💜[12/12] the creativity for good friday five

1. Typographic Awareness: How Fonts Impact Meaning (presented by Sarah Hyndman)

I am what one might call “generally okay” at graphic design. I have a pretty good eye for color and contrast, a good sense of how to compose an image, a decent track record with not ticking off the actual graphic designers I work with when I ask them to review my drafts before I send them out to clients.

(Eve, if you’re reading this, I love you! Sorry about that weird alignment thing!)

But this deep dive into typography and essentially the neuroscience of font design is the kind of stuff that absolutely separates those of us who are “generally okay” from the people who really get design, and it’s absolutely fascinating.

What is your “default” or “go-to” font? What made (or makes) you choose it? Habit? Professional expectations? Intention? Industry standards? How much — if it at all — do you think about the font you use, or the font you’re reading, on a day-to-day basis? Are there particular fonts you have a strong reaction to, either positive or negative? What does that feel like?

Prompt: Each day this week, choose a new font at random to use for all of your typing work. What do you notice? What kind of reactions come up? How does it feel to experiment like that? Does it change your work? Your process? Your flow? Create about it.

2. Anatomy of a Sex Scene: Heated Rivalry Edition (Jenny Hamilton for Reading the End)

As someone who has been writing sex scenes since long before it was probably at all appropriate for me to be doing so, I have a lot of thoughts about writing — and depicting — sex. Every time a “sexy” show goes mainstream, I brace myself for the flood of think pieces, the vast majority of which don’t grasp what sex scenes are all about. Which is to say: Yeah, they’re about sex, but if they’re only about sex, you’re doing something wrong.

Jenny Hamilton, on the other hand, gets it. So does Jacob Tierney, the showrunner on Heated Rivalry, which you should absolutely be watching if you aren’t already (though maybe like…not with your window shades open? IYKYK). This piece contains some significant spoilers for the first two episodes, but the bit I want to highlight comes (ha) right at the beginning:

Everyone who writes sex comes (ha) at it from a different perspective. My philosophy is generally “everything is about sex, except for sex, which is about character development.” I have a friend who approaches sex scenes like fight scenes — focusing on body language as a form of character and expression. I have another friend who only writes sex scenes that are designed to be anything but sexy, which is a thing I personally do not understand but you go, babe, I love that for you!

Writing is a skill. It takes craft, intention, and empathy to do it well. This is true whether you’re writing Pulitzer Prize-winning literature or mass-market romance. I spent a long time believing that people who wrote literary fiction were better writers than those of us who write in genre spaces, and un-learning that has been some of the most important work of my career. Just because one type of book is more likely to be analyzed on a syllabus doesn’t mean other work isn’t worth that same examination. You might be surprised at what you might learn.

Do you find yourself believing in a “hierarchy” of creative genres or types of work in your field? Where do you place your own work in that hierarchy, and how does that placement impact the way you see the work you create? Where does that hierarchy come from? Who enforces it? What would it feel like to disrupt that system?

Prompt: Spend a week exploring forms of creative work that you think of as being on the “lower” end of the prestige hierarchy. (If you’re a writer, maybe that’s reading children’s books or genre fiction. If you’re a chef, maybe that’s going out to a diner instead of a bistro.) Put aside your preconceptions about what makes something “good” or worthy of recognition, and engage with the work on its own terms. What do you notice? Create about it.

3. Extralibrary Loan (Shannon Mattern for Places Journal)

Listen to me. Listen to me. I am holding your face lovingly in my hands as I say this:

Support your local library.

We’re living in a shitshow of a time. In the past fifteen or twenty years, we’ve gone from having all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips to a couple of tech-bro douchebags ruining it for all of us through monetization, service degradation, and AI slop. In that time, libraries have been a bedrock of information, innovation, community advocacy, and incredible creativity the likes that ChatGPT could only dream of. But that kind of work isn’t sustainable without help.

If you ever need a reminder of what creative community looks like, go to your local library. If you need a reminder of what intergenerational community looks like, go to your local library. If you need a reminder of what community care looks like, go to your local library. Libraries are inspiring and innovative and experimental and agile. Take a look, it’s in a book, but it’s also at your local library. Go to there.

(No, really. Go.)

When was the last time you interacted with a library, and what did you do? What comes to mind when you think about libraries, both as institutions and as resources? What is the most meaningful experience you’ve had with a library or librarian? If you’ve never visited a library: What has stopped you?

Prompt: Find the website for your local library and explore their offerings — or, even better, visit and explore in person. What surprises you? Participate in one program, event, or gathering. Create about it.

4. Life & Death at the County Fair (Michael Adno for Bitter Southerner)

When I think about county fairs, all my memories turn sensory. Specific experiences — particular visits, people and places, standout moments — disappear, replaced instead with a whirlwind of remembered sights and smells and tastes: powdered sugar and fried dough, the sour-sweet smell of animal manure and the sweet-sweet smell of cotton, the bleating of baby lambs and the shrieks of small children and the blaring mix of live music against carnival jingles.

The thing about county fairs is that they’re immersive, communal affairs. You can drift alone through a fair, but you can’t actually be alone — you’re too much a part of what’s happening around you. Someone will always be jostling you, be calling out in your direction, be shouting loud enough to draw your attention, will be looking to pull you in. Walk through a county fair and you’ll see, without fail, every possible type of family, every type of person, every kind of community.

They’re liminal and loud. They’re inherently creative. They should, all things considered, be impossible — especially today. But they’re not.

What strange, impossible, beautiful gatherings have you experienced in your lifetime? Were they one-time events? Annual traditions? What made them so special, and what memories stand out to you?

Prompt: Take yourself on a walk down memory lane. Imagine yourself back at that gathering. What would it be like to experience that now, as the person you are today? How are you different? How are you the same? What feelings, sensations, emotions, do you want to recapture? Create about it.

5. Worksheet: Staying Whole in 2026 (Kelly Hayes)

In her newsletter this week, organizer and teacher Kelly Hayes writes, “This is not an easy time to be a person who embraces hard truths, and moves through grief to take action. Next year won’t be any easier. So, I think this is an important time to think about what sustained us during 2025, and what we will need more of in 2026.”

As she so often is, Kelly is exactly right. So rather than give you any of my own prompts here, I encourage you to take 20 minutes to explore the exercises in this worksheet to orient yourself for the work ahead. Because this storm isn’t going anywhere, my loves. And we need all of us in the fight.