Roots and Branches

Crafting a Unique Writing Practice Rooted in Reality and Possibility

In April, I had the honor of speaking at the Georgia Writers’ Association’s Red Clay Conference.
The experience brought me joy in quite a few ways, but one of them was the opportunity to talk about how my food writing experience has helped me cultivate abundant thinking, and informed my own writing practice (as well as how I teach and coach in writing spaces).

The talk was, in essence, a deeper dive into the topic of this newsletter issue from January, and it was a joy to dive more deeply into reflection on practice and praxis in my own writing life.

A few quick thoughts on the conference:

-I appreciated that there was a good mix of fiction and nonfiction

-I loved that I was invited in to talk about about food writing to fill that gap in the program (and am looking forward to doing so again)

-The community was very friendly: I enjoyed how approachable and kind the organizers and booksellers were, as well as attendees, from all stages of their writing careers.

-Have you been to this conference? What did you think? (Or alternately, what’s a writing conference you absolutely adore?)

A quick reminder of ways to work together this summer:

If you’re eager to work with me this summer on your writing or fermentation practice (or both), I still have a few spots each in my summer writing workshops: Bloom (which starts July 22) and Writing Playground (which starts August 1st).
I’m also leading a very special multi-day fermentation and place workshop at Hambidge this July.

• In Bloom, we cover the pillars of practice that make a sustainable, productive writing practice a lifelong habit (and one you turn to out of joy rather than frustration). It’s geared towards writers tackling big projects (like books) but all writers are welcome.
  It includes:
  Live Q&A sessions with me plus coaching support every weekday, free bonus gifts for showing up consistently, weekly journaling prompts, lifetime resource library access, and more.
  Plus two very special Q&A sessions with industry experts:
  *Sally Ekus of The Ekus Group answers your questions about agent representation and publishing
  *and Emma Sector of Storey Publishing talks about finding and connecting with your audience.
  Use SUMMERWRITING for an extra 20% off, and if cost remains an issue, email me for sliding scale.
  

• In Writing Playground, we meet together once a week to respond to playful writing prompts that ask us to try different approaches to thinking about a given topic, AND we cover some of the core skills I teach for a lifelong, sustainable writing practice that you can put to work in your life right away.
  I’ve used feedback from last year to make Writing Playground even better, and it includes:
  Dedicated time for writing responses to prompts (no critique/sharing required unless you wish to), lifetime resource library access, free gifts for consistently showing up, 1:1 writing coaching support each week, and more.
  Use PLAY for an extra 20% off, and email me if you need sliding scale pricing.
  

• Finally, my Hambidge workshop is perfect for my fellow hands-on, multidisciplinary creatives who want to work together in real life: Together we’ll make ferments (and make ferment-inspired zines!), walk in the woods, take time to journal and reflect, and enjoy all that Hambidge has to offer.
  My friends at Hambidge are very graciously handling all the logistics and tickets (as well as lodging and meals for our guests): Learn more and sign up to join us here.

Now, on to the meat of my Georgia Writers’ talk. I fleshed out this (long) transcript of my hour-long talk below. If you want to go more in depth into this topic, here you go (and for a more condensed version, head here):

Today I’m talking about food writing as an abundant practice: How we discuss food, and its many facets, without erasing parts of the story that ask us to tackle difficult histories, emotions, and present conditions.

Abundance doesn’t mean everything is sunshine and roses, but rather an acknowledgement of the complete landscape of possibilities and contexts that inform our work, followed by intentional choices.

But writing from this place means we also offer readers, and ourselves, momentum and a direction: Not just mapping out how things are, but how they might be (and how we might get there).

What I’ve found is that in order to consider food from a place of possibilities, we must consider our own writing practice from the same place.

So this talk is about subject, but also about author: And how reimagining our own writing practices allows us to reimagine the world beyond them.

How did I come to think about abundance and writing?

