Today I am so pleased to announce a new digital space for writers :
Landscapes : A writing group for all genres
We start July 13 with a visioning session (recorded) Have an opening five day writers retreat July 15-19 11am EST And then we write for 90 minutes every Tuesday and Thursday Our first three guest teachers are , , and (all recorded) With monthly BIPOC Writers meet ups hosted by There are Cave Days where we go deep and also do some admin work Basically it is the best place on the internet
It has been one year since the most important relationship in my life ended, and I don’t know how to write about it. This year of silence has been so painful, so disorienting, that when I try to write about it it feels like the wind can’t catch the sail.
There is the public nature of the companionship, honoring my own privacy and that of another, and the sheer embarrassment of being left.
This loss has pushed me toward a deep excavation of my self, my codependency, my relationship to money, releasing stigma around my own mental health, and finding myself more radicalized and free of ambivalence. At times I have never felt so alone, and yet in this aloneness I have found a new freedom.
A few months ago I invited the public to apply to Window Place, an artist residency and rural land project where I live in Cedar, MI. Eighty-nine people applied and I invited twelve. Yesterday the first person arrived and I could not be more delighted. is tucked away in the camper, working on their novel in the tiny studio. Shannon writes the newsletter and every time I say something meaningful comes back with an even more poetic quip.
Hosting artists and giving them the time and space to do their work has been a part of my practice for over a decade. In 2013 I opened Have Company as a storefront in Grand Rapids and before I started hosting residents in the back half of the space I hosted them in my home. In California I developed the hosting project CENTER with the visioning and design help of Nicole Lavelle who writes . I hosted Billy and Bob while they worked on a new Bonny Doon album and we made the Longwave music video. I then hosted Ellen Rutt where we begin our many years collaboration of rearranging shapes together.
When I moved back to Michigan, Center carried on as an artist residency in a mansion that I co facilitated with John Hanson. It was a wild risk to move in with the person I was once married to, but we found our footing in a new way and had nine months of artist residency bliss. This is where I met who would eventually make the art for this newsletter and Common Shapes. (and John made the music! Family affairs only)
I come to you today from the North where it is rainy but beautiful. I just finished teaching the most amazing cohort of The Shapes of Our Offerings and am already feeling sad it’s over. You are welcome to hop in and buy the recording of class. The whole course will be automatically delivered to you and you’re welcome to email me any questions that come up while you attend it in a self paced way.
I am gathering my favorite quilt books to teach A Quilt in a Weekend June 29 and 30, putting the finishing touches on a new co-working space for writers, waiting to hear back about interest in my next book, and tending to the tiny things in my day to day.
Tomorrow the first resident arrives for the summer and I couldn’t be more excited for the great experiment to begin. If you’re in the Leelanau Peninsula area we’ll be headed to The Odawa People: History, Culture, and Peacemaking with Joanne Cook on Monday at the Leland Library at 10am with a beach hang after
I am in the process of shaping a new offering that will be a writing club monthly membership and I am looking for your input! Think Flexible Office meets your own solo writing time meets consistency and fun
THE VISION :
🌼 It will meet three days a week for 90 min on zoom - most likely 11am EST
Last month I started a new project called - a newsletter where I write a prayer everyday for a year to then self publish them into a daily prayer book next year on the Summer Solstice. The experiment of writing every day publicly doesn't scare me and I feel able in my time and capacity to carry on with the project.
My writing however feels incredibly boring. How many ways to pray can there really be? In order to complete the project I must find 365 different ways, each one unique to the day and the season.
I find myself repeating words like god, benevolence, capacity, spaciousness. I wonder if I am just saying the same thing over and over. I don’t worry about boring the readers as much as I worry about boring myself. Selfish perhaps, but much of my writing practice is for the self.
Last week I had my least successful online class launch of my career, both monetarily and in terms of number of people signed up for my class.
I want to share about why I think this happened, my exact number of sign ups and how much I earned, how I am pivoting, and how I am accepting this truth.
