In January 2025, I had the pleasure of hosting a vibrant group of writers at my Open Beach House, held during my annual Island Time writing retreat. This Special Event provided the perfect chance to introduce attendees to the retreat space with a virtual tour of stunning Waiheke Island.

Following the tour, we jumped right into a workshop on how to simulate your own retreat mindset for pleasurable writing. What would the ideal writing retreat look like for you? What are the ideal elements of that retreat? How can we bring those elements into our daily writing routines?

Here is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

……………

This wonderful event invited participants on a shared adventure into the joy of writing and how to simulate your own perfect retreat-like conditions for productive and, most importantly, pleasurable writing.

Helen began the session with introductions and then launched straight into a creative exercise. This session perfectly resonated with the spirit of the Pleasure Catalyst, as the exercise centred on designing a pleasurable writing retreat. Helen encouraged us to measure our retreat ideas against her SPACE model—that is, a space that’s Socially balanced, Physically engaging, Aesthetically nourishing, Creatively challenging, and Emotionally uplifting.

In my mind, Waiheke Island is a retreat venue that attunes to all of these five aspects. Waiheke, tucked away in the Hauraki Gulf of Aotearoa New Zealand, is a laid-back paradise with its serene bays, lush vineyards, scenic bushwalks. I was lucky enough to attend Island Time this year and meet all the kind and interesting writers who came along. For me, Helen’s workshop highlighted the importance of bringing elements from the Island Time retreat into my own daily writing space.

Our vineyard lunch at Island Time 2025

I encourage you to try Helen’s interactive Retreating at Home workshop, which will challenge you to compare the SPACE of your ideal retreat to the SPACE of your everyday writing life.

A big thank you to Helen for this inspiring special event, and warm wishes to all the writers who joined us. I hope to see you all again at the next Live Writing Studio or Special Event!

WriteSPACE and WS Studio members can find the recording of the Special Event in their Video library.  

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

Better yet! Join the WriteSPACE with a free 30 day trial, and access our full Library of videos and other writing resources as part of your membership plan.

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Writing with Pleasure was published by Princeton University Press exactly one year ago. If you missed my virtual book launch on Valentine’s Day 2023, featuring ebullient poet-illustrator Selina Tusitala Marsh and legendary PUP editor Peter Dougherty, you can watch the video replay here.

It took me six years to bring this buoyant book into the world — and yes, I experienced plenty of stumbles and grumbles along the way. But pleasure, I’ve learned, is an emotion contoured by shadows as well as light. No mud, no lotus.

Some days, I’ll confess, all I could see was the mud. My data set included 590 handwritten narratives of pleasure gathered from academic writers around the world; thousands of individual notes and quotes; millions of combinatory possibilities. So much information, so many swirling ideas! How could I make sense of them all for myself, let alone for my readers?

Fortunately, my research on productivity and pleasure equipped me with many creative strategies for bringing curiousity, playfulness, and joy to my writing. One that I turned to again and again was a technique I call “Containers for Chaos”: an iterative process of meaning-making that shifts back and forth between conceptual and material modes. It’s an intensively intellectual activity informed by physical acts of seeing, making, and doing.

Here are three Containers for Chaos that helped me find the shape of my book and the flow of my writing.

Enjoy!

Scrivening

Picture a long wooden table cluttered with piles of pdf printouts, handwritten notes, interview transcripts, rough drafts, notecards, post-it notes, photos, DVDs, ideas scribbled on cafe receipts — you get the idea. Next, imagine a row of colorful milk crates beside the table, each labelled with a potential chapter topic or title. As you sift through the items on the table, you toss each one into the box where you think it belongs, gradually accumulating all the materials you’ll need to support your arguments for each section of your writing project.

That’s how I used Scrivener, a proprietary software program beloved by many academic writers despite its steep learning curve. This screenshot of my Scrivener console comes from the video replay of The Secrets of Structure, a live Zoom conversation that I held with developmental editor and ScholarShape founder Margy Thomas in September 2020, when Writing with Pleasure was still very much a work in progress.

Yes, I would have preferred the chunky materiality of a real wooden table, a real set of milk crates, real piles of real documents with crinkled edges and smudged ink. But the multimodal affordances of Scrivener — the color-coded labels, the scanned handwritten texts, the virtual index cards — helped me contain the chaos of my complex materials in a satisfyingly creative, visceral, non-linear way, with all the added benefits of digitized searching, effortless cutting-and-pasting, and efficient storage.

Fractals

Much though I enjoyed working with Scrivener, I still needed an occasional break from keyboard and screen, a return to the material pleasures of paper, pen, and glue.

One day, following an intriguing conversation with Margy about her Story-Argument model — which offers a way of conceptualizing a scholarly project based on macro, meso, and micro levels of meaning — I decided to map out the story-argument of my book, chapter by chapter and section by section. In joyful anticipation of the task, I gathered some colorful materials that I already had to hand and laid them out on my carpet: a book of Indonesian wrapping paper designs; a stack of post-it notes; a fountain pen filled with turquoise ink.