It’s easy, and very deeply socially conditioned, for us to look towards what’s lacking in our work and ourselves. As writers, this might mean an internal monologue peppered with thoughts like:

Did I write enough words? Will I meet my deadline? Is this piece good enough?

When I began to notice this tendency in myself, it appeared as a disconnect from what I’m actually writing about, given that a big part of my whole thing as a writer is sharing abundance and possibility through food.

But rather than culinary abundance through big, opulent six figure dinner parties and the outward performance of abundance, I focus on abundance and creativity as a daily practice: creating a life and cooking practice where everyday abundance is possible, where we give ourselves permission to play, and where connecting to food traditions offers us an opportunity to learn and grow forward into the future in ways we might otherwise have overlooked.

Since this is how I view my subject matter, and this perspective, that magic and abundance are accessible to us each day, is at the core of how I reach my readers, viewing my writing practice itself from a place of lack feels antithetical to this core belief.

If I am so focused on creating abundance and finding everyday magic in my kitchen, why does it suddenly go out the window when I sit down to write?

I want to start by talking about the complexity and rewards of writing about food as an abundant subject, and then we’ll transition to the writing process itself as an abundant process and practice.

What I mean by food as an abundant subject

When you hear “food and abundance” what first comes to mind for you?

We have so many mental associations with food and abundance (big feasts, harvest seasons, cornucopias, etc), and certainly talking about a lot of food in one place is one way we can think about abundance.

Food also offers us a rich site for considering abundance because it is connected to so many things in our lives.

“Every story is a food story” is a sentiment I hear often from other food writers and researchers, which also makes me think of my doctoral research in Library & Information Science: Where I and my colleagues often said “everything is information.”

That means my potential research scope is infinite, and anything and everything could conceivably fall within its scope if viewed through a certain facet. Talk about abundance!

If everything is my area then nothing is, so this kind of abundance asks us to be clear in defining our own boundaries and scope, recognizing that we can’t cover everything, and being intentional about what we do.

Once we decide on what’s within the boundaries of our topics, we can dive into the abundance of that specific story: So rather than just saying, for example, that the format of printed recipes changed over time from a narrative block of text to ingredient lists and numbered steps,

Wouldn’t it be more interesting to include why that change took place?

Which was because Fannie Farmer and the Boston Cooking School were using cookbooks to educate working class women who were new to cooking, and needed affordable, easy to replicate recipes.

Whereas earlier recipes coincided with higher costs for books and much lower literacy, so the audience was wealthier and used the books for inspiration or to deepen skills, not necessarily as a way to learn cooking from start to finish.

But, also very important, food is an abundant writing subject, but that abundance is not all love and light: many aspects of food stories are not abundant: histories erased, lives lost, ecosystems razed.

Discussing abundance can run the risk of glossing over big issues, but when done right I believe it also allows us to talk about the many difficult histories, the erased stories, violence, and modern oppression and destruction that accompanies food, in a way that can resonate with readers because it not only shines a light on these issues, but gives them something to hold on to and somewhere to take what they’ve learned.

Again, we’re going back to directionality.

We can be honest about the current situation, the history, the damage that has been done and continues to be, and then we can consider where we might go from here, whether that direction feels far-fetched, or distant, or very within reach.

Writing is like handing our reader a gift: I actually envisioned it while writing this talk as literally setting a gift in their hands.

Whatever that gift looks like and contains, it will be more useful to them if they then have something to do with it: Even if that something is just setting it on a shelf so it’s more visible to others.

We build up energy and emotion as we read, particularly reading about difficult subjects, and providing an abundant framework (more on that in a second) offers our readers a direction for that energy to go.

Our readers are certainly capable of parsing and incorporating what we share with them, and deciding where to take it, but I’ve found that offering a possible direction to go in gives them a starting point for their own exploration beyond my work, rather than an end point.

In other words, I’m saying, “Here is this food story, how can we reimagine it? What can you do?” rather than saying “Here’s this story. Ok, now you know!”

It’s the difference between holding the gift and using the gift.

