Dear friends,

Above the Wurlitzer electric piano, my father once taped an index card with a note to himself that read: “SLOW SAVOR.” When I asked him about it, he explained that it was a reminder to himself when he practiced the piano to slow down and savor the sound of every chord.

This simple phrase has guided me through my return to a daily writing practice — a reminder to slow down and savor the memories, fragments, symbols and images that come up when I sit down to write.

Over the last few months I’ve experimented with a few forms and exercises that I’d love to extend to all of you in a series of summer writing workshops I’m calling Slow Savor.

This June through September, I’m leading a four-part generative writing series — one Wednesday a month, midday, one hour, on Zoom. Each session has its own framework, set of prompts, and particular door into the writing.

Here’s what I have in mind:

June 17 — Dear You: A Letter Writing Workshop

Writing toward the people, places, and selves that have been waiting for a letter. You can read more about my recent musings on the power of handwritten letters here.

July 15 — In This Moment: Capturing Essence and Attention to Detail

Slowing everything down to write the present moment with precision and care. You can read more about this concept here.

August 19 — Transit Slips: Writing Memory Fragments

Working with the fragment as form — memory as it actually arrives, in slips and flashes. You can read more about my thoughts on this idea here.

September 16 — Reading Your Day as Tarot

Interpreting life’s moments, scenes and encounters as symbols with depth and meaning. You can read a little more about what I mean here.

Each workshop is $15 — pay via Venmo or PayPal Friends & Family at registration. This is pay-what-you-can, meaning I welcome everyone and understand that we’re all going through it when it comes to resources. Pay less if you need to and pay more if you can!

Sessions run 12–1pm CT and will be recorded, so if you can’t make it live you’ll still get the recording and prompts. No writing experience necessary, just a desire to slow down and generate new writing.

To register for any session, fill out the form here.

I’m truly grateful for each and every one of you as readers. I’d love to write alongside you. Come for one, come for all four — hope to see you this summer.

Reach out with any questions! And if you know someone who might enjoy this, please spread the word.

Big Love,

Amanda

The idea came to me in a flash as most do, without my fullest understanding or consent. I’d write a series of “transit slips” — fragments, snippets, and memories — and the only rule I had for myself was to write freely without interruption to censor, edit, or analyze.

The words would flow in the morning after reading a few books, taking lots of notes, and then letting my mind wander to places lost to the continuum. I strung those words together like a weird necklace and they became what I referred to as “micro-essays.”

“What’s a transit slip,” my sister asked. “You know, like a receipt,” I answered. I’d collected many (receipts) as a traveler, and I started to feel like memories themselves were a strange kind of dream receipt from invisible trips. I wanted to make them visible as evidence of the distance I’d traveled — or perhaps to show how far the memory itself had traveled — to reach me.

But then I did some digging and realized that transit slips are actually a “thing” within the universe of library circulation systems — a printed document that accompanies materials as they move from one place to another — between branches, to storage, or into a reader’s hands.

And so I started to think about our memories as materials we circulate in lifetime. The status of a memory depends on our willingness to track and take inventory. Is a memory even available to you? Perhaps it’s available, but only to you. Or maybe a memory is checked out or needs to get renewed. Perhaps a memory is on hold, waiting for you to find it. Or it’s on a shelf, ready for you to pick it up. Or maybe your memory is in process, being prepared to fulfill your request to experience it.

Other times, we know that a memory is on the move as we move, in transit between locations. A memory may get lost in transit as you shift from one place to the next — details get lost or scattered along the way, or muted in the moving. Perhaps the memory gets shipped off to the future but it hasn’t yet arrived and you’re still wondering if it ever arrived. (At least a few of my memories from Zanzibar are forever in transit, lost somewhere in the sky between two oceans).

Or maybe a memory has been recently handled or returned and needs to get put back on the shelf of your life story. For instance, I remember that ballet class when I was three, but just the shoes and the mean teacher and her fuzzy beige cardigan, her hair clips, but nothing else.

Maybe you checked in the memory but it still lacks category or definition. Where would you place it in the personal archive if you had the chance to reorganize it? Is this a ballet dream or a girlhood dream? Is this memory of Zanzibar, or a memory of the person who thought she could live there forever?

