Wisdom of the Week (January 15, 2026)

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

The quote of the week for the teens in my creative writing classes, comes from Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.”

I often find myself encouraging my students to take creative risks and follow those avenues of artistic enquiry without worrying too deeply about the “product.” Of course, this type of exploration can lead to getting “lost.” This goes against most things that have been engrained in them about education, but I believe getting lost is an essential experience of learning how to be more creative.

Speaking of paths, my son and I like to explore the neighborhood park, often imagining it is a fantastical realm inhabited by dragons and pirates while we seek treasure. As part of this adventuring, we enjoy taking detours, sneaking off the main pathways, pretending we are discovering corners of the woods that no one else has encountered. 

Not so long ago, on one such treasure hunt, my son decided to risk a path that disappeared into the thick undergrowth (you can see his pirate map in hand). This foray came to an abrupt end when he encountered “Spider City” and he came darting back to safer territory.

Ah! When forging a new path of creativity, we must push through those sticky webs that want to restrict us. But in the real world, I’ll agree with my son and avoid arachnid neighbourhoods!

Wisdom of the Week (January 8, 2026)

“I have actually come to believe that creativity IS magic.” Pam Grossman

Here’s my first quote of the year for the teens in my creative writing classes, which comes from Pam Grossman:

“I have actually come to believe that creativity IS magic.”

I snagged this quote from one of Austin Kleon’s fun typewriter interviews (you can find it here). I agree wholeheartedly with Grossman. 2026 is barely a week old and I feel like it’s already been an emotional rollercoaster. But the one thing that never fails to soothe me, to bring me focus, comfort, and joy is the act of creation. 

The other thing that soothes me? The ocean. My family and I headed down there this most recent weekend to hear the waves rattle the stones, hunt for sea glass, and smell the sting of salt and seaweed. As my son and explored our favourite part of the shoreline, we came upon an old rotten timber and I marvelled at the tiny warmish organisms sprouting from the decay. 

Reminded me of creativity! Out of seemingly nothing can come something! 

Wisdom of the Week (December 11, 2025)

"Storytelling can be a strategy to help you make sense out of your life." Dorothy Allison

It’s time for my final quote of the year for the teens in my creative writing classes, and comes from Dorothy Allison:

“Storytelling can be a strategy to help you make sense out of your life.” 

I love this quote because it emphasizes the creator, not the audience. I harp on this all the time, only because it’s a message that I feel is becoming increasingly lost. Being a creator is not simply about attempting to satiate an increasingly consumptive society! The very act of creativity provides something to the creators themselves. 

I leave you with some brainstorming of some fridges created by my students. We’ve been imagining characters through their fridges—a lot of our personality, I think, comes through them! The students did the brainstorming, then numbered the items then wrote corresponding descriptions for each of them. Many of these turned into fun anecdotes!

Wisdom of the Week (December 4, 2025)

"Children learn through play. Adults learn through art." Brian Eno

My quote of the week for the teens in my creative writing classes comes from Brian Eno:

“Children learn through play. Adults play through art.”

This time of year can be a time of play—if we let it! I love making stuff, both with my family at home, and with my students in the classroom. That means we have lots of creative projects happening across my different “studio” spaces. 

My one class is just wrapping up their beautiful dragon scales.

And if you’re wondering what that has to do with the holiday season, well, then you need to take a closer look at the Fodi-Nestman festive tree! Digging through the ornament box, our son was very pleased to find the dragon scale decorations we made in a past year, and he made sure they got places of prominence. (We have dubbed the backside of our tree the “shun section,” but it’s really my favourite section of the tree because that’s where the really weird stuff . . . wait for it . . . hangs out!) 

Wisdom of the Week (November 27, 2025)

"Be the weird you wish to see." Austin Kleon

My quote of the week for the kids in my creative writing classes comes from Austin Kleon:

“Be the weird you wish to see.”

Last week, I rolled out a fun activity in which the kids had to imagine themselves as the worst supervillain of all time. They started with my supervillain cheat sheet then, taking inspiration from Dr. Horrible, wrote application letters to the Evil League of Evil. Along the way, many of the kids made evil mustaches and—well, they got to embrace their weird.

By the way, I love this example of a student’s brainstorming. She didn’t simply circle her ideas—she used “evil” lightning to discover her supervillain’s ridiculous name. This might seem like a small thing, but these are the sorts of thing that show me a student’s imagination is dancing.

Keep being weird, everyone!

Wisdom of the Week (November 20, 2025)

“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

My quote of the week for the teens in my creative writing class comes from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”

When I happened upon this quote, my brain immediately went to the idea of writing a book. Because every act of writing feels like exactly this sort of experience, an exercise in self-exploration and discovering some part of yourself that, up to now, may have well been hidden. 

I leave you with a photo of a little mushroom family that my son and I spotted as we trekked home from school one day last week. I treasure those little “travels” through our neighborhood, ever changing through the seasons. We enjoyed spotting “stories.”

Sometimes, those stories are quite epic—one time, we saw a cat with no tail chasing a squirrel, only to get dive-bombed by a pair of crows. As my son said, it felt like watching a cartoon.

As for this mushroom family, we imagined these little folk were on the move—but we never decided if they were escaping peril or seeking adventure . . .

mushroom family.

Wisdom of the Week (November 13, 2025)

“Is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity? Or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes?” Joseph Campbell

My quote of the week for the teens in my creative writing class comes from Joseph Campbell:

“Is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity? Or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes?”

I’ve been doing a lot of drawing and design work lately, giving me the opportunity to re-listen to my favourite audio book: The Power of Myth, which is an interview between Joseph Cambell and Bill Moyers. 

