PROMPTS + More Landscapes

Welcome back to Common Shapes.

Dear Listener, this is the second installment of our 3-part mini-series exploring the ebbs and flows of creative work.

Today’s episode is about offline offerings— the act of returning to a practice, creating with less noise, and building new channels for connection.

Cody shares the evolution of PROMPTS. Prompts comes to your door once a month. A letter from Cody with ten writing prompts to do off screen.

Cody also reflects on the tension between visibility, burnout, and the desire to stay in conversation with their audience.

In this episode:

• Navigating burnout and rethinking the pace and structure of the podcast
• The desire for connection and communication without screens/social media
• The origin of PROMPTS as a project shaped inside Landscapes (a writing co-working group)
• Using themes as a creative constraint to support consistency and flow
• The role of analog practices in slowing down and deepening creative work

Invitations:

• PROMPTS (Analog Newsletter)
• Landscapes (Writing Co-working Group)
• Creative Ideation Portal (free resource)
• The Practice of Attention (my new book!)
• The Pattern of Words: From Idea to Shape in Three Weeks (upcoming class May 13, 20, and 27th)

Tune in tomorrow for episode three 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.

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Common Shapes, a podcast about practices and systems for creative work. And today, a podcast about writing. A podcast about coming back to a practice, looking at our screens less, and a podcast about hope and returning. We're gonna keep talking about returning. I'm your host, Cody Cook Parrot. I'm so glad you're here listening to episode two of this little mini series here between seasons of common shapes. Before we dive in, I'd love to remind you to grab the free creative ideation portal, which is a three-day guide to help you vision your projects and bring them into the world. You can find a link to that in the show notes or at CodyCookParrot.com. So we're back for day two. And, you know, I wanted to actually also talk about Common Shapes, the podcast. You know, I mentioned yesterday talking about landscapes that I experienced some level of burnout. I've been writing about burnout more in my newsletter Monday, Monday, and just thinking a lot about how to avoid it. And sometimes it comes and lasts for a long time. Sometimes I might just feel burnt out for a day. But having a podcast has often tipped the scale for me in terms of burnout because it's a lot of energy, takes a lot of money to pay an editor and a producer, and it can be a big lift, even though it's also so fun and so special to get on the mic and do a little dance. So I had visioned an entire new podcast season, and I got new music, a new editor, and we have this beautiful art by Jess Herrera. And I just planned the whole thing out with my launches and with landscapes coming back. I had invited all these guests to be on and scheduled their interviews. And as I was preparing to start making the episodes, I saw the burnout coming, specifically still being in grad school. So I am getting my MFA in creative writing from Naropa University, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. And I am in school through July 17th. That's my last day of school. And I've sort of been saying, like, you know, I'm writing my thesis right now, which is due May 8th. So as you're listening to this, I am absolutely clickety-clackety typing away. And I felt this feeling of like, okay, I can't add anything new while I'm in grad school. And I keep doing it. I keep adding new things. I'm in another Pilates Matt teacher training with spring movement online right now. It's amazing. I'm deeply enjoying it. But, you know, I added that on top of grad school. So I was talking with Joy, my editor, and you know, she recommended, what if we just did a little mini-series? Because I was in huge indecision. I was just like, I really want, and this is what we're going to talk about today, another channel to reach the people. My email newsletter is not feeling like enough without social media. I want another way for people to interact with my work, to hear about what classes are coming up, to hear about landscapes coming back, to hear about how I run a business and to teach through. And that is the podcast in so many ways. And so I was like, okay, I have to map out all of season five, and it has to be really big and really amazing. And people were like, you could try it bi-weekly episodes or, you know, once a month. And I just, I have this vision that when a podcast is in season, for me, I really want it to be weekly. So for better or worse. I don't know if that's the Gemini in me, the manifester in me, who knows which trait the person who just wants to do everything and can't find the time. So the pivot we made was to make this little three-day mini-series. And I'm so glad we did because it feels so fun to be back on the mic. I love to talk about writing and creative business and how it all works and lands. So season five of the podcast will come back. Right now, we're planning for an August emergence. So I'll start recording again in July. But as you know, in the world of Cody, that could change and pivot too. But that's what we're dreaming up right now. And there's going to be a lot of amazing guests and fun episodes ahead. So in the meantime, I hope you enjoy this little mini-series. And I want to talk about prompts. Prompts is a project that was born in landscapes. And so was the practice of attention. The practice of attention was born long before landscapes, but it was really written in