We all know that memories present problematic and exceptional states. The missing memory: it’s not found where you expected it; or it’s lost in transit, declared irretrievable even after a deep search with the help of therapists and somatic practices. Perhaps there’s a problem with claims returned — you say you returned the memory to yourself, but your internal system hasn’t yet confirmed it. Or even worse—a damaged memory — the one that needs repair.

(I remember my ex’s limp, and his missing tooth, I remember the gash on his leg from the motorcycle accident, I remember how he waved a knife in my face, but surely there’s more to this series.)

Sometimes a memory gets stuck in a state of perpetual processing with the hopes of being cataloged or repaired. Or it remains on order — not yet arrived. I wish I could remember more about my sisters but most of my earliest memories star me as the main character. Maybe a memory has been withdrawn from the archive or discarded, removed from the permanent collection. (That’s what a few rounds of EMDR did for me and a few select memories about my mother, but that’s a story for another day.)

What if we could borrow the language and formal structure of library transit slips to contain our memories as materials from the personal library of experience? To treat them not just as logistical tools, but as poetic artifacts — traces of where a memory originated, where it’s gone, and what it still carries?

During the month of February, my transit slips explored themes of transition and displacement, connection and the continuous present, using other braided texts as my inspiration. But I wonder what would happen if I pushed the format and language of transit slips to create short pieces that mapped these transits—the stories that live in the spaces between origin and destination, leaving and returning.

How would you identify or label your memory? Where did it begin and where does it surface now? What was the date of the occurrence and what is the date of the recall request? Could you include subject or keywords? A description of the memory itself? Could you describe its condition upon retrieval — faded, distorted, fragmented, intact, altered, uncertain? How would you describe any current access restrictions?

Does the memory return at-will or only when you’re not looking for it? What are its handling instructions? Is this a fragile memory, one that’s drenched in poison? Or is this a solid memory, as sturdy as a sunflower on a sunny day?

I collect certain memories that move between shelves within me but never leave the inner library. What would anyone else do with the dhow and the crabs, the scabs and the scraps, the amulets and the actual hotel receipts? Sometimes a memory is too heavy to circulate, too cumbersome to shift from its current, stubborn form.

Let’s discuss associated materials — is there a related song that connects with that memory — perhaps a face you can no longer construct but still see in your mind’s eye? A forgotten promise or tiny detail from the records that never made it into the original register? A mole. A lisp. A stench. A wave.

Could you account for gaps and missing data in the memory? What happened just before the memory in question and what happened right after? Why does that matter to anyone handling the memory in the present tense? This gets tricky when the timeline collapses or deflates—trust no longer factors for the teller or the told.

Where was the memory’s last known location? In the body? In the mind? In the spirit? In a journal? In the living memory of the world that went on without you? I keep most of my materials within me, in the hips where there’s new pain forming at the joints. Or does the memory live somewhere behind the eyes? Buried in the furthest corners of your heart? In the basement tucked inside a mildewed book?

And finally, what’s the current transit status of your memory? Is this memory still in circulation or on hold? Recalled or lost? Returned to storage or misremembered? Damaged beyond repair or ready to share? My memories circulate in a perpetual draft state, but they change shape when I bend a sentence or two, as a I grew. Leave any memory notes as marginalia.

To read the “transit slips” that came to me as micro-essays in February 2026, read them here.

I’m thinking about leading a series of “transit slips” writing workshops over the summer and I’m still playing around with the extent to which we may want to borrow from the form and language of actual transit slips as a way to conceptualize the writing. But for now, I think the questions that come from the form itself are quite useful—and playful—the way we think of memory as material—as something in motion—and changing incrementally as it circulates throughout our lives.

What is happening for you right now, in this moment? A bird chirps. A clock ticks. A car door slams. The moment’s gone now but I still hear the clock ticking. And so on. A day does not depend on our awareness. So many things go unnoticed and buried—there’s much to miss to make it through another day.

But something extraordinary happens when we spend some time in the deep present. The world steps forward and opens itself up to a conversation—you and the body, you and the stranger, you and a loved one, you and the universe. We call it paying attention to—but I like to call it calling attention.

A long while ago, when I was still working as a teaching artist in Chicago Public Schools, I loved leading a simple yet expansive writing exercise that gets at this idea of the continuous now. “In this moment,” it begins, with prompts that lead to layers of awareness, from the tiniest details to the most sweeping waves of cosmic consciousness. This writing exercise tends to collapse and also expand time and our relationship to it. It’s one I return to again and again as a kind of meditation.