I find readers respond much better to my writing when I give some direction for them to put the energy and momentum into.

Sometimes that direction is expansion: Expanded knowledge (and I include having a more nuanced understanding of a subject as its own expansion), understanding of a different perspective or culture, or expanding into new ideas and possibilities.

You choose the path of your writing and the direction your reader might walk alongside you:

In Our Fermented Lives, I talk about a whole range of fermentation-related cultural traditions around the world.

Most readers I’ve spoken to say they enjoyed learning about different histories, but many also have really tapped into my concluding chapters on community and on the power of work done by hand and the potential future directions the story of fermentation might go, noting that has influenced their day to day lives and perspectives.

One of the biggest takeaways I hear from readers about is actually not specific to fermentation, which is the subject matter of the book.

This is the reminder that we are a bridge between the past and all it contains in its many facets, and the future.

We are active participants, each of us, in co-creating history with every choice we make, choosing what from the past to carry forward to the not-yet-imagined future, and seeing what else from the past can be left behind, or perhaps alchemized and transformed in some way. In our kitchens and our lives, we get to pick what that looks like.

In other words, when we write/think/etc about food we are not only experiencing abundance, we are creating it too.

Let’s talk about how this looks in relation to a specific topic of fermentation history.

One tradition you may be familiar with is kimjang, kimchi making parties that are a good example of how our collective fermentation efforts exemplify the different themes that I spoke about in my book and that I believe inform our relationship to food (life and tradition, preservation, flavor, health, community, and the future).

At these kimchi-making gatherings, folks are preserving food and carrying on tradition, making something flavorful and healthy, strengthening community in two ways (by gathering together, sharing conversation and knowledge within the group while collectively creating something to feed the community later in the winter), and finally, participants are carrying forward these traditions, and their tangible, edible results, into the future.

There are food writers, artists, and others who are recording and preserving the importance of these traditions, and I mention them in the book as a way for people to learn about this tradition in greater depth or explore certain facets:

Jiwon Woo’s exploration of the science and art of son-mat (hands taste), for example, or Eric Kim’s discussion of kimjang alongside a kimchi making tutorial.

The path in your writing might look different. Maybe, for example, your writing covers farm labor conditions in the South, and perhaps it pushes people to get involved in advocating for farm workers’ rights, or provides a case for higher pay and better working conditions.

Perhaps the direction and invitation you extend to readers is not for a specific flavor of advocacy or action, but instead an opportunity for them to pause, reflect, and incorporate what you’ve shared.

Pausing, then taking steps with intention, is its own form of direction.

In all these cases, our writing is not static, we aren’t presenting a bullet point fact sheet that says “Kimchi is thousands of years old” or “farm workers’ working conditions are often appallingly bad.”

We are handing people a gift with all its nuance, and the opportunity to walk down a given path (or, maybe, probably, to use what they learned as a brick in their own unique path).

(A side note: This isn’t the be all and end all: my own limited worldview and my specific perspective is the starting point, not the end point for this conversation.)

As we think of the direction I’m offering you, I hope you’ll view this as a starting point:

My goal in talking about abundant food writing is to share how I think about tackling a very complex subject, and to discuss it from the lens of giving our readers something to leave with:

An action, a feeling, whatever, so they have somewhere to channel their energy and efforts they might have built up after learning about around that complexity. 

So the direction I encourage you to go is to simply think about what that might look like for you.

An abundant food writing framework

I’ve been thinking about what an abundant food writing framework might look like, and here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

You might incorporate each element differently, or to different degrees, depending on your subject and format, so take what works and leave what doesn’t.

But the important thing to think about in adopting this abundant mindset is locating the abundance within your chosen story, but also the abundance of possibilities beyond it.

So our abundant framework asks: How does the story itself, and do you as the writer, actively shape the future, or help us connect to the past, through this particular telling?

Again, we’re clearly identifying the boundaries of our work so we can really play around and dive deep within those boundaries.