In my twenties in the window of Have Company 2014, Photo by John Hanson
As I cross into the second half of my thirties I have been identifying my role in the web. Not as the challenger of others but the challenger of myself, to show others what it looks like to stretch past my capacity for service and care. In my singleness I keep thinking, I must not be here for love, I must be here for something else.
I consider myself a decade ago when I was here for love. Making zines, tending to Have Company my shop/artist residency/gallery in Grand Rapids, married, babysitting, riding my bike a lot, roaming around in a manic polyamorous stupor. Going to meetings, petting my cat, ruining everything, making it pleasant again, throwing plants, not caring much about how my actions would affect others.
I find that while romantic relationships mark these different chapters of my life so do the places, the friendships, the bars, eating stuffed french toast at the counter at Marie’s, locking my bike outside of the house on Benjamin, my Subaru that was a lemon but was my first car and moved me to California.
Here is where you can check in for Week Five! Feel free to check in today, tomorrow, Sunday, whenever feels right!
Also - even if you missed all four of the first meetings you are welcome to join us for week four. No rules here!
✏️ TOMORROW The Shapes of Our Offerings begins and I would love to see you there. It is a place where as a group we can brainstorm even more ways to create curiosity, play, and hope in our creative ecosystems.
This last week the news of the world and the elements of my life brought me to my knees in hopelessness when I remembered the words of Toni Cade Bambara : The role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible.
I knew I had to make a detour toward hope, and I knew it had to be in actions. I knew it couldn't shift in my brain without making something, doing something, being a part of something or there would be no entry point for change. I could sit in despair, self pity, and fear or I could make art and shape it in a way that is of direct service to others.
FOR MY 36TH BIRTHDAY THIS WEEKEND I WISH FOR A FREE PALESTINE
RAFFLE FOR GAZA - OPEN THROUGH SAT JUNE 2
I find that in moments of hopelessness and despair we must take action. As artists we can use the resources we have, what is around us, what we have created, and let them speak ideas and truth to us.
In my little garden beds I have done what I believe the kids are calling “Chaos Gardening”. I ordered dirt that is in a giant pile in the yard in between two rows of raised beds. Shoveling it is a hell of a workout. I bought two bags of flower seeds - one of zinnias and one that is a perennial wildflower mix. I ran the ingredients by Brenin who said I could be a chaos gardener but not too chaos (he saved me from planting baby’s breath and I dunno why but he said it would be bad and I trust his plant skills) Then I put the seeds in the beds. Then more dirt. Then watered the beds. Then put some earthworm droppings on it. Watered it again.
I did this where the camper used to be parked and all the grass died. Now it is covered in dirt and seeds and earthworm droppings.
I walked around the meadow and threw seeds everywhere even though I didn’t mow the grass or til the soil. I had a conversation with the meadow and it said - try me, let’s see what happens.
Last year in September I triumphantly announced I quit Instagram. With all things quitting I also shared the caveat that I might come out of retirement but it felt like forever. I wanted to share today how and why I came back, and why I left again. And why I am telling you. Especially after I said I wouldn’t tell you again.
I woke up today and simply couldn’t believe I was alive. This happens every year on this day. The day I stopped drinking in 2011. The greatest gift I ever gave myself, the gift that keeps on giving, the gift that keeps me writing to you, the gift that keeps me alive one day at a time. Happy lucky thirteen to me.
There have been a few moments in the last few years where I felt so close to a drink it was almost unbearable, and yet I made it to the other side. Today my freedom from the first drink is spacious and buoyant and as iconic as the Northern Lights.
Last year I invited people to apply to Window Place, the artist residency at my house tucked up on the hill in Cedar, MI. It wasn’t quite the right format or time, but today I am pleased to open the experiment back up for Spring, Summer, and Fall visitors to stay in the camper with their own small studio in exchange for help stewarding the land. You can read all of the details here
I am exhausted from watching multiple genocides carry on, I am exhausted thinking about the upcoming US presidential election, I am exhausted hearing Amy Goodman tell me yet again how many children have been killed in Palestine. I am exhausted by the makings of my own debt, I am exhausted by wealth inequity, I am exhausted by my PMDD, I am exhausted by the fact that taking a break in our current system is almost impossible. I am exhausted by men who can’t speak truth to my face. I am exhausted by my dating choices. I am exhausted by capitalism. I am exhausted by zionism, white supremacy, and occupation. I am exhausted by war. I am exhausted from being queer. I am exhausted from being non binary. I am exhausted from being misgendered. I am exhausted by how much pain people I love are in.