landscapes. And that's what I'll talk about on tomorrow's episode. So I wanted to share about these projects that I conceived of in landscapes, because a big part of writing for me isn't just the material itself, but is the conception and is outlining and understanding the copy of how to talk about a project, how to sell a project. What does it want to be? How does it want to be in the world? And, you know, when I was in landscapes, I had this feeling like I was on my screen too much. Even though I had quit social media, I was still writing a lot and, you know, hosting landscapes twice a week with my camera on. So as I mentioned yesterday, we'll be experimenting with camera off to see how that feels for our writing. It just felt like, yeah, I was just on so much. And I've had a few friends who have had analog newsletters over the years. Chelsea Granger, dear friend, an amazing illustrator comes to mind, have company residency alumni, and so many others. I can't think of or list them all, but you know, I am certainly not the first to have an analog newsletter. And I really wanted to keep a channel open to reaching people. And so the original idea was that prompts would be sort of like a teaching mechanism. And so first what I did was I wrote a year and wrap-up letter and sent that out. And then I wrote January, February, and March. And they all felt a little stale, I would say, in my writing, like a little robotic, a little bit like I was trying to follow like a formula of teaching and pace and lessons. Like I really wanted to make sure I was sharing like lessons in writing. And that's just not really me. That's just not really how I saw this project working. But one thing I did is I mapped out a theme for each month. And that has been really helpful. And so when I announced the project, I announced the themes. And people could subscribe for a year or just per month. And it's $11 a month plus shipping. And I found that having the theme every month really helped me just like lock in and start right away. It wasn't like, oh God, what do I write about? I just sort of like knew what I wanted to write about. For instance, in March, the theme was attention, and that linked up with the practice of attention coming out. And so they kind of went together. And a few things occurred to me and happened and shook out. And I wanted to just write more from myself, my inner being, and less from my head. I think I was really writing from the head and not like having an embodied experience, like a somatic experience writing prompts. This month's theme, April, was memory. And I returned to a book of the same name by Bernadette Mayer that is a collection of photographs that she took. She shot a roll of film every day in the month of July in the 70s and then developed them and has all these beautiful photos and then a series of writing that goes along with it. And it really inspired me to just get a little more personal and peel back the curtain a bit in prompts and not be so vague. I had a dear friend kind of call this out in my writing recently. Like, there's a beauty to the vagueness because it protects my privacy in some ways, but there's also really something to be said about the power of specificity. And I've been also really thinking about that with my relationship to money lately, vagueness as a way to avoid and clarity as a way to empower and get clear. So I feel like that's how prompts has kind of emerged and changed over its short lifetime already is it's a little more personal now. And it's a little more me. It's a little less like I'm trying to teach you something, and a little just more like, here's a letter from me, a little missive about what has been happening in my world, what I've been up to, and what I'm thinking about in terms of this theme. The day that this episode comes out, April 30th, is the last day you can subscribe for May. And the theme for May is thresholds. So I'm really excited to sit down this week and write it. And then it goes out into the world in little envelopes, May 1st or 2nd. I usually pop them in the mail the first few days of the month. Each month comes with a letter and then 10 writing prompts. So you can always subscribe to the next month by the last day of the month before. So that is today, April 30th, 30 days has September, April, June, and November. And that's how I know it's the last day of the month because I have to say that little poem every day of my life. Having mapped the themes out and like outlined them made it so much easier for me to think of the prompts each month. The other themes June is the body, July is listening, August is edges, September is structure, October Shadows, November, Devotion, and December rest. It's been so sweet to have this year container, this year project container to experiment and make prompts exist in. And the other thing that's really sweet and been really fun is picking the stamps every month. So I got a little excited and I found some stamps online of like different artists I really love and bought them. They like cost a little more than the actual forever stamp price because they were old stamps. They weren't that old, but you know, from like a couple years ago. But then they released special edition Harriet Powers stamps. If any of you have taken a quilt as something human or any of my quilt classes or quilt camp, you have heard me talk about Harriet Powers, an amazing black woman from the South in the 1800s, quilter making mostly applique quilts that are stories and events, biblical, astrological events. And we in a quilt as something human choose sort of like our personal quilt ancestors. And Christy Johnson, who is an amazing artist and my