3 WEEKS OF BUILDING YOUR DREAM JOURNALING PRACTICE
One virtual, 2-hour workshop on my perspectives on journaling (pulling from the wisdom of Lynda Barry, Julia Cameron, Ivan Brunetti, Suleika Jaouad, Francisca Rose Chavez, and more!), followed by three weeks of thrice-weekly virtual practice spaces to journal in community, and collective resources to gather and share inspiration.
This is for you if:
You feel some deep part of you dying for a creative practice, but don’t know how to start
The creative practices you DO have go un-practiced more often than not, because you’re avoiding the frustration and shame you often end up feeling when you try
You’ve started and abandoned at least a dozen different notebooks over the years - picking them up in the hope that journaling would feel like a nourishing exploration, putting them down when, once again, it turned into a boring chore
You’d love to curb your screen time, but genuinely are not sure what to do instead
You tried morning pages and, if you can be honest, they made you feel bored and a little depressed
Enter The Wizard Method…my multi-media, magic-fueled style of journaling that prioritizes felt inspiration over box-checking, and invites you to experience your journal as an alchemical cauldron - a place where all the energies of your life can meet, synthesize, and transform.
This is not your standard writing-heavy brain-dump method that asks you to commit to a labor-intensive three-page scrawl every single day.
It is also not the art journaling practice that suffocates you under the pressure to make something Pinterest worthy.
The Wizard Method challenges you to step out of what you think your practice is supposed to look like and, over and over, drop into what is. It invites you to stay close to your own experience, responding to your doubts, resistance, and desires as they arrive, and provides you with a wealth of tools, mediums, and exercises to work with how you truly are, in this moment.
Part creative project, part unfiltered diary, part portal of transformation, your journal should be a space that honors your humanity AND connects you to your power, every day.
Here, the goal is to create a practice you actually get to use and feel the effects of. Less feeling guilty for avoiding your journals for another day. More using the information offered to you by your hesitation to build a habit you feel enthralled to return to.
Throughout the formation of The Wizard Method, I’ve found my way into a practice that genuinely serves as a lifeline for me. My notebooks hold the depths of my grief but also the fullness of my whimsy. They are a safe space for me to try on new ideas and ways of creating, dive into the parts of myself I’ve been avoiding, and experience my life as a creative canvas. I meet myself as an artist and adventurer every day, thanks to the way I’ve learned to wield a cheap, 100-sheet composition book.
Throughout this process, I’ve also been studying what other thinkers and creatives have to say about a journaling practice, and gathering inspiration far and wide to pull into my notebooks and now, share with you. My practice is deeply inspired by the work of Lynda Barry, and pulls in elements from at least half a dozen other artistic philosophers…it is always growing and transforming, adopting new spells, performing new magic, to respond to the shifting needs of my life.
I will not be teaching you my method in hopes that you go out and start journaling just like me. I’ll share all I’ve learned in hopes that you use it as a springboard to discover what it means to journal like you!
All paid subscribers to my Substack get 20% off! Joining my Substack for $7 will get you access to exclusive bonus content AND save you $10-18 on this workshop!
We will meet at 7pm Central on Friday, August 22nd, for a 2-hour introductory workshop. Replay will be emailed out afterwards for those who can’t attend live!
For the three following weeks (finishing on September 12th), there will be three 2-hour practice spaces a week at the following times:
Saturdays at noon central
Tuesdays at 8am central
Thursdays at 6pm central
For a total of 9 practice sessions. You are not expected to attend all of them (although of course you’re welcome to!), I just wanted there to be options for a variety of time zones and schedules.
These spaces will begin with a prompt or activity to ease us into journaling, and then will be open, body doubling space for your practice. We will end with a non-mandatory show and tell, where you can share anything you’ve created or experienced in your practice and enjoy being cheered on!
In addition to the live spaces, we will also have a workshop Discord and a dedicated workshop Tumblr page that all participants can submit to. I tried this out for our most recent Week of Delight, and it was so fun to see people sharing beauty and inspiration and connecting with each other!
We will end with one final closing session on Friday, September 12th, at 7pm central!
This will be a practice session with prompts geared towards reflecting on what you’ve learned and setting intentions for how you want to continue. And celebrating!
SCHOLARSHIP SLOTS HAVE BEEN FILLED AT THIS TIME <3
PLEASE NOTE: The workshop is offered on a sliding scale to make it accessible to more people. I trust you to choose an appropriate price, based on what you can afford. Paying as much as you are truly able to allows me to offer this workshop for free to low-income participants sustainably.
10% of all proceeds from this class will be donated to efforts to provide clean water in Gaza through Gaza Mutual Aid Solidarity.
Who you’re hanging with:
My name is Frankie Simmons, and I’m a certified Texas Master Naturalist, an enthusiastic doodler, a grateful Lexapro taker, and a Sunshine Hunter. I am very curious about relationships (with ourselves, with life itself, with the world around us) and how examining and tending to those relationships can offer us inspiration and healing. I don’t have any fancy credentials to share with you, and I don’t approach you as an expert on anything, but as a fellow seeker, trying to feel my way through life without closing my heart or losing my center, just like you.
I am not a therapist or a trained counselor, this space is not a substitute for mental health care, and not an appropriate support for those in active crisis. It is also not a space that will fix you, erase your grief, or magically make functioning in late-stage capitalism an easy thing to do. My hope is that it will offer you anchors, tools, and perspectives that will make staying close to yourself feel doable and maybe even a little bit fun. And that you will continue to tweak and transform those tools to match your unique needs.
My dream (and belief) for this workshop is that you leave feeling firmly rooted in a practice of creativity and reflection that matches your life, emboldens your magic, and adds color to your world. That you’ll have a habit which, instead of making you feel wrong, gives you a consistent mirror reflecting back how magical you are. Your life deserves to be experienced, your genius deserves to be expressed, and I hope this workshop can be a step in those directions. Hope to see you there!