Common Shapes

The Return of Landscapes

• Cody Cook-Parrott

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0:00 | 22:31

Welcome back to Common Shapes.

Dear Listener, as we pause between seasons, we’re bringing you a 3-part mini series to re-connect with you and talk about the ebbs and flows of creative work.

Today’s episode explores what happens when a project comes into the foreground of our attention and asks to be revisited.

Cody shares life and work updates, and an invitation to join Landscapes: a writing group for all genres.

In this episode:

  • Reflections on closing Landscapes—and what made it unsustainable at the time
  • What shifted in the quiet absence of social media
  • The role of creative community in anchoring a writing practice
  • Returning to an offering with clearer boundaries, shared facilitation, and renewed intention

Invitations:

Tune in tomorrow for episode two of this mini-series.

Thanks to Joi, Melissa Kaitlyn Carter, and Jess Herrera for their help making this episode.

If you'd like to support the show, please send it to a friend, leave a 5-star rating & review, and download the Creative Ideation Portal.

SPEAKER_00

Hello, and welcome to Common Shapes, a podcast about practices and systems for creative work. And today it's a podcast about returning. I'm your host, Cody Cook Parrot, and I am delighted to bring you this between season three-part mini series. The podcast is always an experiment, and today is no different. So I thought I would welcome myself back a bit to the feed and tell you a little bit about what's been going on in my life and in my business. And we're really here to talk about writing and returning to writing and returning to a writing group and bringing something back that you've sunsetted. And so this episode is all about giving yourself permission to be curious and to play and to find out what is on the other side of the mystery. I'm so glad you're here. I'll remind you that you can always download the free Creative Ideation Portal, which is in the show notes, or at CodyCookParrot.com. And the Creative Ideation Portal is a free three-day guide to help you vision your projects and bring them into the light. It's hosted in Notion. You get an email over three days with each day, or you can just jump ahead in the Notion dashboard. There's a project database that helps you organize all your projects and a ton of prompts. And I hope that you love it. The last episode is from November, where I interviewed the amazing Podge Thomas. If you haven't listened to that, I highly recommend going back and listening to that episode. She is just amazing to talk to about all things Notion and organizing and running a small business and our capacities. And it was really fun. So have a listen there if you're catching up or if you're new here. And so much has happened since November. I am known to be one who can pack a lot into a small amount of time. Let's see. I celebrated one year of love and partnership with my partner, Catherine. And that feels like a win. That feels like a win all around in my business, in my life to have something so steady, so safe, so secure, so beautiful, still celebrating that milestone and that win. And in February, I had top surgery and I wrote about it in my newsletter. There were some sort of harrowing details and complications, but overall, it went well. And I'm healing well and feeling the gratitude and gender euphoria that comes with gender-affirming health care. And in March, I put out a new book, The Practice of Attention: Cultivating Presence in a Distracted World. And that has been lovely to have out in the world, in bookstores all around the world. We found out it's getting translated into Vietnamese, which is really exciting. It's available as an audiobook, as an ebook, and as a physical paperback book. If you haven't grabbed your copy, head to thepracticeofatention.com. You can find all the places to buy it there, as well as get some order bonuses. So there's an attention audit workbook and then a seven-day email course called No Signal that is all about doing a digital detox. Many things to enjoy alongside of the practice of attention. The other project I launched in my business at the end of last year was Prompts, which is my analog newsletter that gets mailed to you every month for $11 a month. It's been so special to send those every month. And in tomorrow's episode, I'm actually going to talk a little more about the creation of prompts and sending it every month and all of the ways that I set up channels in my business to communicate with my readers and my students. So that's a little about what I've been up to. I've been trying to walk a lot. The snow is melted in northern Michigan, and the air is getting warmer. The grass is turning a new shade of green, and I'm really grateful for spring and the weather changing. It definitely was a long winter up here, and I'm always struck by the invitations I receive from the changing seasons. Without social media and putting the practice of attention out, it's felt pretty quiet because you don't have that feedback loop of people tagging you, showing themselves opening the box, or spotting it at a bookstore somewhere. It's up to people to email me if they want me to see that they saw the book or that they got the book, and that takes extra steps. So it's been a little quiet. And I think that actually has to do with the