We aren’t glossing over and erasing (food history has enough of that already), we are presenting an opportunity for movement: An in that movement is where we can find abundance.

As I said a few minutes ago, I talk about us as the bridge between the traditions of our ancestors and the possibilities of the future, deciding what is carried forward and how it might be reimagined. This writing approach is one example of that.

Abundance means including all stories: Who has traditionally been erased from this narrative? Whose stories exist within the gaps and margins of the research you’re doing?

Let’s use the example of women’s brewing history in England: Women brewed much of the beer in England for probably thousands of years, yet weren’t allowed to be a part of professional Guilds in the early modern period when those started to form, so we don’t see them recorded in professional brewing documentation.

And, because the landscape of cookery books and even handwritten recipes was very different (literacy was lower, especially for women, and books were very expensive, paper was more expensive, etc.) we don’t necessarily see that knowledge transmitted in written format in, say, cookbooks or family recipes.

But their absence is a nudge to look elsewhere, and in some civil records (family law, disputes between neighbors, etc.) we see some records of women brewing beer (and maybe getting sued by a neighbor, or fighting with their spouse over who should keep the earnings, etc.)

But women brewers appear in the larger culture in some interesting ways:

Our modern stereotype of a witch (pointy hat, cat, broomstick) is actually the result of a smear campaign against women brewers by the newly-established brewing Guilds.

Women brewers often stood on the street or had a stall to sell their wares: many wore large hats so they were visible in a crowd, and had a bubbling cauldron (which would later become beer), and cats to keep rats from their grain stores.

In the 1600s and 1700s, being called a witch was a career killer (and actual killer), and the men in the Guilds knew this. By associating women brewers with witches, while also blocking them from being legally allowed to brew beer (remember, women couldn’t join guilds, and guilds controlled trade and production in their jurisdictions and could shut down non-members), women, who were for centuries the primary brewers of beer in English communities, were pushed out. AND they were pushed out of one of the few ways they had to make their own money independent of male relatives, increasing their reliance on men.

We see the ripple effects of this today: women still only make up something like 2% of professional brewers. And while we’re now allowed to join professional guilds (I’m a member of the Fermenters’ Guild), we have a long way to go (likewise with brewers with roots in the Middle East and in Africa, where brewing was literally invented).

I talk a lot more about the history of brewing in Our Fermented Lives, but for the purposes of discussing the process of writing itself, I think it’s so important for us to be actively aware of how we are participating in or countering the erasure that has happened in our histories for, well, as long as we’ve had them.

And part of abundance is remembering that by doing this work, by considering whose stories should be included and practicing intention about including them, we are participating in a reimagining.

We are saying these stories should be included, we are reaching back into the past and serving as that bridge to the future, a future where stories that need to be told are told rather than erased.

This is part of why I so adamantly encourage people to record their own food stories, family food stories, to preserve family recipes and records, and community food stories, because many food traditions and particularly the stories of people who grow and make food have not, through much of history, usually been considered “worth” writing about in any in-depth way by the powers that be who are writing the history.

So we’ve lost a lot of stories and traditions as a result. Your decision to include and preserve food stories is important: It is a reimagining of the future, an opportunity to be a good ancestor, and to clear more paths for future writers.

Abundant writing is informed by abundant reading

So how does all of this relate to my work as a writer?

As a food writer, thinking about possibility, abundance and directionality feels more aligned with the work I do and the soul of what I’m trying to communicate, than writing that’s purely didactic or descriptive, though my work has those elements.

Again, as food writers we are often dealing with issues that aren’t rooted in abundance: unsustainable food systems, exploitative labor practices, environmental destruction, etc. And, again, it’s important for us to not look away from these, and instead ask what we can do with our words to help shine a light on a subject and imagine alternatives.

My perspective on abundant writing is rooted in my perspective as a reader.

As a reader, I appreciate writing that doesn’t shy away from what’s difficult and challenging in the world, but also goes beyond saying “here is a problem!” I don’t want to be told exactly what to do, necessarily, but I want to feel informed and empowered, or inspired, or curious.

