to be an even better word for this situation, a word right smack on the button, and why don’t you try to find such a word? If none occurs, don’t linger; keep reading and drawing boxes, and later revisit them one by one. If there’s a box around “sensitive” because it seems pretentious in the context, try “susceptible.” Why “susceptible”? Because you looked up “sensitive” in the dictionary and it said “highly susceptible.” With dictionaries, I spend a great deal more time looking up words I know than words I have never heard of—at least ninety-nine to one. The dictionary definitions of words you are trying to replace are far more likely to help you out than a scattershot wad from a thesaurus.

    On knowing when he is done,

    When am I done? I just know. I’m lucky that way. What I know is that I can’t do any better; someone else might do better, but that’s all I can do; so I call it done.

    William Shawn, McPhee’s Editor at The New Yorker when asked how he has so much time to work with each writer on the smallest details,

    “It takes as long as it takes.”

    McPhee’s advice on maintaining your voice when working with editors,

    There are people who superimpose their own patterns on the work of writers and seem to think it is their role to force things in the direction they would have gone in if they had been doing the writing. Such people are called editors, and are not editors but rewriters.

    My advice is, never stop battling for the survival of your own unique stamp. An editor can contribute a lot to your thoughts but the piece is yours—and ought to be yours—if it is under your name.

    And then on how invaluable editors can be,

    Editors are counselors and can do a good deal more for writers in the first-draft stage than at the end of the publishing process.

    The help is spoken and informal, and includes insight, encouragement, and reassurance with regard to a current project.

    Confidence and Imposter Syndrome

    If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.

    And unless you can identify what is not succeeding—unless you can see those dark clunky spots that are giving you such a low opinion of your prose as it develops—how are you going to be able to tone it up and make it work?

    This is encouraging because this is the same reframe I used when returning to fiction writing after giving it up. If I see the problems I can work on fixing them.

    Notes on Technology

    Howard thought the computer should be adapted to the individual and not the other way around. One size fits one.

    Howard was a computer programmer who helped McPhee customize the software he used.

    Hat Tip to Austin Kleon

    Read more: Draft no. 4
  • Leap Before You Look (2015)

    By Helen Molesworth


    These early index cards were specifically collected for ideating the type of creative community I want to cultivate.

    Handwritten index cards. Quotes typed below.

    There are a lot of threads to pull on here.

    “the aspirations of Black Mountain College: namely to inspire us in an expansive notion of the arts and creativity through close observation, physical engagement, service, and play…”

    Jill Medvedow (p. 18)

    Keeping an expansive view of art and what it can do and be. It also feels important that creativity can both be of service and play which so often seem at odds with one another.

    Handwritten index cards. Quotes typed below.

    “artistic exchange” and “the cultural ecosystem is a theme”

    Jill Medvedow, p. 18

    “the effect of a long gestation period cannot be under estimated”

    p. 20

    “Josef Albers insisted that art display a rigorous understanding of its material properties.”

    p. 25

    Handwritten index cards. Quotes typed below.

    This quotes are at the heart of a desire for social change. It still feels very radical to value the wisdom of youth. And also the focus on practical learning.

    “We must realize that the world as it is isn’t worth saving; it must be made over.”

    John Rice, p. 30

    “We should realize there is a wisdom of youth as well as wisdom of old age.”

    John Rice, p. 31

    “There are things to be learned through observation (that) cannot be learned any other way.”

    John Rice, p. 31

    Handwritten index card. Quotes typed below.

    “Whatever cannot be expressed in words cannot be learned in words.”

    John Rice, p. 31


    This ties in to a conversation I had with Morgan Harper Nichols and this idea that art is a form of communication.

    It feels very relevant to Neurokind as platform to share experiences that may transcend or defy language.


    Black and white photograph of white man lighting pipe
    John Andrew Rice and student David Bailey, Blue Ridge campus, Black Mountain College, circa 1933 or ’34

    “…there is something of the artist in everyone and the development of this talent, however small, carrying with it a severe discipline of its own, results in the students becoming more sensitive to order in the world and within himself than he can ever be through intellectual effort alone.”

    John Rice, Black Mountain College Bulliten, 1935 (p. 34)

    Black and white photograph of Buckminster Fuller, Elaine de Kooning, and Josef Albers in field of collapsed geometric dome at Black Mountain College.
    Bucky Fuller, Elaine de Kooning, Josef Albers, students, and a thing that would become, a year later, the first geodesic dome

    “The summer sessions permitted an extraordinary form of cross-pollination.” 🐝🐝🐝

    “Almost none of the summer faculty was paid a salary but received instead room and board and some relaxing time in the country.”

