The Story
If you have yet to join us for our creative nights on Zoom, we have been providing a modest space for folks to bring their creativity in any form. Practically, this has looked like some brief reflections on the creative process from Coastland Commons leaders, and then 30-45 minutes of open time for members of our community to work on creative projects.
These creative moments we considered to be "separate yet together." We played some soft music in the background, some of us turned our cameras off while others stayed on screen, and we released everyone to work on their own. We spent that time writing, sketching, painting, reading; really anything that gave us a connection to creativity, in essence trying to recapture the feeling of being gathered in the room together at a time when we were prohibited from doing so.
Something as simple as unstructured time on Zoom to flex our creative muscles yielded such unique and beautiful gifts. People shared their lives through artwork, poetry, stories, and other various projects. Recently we have begun to wonder about how to commemorate these experiences, and we had an idea: what if we published an anthology of our creative work from the pandemic?
The Ask
That's where you come in. If you participated in any of our creative nights, or even if you didn't but have been connected to Coastland Commons at any point, we'd love for you to submit something if you felt drawn to!
It could be something you worked on during our Zoom gatherings, it could be something that you worked on another time, or it could be something new that you want to submit for this project. We welcome it all - poetry, watercolor, sketches, essays, pictures! We will then take these submissions, work them together into a publication, and release it. More details will be coming soon, but check out the dates below if you are interested in collaborating with us.