But something magical also happens when we translate words into images and images into words—a conversation that begins between the two. I learned so much about how text and images “talk” to each other from artist and educator Cynthia Weiss, whom I first met at Columbia College Chicago’s Center for Community Arts Partnerships. With Cynthia’s guidance and leadership in Project AIM (Arts Integration Mentorship), a group of us—all artists or writers of some kind—learned to create curricula centered on the overlapping relationships between text and image.

These were some of my most meaningful moments as a writer and educator—our days were spent finding ways of seeing that surprised or even defied the eye. It was a time of what if and yes/and. I first read John Berger’s work upon Cynthia’s recommendation. I devoured “Ways of Seeing,” and “The Shape of a Pocket.” These years taught me how to see with the mind’s eye. I learned, in Berger’s words, that “the relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.”

One of my favorite lessons from Cynthia came in the form of a simple frame—what happens when we walk around with one in our hands and start framing the world around us—up close, far away? We start to see—out of the whole—exactly what’s taking our attention. It’s delightful, what steps forward to be seen, and what you step toward, too, to center as the only thing in the world that you want to see—in that moment.

I stepped away from teaching for several years but I carried these lessons with me as I continued to write poems, essays, journalistic pieces. And I’m so grateful to have the chance to collaborate with Cynthia again in an upcoming workshop at HIVE: The Center for the Book Arts, titled, “In This Moment: Zooming In & Out with Poetry & Collage.”

We’re excited to share writing and visual arts practices that invite us to slow down and drop into the fullest sense of the present tense, in all its complexity and expansiveness. We’ll meet on Saturday, March 14, 2026, 1-3 p.m. at HIVE in Evanston, click here to register. I also want to note that artist, writer and activist Jamie Thome, the co-founder of HIVE, is also a fellow teaching artist and I love that our paths are crossing once again.

All seeing (and feeling) is about receptivity. But sometimes we have to shut one eye to see with our hearts.

Quick, funny story—Cynthia and I planned to meet at HIVE to plan for the workshop and think through materials. On the way there, I felt an itch in my eye—a rogue lash—that would not correct itself. My eye teared up. I had to pull over in a 7-11 parking lot, thinking I could stop in if necessary to pick up some eye drops and keep going. But no, my contact popped out and I was suddenly half-blind. I had to drive all the way back home with one hand covering my left eye. I needed a new relationship with the road. My mind quickly adjusted to good enough—I was feeling my way home. I saw what I needed to see.

Anyway, I hope some of you can join us at HIVE—a place most alive with book arts & community. I’m so happy to have the chance to co-lead this workshop with a dear mentor and friend from whom I’ve learned so much. And I’m grateful places like HIVE exist in these times of great anticipation and becoming. The world is way too much with us, but we’re also on our way!

Note: If anyone’s interested in the full writing exercise, please let me know. I’m happy to write it up & share it so you can try it on your own. Right now, it’s stored in my mind-files but I’ve been thinking about sharing more writing prompts & reviving older curricula, games, exercises, and lessons, especially for the great year of the return to analog.

Dear Beautiful People,

What does life look like for you on a random Tuesday afternoon in January? Last year, I was editing longform essays for SAPIENS, a digital anthropology magazine based out of the University of Chicago Press. When that gig recently ended, I found myself craving more time and space for creativity & connection—and a renewed letter-writing obsession!

I’ve always been an avid letter writer—I got it from my dad who I think learned to love letters from his parents, who had a wildly romantic letter writing exchange for years.

At school, I wrote secretive letters folded into complex origami structures for illicit passing between classes. At camp, I wrote furtive letters home asking for bicycles and radios and care packages with stickers.

In college, I exchanged letters with friends in far-flung places we’d found ourselves as wide-eyed students abroad: Kenya, France, Senegal, Ecuador. And then there were the love letters—bless the boyfriends who spent considerable time penning their professed love for me! How utterly Victorian, and yet, this was the early to mid-2000s.

We tend to dismiss letter-writing as a dying (or dead) art, but the gesture is as old (if not older) than recorded time—and now we’re seeing the revival of the form as folks desperately find ways to get offline and into deeper real-time with self and others—to resist the zombification and doom-scroll of our days and nights, the outsourcing of feeling and relating to AI robots that simulate expression but bend to the banal.