    Helen Molesworth , p. 42

    “The summer sessions modeled a form of artistic community, one that de Kooning took with him to New York in 1950, when he helped to found the Artists’ Club, a gathering dedicated to the presentation of avant-garde ideas.“

    “Black Mountain helped to establish the idea that an art school is a place of competing and diverse ideas, where the task of the faculty is to commit to a sense of rigor instead of personal taste, and the job of the students is to navigate the complexity of the options, in the hope of finding their own paths through what John Cage called “the big question,” namely, “What are you going to do with your time?”[^3]

    Helen Molesworth, p. 45

    “the relation is not so much of teacher to student as of one member of the community to another.”

    Black Mountain College Catalogue
    Leap Before You Look, p. 80

    “In essence there exists the utmost freedom for people to be what they please. There is simply no pattern of behavior, no criteria to live up to. People study what they please, as long as they want to, idle if they want to, graduate whenever they are willing to stand on examination, even after only a month here, or a year, or whatever, or they can waive all examinations, and graduations. They can attend classes, or stay away. They can work entirely by themselves, or they need not work whatever. They can be male, female, or fairy, married, single, or live in illicit love.”

    Jack Tworkov , p. 42

    These examples highlight an egalitarianism and exchange of ideas that I’d like to foster in creative spaces I facilitate.


    Students and John Andrew Rice sitting outside a stone building

    John Andrew Rice holding court with students (including Dave Bailey, in hat), Black Mountain College, circa 1933 or ’34

    “What you do with what you know is the important thing. To know is not enough.”

    John Rice, pg. 77

    “There were no letter grades at Black Mountain College, nor were there required courses, set curricula, standard examinations, or prescribed teaching methods.”

    “When John Rice established Black Mountain College in 1933, he sought to create a school that dissolved distinctions between curricular and extracurricular activities, that conceived of education and life as deeply intertwined, and that placed the arts at the center rather than at the margins of learning.“

    “For Rice, education was registered not by grades or other standard criteria but in a heightened desire to learn and to question, which would lead students to an expanded aptitude for solving a range of problems and to a richer sense of self.”

    Ruth Erikson, p. 77


    “WE DO NOT ALWAYS CREATE ‘WORKS OF ART,’ BUT RATHER EXPERIMENTS; IT IS NOT OUR AMBITION TO FILL MUSEUMS: WE ARE GATHERING EXPERIENCE.”

    Josef Albers, p. 33

    Josef Albers giving Nan Chapin (and others) painting pointers, Lee Hall porch, Blue Ridge campus, Black Mountain College, spring 1936

    Josef Albers giving Nan Chapin (and others) painting pointers, Lee Hall porch, Blue Ridge campus, Black Mountain College, spring 1936

    “Josef Alber’s thought of teaching art as analogous to teaching a language, hence the students had to begin with the building blocks of aesthetics; he called drawing a ‘graphic language’ that was both a ‘visual and manual act.’ “

    “Alber’s color course… proved that the experience of color was ultimately fungible.”

    For example: Cutting up and collating bits of paper to see how they change in relationship to each other.

    Helen Molesworth, p. 34

    “The relativity of our experience of color has philosophical and ethical implications, as well. If our experience of a piece of colored paper can change so demonstrably, then what side footing do we have when we appeal to ‘common-sense’ truths like color?”

    “forms are subject to perception – what Albers calls experience.”

    “The task of training students to see, “to open eyes,” as Albers often said, was to facilitate their critical awareness of the made qualities of the world around them, to make them self-aware of their own experiences to better prepare them for the democratic work of making considered choices.”

    “Rather Albers insisted on the relativity of color, the perceptual instability of human experience, and the need for a constant performance or testing of innumerable variables.”

    Helen Molesworth, p. 41

    This basis for experimentation is really key to BMC – although every artist interpreted that in their own way. Albers’ way was questioning your own perception and experience as a lesson to think deeply about the world.