If a piece of writing leaves me just feeling enraged or helpless, it pulls away any momentum I might have had, even to take small steps towards addressing big problems.

So, as a writer, thinking about possibility and abundance does a service to my readers who, I imagine, might feel the same way. I give myself permission to imagine a world where we are respectful and reciprocal in our care, community minded, ecologically minded, etc.

Writing from abundance and possibility allows me to harness the power of choosing this creative path: Again, One where we not only describe what is, but helping the collective imagination create what might be.

It allows me to talk about things like putting up food when you have too much to eat right now, without glossing over the fact that not everyone gets to have the experience of ‘too much food.’

And in that acknowledgement, I open up a door to the reader, and I get to choose what that door looks like: Maybe it’s a reminder that food preservation is community care, or even just the opportunity to practice gratitude for things we often overlook.

You’re offering a possible path, and in collaboration with your reader, they take your work and move in their chosen direction.

My abundant writing practice

So we’ve talked about what abundance looks like for my subject matter, but I also mentioned that doing this work has shaped my actual writing practice itself.

So what on earth do I mean by that?

Viewing my subject matter through an abundant lens helps me see the many rich stories that are already right there, approach a topic honestly but hopefully, and consider how my actions and creations contribute to reimagination and rebuilding.

And in viewing my subject through this lens, that ripples out into my actual writing practice itself: The experience of sitting down and creating the work.

It allows me to root my actual practice itself within gratitude and abundance, which leaves me resourced so I can give my writing and the subjects I tackle the energy they deserve.

What does this mean practically?

An abundant, joyful writing practice looks different in its particulars for each of us.

But here are some overarching ways I support other writers and myself in seeking that abundance:

One is recognizing what I’ve already accomplished. So, gratitude for what is, and excitement for what’s coming, rather than telling myself I or my work aren’t enough, or {insert your own imposter syndrome monologue here}.

Messages of not being or doing enough were for a long time deeply embedded in my psyche, thanks to a range of things including my experiences as a Queer person and a woman, the behavior of abusive former employers and colleagues, a whole buffet of various other experiences, etc. but also our culture’s toxic relationship to work generally.

All of these make it very easy to adopt a scarcity mindset about life in general and our creative output in particular:

Each of us has a whole host of inner voices telling us to stay small and quiet, or that our writing isn’t “real work” if we’re enjoying it, or that we’ll never do or be enough, or that there’s never enough time, or we have to set our writing aside and only do it when we have a completely free schedule and full battery.

An abundant writing life helps us quiet those inner voices and find our resources to tell the stories we most want to, and we can find time to write them within the life we already have.

Gratitude for what’s already working is a really powerful starting point (and returning point, when those inner critics pop back up), because it reorients us and gives us permission to lean into our trust of our own creative processes.

So thinking of what’s working, and what I’m running towards (e.g. “I want to sell this manuscript”) versus running away from (e.g. “I need to publish a book to quit my job”) keeps me more resourced and oriented in the direction I want to go.

When I feel gratitude for what’s already taking place in my writing life, I get into my flow more easily.

I also enjoy the process more, and tapping into that joy is another important piece of this pie:

Finding pleasure in my work energizes me and leaves me open to inspiration and serendipity.

We’ve all had the experience of really enjoying something and then suddenly having all these great ideas.

But because we exist in a culture that tells us those enjoyable moments are somehow tangential to our work rather than central to it, we deprioritize them, instead trying the tried and sort-of-true method of banging away on our keyboards, hoping the right words come out.
We have enough areas of our lives that feel dull and hard (hello, tax season!): Your writing doesn’t need to feel that way, too.

So an abundant writing life is, at its core, a permission to let writing be the joyful, transformative act it is: Allow it to transform how you create, and possibly, also transform you.

My writing practice as a joyful space also serves as a space of radical reimagining and self-forgiveness: It allows me to see where I’m internalizing narratives that aren’t mine to carry, and how those show up as my own imposter syndrome.

