Many years ago, I took part in a cross-disciplinary collaboration called Metonymy, billed by its organizers as an exercise in artistic blind dating:

Each artist will be paired with a poet or writer, and over a period of one month you will work together to create a collaborative multi-disciplinary work.

My “date” was Anne-Sophie Adelys, a visual artist I had never met. Because we lived at opposite ends of our sprawling city and both had hectic work schedules, we decided to collaborate without meeting. Instead, we agreed on a shared theme — “memory / childhood / paths not taken” — and then mailed two notebooks back and forth once a week for four weeks. (That was back in the days before Zoom, and when the mail service still worked).

Below I’ve traced a few of the thematic and imagistic connections that I remember making as the notebooks travelled between us. But time, like memory, creates its own kind of distance — and some of the most resonant meanings may be those that emerge from the blank spaces in between.

Enjoy!

The containers

To kick off the project, Anne-Sophie and I each selected a blank notebook and mailed it to the other person. Mine was a pretty little pocket-sized blank book with flowers on the cover, a recent birthday gift. Here’s how it looks today, filled with the bulky treasures later added by Anne-Sophie:

Her notebook, by contrast, was a plain black Moleskine:

We both had fun decorating the padded envelopes that we sent back and forth. Here’s one from me to Anne-Sophie:

And one from Anne-Sophie to me:

At the end of the experiment, Anne-Sophie kept her original notebook, and I kept mine — so my only record of hers is the digital exhibit that I created way back in 2010 for my poetry website, The Stoneflower Path. Flipping through my little flowered notebook in preparation for writing this post, I discovered several poems and drawings that didn’t make it into our digital exhibit. What forgotten secrets lurk in Anne-Sophie’s black notebook, I wonder now?

Flowers

When I opened “my” notebook on its first journey home from Anne-Sophie’s studio, a cardboard flower popped up:

Inspired by Anne-Sophie’s three-dimensional imagination, I wrote a poem called “My Grandmother’s Garden” and let it ramble through the notebook line by line, page by page, leaf by leaf. Then, having already filled 20 pages of the notebook with lines of hand-written text and tiny cut-out leaves, I copied the whole poem out again on a scroll of tissue paper that unfurled from the book when it was opened:

My Grandmother’s Garden

in that garden with walls
like a chocolate box
or a casket of dreams
I clambered to the top
of the old apple tree
and feathered my nest with
lace scraps from the attic
paper from the bookshelves
darkness from the cellar
until my wings outstretched
my perch and spiralled me
up to gawk from the sun:
at it all: my mansion of
memory no wider
than a widow’s cottage,
the rolling lawn a doll’s
handkerchief, the secret
garden a tangle of
weeds behind the toolshed.

Birds

At the front of Anne-Sophie’s black notebook, I had pasted a manila label hand-lettered with the phrase “a box of birds.” (Or maybe Anne-Sophie glued the label into the book, and I wrote the words on it? I honestly don’t remember!) It’s a New Zealand colloquialism, meaning chirpy or in good spirits, as in “That little girl is a box of birds!”

The following week, in my flowered notebook, I wove the same words into a poem that conflates fuchsias, birds, and little girls in a ballet class:

Fuchsias

four girls in the back
of Mrs. Fleetwood’s station wagon

a box of birds
a basket of flowers

carpooling to Miss Irene’s
Russian ballet school

Ginna, Kimberly,
Helen, Yvonne

an hour in the suburbs
a room with a barre

birds at the window
fuchsias on the lawn

Should I have been surprised when my notebook returned to me two weeks later with a beautiful bird inside, unfurling its gorgeous wings as the book popped open?

Books

I mailed my notebook back to Anne-Sophie with a new poem inside:

The Books

walking home from Pilates I recall
their perfect posture, the graceful way they slid
from their slipcovers like dancers from the barre
at Miss Irene’s, each bending at my will
as my own obstinate body would not,
its pages arcing over my palm:

a balancing act
an opening door
a floating bird

People

Meanwhile, amongst all the birds, books, and flowers travelling back and forth between us, a familial theme was emerging. People I didn’t know, along with other enigmatic hints of family life — a pair of shoes pinned to a clothesline, an old camera with a neck strap — started appearing in Sophie’s notebooks:

It may have been this drawing of two women strolling side by side that inspired me to write about the sister I never had:

