Welcome email...
(important dates and Zoom details for subscribers)
Welcome to The Words to Live By Creative Wellbeing Studio — we’re so glad you’re here.
This space is all about helping you refine your poetry practice at your own pace, with gentle guidance, expert-developed materials and a warm community beside you.
Subscribers will have full access to:
Monthly Writing Lens
A simple ‘lens’ to carry with you throughout the month. Something to reflect on and draw inspiration from.
Grounding and Breathing Exercises
Writing can be a deeply powerful way to explore thoughts, emotions and experiences — but it can also bring up intensity, tension or overwhelm. That’s where grounding and breathwork come in. Each month we’ll share a couple of simple, intentional practices to help you settle your body, focus your mind and create a safe, supportive space for writing, reflection and emotional processing. They only take a few minutes. You may decide to use them to start and end your writing sessions. You can also use them to anchor you if your writing takes you somewhere difficult.
This month we’re also sharing a short introduction to grounding practices and breathwork to give you a bit of an overview.
Community Chat
As part of your membership, you’ll have exclusive access to your pathway’s communal space. You can access this through the chat icon on the publication’s Substack. As the month progresses, we’ll start threads asking you to post your work for peer feedback and to recommend what you’re reading. Feel free to request a thread topic if there is something you’d like to discuss with the community!
Weekly writing prompts
Every session is self-led, so there’s no pressure to “keep up”.
Every Monday at 6am we’ll post the prompts for the week. They will remain in the archive until September, so if you miss a week you can easily revisit them.
There will be a minimum of one prompt a week, but most weeks there will be several as I had so many ideas! There is no pressure to complete them all, no one’s keeping check. Choose the prompts that work for you, adapt the ones that inspire you and maybe even save some for a rainy day!
You’ll probably take a few weeks to find your rhythm building up a new practice. If you’re struggling to find time to write, then the writing hours offer you the perfect space to engage with that week’s prompts.
Weekly Writing Hours
Each week in term time (and for 4 out of 6 weeks of the summer holiday), members of all three pathways are invited to gather for a live writing session and creative check-in.
Community Circle
Each pathway will meet up once a month over Zoom to share our work and deepen our practice together.