I rarely admit exhaustion, assuming I am unworthy of the feeling. I have my home and my health and my dog and my beautiful life, I shouldn’t be exhausted. I weave my privilege into as much as I can as a tool for good. And yet I am exhausted. Gaslighting myself into thinking I shouldn’t be what I am has never proven helpful.
I hope you enjoyed the Introduction and the readings from Week One this week. I look forward to meeting together on zoom this Sunday May 12 at 8am PST / 11am EST for 60 minutes together.
I love to create classes, I love to teach, I love to learn. This weekend in Detroit I had the most beautiful time studying natural dye and quilts with Kayla Powers, saylem m. celeste, and Ellen Rutt. It fed my spirit to be in community with other queer and trans people, doing and undoing with plants and fabric.
I am in a time of deeply contemplating why it is I teach, read, learn, write, or show up in any way to not just my creative practice but this practice of becoming and belonging.
Last year I swiftly accepted a space in The University of Nebraska’s Quilt Studies Certificate Program. I did almost no research I just saw the words Quilt Studies and thought yes this is right for me. It was almost immediately incorrect, but I quickly saw how much I had been desiring school and it made me realize I wanted to get an MFA. I didn’t know in what or why I just felt the call and the pull and the desire to be in grad school.
Hello and welcome to the LIVING THE ARTIST’S WAY BOOK CLUB. I am so excited to go through this book with all of you over the next six weeks. For those of you who haven’t joined but are thinking about it : it’s not too late!
Before I even get into today’s newsletter I just want to share how powerful the student movement of protestors is and how we are witnessing such a huge mobilization for Palestine in our lifetime is a miracle. For as painful as what we see in Gaza I feel heartened to see so many on the front lines, participating in jail support, redistributing money to bail funds, sending in supplies, checking in on each other.
I am only four days in to my daily prayer project but it is already rooting me in to staying in touch with the work at hand. Faith without works is dead so we must take action and prayer can be a part of that.
Here is the link to support the encampment at my alma mater The University of Michigan - so many places to pay attention to and support right now, find something that touches in to your history and your heart and put your attention there.
Today I am announcing a new project and talking about the mystery and magic of a daily practice.
Ordinary Practice A Daily Prayer and Meditation Book Serialized on Substack
Every day for the next year I will publish an entry in a new newsletter that will eventually become part of a self published book to come out Summer Solstice June 21 2025.
A few weeks ago I wrote about my beautiful experience at the Gee’s Bend Quilt Retreat. What I didn’t write about was the amazing Anne, dear friend to China and Mary Ann and organizer of the retreats.
Yesterday I woke up to the news of Anne’s passing, which feels swift and unfair and like I am not particularly happy with god on a day like this. More and more it seems like the really good ones go before their time, even if I trust that everything is in its rightful place.
Anne pronounced my name Coowwdy in her thick southern accent and loved every single person who walked in the retreat doors. When I would ask her what to do next with one of my quilts she would always say - What do youuuu like Cody? What do you like? Forever reminding me that the best intuitive next step was the one that would come from within me, and would be as simple as what I like. Not what looks cool, more experimental, the best compositional choice. But what do I like?
Hello it is Monday. I will write to you but I feel quiet today.
Yesterday I wrote to you on Tax Day Eve with my most honest numbers of debt. I am wishing you well today as you may be sending the IRS your money, or deciding what to do with your refund. May your money be blessed in how it serves you and the collective.
It’s tax day eve and all through the house, not a creature was stirring not even a mouse. Except the mice that live in my brain and do little tricks and spin on hamster wheels and tell me I did not do a good enough job yet again.