Family Tree

in my dream of a sister
our mother sweeps her hair
into a golden whalespout

our father wraps damp sheets
around her burning body
and rocks her fever away

a jolly jolly sixpence
rolls from his pocket
by the light of a jealous moon

and in our separate gardens
the dark birds assemble
on a wire drawn taut between us

Yes, those dark birds from Anne-Sophie’s envelope found their way into the final sequence of my poem — just as my dream of a sister found its way into a sequence of rose-adorned letters that Anne-Sophie drew towards the back of my flowered notebook, spelling out the word S-I-S-T-E-R:

And then there were the brothers: the real ones who once tied their two-year-old sister (me!) to a clothesline and who later threatened to blow her up with a bottle of fake nitroglycerin. But that’s a story for another day! In the meantime, here’s the photo of my two-year-old self, my hair in a golden whalespout, that I glued into Anne-Sophie’s black notebook:

Looking back all these years later at our creative experiment, I can still vividly remember the anticipation that I felt each week as I opened the mailbox to find Anne-Sophie’s latest envelope/artwork inside. I would tear the package open and flip through the notebook to find how she had responded to my latest entry: subtly, obliquely, never in an obvious or literal way. I did my best to respond in kind, not just with poems but also with glued-in photos and cards and scraps of paper, items inspired rather than directly informed by Sophie’s enigmatic line drawings.

And now I’m thinking: What might such an experiment look like if conducted not between a visual artist and a poet but between, say, a creative writer and an academic, or a scientist and a literary scholar, or any two curious human beings who love notebooks, miss the materiality of snail mail, and would love to find out what creative serendipities might be sparked by such an exchange?

If you decide to try it out, I’d love to hear about it!

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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In my book Writing with Pleasure, I describe a playful project that I undertook at a time in my career when I was struggling to balance my research and teaching load with the demands of a busy academic leadership role.

Over a two-month period in early 2016, I drew hundreds of tiny color-coded mosaic tiles along a winding paper path that I called the Email Trail. Every week I chose a different set of colored pencils and a different theme to focus on, with each tile representing an ingoing or outgoing email message. My mission? To transform my daily task of clearing my email inbox — which took, on average, two hours per day — from a stressful activity into something more pleasurable and engaging, or at least less burdensome.

Last week, I found my 2016 Email Trail notebook wedged amongst a stack of old journals, its eccentric hoard of workplace data still intact and, until now, unpublished.

I invite you to join me for a walk along the Email Trail.

Enjoy!

Weeks 1-2

January 2016 got off to a slow start, as reflected by my relatively light email workload in the first two weeks of the year. Between January 1-15, I sent “only” 95 outgoing work emails, which I color-coded in my notebook according to the gender of the recipients: purple for women, green for men, and blue for mixed groups or for individuals whose gender identity I didn’t know.

What I learned: Nearly two-thirds of my email conversations were with women, many of them working in administrative or service roles. As a senior female academic who has been socialized all my life to be friendly and accommodating towards other people, did I spend more time responding to routine transactional emails than my male colleagues typically did? (I never investigated that question further but have my suspicions!)

Week 3

By the third week of January, the pace of my email exchanges started picking up. In the 7-day period between January 16-22, I sent out 62 emails to colleagues within my own university and 56 messages to external email addresses. Notably, I was preoccupied that week with organizing an international conference panel, which almost certainly skewed my ratio of external to internal emails.

What I learned: Although most of my day-to-day electronic communications remained internal to my university, there were periods when email became a crucial point of connection and exchange with international colleagues. I resolved to savor those periods of heightened engagement with the wider world, rather than frantically rushing through them to get to the next trivial administrative task.

Week 4

In the fourth week of January 2016 I went completely off-grid, hiking the spectacular Milford Track. When I returned the following week to find 144 new emails in my work inbox, I decided to track how I handled each one. Thirty-three messages (red) could be deleted without reading (this number didn’t include all the junkmail that had already been triaged by my email filtering service!) I quickly skimmed through and deleted a further 39 emails (green). But 21 messages (indigo) required careful scrutiny followed by a reply and/or action, and I read and filed a further 31 emails (purple).

What I learned: I was handling a lot of email every week with attention and care — no wonder I so often felt stressed! Some of my processes were quite efficient (such as filtering and deleting spam); however, I realized that I was wasting a lot of time meticulously filing away messages that I would never look at again.