One is guilt. So much guilt!

Feeling guilt about having fun doing work is part of that toxic work culture, and when we unweave that narrative, we’re starting to unweave ourselves from those capitalistic practices that tell us we have to grind away at unpleasant things in order to be ‘really working.’ And if we don’t do that, then the work ‘doesn’t matter’ or ‘isn’t real’ (my fellow academics in the room probably know what I’m talking about).

When we write about the world as it is, and where it may go, it’s also easy to carry the burden of guilt for “not doing enough” to fix the problems we write about.

But we as individuals do not have the responsibility to fix everything, nor can we.

Our work as writers is in part to serve others through making the previously untold or unimagined present on the page: We are using the power of our words to actually shape the world as we wish to see it.

By returning to gratitude for what’s already working, by continuing to sit down and create, and to weave joy into the actual practice of creating, we are doing our part within the larger communal effort of worldbuilding.

Viewing your writing as abundant, and as ‘enough,’ helps you view your efforts to reimagine a new world as enough too.

And when you do that, you’re more resourced to make the differences you want to make, because you are coming from a place of abundance over defensiveness or fear: You’re running towards the world you want to build, rather than away from the one that feels broken, hopeless, scary, or whatever else.

I’m not saying to rest on your laurels and totally disengage, but rather to be honest with yourself. And honesty with ourselves is often not about harsh truths: It’s about being gentler, and easier, and kinder.

The people most likely to overlook achievements, to offer praise, to give breaks, to allow rest, are ourselves.

Here, abundance means recognizing the progress I’ve already made (words written, pieces submitted, article ideas I’ve had, simply sitting down to write when I say I will, whatever your metric is), as well as viewing the process itself as abundant:

Knowing the ideas will never stop flowing, and if I step out of the way, the joy and ease of the process can really take center stage.

That’s why celebration is so critical to the work I do, because it anchors in the achievements you’re making and allows more to come through.

So, what I mean by that, is intentionally celebrating yourself at each step of your creative process: You’ve struggled to find time to write and now you’ve sat down several days in a row to write even for 15 minutes? That’s worth a celebration.

You got through that difficult paragraph? Celebration! Submitted a manuscript? Celebration!

And your celebration doesn’t mean throwing a massive party or spending lots of money: You can celebrate however you wish. The key behind this is intention.

And finally, an abundant writing practice means trust.

Trust in myself to share what I need to share and trust that it will reach the readers it needs to reach:

Trust in myself to hold myself accountable to do the work of examining my own blind spots, to do the research and listen to stories in the voices of people who live those stories.

Knowing when it’s my time to spotlight another’s voice versus knowing what stories are mine to tell.

 I trust my expertise, but I also trust myself to continue learning and growing.

Trust is expansive, dynamic. It is directional, just as the abundance I cultivate within my writing itself and my larger writing practice.

It keeps me learning more, it keeps me engaged and interested, but from a place that feels resourced, because my desire to keep learning is rooted in eagerness and curiosity and a belief that I can always grow and learn. Rather than in a feeling of guilt or scarcity (like “I should know more about this” or “I’m a terrible writer for not already knowing that.”)

Put another way, trust in myself is about running towards something, rather than away from it.

Something else I’ve noticed: When I view this beloved, joyful practice of writing from a place of “I’ll always have enough (or more than enough!)” rather than “my writing will never be enough” it seeps out into the rest of my life.

When I trust myself here, I find I trust myself more elsewhere.

I can step away when I’m feeling overwhelmed or at a point of diminishing returns, and not worry that I’m failing/not writing enough/etc., because I know I can return resourced and create work that comes easier and ultimately is better quality.

So, what does it mean to write about food from a place of abundance?

It means honestly and responsibility, to see the abundance of stories already there and to be committed and intentional in your telling.

It means using your skills as a writer to fearlessly share about what is, but with equal fearlessness, to share what might be.