I keep no secrets when I tell the story of my tax debt, I am here to be a truth teller of the self employed artist freaks who can’t seem to get their shit all the way right, even after many attempts at solvency.
Today I present to you my wins of estimated taxes, my fail of not getting it totally right, my current tax debt numbers and monthly payments, and the hope of what is next for me and my money.
Image Description : Classmates holding up my quilt tops while I talk in front of them with a mic while Lukaza kneels and documents
There are two things I love more than anything in this world : god and quilts.
Quilts have a long history as sites for transformation, liberation, storytelling, radical generosity, and imaginative gifts. I am not the first or the last to tell you this, but today I wanted to share more about the powerful experience I had studying with Mary Ann Pettway and China Pettway at the Gee’s Bend Quilt Retreat a few weeks ago.
I started quilting in 2013 when Eliza Fernand taught an improvisational quilt class at Have Company, my shop/gallery/residency space in Grand Rapids, MI. My life really changed forever after that day. I had been knitting since I was a kid but had never learned a new skill outside of dance in many years. It was both the pleasure of learning the new skill and finding one that resulted in a beautiful tangible object.
Something happens to me and I am new again. There are a few of these things. The things that happen to me that make me new again. Like the breaking of a spell, the spell book written only by me, that lovers and friends and neighbors seem to find the keys to. I am on the edge of mystery, beholden to touch and to taste and to sounds that do not betray me. I am befallen but only for a moment, one that I will withstand with ease.
I commit to staying out of the realm of the ordinary, lingering just outside of what is expected and what is pre determined to have a life so wildly different that it shocks my own system into something new and imperceivable. Owning the house, no more u-hauls to rent, dog by the fire, things are in their place and only the bank could move them.
The light turns on in my head the one that says, this could be the last time you are new again. This could be the last time that you have this feeling or this hope or this vision. But it’s never true. Everything is repeatable. It is the promise of repetition that I let myself open up to new possibility, new thresholds, new mountains to climb to see over. There is so much less grasping when I linger in the waltz of again and again and one more time.
My favorite place to be! A clubhouse for tornado people looking to use their time in a new way. 8-10am PST / 11-1pm EST we meet for two hours twice a week to vision our goals, projects, admin tasks, creative work, and anything else that we are longing to carve out TIME for. There is a Discord server for connection, collaborative resource library, and so much more!
We kickoff with a visioning session on Tuesday April 2 (this will be recorded) and imho is worth the price of admission! We’ll set easy goals and hard goals and little hopes and dreams for our season together ad beyond
Monday Monday is a free weekly newsletter. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to support this work, these essays, and get the monthly Yes Yes Advice Column as well as a back log of Friday Threads and other essays for paid only subscribers. Your support means so much.
Hello Common Shapes listeners. 🔸 I wanted to pop in with a little mini-episode to check in between seasons and share a few updates. Take a few minutes to hear why I changed my name and how you can join us in Flexible Office this spring. 🔹
If I may say something so bold I’d like to tell you, I love to work. I love to work because writing and making art and teaching is my job and I love these three things more than life itself. I love my job and it is the ultimate gift to do it, even on the days it feels somewhat impossible to sit down and do the work at hand.
In the same beam of light of pleasure is the pleasure of learning. This is why I went back to school, why I take classes up the road from my house, why I sign up for the things my friends organize and teach. It is of great pleasure to me to learn new skills, new ways of existing, new ways of showing up to the task of aliveness.
I find it all so innately pleasurable that it sometimes stops me from being in right relationship with myself and other people. It would be why I wrote the book How to Not Always be Working, to create systems for checking in with myself about when it is time to put the work down and when it is time to pick the work back up. But as one might guess just because you write a book about something doesn’t mean you’ve mastered it. Everything is a spiral and the lessons continue.
How I feel when my newsletter is free every Monday
For the last 2+ months I have put most of my Monday newsletters behind the paywall in an experiment that I named Into the Mystic. You can read about it below and in today’s newsletter I want to break it down. I will share what my goals were and what actually happened. I can hear Jesse Palmer whisper softly This is the most shocking Bachelor finale we’ve ever seen.