The image above captures my mapping of the first two chapters: Chapter 1 “Society and Solitude” and Chapter 2 “Body Basics.” On each of the two facing pages, I’ve stuck nine square post-it notes that record the following information:

• The One Essential Idea (OEI) of the chapter.

• The Hook that will draw my readers in and the Revelation that will inspire them.

• The Hook and Revelation for each of the chapter’s three sections.

• Three key Units of Meaning (UoM) for each section:

  • The Claim that will make my reader think, “Oh, really? Prove it!”

  • The Evidence that will persuade them.

  • My Interpretation and Analysis of that evidence.

• The Complications and Caveats that I need to keep in mind.

Smaller post-it notes suggest possible topics for the three illustrated panels in each chapter (“The Pleasures of . . .”) as well as further areas for research.

The visual, tactile process of assembling this Container for Chaos proved intensely pleasurable for me, both intellectually and creatively. The entire project took me no more than a few hours. And by the time I had finished, I understood with a new intimacy and clarity the fractal nature of my book, which started from One Essential Idea — “Academic writers can and should write with pleasure!” — that radiated out into every chapter, every section, and every illustration.

Mosaics

Another Container for Chaos was the mosaic mirror on the wall of my study, which became a sort of talisman for me, a visual representation of the aesthetically beautiful, intellectually complex work that I wanted my book to be. In my Preface, “The Mosaic Mirror,” I recalled how I created the mirror from a curated collection of fragments:

I remember the first time I crafted a mosaic mirror, the one that now hangs in my study. I had already spent a long time assembling its constituent pieces and sorting them into containers: shards of stained glass in rich blues, purples, and greens; sea glass worn smooth and opaque by the waves; seashells and broken pieces of mirror; colorful glass nuggets with flat bottoms and domed tops. I laid out all my materials on my dining room table and began positioning them on a large piece of particleboard around a smaller square mirror at the center: fragments of glass and shell arranged randomly but not capriciously in flowing drifts of light, each set off by the color, shape, and texture of the others.

Describing the structural design of the book, I reflected on the anxieties I felt about publishing such an unconventional piece of scholarship:

The treasures I have laid out here are at least as precious and varied as those bits of stained glass, mirror, and shell, but much more hard-won: first-person narratives of pleasure contributed by hundreds of writers from many different countries; books and articles from a wide range of research disciplines; excerpts from my own poetry and experimental prose; original artwork by my friend and colleague Selina Tusitala Marsh—all broken up into colorful fragments that I arranged with a similar sense of self-confidence mingled with dread. Have I got the balance right? Do I dare to glue them down? Is the grout between them bland enough to set off each independent element yet also strong enough to anchor them in place?

Selina’s artwork beautifully captured the playful mosaic-like energy of the book, reminding us that the pleasures of both writing and reading extend far beyond the march of black letters across a stark field of white:

If you are the kind of reader who likes to start by reading the preface of a book and working your way straight through to the afterword, feel free to set my mosaic metaphor aside and progress along the linear path laid out in the table of contents, which will offer you safe passage. But if you would like to try out a more creative, intuitive, nonlinear style of reading, I invite you to approach this book as you would a mosaic mirror on a gallery wall, first stepping back to take in the whole composition, then moving in close to absorb its colors and touch its textures in whatever order you please.

Each of these Containers for Chaos — my Scrivener project file, my book of fractal logic, my mosaic mirror — helped me find my way to the final structure and shape of Writing with Pleasure. At the same time, each container held its own little universe of colorful chaos: capacious enough to absorb new ideas, flexible enough to allow for experimentation and play.

Perhaps life itself is a Container for Chaos?

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In February 2024, I welcomed a group of enthusiastic writers to my free Open Beach House at Island Time.

This WriteSPACE Special Event offered a wonderful opportunity for me to show everyone around my Island Time retreat venue and take them on a virtual walk across beautiful Waiheke Island.

From there, we dove straight into a truncated 60-minute Live Writing Studio session so that participants could experience this core feature of the WriteSPACE Studio.

Here is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

……………

This special event was far from a typical Live Writing Studio. Not only did it celebrate the 3rd birthday of the WriteSPACE, but it also prompted a collective journey into the realm of joyful writing through a metaphorical tour of Helen’s Island Time retreat venue: Waiheke Island. Waiheke is a special place, nestled in the Hauraki Gulf of Aotearoa New Zealand. You could call it a kind of casual paradise, full of unassuming charm, peaceful bays, vineyards and bushwalks, with independent shops and friendly locals. And it has a dear place in my heart, as it was where I was born and raised.

Our journey in the writing studio began with warm introductions and swiftly segued into a creative exercise. This event aligned very well with the Pleasure Catalyst, and for our creative writing warm-up, we turned to the themes of journeys and writing with pleasure.

You can try this exercise too, either by watching our interactive Island Time video or following the prompts below.

