the life-giving consequences
of creative rest
MY FIRST SELF-PUBLISHED ESSAY ZINE
From that announcement and into the unexpected life disruptions that followed, so much was revealed about the resistance to slowness and softness many of us still hold— especially when it involves a Black woman focusing her creative life and existence on ease instead of urgency and endless productivity.
Finding ways to move my grief and my rage, I cried and wrote. Buried my dear Granny and wrote. Cleared my childhood home and wrote. Walked through wintered woods and spring renewals and wrote. I gathered a stream of questions and divine downloads captured in my journals, on sticky notes, and in digital documents. I let words weave together to tell the story that wanted to be written.
Fall of 2021, when taking an extended three-month pause, I called on my communities to celebrate my creative rest as much as (or more than) my creative labor.
PUBLISHER
Self-published
PUBLISHED ON
March 2023
DESIGNED BY
Denise Shanté Brown
PRINTED BY
Sense of Press
My writings became the life-giving consequences of creative rest, a personal essay on reckoning with what happens to creative practice when choosing slowness and softness.
After noticing how my life, work, and relationships have changed since taking a breath amid grief and turmoil, this essay captures a glimpse of what it feels like to resist systems of exhaustion while centering care.
This lil’ essay zine (special limited edition of 50 copies, sold out) was the beginning of an unfolding body of work. As I nurture my writing dreams in the day-to-day through daily writing, connecting with publishers, staying in trusted community, reading, taking care of my creative body, seeing the essence of creation in everything—I also allow my smaller works, like short essays, to be celebrated in the process.
close up of the front cover, celebrating the experience of writing and designing my first self-published essay zine.
interior pages that carry a burst of yellow light at the center to remind us of our radiance through decay and transformation.
back cover, highlighting the amazing printing by sense of press, an independent publishing and risograph printing studio based in Baltimore, one of the places I call home.
my living definition
of creative rest
The felt experience of one's rest being valued throughout a creative process and/or creative life, as much as (or more than) creative labor.
Rather than focusing on urgency, productivity and survival, “creative rest” emphasizes ease and is spacious and protected.
It extends continual permission for creative beings to focus their full expression on the practices of slowness and softness while honoring life's natural cycles of decay and transformation.
a few of the what-if
questions inside
What if we imagined our capacities showing up as Care Guides from the future, revealing what we need to rest and recover?
What if we released capitalistic, white supremacist patterns that pull us away from our presence so we can become portals of possibility?
What if we explored what’s powerfully potent in our creative bodies and wants to be channeled and built through us, untethered to production and perfectionism?
As I sat on a boulder on the riverbank, I cracked open the zine.
It wasn’t the first time I held it open but it was the first time I was open and ready to receive the offerings within its pages. As I read the sentence: “I’ve been struggling internally with this feeling of stagnation caught up in grief and mourning.” I was immediately able to locate myself within the words. Reading on, I felt present within my being. I was witnessing Denise Shanté along her journeying within this essay, responding to the invitation to witness myself and where I was in relation to her words and to myself. I have since shared the zine with others who are finding their way along their own journey as they move through their own processes, but I continue to hold what it offered as I have engaged intimately with my own grief and disappointment.
— Olivia Hunte