When’s the last time you wrote a letter and sent one in the mail? The feeling transcends description—the dropping in and tuning in to the present tense of you and your dear reader of one. The acceptance of time travel as an inherent part of the act, how what we scribble in that moment is sacrificed to the sacred altar of now.

“Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down,” wrote John Freeman in his manifesto for slow communication back in 2009. Speaking against the tyranny of emails back then, he urged us to consider how speed matters, the physical world matters, context matters.

“The difference between typing an email and writing a letter or memo out by hand is akin to walking on concrete versus stroll­ing on grass. You forget how natural it feels until you do it again,” he wrote.

If you’re reading this, it’s likely that you and I have even exchanged a handwritten letter or two! Each letter and postcard that arrives in my mailbox feels like a miracle these days, and I’m grateful. That’s not to say that texting, calling or even a long email doesn’t have its charms, but the physical manifestation of a letter feels like a kind of supernatural feat when so many forces in our world are actively working against the human impulse to materialize our love for one another.

So here’s a little invitation to join me for a letter-writing workshop at a magical little place called HIVE: The Center for Book Arts, in Evanston, Illinois. We’ll meet on Tuesday, January 27, 2026, from 4-6 p.m. central, as long as the class has 3 or more participants! The class will include dialogue, writing prompts, with plenty of time to write & craft. The fee includes stationary supplies & a USPS stamp, should you decide to drop that letter in the mail!

OK, I know a Tuesday afternoon is kind of random. When I was working full-time hours, I would see something like this and regret that I couldn’t make it. But now that life has given me the gift of bending time to my desires and obsessions, I invite whomever is floating in the same sea of creative uncertainty! My sister Hillary will also join me with her amazing box of stationary supplies, stickers, and stamps in tow!

And even if you can’t join me in person, I encourage you all to check out HIVE, where they offer all kinds of literary and books arts workshops and events, online and in person. Founded by book and paper artists and activists Jamie Thome and Ann Hudson, the place is all about building community through the book and paper arts, and this place has had my heart from the start.

I’m excited to offer more workshops this year, so please stay tuned! If there’s interest, I may also offer an online version of the letter-writing workshop, for anyone who’d like to revive their letter-writing practice and needs a jolt of inspiration to get started.

Yours in letter-writing solidarity,

Xo, Amanda

I come from a long line of letter writers. My grandparents exchanged deeply romantic, heartfelt letters to each other during the years when my grandfather served for four long years as a surgeon in Italy during World War II. In between the mundane details of life they’d each express their unwavering love and desire for one another—and reading this was a testament to the power of letters to keep love alive across long distances.

When I was a kid, my sisters and I loved seeing long, handwritten notes from our father each morning. We called them “daddy notes.” Sometimes they were silly little messages with a smiley face. Other times, he’d write long-winded letters across three pages of white paper, sharing his thoughts and observations and dashing off compliments about our gifts and achievements. As I got older, my father would sit down and write even more thoughtful letters that he’d fold into an envelope and hand to me with instructions, “do not read this until your mid-flight.” I grew to look forward to this on every trip.

In preparing for an upcoming workshop on letter writing at my local library, I went searching for old letters to use as examples. I found huge bags and bins of old letters from friends, schoolmates, acquaintances, and old loves, letters from teachers and letters from former students, too. So many kinds of letters—love letters, breakup letters, congratulations letters, life update letters, existential letters, letters of goodbye. letters just to say hi. apology letters, thank you letters, letters of regret, letters to connect, letters to lament, letters never sent.

Yes, there are the famous letters of note. Virginia Wolf. Frida Kahlo. Nelson Mandela. Wole Soyinka. John Keats. The Beats. But the true beauty of letter-writing is that anyone can write and publish their letter for an audience of one. And there’s a powerful 5,000-year-old history & process to guide you. From clay tablets to papyrus scrolls, wax tablets to parchment and vellum, to all kinds of paper, humans have been writing and exchanging letters to each other for at least 5,000 years, always with the one intention—to connect.

What goes into a personal letter? There’s really no “right” way to write a letter and that’s what’s freeing about it. Personal letters are imperfect and unscripted. It’s a conversation. An improvisation. A way to bend time and space. A kind of time travel. Whatever you say, there’s a delay—a breath held in the time it takes to reach the other. And so they receive a bit of you before you grew. A snapshot of a moment. A snippet of a record of a continuous life.