1) Imagine you have arrived on Waiheke Island. You have your hiking boots laced tight and can’t wait to discover the island. Your first stop is Rocky Bay. Located in a more remote part of the island, the bays here are pebbled and rough. But they are a great place to launch a sailboat or kayak.
Where are you starting from on your journey across the island? What does your Rocky Bay of writing look like and feel like right now? (3 minutes to write)

2) Next you embark upon a walk through the Nikau palm bush in Whakenewha Regional Park. The light filters through the canopy, the waterfall trickles in the distance, the tui birds chirp overhead.
Walk silently along the Nikau Track. What are some of the sensory details you notice when you clear your mind and focus on your surroundings? (3 minutes to write)

3) The bush path begins to rise steeply, it brings up your heart rate!
What challenges do you face in your current writing practice that you would like to overcome? (3 minutes to write)

4) You come upon a cool, clear cascade of water flowing from a spring at the heart of the island. What song does it sing to you? What music flows from your heart onto the page? (3 minutes to write)

5) Travelling from your bushwalk, you arrive at a vineyard at the top of the island. What sustenance do you need to fuel you on the rest of your journey? Who will accompany you on your way? (3 minutes to write)

6) Refueled and refreshed, you head down the track on the other side of the island.
What do you hope to find there? (3 minutes to write)

7) You’ve arrived at beautiful Onetangi Beach. Immerse yourself in the blue-green waters of the Hauraki Gulf. What does that cleansing, clarifying ocean swim symbolize for you? (3 minutes to write)

8) Your final destination: a little place called Epiphany Point. Reflect on where your journey across the island has taken you and how it has transformed you. What have you discovered or shed along the way? (3 minutes to write)

In the second half of the studio session, Helen guided the WINDOWS session (Writers IN Discussion with Other WriterS). The WINDOWS sessions are usually 2-3 people in breakout rooms, sharing ideas and editing each other’s work sentence by sentence. (If this sounds like a bit of you, I hope to see you there at the next session!) Those writers who wanted some independent writing time joined me for a 25-minute timed Pomodoro sprint.

In our normal fashion, we concluded this wonderful event with a collaborative poem, with each participant choosing one word to sum up something we had discussed or thought about during the session. Here are the poems from our two sessions:

Puzzle

palm tree dictators
motivated guinea pig
bird re-treat
cliff bonfire
olives canopy
boat notebook

Island

black rock glimmering
journey glade
stairs downhill
pohutukawa

A big thank you to Helen for this informative and inspiring special event and a warm welcome to all the new writers who joined us. I hope to see you all again at the next Live Writing Studio or Special Event!

If you would like to know more about the WriteSPACE or WS Studio, we would love to hear from you!

A recording of thisWriteSPACE Special Event is now available in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not a member? Register 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.

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters. WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $135/year).

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To kick off 2024 with a burst of color, I’ve brought together half a dozen of my favorite newsletter posts from the past two years, pairing them up for shared conversations under the theme of writing with pleasure. Each pairing ends with a question: What does pleasurable writing look like for you?

You may wish to complement today’s post with the daily prompts of my 30 Days of Writing with Pleasure challenge, now on Day 8 (but it’s not too late to join us!). Then, on February 1, segue into #AcWriMoments 2024, a series of monthly writing prompts co-curated with my friend-in-writing, Margy Thomas. Our open-doored theme for January 2024 is WELCOME.

Enjoy!

The Pleasures of Wordcraft

In the first of these two posts on the pleasures of close reading, I use colored highlighting to analyze (with pleasure) a piece of writing by master stylist Steven Pinker; in the second, I conjure a multilayered collage from the words and images of a Wordsworth poem.

Savoring good writing or exploring unknown paths: which mode of discovery speaks to you?

These next two posts explore how metaphorical language can inspire and empower academic and professional writers. The first takes you on a joyride through my various publications on writing and metaphor — a theme I can’t seem to escape from! — while the second offers a glimpse of what awaits you in the metaphor-rich landscape of my upcoming Pleasure Catalyst.

Past research or future learning: which direction will the metaphor bus carry you next?

The Pleasures of Be-ing

And finally, here are two contrasting takes on be-verbs. The first plies you with stylistic strategies for avoiding forms of the verb to be, while the second urges you to ignore such bossy syntactical pronouncements and have some fun.

Well-meaning Bee or contrary Cat: whose advice will you follow?

In case you missed my announcement last week: this year I’m scaling Helen’s Word back to one post per week, alternating between newsy newsletters, craft-based essays, and new episodes of Swordswings, my monthly podcast for paid subscribers.

I love hearing back from my readers! Please leave a comment, share this newsletter with a friend, drop me a restack — or at least toss a heart into my crazy weaverbird-mountain-bus-hands-bee-cat collage (which was a lot of fun to pull together).

Kia pai tō koutou rā (have a great day) – and keep on writing!

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters. WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $135/year).

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In July 2023, I welcomed a group of enthusiastic writers to my free Open Writing Studio.

This WriteSPACE Special Event offered a wonderful opportunity for me to show them around my new WriteSPACE membership area, where members of my premium WriteSPACE Studio membership tier can access a variety of resources to support them in their writing practice.

From there, we dove straight into a 90-minute Live Writing Studio session so that participants could experience this core feature of the WriteSPACE Studio.

Here is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event:

……………

Not only was this special event an in-depth tour of the new website and member’s Studio pages (Hurray! I love the new layout), it was also a generative, interactive Live Writing Studio (LWS) session.

