About Joyful Practice
At the end of 2024, we decided to design the workshop we needed for our own creative growth. Together, we wanted to build a creative community centered around play and exploration, and we wanted to liberate our process from the values that drive patriarchy and capitalism.
We called it Joyful Practice for Dark times.
Traditional approaches to creativity–ones that center discipline and criticism—can distance us from from the inner voice and urgency that is the heartbeat of creative practice.
Through our online community, in-person gatherings, and hand-designed products, we seek to build a collective of joyful collaborators. While we value online connections, we also find deep satisfaction in working with analog tools—pen, paints, paper, typewriter, glue and scissors—as an antidote for digital overwhelm. We call this convergence the analog-digital estuary.
If this work speaks to you, please join us.
About Sarah & Jenn
Jennifer Berney and Sarah Tavis are writers and teachers with over 40 years of combined experience working with writers of various ages, backgrounds, and levels. Together, they write a weekly newsletter about healing and creative process, The Scrap Heap, and their book, The Joyful Practice Handbook: analog play for dark times, will be released in September 2026.
Jenn is a queer & neurodivergent writer, who has recently fallen in love with making visual art. She spends hours cutting up boxes and junk mail, and still more hours drawing animals and old family photos. She lives with her partner, two sons, and many animals in a farmhouse on the edge of town. Her memoir about queer family building, The Other Mothers (Sourcebooks, 2021), was a Washington Book Award Finalist. Her essays ave appeared in Longreads, WIRED, Outside, and Craftsmanship. Her essay on Autism and thriving, “The lights are bright and there’s nothing to look at,” recently won the Dirt x Prism essay contest.
Sarah has been a Texas punk girl, a teen mom, a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a bookseller, an artist, and a teacher of writing. Her hands are often stained from watercolors and ink and full of garden soil or flour. Everyday she learns more about living creatively in a middle-aged, chronically ill body. Sarah’s hybrid novella, Beyond the Pull of Gravity, will be published in Cosmographia Books’ ‘Famous Orphans’ short book series in September 2027. She is a founding member of The 3rd Thing, an independent publisher of necessary alternatives.