It empowers your readers to see the abundance of possibility, and offers them a potential direction in which to begin exploring and bringing those possibilities to life.

And it means seeing the abundance in your own writing life: All the progress you’ve already made, the things you’ve researched, the work you’ve created, the lives you’ve shaped, the plans and dreams you already have that are ready to come to life.

An abundant writing practice contains:

 Gratitude, self-honesty and kind self-talk, joy, releasing stories that aren’t mine to carry. It’s understanding that the way we’re “supposed to work” isn’t how most of us work best, and giving myself permission to witness my own progress, and to create a process that works for me.

It means starting from and ending at a place of celebration, rest, appreciation for all I’ve done, trust, and gratitude.

I want to end by sharing a few practices I do every day that help me bring more joy to my writing, then I want to open it up for questions, either about food writing, or my writing practice, or whatever!

A few joy and grounding practices for writers:

Writing ritual: Many of us build in priming activities to our writing time to get us into our writing headspace and writing voice (think journaling or outlining, reading material that inspires you or relates to your subject, etc.)

But I really want to encourage you to build some pleasure and fun into that ritual too.

This helps to make your actual writing time itself more enjoyable, but also bookends it so it is distinct from the rest of your day (my mentor K. Anne Amienne refers to this as treating your writing time as sacred space).

Maybe you: do some movement or meditation at the start and end of writing time, light a nice candle then blow it out when you’re done writing, make a cup of tea to sip as you write, then wash the mug when you’re done. Etc.

Whatever feels really good to you, that you can do consistently, and that marks the writing time as a unique space in your day.

Having that really nice, cozy, pleasant thing you look forward to consistently connected to your writing time makes the writing time itself more pleasurable too. The more often you practice your writing ritual, the stronger that association is.

Grounding:

A pleasurable writing practice is about adding in pleasurable practices, but also releasing stress and tension and any negative energy others send our way. When I’m feeling stressed, or spread thin or a bit dissociated, or had a difficult interaction with someone, or whatever, I do this.

It’s so subtle you can even do it around other people which is really useful, because other people are really a lot sometimes!

Sitting (or standing), bring awareness to your feet touching the floor or earth. Imagine all that extra energy, anxiety, worries, anger, etc. as a physical substance: maybe it’s electricity, or a liquid, or whatever else resonates with you.

Take a deep breath in, then as you exhale imagine that extra energy pouring from your feet into the floor, down into the earth, where it’s repurposed and recycled and no longer connected to you.

It takes about 30 seconds to do, and is a real game changer for tapping back into the present moment and regulating your nervous system.

You may think it sounds silly, but give it a try (and if the people you’re around will notice you taking big deep breaths, just omit that part and do the visualization).

And finally, for my journaling lovers:

There are two practices I came up with in collaboration with a couple longtime writing coaching clients that I love so much that they’ve become staples.

First is the self-reflective paragraph: At the end of my last writing session for the week, I reflect on how things went. Where did I feel in flow, where did writing feel difficult? Is there anything I want to try next week to make things go more smoothly? And, critically, what am I celebrating about my writing this week?

I have one client who keeps a dedicated journal for these, so he can look back and see his progress over time.

And the final simple practice is another journaling practice that takes maybe 1-2 minutes a day: At the end of each writing session, just write two sentences:

What’s done and what’s next.

In other words, summarize what you did that day, and where you want to start when you sit down tomorrow.

Some of my clients put these in the Word document they’re working in so it’s the first thing they see when they open their laptops. Others keep them in a dedicated notebook (which is nice for witnessing your progress over time).

But this helps you both acknowledge your progress and immediately orients you back into the work the following day.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and questions (especially after reading through such long notes!) and, I’d love to hear: How would you define “food story?”

Thanks for reading Roots + Branches!
I’m on a mission to help my fellow creatives build sustainable, joyful writing practices that give their biggest, most magical, and important ideas space to come to light.

Thank you for your support, and happy writing!