I come to the LWS to find a sense of community with other writers, to be challenged by Helen in some creative wordplay experiments, and to gain perceptive feedback from others on my writing. In fact, even if it’s not about my own writing, I still learn from the feedback of others. I’m always coming away from these events with a new vision for my work or myself as a writer. Being part of a writing community motivates me and keeps me accountable to my writing.

For other WriteSPACE Studio members, these sessions are about:

• Connecting with others across different countries and disciplines — From Spain to Australia! From education to engineering!

• Sharing in a “spiritual, uplifting group that keeps you going … and keeps you responsible.”

• Making yourself a bit vulnerable by showing your writing in a constructive, encouraging space.

• Putting fingers-to-keyboard to finally write that book proposal you have been mulling over.

• Seeing yourself as “a writer practising a craft rather than just a PhD student pushing out a thesis!”

We began the writing studio with some quick introductions before diving into a creative warm-up together (inspired by NZ poet Glenn Colquhoun’s An Explanation of Poetry for my Father). Why not try it yourself?

1. Choose a word (for example, STUDIO)

2. Write each letter on a different line in your notebook.

3. For each letter, write one line of poetry that describes what that letter looks like.

Here’s a compilation of some of the beautiful lines produced by our LWS writers:

S is the shape of a swirl when it’s not done…yet

T is a power pose beforehand, and maybe after!

U is a canopy shielding from the rain or an unprompted grin

D is a bridge of words and connections

I is that very first mark on the page

O is for open mouths and minds

After our warm-up, we were ready for a timed writing sprint, with each one of us working independently in a shared digital workspace.

Then, in the second half of the studio session, Helen guided the WINDOWS session (Writers IN Discussion with Other WriterS). The WINDOWS sessions are usually 2-3 people in breakout rooms, sharing ideas and editing each other’s work sentence by sentence. (If this sounds like a bit of you, I hope to see you there at the next session!) This time, we all stayed together in the main room, where a few brave writers shared a drafted paragraph and received Helen’s expert coaching feedback, as well as insights and advice from other participants.

We ended this wonderful event with a collaborative poem, with each participant choosing one word to sum up something we had discussed or thought about during the session.

Here are our two rather enigmatic poems:

• Miss Rizos: spine diving, light spark, normalize, beggars, closed pictures, celebrating curls

• Crossroads: springboard courage, accordion trampoline, lurking, exhale, champagne heat, soulful barking

A big thank you to Helen for this informative and inspiring special event and a warm welcome to all the new writers who joined us. I hope to see you all again in the 6-week Live Writing Studio “Creativity Sequence” starting in early September. Until soon!

If you would like to know more about the WriteSPACE or WS Studio, we would love to hear from you!

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

Not a member? Register 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.

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters (USD $5/month or $50/year).

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year).

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At this live Special Event hosted from my Mountain Rise writing retreat on June 22, 2023, I took attendees on a virtual tour of Chalet Alpenheim, our gorgeous retreat venue in the Swiss Alpine village of Wengen. Following a greeting from some of this year’s retreat participants and a brief Q&A session, I guided my visitors through a reflective Walking and Writing exercise designed to shift them into the relaxed-but-energized creative mindset of writing on retreat. We ended with a surprise video — read on to find out more!

Below is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ first-person account of the live event.

……………

“Freeing and creatively sustaining” . . . “Ridiculously scenic” . . . “A great community” . . .

These are just some of the phrases that came up to describe the Mountain Rise retreat during this live Open Chalet session. We wanted to open the door so you could see what a mountain retreat might look like for you — whether that be a physical retreat next year in Switzerland or a virtual retreat in the comfort of your own workspace — and meet some of the 2023 retreat participants.

During this week-long retreat, we atended at daily workshops with Helen, where she guided us through various experiments to tackle some of our writing-related problems: from improving book structures to forging more productive habits; from playing with creative expressions of our research to undertaking nitty-gritty editing….

I found Helen’s retreat workshop on structure particularly insightful and useful. It involved creating several metaphors designed to deepen my understanding of my project’s layout and guide the reader through my work in a concrete and considered way. My Master’s thesis suddenly became like the Lauterbrunnen valley, our spectacular retreat venue. In my notebook, I drew an ascending cable car, the introduction where my readers begin their journey. Which information will help set the scene and carry them up to the mountaintop? The lookout spot represents the heart of my work, where the key concepts shine. The reader then travels along a ridge-top path and ascends three undulating rises — aka the case studies — before traveling down gently on a cogwheel train through the discussion and conclusion.

Amy’s map of her reader’s journey to the top of mountain and back down again.