topic of today's episode, which is bringing back landscapes, my writing group for all genres. If you go back last season in the podcast, I made an episode about closing landscapes or putting a sunset on landscapes. I won't go into it too much here. You can listen to that episode. There was a lot of different reasons that it wasn't a good fit in my business anymore. I had had some leaky boundaries that made it more of a social group than a co-working group to really get our writing done. And in this quiet without social media, I realized that so much of my tether to my audience and to others and to my peers really came from being in landscapes, from having a regular place to go to work on my writing, to work on my craft, to ground in with other people dedicated to doing the same. And so I'm in a season of wanting to experiment bringing it back. I went to a lot of peers, mentors, guides to develop a new way to bring landscapes forward that didn't burn me out, that involved having more frequent subs and involved turning our cameras off, not checking in at the beginning, saving, checking in, and cameras on for specific sessions that we call office hours, where all members can ask me any questions for the month. You can bring your work and workshop it. It's just a free open two hours where we brainstorm together, get to know each other, have that social time. But in our regular co-working times, which are Tuesdays and Thursdays, from 8 to 10 PST, 11 to 1 EST, we will come together with our cameras on, greet each other. I will read a writing prompt, and then we will turn our cameras off and we will get to work. And we will really focus on the writing and bringing the writing forward. So I'm really excited to stay committed to my own writing practice, which wavers. And I notice that when I'm in landscapes, it has a root. It has an anchor that can sustain me while I'm working on a lot of other projects at the same time. So yeah, I really miss being in an online group and an online community that I facilitate. It's been fun. I've been facilitating Flexible Office for two seasons this year, which is my admin co-working group. And so to sort of weave that into landscapes, every month there will also be an admin hours group. And so admin hours is a two-hour chunk of time where you can bring all of your admin tasks like answering emails, calling someone back, making a doctor's appointment, calling the lovely IRS, whatever you need to do, whatever you're avoiding is usually the best thing to bring to admin hour. And then each month we'll have a guest workshop, and we already have those planned for the next four months. In May, Amelia Fruby will be joining us to talk about finishing a book. In June, Podge Thomas will be talking about creating a Notion dashboard for your writing. In July, Casey Zabala will talk about magic and rituals in writing. And in August, Salome Samuel will talk about money for writers. So that, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg of landscapes. And I hope that if you're listening and you want to create your own co-working group, that you absolutely do. It's a great way to facilitate connection with the folks who are buying your courses or your books or interacting with your newsletter or your podcast. It just really builds a central hub for everyone to gather around similar ideas and values and share resources. Before landscapes was hosted in Mighty Networks, and now we've moved to Circle. And so that is a place for socializing. That is a place for connection, for sharing resources, for sharing self-promotion. That is the other great benefit of landscapes, it's really a place to find friends, to find collaborators, to find coworkers, and to not be so alone in the process of either working for yourself or doing your writing, however, it fits into your life. When I say a writing co-working group, you might be asking, well, Cody, can I paint? Can I sew? Can I do other things? Your camera is off. No one is taking attendance. No one is checking on you, but it is a group focused on writing. And so the hope for me is if you are someone who paints or who sews or who has another craft, that maybe writing is a part of your ecosystem. And so you might write sales emails or a weekly newsletter or a monthly newsletter. You might have texts or letters to respond to. So the hope is that it's really the place that you're bringing your writing and that you're cultivating a writing practice that is rigorous and devotional and disciplined without being in too rigid of a framework. We also give ourselves permission in landscapes to toast a bagel, make a smoothie, throw a load of laundry in, right? So we can make a little menu for the day that sets us up for success. And success in landscapes means tending to yourself. That doesn't mean finishing a novel in three months. It doesn't mean getting a book deal. It can mean those things, and we love when those things happen in landscapes, and we've seen them happen in landscapes. But it doesn't have to be the end all be all of your time in the writing group. Landscape starts Tuesday, May 5th, and registration opens May 1st. So in the show notes, you can join the wait list for landscapes so that you get the email as soon as it opens up on May 1st to join us. Registration will be open for two weeks, and then we'll go back to the wait list model. So the wait list kind of gives us a chance to just let