Week 5

In the first week of February — a short work week due to a 3-day holiday weekend — I tracked the status of my outgoing emails, which numbered 74 in all:

• 32 messages (blue) started a new email trail.

• 24 emails (green) replied to a new email trail started by someone else.

• 18 emails (orange) contributed to an existing conversation.

What I learned: Perhaps I could keep my inbox clearer by initiating fewer new conversations and bringing ongoing exchanges to a close?

Week 6

Week 6 was another 4-day work week. Of the 67 emails that I sent out that week, 43 messages (orange) contained fewer than 50 words; 16 (violet) were between 51-99 words long; and 8 messages (magenta) exceeded 100 words.

What I learned: The shorter emails were mainly transactional and could be clustered and cleared fairly quickly. The longer ones, by contrast, were often linked to chunky writing tasks such as administrative reports and reference letters, which required from me an entirely different kind of focus and time commitment. Anything over 100 words isn’t just an email any more; it’s a project!

Week 7

When I tracked the number of people to whom I cc’d each of my outgoing messages, I was surprised to find that well over half of my emails — 57 out of 92 — were addressed to only one person. Around one third of my messages (32) reached groups of 2-8 people; and only 3 emails that week went to recipient lists of 9 people or more.

What I learned: Most of my email consisted of one-to-one exchanges. Maybe I should pick up the phone more often?

Week 8

Week 8 was relatively mellow; I sent out only 46 emails. The topics of these messages were fairly evenly distributed among the categories of research (14), teaching/supervision (14), and administration (12); plus there were 6 emails of a more personal nature that I coded as other.

What I learned: Research-related tasks took up a larger share of my email than I had realized. When I started to count that “email time” as “research time,” I became less stressed about the perceived imbalances in my workload, which felt heavily skewed towards teaching and administration.

Week 9

In my final week of tracking my email, I scrutinized the purpose of each outgoing message. It turned out that I spent much of my time and energy simply greasing the wheels of human interaction:

• Arranging a meeting (red - 12)

• Thanks/acknowledgment (dark orange - 18)

• Question/request (light orange - 18)

• Response to a question/request (blue - 18)

• Other (yellow - 19)

What I learned: Writing and responding to email can feel monotonous and impersonal. But every email exchange — at least until the chatbots take over completely! — represents a human interaction. By picturing the person at the other end of each email and imagining myself actually communicating with them, I found I could make the whole endeavor feel much more meaningful and human.

The end of the trail

The Email Trail petered out in March 2016, as I realized that my experiment had increased rather than decreased the amount of time I was spending on my email — which rather defeated the point! The lessons I learned, however, have stayed with me. For example, I now make a point of writing transactional emails more quickly, taking frequent breaks from keyboard and screen, and picking up the phone for conversations that called for the warmth of a human voice.

Looking back, the Email Trail helped me to see my weekly email load through new eyes (or, if you will, through mosaic-colored glasses) and to reframe my attitude toward what I had previously regarded as a menial and often meaningless task. Each week, as my hand-drawn tesserae accumulated and the winding trail through my notebook grew longer, I was able to recognize in a visual, visceral way just how much I had actually accomplished that week—a striking change from the “inbox zero” approach to email management, which aims to sweep the trail clear.

This post was originally published on my free Substack newsletter, Helen’s Word. Subscribe here to access my full Substack archive and get weekly writing-related news and inspiration delivered straight to your inbox.

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership, which costs just USD $12.50 per month on the annual plan. Not a member? Sign up now for a free 30-day trial!

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On Thursday 1 December, my colleagues from the Centre for Arts and Social Transformation (CAST)  and I launched The Artist*Academic website, a colorful new website that showcases some of the many ways in which arts-inspired ways of making, knowing, and being can infuse academic research, teaching, and leadership.

Whether you identify as an artist, an academic, or both, you'll find resources here to help you move between and beyond.  You'll also learn why I opted to join these two powerful words with a multidirectional wildcard asterisk rather than a linear hyphen.

This free WriteSPACE Special Event consisted of two live one-hour Zoom sessions scheduled twelve hours apart.

I opened both sessions by introducing Amy Lewis – already known to many of you as our wonderful WriteSPACE Events Manager – with whom I’ve worked closely over the past nine months to design and populate the Artist*Academic website. We took everyone on a short tour of the site's five main sections:

• WHAT is an Artist*Academic?

• WHY do we need Artist*Academics?