    Footnotes
    1. Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidsilver/29287248690/in/album-72157673611048125/

    2. Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidsilver/7364006522/in/album-72177720312993838/

    3. John Cage question from interview in 1968. Interviewer: “But does that alter the fact that you might have preferred going to a different happening?” Cage: “That’s not an interesting question; for you are actually at this one where you are. How are you going to use this situation if you are there? This is the big question. What are you going to do with your time? If you use it negatively, you really are not consuming. You’re rather doing some other kind of thing which, as I’ve explained just now, loses tempo. You have somehow to use it posi-tively. We have illustrations of how to get at this, and it would be part and parcel of the new ethic or new morality or new aesthetic.” Source: p. 28 in John Cage: An Anthology (1991)

    4. Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidsilver/29523433136/in/album-72157673611048125/

    5. Image Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/davidsilver/18655203702/in/album-72157673611048125/


    Leap Before You Look Black Mountain College book over. Large yellow background with brown pressed leaves.
    Book Information
    Edition

    Hardcover

    Source

    Personal Library

    Publisher

    Yale University Press

    Publication Date

    2015

    ISBN

    9780300211917

    Length

    400 pages

    Dimensions

    9.50 x 12.50 in

    Book Information

    318 color + 170 b-w illus.

    I haven’t bought a book that cost this much since university, but it is a beauty. If you’re interested in reading I’d suggest checking out an interlibrary loan or trying library at your nearest art museum. But compared to going back to school for a Ph.D., which I briefly considered this Spring, this book is basically a steal. 😉


    Cross Pollinate 🐝

    More posts about Black Mountain College.

    Read more: Leap Before You Look (2015)
  • “The act of taking notes in public is a powerful discipline: rather than jotting cryptic notes to myself in a commonplace book, I publish those notes for strangers. This imposes a rigor on the note-taking that makes those notes far more useful to me in years to come.”

    “Better still: public note-taking is powerfully mnemonic. The things I’ve taken notes on form a kind of supersaturated solution of story ideas, essay ideas, speech ideas, and more, and periodically two or more of these fragments will glom together, nucleate, and a fully-formed work will crystallize out of the solution.”

    Cory Dotorow on Blogging

    Read more: untitled post 156077616
  • Digital gardens let you cultivate your own little bit of the internet

    A growing number of people are creating individualized, creative sites that eschew the one-size-fits-all look and feel of social media

    By Tanya Basu

    MIT Technology Review, September 3, 2020

    “These creative reimaginings of blogs have quietly taken nerdier corners of the internet by storm. A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblr—less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter.”

    “Digital gardens explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning, particularly among people with niche interests. Through them, people are creating an internet that is less about connections and feedback, and more about quiet spaces they can call their own.”

    “With blogging, you’re talking to a large audience,” (Tom Critchlow) says. “With digital gardening, you’re talking to yourself. You focus on what you want to cultivate over time.”

    The author of this post ends by wondering if it will hit critical mass – like that is something to aim for. I don’t think so and I hope not. When something becomes mainstream it is co-opted by capitalism and neurotypical social norms. This is exactly what happened to blogging when it went from something nerds did for love and passion to a revenue stream.

    Read more: untitled post 156077614
  • A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden

    by Maggie Appleton

    “A garden is a collection of evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date. They’re inherently exploratory – notes are linked through contextual associations. They aren’t refined or complete – notes are published as half-finished thoughts that will grow and evolve over time. They’re less rigid, less performative, and less perfect than the personal websites we’re used to seeing.”

    As someone who struggles with perfectionism and can get caught up in finding the right container a wild digital garden sounds like a particularly fertile project for me.

    “Gardens present information in a richly linked landscape that grows slowly over time… You get to actively choose which curiosity trail to follow, rather than defaulting to the algorithmically-filtered ephemeral stream. The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.”

    This metaphorical contrast of a constantly flowing stream (like social media) versus following your own curiosity down various rabbit holes reminds me of my early days of the internet and an experience I’d like to get back to.

    When I realized I wanted to reframe my artist’s log project as a digital garden (or compost heap) it was clear to me that my newsletter was more of a campfire… a space for connection.

    Then I continued reading to find this,

    “While gardens present the ideas of an individual, campfires are conversational spaces to exchange ideas that aren’t yet fully formed.”

    Love it when a metaphor comes together.

    And just when I was wondering if maybe it wasn’t all a bit frivolous and I was being distracted from the real work Appleton says,

    “Naming is a political act as much as a poetic one.”

    Read more: untitled post 156077612
  • I first heard about this concept from Morgan Harper Nichols,

    “[Digital gardens] are online spaces where you can collect or share information…an organically grown collection of ideas, resources, and thoughts. It’s a place that you can create online that encourages continuous learning, exploration, and growth, much like tending to a physical garden. It’s a living ecosystem of interconnected insights where the ideas and concepts can bloom, cross-pollinate, or sometimes wither away. Unlike a static blog post or article that presents a finished thought, a digital garden’s content is often in a constant state of growth and environment.”

    I was immediately intrigued. This integrates nicely with my own ideas about creative ecosystems and creative compost.

    Read more: untitled post 156077610