Weaving a creative ecosystem

The multiple threads and connections of my work

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

Since discovering the term ‘multipotentialite’ from Emilie Wapnick over a decade ago, I have fully embraced the winding and multiple threads of my work (and life). On the surface, this has likely appeared to many as though I’m always juggling too many plates, or perhaps that I’m afraid to go all in on just one thing. While it’s true that there’s certainly an ever-present potential for overwhelm, I just can’t imagine doing only one thing; life is short, and I want to learn and write and share and teach as much as I possibly can.

Life as a multipotentialite can sometimes appear a bit messy and confusing on the surface, however much it feels rooted and grounded within, so today I want to share about the threads that weave together to create my ecosystem. It’s what I’ve been unpicking behind the scenes, too, as I’ve compiled material for my new personal website (see below or check it out here), and, in doing so, I've realised that what once felt like lots of different paths has always been one landscape.

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I often imagine my work like one of those crime scene boards, with photographs and scraps of paper connected by lengths of red string (minus the crime, of course). It isn’t just the individual pieces that interest me, it’s the relationships between them. Pull on one thread and another shifts. Follow one idea far enough and it inevitably leads somewhere unexpected.

Connection became the heartwood of my work back in 2017 when I launched Creative Countryside magazine. At first, it was a place to publish thoughtful writing about nature, creativity and the seasons, but before long something else began to grow around it. Readers wanted to meet one another, so we gathered for local meet-ups, then weekend retreats, and eventually those conversations found a home in a monthly membership. The magazine became less about pages and more about people, and at the same time, my own roots were spreading.

Writing led me to immerse myself in myth, folklore and ritual. Those pathways tangled with ecology, archaeology, education, poetry and creative practice. Each new fascination sent out roots that intertwined with the others, until I could no longer tell where one ended and another began.

Looking back, I realise I’ve never really been interested in specialising - I’ve been interested in relationship. I’m forever fascinated by the intertwining of people and place, of language and landscape, of story and belonging, of the ancient and the everyday. Perhaps most importantly, my work has always emerged from exploring the interconnection between the human and the more-than-human world, and now everything I create grows from these same roots.

I write essays and books, host podcasts, run memberships, edit manuscripts, publish chapbooks, study and (un)learn - and all of this has deepened my understanding of curiosity, wonder and learning through relationship rather than extraction. From the outside, it can look like a collection of different projects, but from the inside, it feels a little like tending a woodland.

Some trees are old now, although still bearing fruit year after year. Others are saplings, full of possibility. There are seasons of flowering and seasons of composting, when ideas disappear underground before returning in another form. Nothing exists in isolation, and everything nourishes something else.

I’ve stopped trying to force all of this into a single job title because none of them quite fit. Writer. Editor. Educator. Publisher. Podcaster. Researcher. They’re all true, but they’re only individual species within a much larger ecosystem. If there’s a thread that binds them all together, it is this: exploring the intersections of story, land and wildness, and inviting a remembrance of our kinship with the living world.

The older I get, the less interested I am in building a career and the more interested I am in tending an ecosystem. This web is diverse, interconnected and alive. Within it, every project feeds another, and curiosity is allowed to ramble like a woodland path. The work is measured not by how neatly it fits into a box, but by the relationships it helps to cultivate. Perhaps that’s what I’ve been weaving all along.