Feed Your Creative Joy this Fall Season

Download your experience guide + play to win The Artist's Way Toolkit

Oct 30, 2025

Keeping Creative Time
it’s never too late to be the creative person you want to be 💖

Megan M. was the winner of the Nourish Your Creative Relationship Challenge which I ran this spring to help creatives manage chronic stress, unlock the stress response cycle, and get back to making their art as radical act of well-being. She won a copy of “The Artist’s Deck” by Beth Pickens. Go, Megan!

“Your joy matters. Please tell everyone you know”

—BURNOUT: THE SECRET TO UNLOCKING THE STRESS CYCLE—
by Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski

Hello, dear readers and creative friends! I’m writing to you from the corner window spot at Heiwa Shokudo in downtown Asheville. It’s raining and cold, which is why this tiny Japanese restaurant is full of people drinking tea and slurping ramen (including Chloe Smith of Rising Appalachia who’s song “Thank You Very Much” I featured last week in the Odes to Time section!).

The window seat at Heiwa Shokudo in downtown Asheville on a blustery and rainy Wednesday night with a pot of genmaicha tea and a mackerel roll, October 2025.

I’m feeling stronger since then, when I shared about my most recent burnout relapse that left me feeling like I’d done something wrong, to burnout again, after working so hard to recover and heal (oh, the paradox of working to heal from burnout!). Until I experienced what every human giver needs, but so seldom knows how to receive, real care from other human givers and rest, lots of rest.

Get Yourself a Burnout Buddy

J. Faye D'Avanza

Oct 23

Read full story

I also turned to a resource I created earlier this year when I was teaching burnout education workshops for creatives, to see if spending time revising it to share with you, might help me reconnect with the practices I know are proven to help manage stress, resist burnout, and feed my creative joy.

✨🍂 Introducing the Feed Your Creative Joy Seasonal Experience Guide to Fall 2025🍂✨

Get the Feed Your Creative Joy Experience Guide to Fall

The Feed Your Creative Joy Experience Guide to Fall 2025 is an invitation (and reminder) that self-care practiced in community with others, helps to keep our creative energy from burning out, so we can keep making a creative life that is meaningful to us, while also opening ourselves to more fully share that creative life with others.

Play to experience some moments of creative joy this fall season, then submit your completed guide through the form on my website for a chance to win a free copy of The Artist’s Way Toolkit: How to Use the Creative Practices by Julia Cameron.

HOW TO PLAY

Experience one activity from each column on the seasonal guide, and also take yourself out on an Artist Date. (That’s (6) six creative joy experiences including the Artist Date.)
Submit your responses to the form on my website, including uploading a photo of your (6) six completed creative joy experiences.
We’ll select a winner at random after the form closes on 11:59pm ET on December 20, 2025.

I designed this guide for artists and creatives based off of the research from Emily Nagoski and Amelia Nagoski in their best-selling book Burnout: Unlocking the Stress Response Cycle, and the work of Julia Cameron and The Artist’s Way, with particular focus on artists and creatives learning to be self-nourishing.

In Burnout, the Nagoski sisters write,

When you’re being chased by a lion, what do you do?
You run.
When you’re stressed out by the bureaucracy and hassle of living in the twenty-first century, what do you do?
You run.
Or swim.
Or dance around your living room, singing along to Beyonce, or sweat it out in a Zumba class or do literally anything that moves your body enough to get you breathing deeply.

Physical activity, they say, is the single most efficient strategy for completing the stress response cycle.

The second is sleep.

But there are also other evidence-based strategies for completing the stress response cycle, like positive social interaction, affection, laughing, crying, and my personal favorite—creative expression.

Managing our well-being as artists and creatives is part of the practice. And for me to practice anything regularly, I need to know what positive experiences feed that practice. This is where I layered in research from a course I took in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), where I learned about the concept of nourishing activities versus depleting activities, and my whole world cracked open!

Learning these two concepts and putting them into practice, have been revolutionary in reclaiming my life from chronic stress, anxiety, and burnout. If you’re curious to know more, keep following along! I’ll share that resource in an upcoming edition of this newsletter, but for a sneak peek, you can check out the second page of the Feed Your Creative Joy Experience Guide to Fall 2025.

“Stress is the most common and unifying experience we have as human beings. We’re all living life with the same intensity, but we go through the experience feeling completely alone. We’re completely isolated in our togetherness with stress. It’s one of humankind’s greatest paradoxes.”

—THE FIVE RESETS: REWIRE YOUR BRAIN AND BODY FOR LESS STRESS AND MORE RESILIENCE —
by Aditi Nerukar, MD

I’m really excited to be here writing to you! Sharing what’s helped me recover from burnout and find my creative joy. And I’m thrilled that more and more people are subscribing and connecting with me through this newsletter, or coming out to visit with me at a Creative Coffee Chat, or virtually through a Creative Rx Session.

It’s a true joy to be of service to creative people and be living a life I could barely imagine four years ago (this week!), when I left my public librarian career as a burned-out husk of my once artsy and soulful self, to take the next step on the journey to becoming the creative person I want to be.

In the weeks and months ahead, expect interviews with creative friends in Asheville, deeper dives into experiencing creative joy as a practice for greater well-being, reviews of places in-and-around Asheville that bring me creative joy, and even more personal writing (unveiling soon for paid subscribers) that documents the next phase of my creative journey. <3Faye

✨ New Offerings to Nourish Creativity + Connection

The Reading Room: Focused, Hybrid Coworking for Creativity + Connection will take place at Story Parlor and virtually on Thursdays from Nov 20 to April 30.

📖 Thursdays, Nov 20-Apr 30 | 11am-1pm | Story Parlor + Virtual
The Reading Room: Focused, Hybrid Coworking for Creativity + Connection
Join online or in person at Story Parlor, Asheville, NC
Register for a single drop-in session
Purchase a monthly subscription and save 25%—for those who subscribe by Nov 20, receive a free creativity coaching session with Faye! (A $300 value.)

🙏 Saturday, November 29 |1-3pm | Virtual
Express Yourself with Gratitude: A Writing Workshop to Release + Receive
Reply to this email if you want to be placed on the interest list to be the first to know when registration opens.

🌱 SALE ENDS OCT 31 on Creative Coaching + 1:1 Coworking

All of my creativity services are on SALE through the end of October and my books are open through December 30. Reserve your session by October 31 to receive the sale price on a November or December booking.

💪 Do-A-Thing! | Creative Cowork Sessions with Faye
Book an hour or two with me to commit to doing something you want to get done in your creative practice or anything that supports your creative practice.

🍁 Creative Care + Author Care | Creativity Coaching Sessions with Faye
Book a coaching session to receive the grounding, structure, nourishment, and support that we all need to find the courage to create.

Where You’ll Find Me in the Community This Fall

🍳 Sunday, November 2 | Creatives Over Easy : A Monthly Soul Reset
10am-12pm, Story Parlor, Asheville, NC, $10—Tickets are going fast! Get yours today.

☕️ Wednesday, November 5 & 19 | 15-Minute Creative Coffee Chats
9:30-11:30am, Cooperative Coffee, Asheville, NC, free

Not in Asheville? No problem! Book a virtual free 15-minute Creative Rx Session, and we can chat about what’s working and what’s not working in your relationship with creativity.