The freedom of a personal letter comes with knowing that you bring the specificities and intricacies and idiosyncrasies of you. The personal letter remains a private act—a chance for minds to meet through the medium of the written word—in a secret portal designed for two.

True, there’s the basic anatomy of personal letter: Greetings of some kind, a chance to ground and tell a story, memory or anecdote. Ask a question. Send a direct message. Confess, reveal, revel, and reflect. Give thanks or write slanted into a shared pain. Ask for what you need. Describe your dreams and wishes. Sign off, silly or formal or indefinite! But you can also just pick up a pen and paper and see where your mind takes you. Send words, poems, scribbles, drawings, quotes, anecdotes, recipes, photos, collages, whatever your heart dreams the other might appreciate on the other side.

Sending a letter in the mail is the best kind of publishing—it’s exciting to drop a finished letter in the mail and there’s really no greater feeling than receiving a handwritten letter from someone, especially if it’s unexpected! It’s also relatively affordable—less than a $1 depending on the weight of your envelope. And you can write on anything—doesn’t have to be fancy stationary. The back of a paper grocery bag could work. But we have to make ourselves rich in time to write a letter—to be willing to slow down enough to settle ourselves and drop into the relationship with the other.

In a world that feels so unhinged, chaotic and disconnected, writing a personal letter can help us feel like we’re closing the distance between self and other. A letter as a bridge. A letter as a stone laid along the road back to connection. A letter as an expression of philosopher Martin Buber’s I & Thou state of being—I exist because of you and you exist because of me. For Buber, the I & Thou pact is divine and extends to relationships with everything and everyone, stranger and friend alike. So write a letter to a tree, write a letter to a bee. Write a letter to the ocean. Write a letter to the cosmos. The letter is the midpoint between two distant stars.

There’s something about writing by hand that alters and heals. The embodied act allows our brains to tap into deeper memories and process emotions in fuller ways. Handwriting is a kind of time-stitching, connecting us to the present tense. Handwriting demands our attention and deliberation, firing up dormant synapses in the brain. It invites us to sustain attention and filter distractions, so that the only thing on your mind is you connecting with the subject of your letter. The letter as the ultimate relationship lab—a place and a process.

The handwritten letter is a heart-link, a love-line, a ritual of connection that defies space and time. Speak from a place of subjective curiosity, intimacy, and intention. Don’t hold back on the details and images only you could name. In a world of instant messaging and fleeting texts, letters remind us to slow down, notice, and connect.

I am certainly not the only one calling for a letter writing revival—ever since the digital revolution and its take over of our lives and minds, people like John Freeman have been calling for a manifesto of slow communication and writing about the numbing tyranny of emails, the conquest of the grid, the madness of machines mediating our lives. There are groups like “letters against isolation,” and projects like “postcrossing,” to encourage strangers to send post cards to each other from anywhere around the world.

I’ve always been a letter writer, but I first started to hone in on this idea of letter writing revival back in the spring of 2009, when I was still in Chicago working as a teaching artist and poet. With the help of two friends, I launched the Letter Writing Revivalists project by setting up a large tent in Humboldt Park and inviting strangers to meet me under it to write letters of any kind to a loved one. I was really into letterpress and limited edition printing at the time, so I handprinted special envelopes for the project and provided stamps as well, so that people could send their letters in mail to someone else or mail them to themselves.

The motto for the project went something like, “before the word there was the letter.” It was a poetic spin off of the biblical “In the beginning there was the word…” and I think I was trying to capture the divine power of words to shape a shared reality. I remember a few curious kids that day decided to sit down and pen a letter to their parents. Another one wrote a letter to then-president Barack Obama. A brave one even wrote a letter addressed to god, and mailed it to himself.

Over 15 years later, I find myself obsessing again about letter writing because I’ve felt so disconnected and flung far away from the familiar. I’m mourning the loss of old friends I thought would be in my life forever. I’m mourning the loss of my father whose presence was so consistently palpable, I find it hard to believe we don’t live in the same dimension anymore. I’m missing old friends who still live in the faraway places I left behind. And so maybe all this love for letter writing is ultimately an invitation—to myself and others—to write that letter and say hello, or finally let go.