At the end of 2024, we decided to design the workshop we needed for our own creative growth. We’d each spent the past handful of years struggling—with complex caregiving roles, post-pandemic burnout, and the looming darkness of this political era. Jenn, raising two autistic boys, was finally learning to understand the intricacies of her own AuDHD brain. Sarah, diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease during the pandemic, was reckoning with the limitations and needs of an immunocompromised body exhausted from chronic illness. 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.

The more we approached our work through the spirit of play, the more we found ourselves called to analog practice—to the mess-making of writing by hand and making visual art. Before the age of A.I., we would have been too shy to share our visual work, but now that writers were using bots to create polished illustrations in seconds, we saw value in the vulnerability of our drawings.