After a greeting from some of this year’s retreaters and a brief Q&A, Helen took our Open Chalet visitors on a similar journey, complete with photos and videos marking every stage along the track. It’s well worth setting aside half an hour to follow along with the live video in WriteSPACE Videos, notebook in hand (timestamp 12:20 - 43:30). Alternatively, you can respond to these prompts:

• Begin your journey in a village halfway up the side of a mountain. This is your standing place, where you spend most of your time. What does it look like to you? For example, ‘I am starting from a place of anxiety’ or ‘I am starting a new project that is exciting but needs quite a lot of mental heavy lifting.’ (3 minutes)

• Take the cable car up the steep mountainside above the village and walk along the ridge until you reach a viewing platform shaped like a crown. What are the crown jewels of your writing project or your writing practice? These gems are your values or touchstones that motivate your practice forward and inspire you when you feel fatigued. Write a list of as many as you can, then pick the three most sparkling jewels. (3 minutes)

• Continue your hike along the ridgeline high above the valley—it curves up and along to a destination just out of sight. Where do you want this journey to take you? What is the overall goal of your project? (2 minutes)

• Now you arrive at a small alpine café and stop for a break. What fuels you to keep going? Who is there with you? (2 minutes)

• Farther along the path, we encounter some alphorn players. What melody do you want to send out to your listeners (readers!) in the next valley? (2 minutes)

• Travel up and over the ridge. Now you’re approaching the end of your journey — but how will you bring yourself back down to your starting place? Helen offered us a few options (5 minutes). :
  -        Take a train – peaceful and gentle.
  -        Walk down the steep track – quite a challenge but great for fitness.
  -        Follow Helen’s example and paraglide your way down – an adventure!

Helen celebrating her birthday on June 21 by paragliding over the Lauterbrunnen Valley.

I want to say a big thank you to the retreaters who were there during the open chalet, to all the writers who came along and simulated their own retreats with us, and to Helen for guiding us through the insightful writing prompts. As always, it was such a privilege.

If you would like to know more about our retreats or have any new questions, we would love to hear from you!

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

Not a member? Register 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.

Subscribe here to Helen’s Word on Substack to access the full Substack archive and receive weekly subscriber-only newsletters (USD $5/month or $50/year).

WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year).

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No pain, no gain.  No rain, no rainbow.  No brussel sprouts, no banoffee pie.  

I asked my new writing buddy Bing (dubbed ChattieG by my brilliant colleague Inger Mewburn) to produce a list of "no this, no that" phrases, for example:

• No risk, no reward.

• No guts, no glory.

• No practice, no perfection.

At first glance, the meaning of these platitudes seems as obvious as their structure. You have to break eggs to make an omelette. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. No bad thing, no good thing.

The "no this, no that" formula isn't necessarily that simple, however – or simplistic.  In his classic book No Mud, No Lotus: The Art of Transforming Suffering, the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh describes suffering and happiness not as oppositional emotions but as two parts of a complex, dynamic whole: 

Both suffering and happiness are of an organic nature, which means they’re both transitory; they are always changing. The flower, when it wilts, becomes the compost. The compost can help grow a flower again. Happiness is also organic and impermanent by nature. It can become suffering and suffering can become happiness again.

The mud and the lotus need each other. No mud, no lotus. No lotus, no mud.

And what's so bad about mud, anyway? In this image from my book Writing with Pleasure, I've surrendered to the sticky mud of too much data, my hands waving joyfully in the air, a gleeful smile on my face. No mudbath, no playful wallow.  

Here's an exercise that you can try yourself on days when the mud of your writing is sucking you down and the lotus of fulfilment is nowhere in sight:

(1) Generate a list of "No bad thing, no good thing" metaphors to describe your writing practice – the more colorful and creative, the better. 

(2) Untangle the syntactical logic of each metaphor. Does the second item actually requirethe first item in order to exist?  For example: 

• No pain, no gain - While pain may be part of a generative writing process, gains can also be made without pain.
   

• No rain, no rainbow - While rainbows are linguistically associated with rain, there are much easier and more reliable ways to produce them than by waiting for rainfall on a sunny day. You can shine a light through a prism, for example, or draw a rainbow using colored pencils.
   

• No brussel sprouts, no banoffee pie - While many a child has heard some version of the dreaded phrase "Eat your vegetables, or you won't get any dessert," there is no intrinsic reason why the consumption of a sweet confection should require a gemmiferous cabbage as a starting course. 

(3) Finally, test the emotional mettle of your metaphors by replacing each "no" with an optimistic "yes": Yes pain, yes gain. Yes rain, yes rainbow. Yes brussel sprouts, yes banoffee pie.  

I'm not so keen on the idea of yes pain – I may need Thich Nhat Nanh's book to get me through that part! – but can accept all the other words on this list as part of a generative writing process. Yes pleasurable progress; yes refreshing rain; yes exhilarating rainbows; yes nutritious brassica; yes sweet banoffee pie. 

Yes mud. Yes lotus.

And yes yes yes to writing with pleasure!

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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Lately I've been revisiting some overgrown pathways in my digital archive, cutting back the brambles and sweeping away dead leaves to reveal the moss-covered mosaics underneath. 

One such recently excavated artifact is The Stoneflower Path, a digital poetry website that I built in the heyday of hypermedia hype (c. 2007-2010) using Dreamweaver, Photoshop, and Flash. Last year, summer scholar Amy Lewis spent the better part of two months pruning away dead links and converting the Flash files to html5 so that the site is now navigable again. 

