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.

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On April 19,  I was joined by writer and wellbeing expert Dr Sophie Nicholls for a lively discussion on Writing and Wellbeing.

Sophie is a poet, best-selling novelist, and Associate Professor of Learning and Teaching in Creative Writing at Teesside University in Yorkshire, UK. She has published two best-selling novels, The Dress (2011) and Miss Mary’s Book of Dreams (2017), as well as a poetry collection, Refugee (2011), partly inspired by her work with the organisation Freedom from Torture.

Click here to subscribe to Sophie's free newsletter on Substack. You'll love her focus on mindfulness and wellbeing and her beautiful spiral-infused writing!

In the first hour of this FREE WriteSPACE Special Event, I talked with Sophie about her background in psychodynamic therapies and mindfulness, and we discussed her research on how writing and other creative practices can help us to think, learn, understand ourselves and other people, collaborate, innovate, and grow.

In the second hour, Sophie and I conducted a hands-on workshop for WriteSPACE members.

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

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In this special seminar, we explored the notion of writing for wellbeing with our wonderful special guest Sophie Nicholls. A natural storyteller, Sophie took us through the journey of how she came to focus on writing driven by pleasure and motivated towards healing.

A few standout quotes from this session: 

• “It’s about being curious and self-compassionate.”

• “It’s important to remember that not every word you write needs to be publishable!”

• “Spirals have always fascinated me. There is something very fundamental about them; they are everywhere in nature.”

Listening to Sophie talk about her career, I was inspired by her pioneering spirit. Motivated by her dad during a period of intense adversity, she began to write a novel full of joy and color, The Dress, which became a massive online bestseller just as e-books were emerging in the market. She began teaching online courses in the early 2000s, long before the standard hybrid teaching mode we often encounter today. She also designed some of the first MA courses in creative writing for wellbeing, long before “writing and wellbeing” was seen as an established and critical field. Not afraid to break the mould, Sophie takes a psychodynamic approach that ensures safe, ethical, and holistic healing through writing.

You may be thinking, what does writing for wellbeing look like for academic writers? For Sophie, there is a key difference between writing as process and writing as product. Especially if you are an academic, you may have intense pressure to produce, produce, produce! Which, of course, does not recognise the value of the process at all. Ironically, the messy process is fundamental to achieving those very outputs. Relishing the process may not only help your writing but can also help you feel better as a person—the two are irrevocably intertwined.

Sophie also talked about the concept of the implied reader. For everything that we write, in a sense, we are writing to someone. They may be part of ourselves, or they may be a specific reader. It’s good to slow down and become conscious of whom you are writing for in your mind—often, without realising, we are writing for critical or unkind audiences. We must ask, ‘Is there a part of myself that is listening to what I am writing now?’ Then you can begin to cultivate a supportive, compassionate, constructive reader of yourself, inside your mind and on the page.

I loved Sophie’s exploding spiral ‘experiments’ (let’s leave the ‘exercises’ in the gym!). Letting yourself go into creativity involves what she calls a playful container—that is, a mode or parameter that helps you to focus your creative energy. It could be a specific notebook, a course or writing group, a visual aesthetic, a specific place, or perhaps a theme or idea. Any poetry teacher knows that the more structure you give your students, the more creative they become. Her work abounds with different therapeutic experiments involving playful containers, three of which she led us through in the second half of the session. Perhaps you may want to try these two in your own time!

• 5-minute spirals

  Start at the centre of your page with a word that springs to mind or begin with Sophie’s suggestion: ‘Thank you’. From there, begin free writing in a spiral formation, turning the page slowly as your write and focusing on your breath. Perhaps your spiral has an irregular shape or begins to unravel; every spiral is different. For visual inspiration, pop over to Sophie’s Instagram.

• 2-minute circles

  Draw an imperfect circle in your notebook. Think about your writing practice or your current project. Inside the circle, write everything that you want to say ‘Yes!’ to. And outside the circle, write everything that make you want to say, ‘No, I will let this go.’

Sophie also guided us through a creative visualisation experiment involving forests and free-writing. The workshop became a gentle reminder that no matter how rocky the path beneath our feet may appear, writing can always be a helpful tool to smooth the road ahead.

A big thank you to Sophie and Helen for taking us on this wellbeing journey and for your compassion, expertise, and warmth during this special session.

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A recording of this two-part WriteSPACE Special Event — including Sophie’s three writing experiments — is now available in the WriteSPACE Library.

Not 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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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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