On creative nourishment

One year of Dandelion Seeds, and a giveaway 🎉

Hello there, and welcome to Dandelion Seeds — an illustrated newsletter that, as of this week, is officially one year old!

To celebrate, I’m excited to share a special giveaway with you today, but before I do, I wanted to write a little bit about what this milestone means to me.

There’s so much about this first year of Dandelion Seeds that I’m proud of. 

I’m proud that I set out to publish weekly, and I was able to sustain that rhythm.

I’m proud to share my work with more than 2,000 people every week now, and I’m proud that Dandelion Seeds has nearly 50 paid subscribers, whose support and belief mean so much.  

And I’m proud to have created nine new illustrated essays since last January, including two collaborative projects featuring your stories.

When I started Dandelion Seeds, it had been almost five years since I published my last illustrated essay — on the storytelling site Longreads — and so a big question on my mind in the early days of this newsletter was: Could I begin to create them again? 

But what I’m proudest of, and most grateful for, from the past year has to do with a different question I had at the beginning of this adventure. On the day I published my first short welcome post, my daughter Elena also turned nine months old, and so I was asking myself:

How could I stay creatively nourished as a new mom? 

“Nourished” is a word I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, ever since I worked on this essay for Dandelion Seeds. 

The post was about our move from Uruguay to Belgium last summer, and I wrote about how uprooted I was feeling during that transition. This led me to look up the definition of “root,” which I learned means: “the part of a plant which attaches it to the ground or to a support…conveying water and nourishment to the rest of the plant.”

For some reason, I was immediately drawn to the presence of “nourishment” in that definition, and the word has stayed with me ever since.

It feels like a perfect way to think about our creative rhythms, as well as the role they play in our life — for me, rhythms like writing, painting, or working on a new post for Dandelion Seeds. They are as vital to my wellbeing as sunlight and air; they’re what help me grow, help me process what’s going on in my life, and keep me grounded.

After Elena was born, I wasn’t sure how to carry my old creative rhythms into my new life.

I didn’t know if I could make it work.

Now, one year after starting Dandelion Seeds, I feel like I’ve joined a great, global tribe of other creatives who are also making it work — who not only nourish their loved ones, but are learning how to keep themselves nourished as well.

Now about that giveaway…

As Dandelion Seeds turns one, I find myself doing a lot of reflection — thinking back over the past year and my hopes for the year to come — and I especially hope that what I share here has been a source of nourishment for you, too.

If it has been, and if you’re in a place to do so, I would love to invite you to become a paid subscriber, so that I can continue pouring my best work into Dandelion Seeds, and keep it my creative priority.

At the end of this post, I’ve listed the different ways you can subscribe, along with what you’ll receive. In honor of this first anniversary, I’m also excited to give away three original paintings I’ve created over the past year, each one from a different illustrated essay:

It’s giveaway time!

Anyone who signs up for a paid subscription over the next week will be entered into the giveaway, and all current paid subscribers will also be entered. I’ll then choose three winners at random next Friday, January 19th.

It’s my small way of saying thank you. Thank you so much for reading and being here over the past year. Thank you for every comment and share, and for the connections that unfold with each new illustrated essay.

It’s such a joy to be here with you, and I can’t wait to see where year two takes us.

With love,
Candace

Ways to subscribe:

Free

Illustrated essays are the heart and soul of Dandelion Seeds, and it’s important to me that they will always be available for everyone to read.

The posts I send out every Tuesday are free, which include: 

• Illustrated essays

• Sneak peeks and art downloads

• Collaborative projects like The Sounds of Home and The Words that Remain

Paid

Once a month, I share a more reflective essay with paid subscribers, going behind the scenes of each season’s illustrated essay and exploring things like:

• My thought process and creative process

• What drew me to each particular theme or topic

• Personal insights behind each story 

And in addition to the monthly essay, I also love mailing paid subscribers a 5x7 print featuring an original painting from Dandelion Seeds.

Founding members

And for those who would like to support Dandelion Seeds as a founding member, you also receive a piece of original artwork — a vignette illustration I’ve created for one of the illustrated essays.

A peek at the prints (and a happy little meadowlark) I love mailing to paid subscribers of Dandelion Seeds 💌