I've also unearthed an in-depth interview about my digital poetics conducted by poet and book reviewer Paula Green back in 2011. There I explicate some of my favorite digipoems, such as this one: 

In Inspiration, I use mouse-overs to subvert my readers' expectations and to raise questions about the relationship between process and product. The poem is contained within a mosaic frame, a digitized version of an actual mosaic mirror that hangs in my house. Both images (mosaic and frame) have a powerful metaphorical function in the poem, with its themes of fragmentation and reframing.

As you move your mouse around inside the mirror frame, searching for a way into the poem, you'll discover that when you pass over the title, the word "Plagiarism" pops up in front of it.  That's the poem’s secret title, the counterpart to "Inspiration." All poets are plagiarists, in a sense, drawing their ideas and vocabulary from those who have gone before them. My digipoem merely makes that process more transparent. 

When you click in the centre of the mirror, you're granted access to the poem, and the full text appears. It's a meta-poem, a poem about poetry, exploring how language can both trip us up and set us free: "words unfold / like butterflies" even as they "weight the truth."

Making your way through the poem with mouse in hand, you soon discover that behind or within each stanza lies a hidden intertext. For example, when you mouse over the opening stanza – "slanted stars / weight the truth"– up pops the line from Emily Dickinson that in turn inspired mine: "tell all the truth but tell it slant." Additional fragments of poetry are hidden behind the shards of glass and glowing jewels the mirror's frame.

Further down, when you mouse over "not text but texture" in the final stanza, you're treated to a quote from Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire: "this  / Was the real point, the contrapuntal theme; / Just this, not text, but texture..." For me, Nabokov's line sums up not only this particular poem but my digital poetics in general – indeed, my entire creative process. A digital poem can never consist of text alone. Its meaning also resides in the mosaic frame itself, the mirror, the mouse-overs, the way you read it – not text, but texture.

Barely a dozen years after I created the Stoneflower Path, many of my digipoems already feel clunky and old-fashioned, like walking into your grandma's living room to find the same furniture that was there in your parents' childhood. Conceived before the rise of touchscreens and tablets, these poems work best when viewed on a good-sized computer monitor as you search for hyperlinks and hotspots with mouse in hand. 

But I still remember the joy that I had in creating them, with their giddy interplay of digital disembodiment and material texture, and I've been having fun reappropriating them for different contexts. For example, several Stoneflower Path poems appear as static printed texts in my new book, Writing with Pleasure, accompanied by fanciful line drawings by illustrator Selina Tusitala Marsh.

I absolutely love Selina's artwork for this poem! The butterflies literally bear words on their wings; the minaret-like candle, like my computer, is powered by an electrical cord plugged into the wall; and the hand-drawn border that frames the image drips with melted wax. 

Inspiration, or plagiarism? As whizzy new AI tools such as ChatGPT remind us, all writing – indeed, language itself – has been pieced together from shards of past expression and grouted in place by algorithms: "these fragments I have shored against my ruins," in T. S. Eliot's words.

There's much more material-digital wordplay to be explored along the Stoneflower Path, so I'll revisit my digital poetry archive from time to time in search of old/new insights. I'd love to see you there! 

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 a 2016 article in the Washington Post, journalist Juliet Eilperin described how female staffers in the Obama White House ensured that each other's voices got heard:

• When President Obama took office, two-thirds of his top aides were men. Women complained of having to elbow their way into important meetings. And when they got in, their voices were sometimes ignored. So female staffers adopted a meeting strategy they called “amplification”: When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author. This forced the men in the room to recognize the contribution — and denied them the chance to claim the idea as their own.

For academic and professional writers, to amplify means to make a fellow writer's words louder, stronger, and more impactful than they would have been on their own. For example, you could deliberately cite a scholar from an underrepresented discipline or invite an early-career colleague to collaborate with you on a high-profile project. 

But what if you're the writer looking for a boost? How can you encourage other writers to amplify your voice?

Three strategies come to mind:

1. The Good Karma Game: Amplify the voices of other writers and trust that the universe will respond in kind. 
    

2. The Quid Pro Quo Pact: Join with fellow writers in an "I'll-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine" fellowship of mutual amplification.
    

3. The Art of Asking: Follow the advice of my friend Amanda Palmer in her famous TED Talk (nearly 13 million views so far!) and New York Times bestselling book The Art of Asking: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help: Just ask!

The Good Karma Game is my personal preference, with its quietly altruistic vibe. Whenever I notice something or someone sucking away the oxygen from our collective space of writing — our WriteSPACE — I do what I can to replace that poisoned air with fresh inspiration and resources. 

But sometimes it can't hurt to ask for help.

If you're a writer who writes about writing, here a few things that you can ask me t0 do for you:

• Social Media: Tag me into your writing-related Twitter posts (@helens_word) and ask me to retweet or quote-tweet them. (I'm less active on LinkedIn, but I'd love to connect with you there too). 
   

• Bookshop: Contact me with the publishing details of your new book on writing, creativity, or wellbeing so that I can add it to my curated Bookshop. You can also amplify your fellow writers' voices by recommending their books. 
   