• WHO can be an Artist*Academic?

• HOW do I become an Artist*Academic?

• WHERE can I learn more?

Each session then featured a different special guest:

• In Session 1, I was joined by Professor Selina Tusitala Marsh – a former New Zealand Poet Laureate, prizewinning graphic memoirist, and artist*academic extraordinaire – whose playful illustrations enliven not only the Artist*Academic website but also my forthcoming book, Writing with Pleasure.
   

• In Session 2, I engaged in a lively conversation with Professor Peter O’Connor, the visionary Director of CAST. We discussed the artist*academic identity and the importance of bringing more arts-inspired research, teaching, and leadership into higher education.

Here is Amy ‘s first-person account of the live event:

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A few quotes from the sessions to inspire you: 

• “My creative thinking has become led by line – the drawn line, the written line, the spoken line, the bloodline…”

• “As an artist*academic, you’ll always be liminal, on the edge, and not quite fit the standard model of the university. But maybe you should embrace that. Be a ‘moonlighter’, and find people who are happy to take risks and stand outside with you.”

• “Going through our arts-based research has been a collaborative and conversational process, and totally outside of our comfort zones!”

How insightful it was to hear Helen expose the roots of this project. She explained how to recognise an Artist*Academic (in others and in yourself). But it may seem daunting to say ‘yes I fit that definition!’ Imposter syndrome is quite common in the battleground of academia. Even some of our collaborators on this project struggled to see themselves as academics, artists, or artist*academics, despite working in a research centre with the word ‘Arts’ in its name. In both sessions, we talked about ways to unpack this triple imposter syndrome and explored the idea of ‘letting go’ of self-doubt to embrace a new stage of becoming. 

‘Letting go’ has become something of a visual theme throughout the website. Bespoke and spontaneous drawings, poems, reflections, and stories abound, dissolving our fears that only perfectly polished work can be published. These fresh and fun artistic moments throughout the website were considered, deliberate, and collaborative. Helen’s fabulous guest speaker Selina Tusitala Marsh explained her hand-drawn, ‘koru-esque’ icons on the ‘How’ page of the website: The square spiral shape honours a motif in women’s traditional weaving from the island of Ambai in the Vanuatu archipelago. Their knowledge is woven into and safeguarded through art. The spiral shape softens in the Leadership and Service icon to reflect the fluidity and responsiveness of this area, it then becomes labyrinthine and nuanced in the Arts and Humanities icon, before transforming into freed birds in the Teaching icon.  

Another standout discussion point of the first session was the asterisk! We knew from the beginning of this project that a hyphen was not going to work. A hyphen was like a minus sign, subordinating ‘artist’ to ‘academic’. But an asterisk is something else entirely—a multi-spoked wild card that could connect the artist and the academic on equal terms. Selina explained that this symbol is not a star but a jellyfish, a Samoan ‘alu ‘alu, or perhaps an octopus with eight tentacles. This motif becomes a portal into Pasifika mythology and epistemology, but it also resonates globally due to the empty space at the centre. What I love most about this symbol is the centre void, which embodies the power of relational spaces. Arts open up space for us as academics to challenge the conventions of the academy and give us space to speak freely. 

In the second session, our wonderful special guest Peter O’Connor reflected on the way storytelling has played such a pivotal role in his life and academic career. Arts-based inquiry can often be like process writing: it reveals deeper ideas and brings things together without you even releasing it. Then you step back and ponder your ‘aha!’ moment. 

A key takeaway for me was the strength of finding an artist*academic community. Peter explained that if academia is like the ocean, most of the sea creatures swimming in universities are sharks, who have a particular way of working and thinking. But to be an artist*academic means being a dolphin, playful and intelligent. Dolphins draw strength by swimming in pods and they communicate in ways that others cannot understand, so it’s good to find a sense of community in other like-minded scholars. 

If you think you might also be a dolphin in an academic sea of sharks, head to the artist*academic website (https://artist-academic.com/). Dive into the wild and wonderful resources that Helen and the team at CAST have lovingly laboured to create and join the conversation!

A heartfelt thank you to Helen, Peter, Selina, and the team at CAST for this great discussion. It has been a true privilege working with you all on this inspiring, one-of-a-kind project!

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A recording of this two-part WriteSPACE Special Event is now available in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not yet a member? Register here to receive an email with the video link.

Better yet, join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources.

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