co-teacher of A Quilt as Something Human, always picks Harriet Powers and teaches about her work. And so it was just thrilling to see that the USPS had made a stamp of her quilts, and I bought many of them. And so those are gracing both April and May's envelopes for prompts. Picking out stamps is very fun. I handwrite every address. So there's about 150 envelopes that go out right now. And Katie, my partner, helps me usually stuff the envelopes and stamp them with my return address stamp. And then I go through and handwrite all of the addresses. And you know, I just haven't found a better way yet. Maybe I'll link it all up to Ship Station someday and it can print little labels, but for now I do it all by hand. It takes me pretty much a full day to like print, fold stuff, stamp, put the stamps on, write the addresses, bring them to the post office. But it's good, hearty, worthy work, and I'm glad to do it. If you're thinking about an analog project, I really recommend it. It feels really sweet to receive letters back in my PO box. I really love when people mail me letters. Anyone can, you don't have to be subscribed to prompts. P.O. Box 252, Cedar, Michigan, 49621. And it's lovely to see other people popping up with their own analog subscription products or projects. It's so fun. So that's just one example of the kind of project that you might conceive of in landscapes. Another thing that a lot of people do in landscapes is their morning pages. And so often I'll spend the first 30 minutes of landscapes just journaling. Morning Pages is a tool drawn from Julia Cameron's book, The Artist's Way. And it's just writing three pages of uninterrupted, kind of brain dump journaling. That's sort of where the idea for prompts really came from was from my journaling practice and from thinking through journaling, you know, what did I want to bring forward? What did I want to bring into the world? And I'd love for prompts to continue to grow, both in people subscribing and maybe it shifts, maybe it changes, maybe it grows, maybe it's more colorful. Prompts is still a very simple framework, and I'm excited to keep experimenting with it and seeing what happens. One thing that I also do is there's an announcements section at the bottom of every letter in prompts that announces the next classes that I'm teaching or the practice of attention coming out. I made little like slips of paper, three on a piece of paper, and then cut them with a paper cutter for the practice of attention. So like little pre-order slips. So I do use it as a marketing channel, like another place where I can say, hey, dear reader, thanks for tuning into prompts. And here's what I'm up to today. So it feels sweet that, you know, 150 people are receiving a little bulletin board moment from me as well. So if a regular co-working group isn't calling to you, but you are wanting to shape a project like this and put it into the world, I'm teaching a three-week class in May called The Pattern of Words. It's Wednesday, May 13th, 20th, and 27th, 10 a.m. EST. And it's all about shaping an idea and bringing it into form over a three-week period. So it's really like idea to shape, three weeks. All you have to come with is an idea, an idea of something you want to write about, something you want to make happen. And then in those three weeks, through a series of prompts and conversations, we will figure out how to shape it, whether that's into a book proposal that you could send to a small press or a publisher or an agent, or it's just an outline for a book that you want to self-publish. It could be the framework for a monthly newsletter. So many fun ideas, a zine. We can talk through them all. So I'm really looking forward to that. The pattern of words, we start Wednesday, May 13th. And then, as I've been talking about, landscapes returns. Registration opens tomorrow if you're listening to this live May 1st. And you can get on the wait list by joining it in the show notes. I would love to see you there. I would love to nurture the co-working space together. Our first guest workshop is with Amelia Hruby, who's going to also be talking about finishing her own book, Your Attention is Sacred, except on social media. And I'm looking forward to all of our guest teachers, admin hours, office hours. It's going to be a really luxurious and spacious time. If you want to hear more about landscapes, feel free to listen to the episode that comes before this in the mini-series. If you're craving something for free, I encourage you to download the Creative Ideation Portal, a three-day guide envisioning your projects and bringing them into the world. If all this sounds interesting to you, but you're not ready to make the financial investment, that is a great place to start, a great place to enter into Cody's universe. It pairs well with three episodes of the podcast that are linked in the Notion Dashboard of the Creative Ideation Portal. Thank you so much for listening to Common Shapes today. Thank you for tuning in to this between season mini-series. Thank you to Jess Herrera, who makes our podcast art, Melissa Caitlin Carter, who makes our music. And thank you to you, dear listener, for tuning in to another episode of Common Shapes. Thank you for being amazing and so bright in the world. And I would encourage you to share this podcast episode or the one from yesterday. Wherever you like to share your podcast episodes, maybe that's social media, in your own newsletter, text it to a friend, review it on Apple Podcasts, give it a star on Spotify. Any way that you can support the show, we really appreciate it. I'm your host, Cody Cook Parrot, and I thank you again for listening to Common Shapes.