• Reviews: I no longer publish book reviews, but I often accept publishers' requests to supply referee reports and/or cover blurbs for new books — plus, I'm always on the lookout for writers and themes to feature in my WriteSPACE Special Events series. If you've working on or have recently published a book on writing, please let me know what you're up to, and feel free to to pass along my contact details to your publisher. 
   

• Newsletter: Send me a link to any open access article, blog post, or other online writing resource that is likely to be of interest to a wide range of writers so that I can feature it in my weekly newsletter. Simply follow the instructions under "Other Writing News" below to format and submit your suggestion.

In return, I've listed below a few things that you can do to broadcast my message of pleasurable, productive writing to the world. By amplifying my voice, you'll help me amplify the voices of others. 

• Amplify my new book: Would your students or faculty writing group benefit from a more joyful approach to academic writing? Or perhaps you'd like to review Writing with Pleasure for a newspaper, newsletter, journal, podcast, or blog — and get sent a free review copy in return? If so, please contact me with the relevant details so I can pass them on to my wonderful colleagues at Princeton University Press.
  

• Amplify my website: I've stocked my website with so many free writing resources that I sometimes lose track of them myself. You can support my pro bono work by taking 5 minutes right now to email someone in your institution — for example, your Provost, Dean, Chair, or the Director of your Faculty Development unit or Writing Center — and recommend that they Zoom me into your campus to run a virtual writing workshop. They'll find all the details they need (including a tickertape display of all my previous gigs) on my Bookings page — and I'll be eternally grateful! 
  

• Amplify my writing community: Please encourage your colleagues, students, and friends to check out the WriteSPACE, my vibrant international writing community. Membership benefits include a live Virtual Writing Studio where you can hone your craft as a writer, a members-only Library stocked with exclusive writing resources, and access to Writer’s Diet Plus, a premium version of my popular Writer's Diet diagnostic tool. I'll be adding a whole suite of new features over the next few months, so there's never been a better time to join!
  
  I look forward to playing the Good Karma Game with you!

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As a child, I loved decorating Easter eggs. Under my mother's watchful eye, I would hold a hard-boiled egg carefully by my fingertips and dip it first in blue dye from one end, then in red dye from the other end, taking care to let the two sections overlap to create a striation of purple in the middle. Magic!

Later, as a teenager, I learned the delicate art of dribbling hot wax across the surface of a blown egg with a special tool called a tjanting in Indonesia or a kistka in Ukraine. Draw, dye; draw, dye; draw, dye; then you heat the egg and wipe away the melted wax to reveal the vibrant pattern beneath. Magic again!

But by the time I reached adulthood, I had abandoned the simple pleasures of color, form, and texture. For a few joyful years, I dyed Easter eggs with my own young children. Then words, words, words swamped my brain again, and all the color drained away.

Until recently. While researching Writing with Pleasure, I rediscovered the pleasures of writing, drawing, and thinking by hand. I also learned more about the science of creativity: how and why our brains respond to the visual and tactile stimulation of color, pattern, and form.

Now, every day of my writing life, I look for ways to enrich my wordcraft with color and to bring texture to my texts. The art of paper collage, another creative pleasure from my childhood, has introduced a meditative element to my writing practice and helped me reframe my wordcraft as art.

These egg-themed creative prompts will get your hands moving and your brain whirring: 

• Cut a dozen or so eggs from textured or patterned paper.

• Label each egg: for example, with the name of a current writing project or creative aspiration. You may also want to designate certain eggs to represent non-negotiable aspects of your work-life balance such as family, friends, and exercise. Use visual cues such as size, shape, patterning, and color to signal their relative importance and to draw connections or contrasts between them. 
   

• Arrange your eggs in whatever way you please. For example, you could pile them higgledy-piggledy in a basket, or line them up neatly in a box, or suspend them on delicate threads from a tree branch. 
   

• Picture yourself juggling all your eggs at once. What would happen if you dropped them? Would some shatter and others bounce?
   

• Freewrite for 10-15 minutes about the writing eggs you have assembled. Which ones inspire you and bring you joy? Which ones fill you with anxiety, frustration, or dread? Have any of them been sitting around for so long that they've begun to stink?

"Seriously playful" reflective exercises such as this one can help you gain a new perspective on your writing. At the very least, it will bring some childlike creativity and joy back into your life!

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My new Pleasure Catalyst has just started, and I couldn't be more excited!  

Writers from around the globe are joining me for six weeks of workshops, activities, and online discussion focusing on the delectable theme of writing with pleasure. Our participant list includes academic, professional, and creative writers in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Indonesia, New Zealand, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and all across the United States.

Together we'll be exploring research-based strategies for excavating past pleasures, amplifying existing pleasures, and discovering new sources of pleasure in writing. My goal is to help the course participants become more productive and resilient writers so they can flourish in all aspects of their writing life, both professional and personal.  

We'll also cast light on the shadow side of our writing-related emotions, bringing our brightest sources of pleasure into relief against the darkness, as in a chiaroscuro painting.

Our first weekly module, Leylines and Lifelines, opened up multiple lines of inquiry via the sinuous metaphor of lines:

• What leylines (invisible lines of energy) run through the landscape of your writing life?