I was so struck by this one moment of the conversation that I found myself pausing my work to transcribe it. Joseph Cambell died in 1987, but his words seem extremely applicable in today’s world driven by AI, corporate media, and commodification. The quote above is part of a larger one:

“This is the threat to our lives. We all face it! We all operate in our society in relation to a system. Now, is the system going to eat you up and relieve you of your humanity? Or are you going to be able to use the system to human purposes? …I don’t think it [mythology] would help you to change the system, but it would help you to live in the system as a human being…resisting its impersonal claims. If the person doesn’t listen to the demands of his own spiritual and heart-life and insists on a certain program, you’re going to have a schizophrenic crack up. The person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a programmatic life and it’s not the one the body is interested in at all. The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.”

This is why I love being creative—and leading creative classrooms as well. When we are creative, we listen to ourselves.

I’m including some photos from a recent workshop where we started crafting some dragon scales. There’s a long way to go, but we’ve gotten a good start!

The witch’s fridge

Witch's fridge

Led a fun class today on thinking about a character through the contents of their fridge!

Step 1: Students picked the character (they could choose from a list I provided, or come up with their own).

Step 2: The students brainstormed the fridge on paper (I provided a fridge “template” and they could fill it with items).

Step 3: The students wrote poems about the fridge! The idea was for them to focus on creating a sense of character, world, and story—but they didn’t have to write a story or worry about plot. 

What I really liked about this activity was that it asked them to develop specific details, especially sensory information such as smell, taste, and visuals (fuzzy mold!).

This class was delivered via Zoom, so I didn’t get photos yet of their brainstorming, but I did do my own version during our project time, so I present to you my brainstorming, the fridge of a wickedy witch named Malveena.

  1. Dragon egg, half-hatched, and kept cold to preserve in this nascent state.
  2. Sister’s hand. Emaleth should have never tried to steal her last poison apple. Maybe Malveena will give it back (the hand, not the apple). Maybe.
  3. Eyeballs of innocent children (hard to come by).
  4. Decaying apple (see # 2).
  5. Old sock (misplaced; Malveena has been looking for it for weeks).
  6. Chicken heads.
  7. Worm cheese—it hasn’t gone bad. It’s served this way.
  8. Dead rat—her pet, Sniffles the Third, who died, and she is going to try and revivify him. Otherwise, it’s on to Sniffles the Fourth.
  9. Heart of a mischievous child (easy to come by).
  10. Pie. Flavour: sweet child o’ mine. (Made from children fattened on sweets for three months).
  11. Milk, expired in 1976.
  12. Ice. (Hey, even witches like to have a cold drink on a brisk October afternoon).
  13. Spider webs. Not really distinguishable from the ones that are already in the fridge from that time Malveena inadvertently left the door open for three weeks.
  14. Bone from the hind left leg of a wyvern. Her name is Elandora and she is currently on a quest to get that bone back.
  15. Potion to transform a warty toad into a slimy frog.
  16. Blood from a spoiled princess, taken on her fifteenth-and-a-half birthday.
  17. Ogre poop. Collected carefully.
  18. Eels from the swamp known as Medusa’s Mire.
  19. Poison, distilled from the nectar of belladonna, mixed with a harpy’s shriek and the scent of a werewolf caught in the act of transformation. 
  20. Spiders.
  21. Liquified troll snot. (It’s not liquid in its natural state.)
  22. An empty jar, cracked; whatever was in here leaked out many moons ago.
  23. Henry. Went to rescue his spider brothers, but chickened out at the last moment, so he’s turned around and made a run for it. He’ll probably make it. Not to freedom. Just to—you guessed it—the fridge.

Wisdom of the Week (November 6, 2025)

“There are moments when what we need, what will benefit us most, is the power to style our own stories.” Kyo Maclear

My quote of the week for the teens in my creative writing class comes from Kyo Maclear:

“There are moments when what we need, what will benefit us most, is the power to style our own stories.”

I love this quote, especially in this age of “quick creativity”, when we can give away our souls to AI and ask it to generate a reflection for us. But as Maclear says, there is benefit to us to grasp our own style, our own voice. There is power in that activity, one that eludes the ravenous appetite of big tech or corporate greed. 

Last week, in one of my classes, we worked on an activity to imagine ourselves as trees. This was an interesting way to explore perspective and to play with emotion. I was fascinated to see that one of my students decided to start this writing project by sketching different tree trunk types. In other words, she engaged in an exercise of self-exploration. Here is a student who is interested in the path of discovery! No one needs to tell her where to stand in the forest. She will find her own way.

The Force is with us this Halloween

Happy Halloween!

Last year, I made our son’s costume from scratch. He wanted to be a Star Wars X-Wing pilot, so I crafted the helmet from foam and paper plates, and his chest plate from a meat tray. It turned out spectacularly. (And he still wears it from time to time, especially when he watches the Death Star trench run in A New Hope.)

This year, he wanted to be a Jedi. I don’t sew, so it was always going to be an off-the-rack costume. But I did promise I’d make him a lightsaber hilt from scratch. He has plenty of toy lightsabers, but he wanted one where he could see the inner workings. Nothing needed to light up or function—he just wanted a “prop.”

Well, I got it done just in time for a Halloween party at his Wednesday Japanese class— Phew!

Everything is handmade; nothing is 3D printed or figured out by AI here (just “AEye”—my “artist’s eye”). I just raided the box of junk I keep in my studio closet (my son and I call it “the robot kit”) and, over the course of several weeks, fiddled with the design. I build like I write, just patiently trying to find the best outcome. 

My son and I are both pretty happy with how it turned out. Personally, I like the aesthetic that emphasizes that it’s handmade. It’s not remotely perfect. But I think there is a certain charm to those types of costumes and props.

As for my costume . . . well, I’m recycling and upgrading something Star Wars theme from a past year. All my Halloween energy went into that lightsaber hilt!