people in, form the group, have the group be cohesive for a little while, and then we open back up the wait list every few months or so so that new people can join and we can orient them to the group. We can welcome them with open arms and have it all be one beautiful landscape. The other reason that I wanted to bring landscapes back now was for recurring revenue in my business. And that was something I think I really took for granted. So if you have recurring revenue in your business, either from a paid newsletter, from a Patreon, from a co-working group, you know, all I'll say is it's a little bit of you don't know what you've got till it's gone. And I really felt like I was ready to bring something back that would bring me some more stability in the ecosystem of my business. And I knew that I couldn't always hold that. And so I'm extremely excited that in June, while I'm at grad school and then at Dance Camp, the amazing Stephanie Graham and Dr. Kate Henry will be subbing for me to amazing artists and podcasters and writers in their own right. Stephanie has an amazing podcast, No C AF, and Dr. Kate has an amazing podcast called Honing In. I highly recommend both of their work. And I trust them both deeply to hold the space while I am away. You know, that was a big part of my burnout before with landscapes, was it just felt like I was holding the whole thing by myself. And so I knew that in coming back, not just when I travel, but when it's time for me to take a break, I need to hire genius writers to sub for me. And so that felt like another really clear boundary to bring in for myself to be a good facilitator and to show members who were members before that I'm taking their feedback really seriously and that I want the space to feel welcoming and safe and like it isn't going to just crumble underneath my feet. So that was what I envisioned in bringing landscapes back. Another format that will stay the same is landscapes is sliding scale. So landscapes is $33 to $99. You can choose one of four tiers: $33, 55, 77, or 99. And the value of landscapes is in all of the coworking. You know, you get eight co-working sessions a month, you get one guest workshop a month, one office hours to ask me anything that you want about business, about writing, about your work, and then one admin hour session a month. And then there's going to be other bonus things, I'm sure, that will emerge each month. It's already been too hard for me to limit the guest workshops to one a month. I'm just so excited to welcome these folks into the fold of landscapes. And to me, that much is worth $99. Like just the guest workshop alone. I mean, we had so many over a year of landscapes before, and they were just all so profound and impacted my writing so much to have these new tools. So just the guest workshop alone is worth that much, let alone the co-working, admin hours, office hours, and the community on Circle. It's going to be really rich and really amazing. Dear listener, I would love to invite you in to the group and have you with us. You can always have your first week free of landscapes. So your first week of landscapes is free. That way you can test it out. You can see if you actually like it. You don't have to commit. If you don't like the vibe or it's not working for you, you don't have to stay. So come and try a few sessions, see how it lands, see how it goes. And we'll see you in there. Tuesday, May 5th. Registration opens May 1st. You can join the wait list in the show notes. And I hope you enjoy this three-part mini-series. Tomorrow we'll be talking about prompts and my analog newsletter. In episode three, I'll talk about what it's been like to have the practice of attention in the world. And then the last thing I want to share is I'm also teaching a three-week class in May called The Pattern of Words from Idea to Shape in three weeks, May 13th, 20th, and 27th at 10 a.m. EST. So those are Wednesdays. So that's an early rise for you West Coast people. That's a 7 a.m. class. That's a 10 a.m. class for East Coast folks. And for my around the world folks, I know you have figured out how to do the time zone conversion, but I would love to see you there. It's all about taking your ideas and shaping them into new patterns. So we're going to outline books, essay books, newsletters. We're going to take our ideas and find the pattern. And we're going to talk about outlining a book proposal that you can send to an agent or a small press or a big publisher. And we're going to talk about outlining projects. All you have to come with to class is a little spark, a little spark of something. And then in those three weeks, we will shape them into products, objects, containers to ship into the world. So that's again Wednesday, May 13th, 20th, and 27th at 10 a.m. EST, the pattern of words from idea to shape in three weeks. Thank you so much for listening to Common Shapes. If you just want something for free, don't forget that you can download the Creative Ideation portal. It's in the show notes or at CodyCookProrot.com. Thank you so much. To Jess Herrera for making our podcast art, for Melissa Caitlin Carter for our music, and to you, dear listener, for tuning in, even when I leave the feed open for long swaths of time. Thank you so much for coming back, for being a listener, and I hope you enjoy days two and three of this little mini series. Thanks so much for listening to Common Shapes.