• What lifelines can you trace in the palm of your hand and reach for when you need rescuing?

• What desire lines (intuitive pathways) and horizon lines (distant destinations) draw you forward?

From there, we'll be moving through a shapeshifting sequence of other resonant writing metaphors:

• Module 2: Ground & Sky
  (on the pleasures of analog, digital, and hybrid writing tools);

• Module 3: Wind, River, Stone
  (on the pleasures of brainstorming, drafting, and crafting);

• Module 4: Star Navigation
  (on the pleasures of finding your own stars to steer by);

• Module 5: Chiaroscuro
  (on the interplay of light and shadow in your writing-related emotions);

• Module 6: Island Time
  (on the pleasures of diving deep, taking time out, and wading through the wetlands between the sea and the shore of your writing life). 

Here's what one of our participants told us about her reasons for enrolling in the course: 

• I have been so grateful for all the learnings I have taken from the Productivity Catalyst last year  –  it has really transformed the way I approach academic writing  –  and had some great life lessons as well. I realised that it is possible to enjoy writing  –  wow! And that writing more creatively is fun and nourishing. So I am excited to see where this course takes me. (Kate, New Zealand)

The Pleasure Catalyst will run again in 2023. In the meantime, you can read about our full Writing Catalyst series here.

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We kickstarted our 2023 WriteSPACE Special Event Series with our annual Valentine’s Day Extravaganza. This year’s free event was a double celebration marking the launch of my new book, Writing with Pleasure, as well as the second anniversary of the WriteSPACE.

The live book launch consisted of two half-hour sessions 12 hours apart, each featuring a different special guest:

• Session I: Book illustrator and cover artist Selina Tusitala Marsh. 

• Session II: Legendary Princeton UP editor Peter Dougherty.

Each launch session was followed by a mini-workshop called “Draw Your own SPACE Map,” now available in my new SPACE Gallery. (Click on “Your Gallery” to fine the workshop).

Here is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ first-person account of the live event:

…………….

The two Valentine’s Day sessions thoroughly explored the many stages and phases of pleasurable writing. After all, writing can be a productive, powerful, and playful act!

Helen began by explaining the inspiration for her new book. She revealed that when conducting research interviews with 100 successful academic writers, the most common emotions mentioned were not frustration and anxiety but pleasure and enjoyment! That unexpected finding inspired her to dive into researching the positive emotions of writing. But of course, this kind of pleasure is complex—more like the joy from climbing a mountain than dancing through fields of daisies. Profoundly satisfying writing can be frustrating at first because it’s difficult, but there is a rich pleasure in the challenge. Writing with Pleasure is a courageous book, a mosaic of ‘pleasure prompts’ and multi-faceted challenges to bring more meaning and joy into our writing lives. Helen questions the familiar adage “writing is painful,” suggesting that flexible and enjoyable writing will always create more interesting outcomes, whatever form they take.

It was fascinating to hear Helen and book illustrator Selina Tusitala Marsh talk about how their perspectives on pleasurable writing have evolved over time. Their collaboration has shaped the book into the visually and metaphorically driven touchstone that it is. Selina explained how her practice has become increasingly led by the drawn line, and her whimsical illustrations reflect this passion. It’s worth simply focusing on their beautiful borders—the margins push up against the text in joyful ruptures, justas Helen cracks open the conventional idea that writing is all work and no fun.

Personal memories abound in this book—for example, a memory of stumbling on a hike reveals that sometimes falling is part of any literary journey and won’t detract from the sense of achievement when you reach the end. The book is full of insightful and unique metaphors that can help us negotiate the emotional ups and downs of the writing process. Selina’s illustrations offer visual hints to mirror the metaphors in each chapter. Highlights include beautiful porcelain teacups, word swings, flying bird-books, and a whirlwind girl!

In the second part of the launch, we heard from retired Princeton University Press editor Peter Dougherty, whose enthusiasm and excitement about Helen’s new book was infectious!

At the end of each book launch session, Helen led us through an exercise (which you can do too! The prompt is in the book) called the SPACE of pleasurable writing. Every letter of this acronym explores a different dimension of your writing practice:

• Social balance

• Physical engagement

• Aesthetic nourishment

• Creative challenge

• Emotional uplift.

Considering these dimensions will enhance your positive feelings about your writing practice. I invite you to grab some coloured pencils and the book, turn to ‘The Road Ahead’, and have a go yourself — or follow the video prompts on Helen’s website at https://www.helensword.com/your-gallery.

Sharing our visual SPACEs of writing with each other was a wonderful moment filled with trees, clouds, spirals, dancers, teacups, animals, landscapes, musicians, and many more beautiful symbols.

A big thank you to Helen, Selina, and the wonderful Princeton UP publishing team, including editor Peter Dougherty and book designer Chris Ferrante, for sharing their ideas and expertise so generously with us. And thank you all for coming along to help us launch Writing with Pleasure. It was a beautiful Valentine’s Day to remember!

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

Not a member yet? 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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WriteSPACE members enjoy a complimentary subscription to Helen’s Word as part of their membership plan (USD $15/month or $150/year).

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