This past week I moved into a new studio up the road in the one block town stretch of Cedar, the place I call home. I feel gratitude to share a studio with my friend Meg, surrounded by her 50+ year career of whacky creativity and magic. Intergenerational Gemini friendship magic for the win. I feel excited to see where this place takes me as I work through school projects and vision new quilt ideas.
I dragged my heels making this decision, not because I can’t afford it but because I wasn’t sure I was worthy or that I could justify it. I already have a room in my house for sewing. How audacious of me to give myself a space just for art making. I knew what really drew me in - the big windows, the window bench, the company, being able to walk to the coffee shop and the post office, and needing to leave the house for work. Tucked into the woods by the meadow it is so easy to never leave, and to leave is to be in the world.
A note to those interested : After a few months break - my books for 1:1 Creative Advising Sessions are open. Check it out and grab a spot, there are only five.
Welcome to Monday Monday on a Wednesday. Today only you can take 20% off paid annual plans. Enjoy and feel free to share excerpts of this newsletter on social media or in your own newsletter. May word of mouth bring the people what they need.
I find my body remembers everything, especially from when I was nine. This was the age my mother lost her second parent, when she was only thirty-nine, and when I felt myself change as a person. From the inside out I learned to be in my body in a new and different way, to express and hide joy, and to trace the way god was shaping me.
I have a deep desire to be understood, to be seen in a light as thoughtful and whole and compassionate. The older I get and the more bold I become in my values the more I find people do not like me. The more brave I get in sharing my messy process the more I disappoint people with not knowing enough yet. The more I become myself the more uncomfortable it is for me and others.
Staying the same is incredibly luxurious, a luxury I don’t feel we can afford but one we may desire and settle into. There is so much jarring in the changing, so much risk for fight, flight, freeze, or fawn to emerge.
There are different levels of disappointing people, conflict, and harm. There is a difference between someone saying my book is a “horribly edited piece of feminist trash” on Goodreads and being in a group of people and having my privilege get in the way of seeing the whole scope of something. There is a difference between bumming a friend out because I had to cancel plans and creating a pattern of distrust or codependency that needs to be carefully looked at.
On Valentine’s Day I woke up early and took the pieces of the quilt I am working on to the beach. I laid them out piece by piece while the rock hunters passed me by. It hadn’t occurred to me how fitting the red and pink fabric was for the day, and one person asked if I was preparing for an engagement. Just to myself, I answered.
Something that never ceases to amaze me is my ability to shapeshift, my comfort in changing forms, my desire for undoing and then buttoning it all back up for a new satisfaction. I undid parts of the quilt, rearranging it in the sand and seeing new ways that I wanted it to be. I sat there for a while, photographing it and the space, and let myself really relish in my creation.
As I headed back to the trail to my car a woman passed me by and yelled DID YOU LEAVE ANYTHING FOR ME I’M LATE! I realized she must be there to look for rocks and I let her know I was just there to photograph patchwork pieces of my quilt. She looked confused and I assured her that the beach would never run out of rocks.
I’ve been sick for the past week and theres been nothing I can do about it. Negative covid test after covid test I sift through the information I have trying to make sense of how bad I feel. Every morning I have expected to wake up feeling better and instead I feel worse. Most people I know have caught this and accepted their fate, waiting it out with herbs and tea and bone broth.
My relationship to productivity and study has been greatly challenged. Just making it back from my grad school residency and wanting to settle in to research and work and rigor and then immediately getting sick has made me feel worthless and like I will never be able to tackle this new found path.
I have had to invite in a gentleness to my day to day, finding new ways to make the hours go by and to take June outside and to nourish myself when it is wholly inconvenient. Light pours through the skylights and I weep.
I come to you today with another BRAG ABOUT YOURSELF Friday Thread - this time with a twist. If you could change one thing right now in your life what would it be? This has been on my mind since changing my name a few weeks ago and I’d love to see this space filled with the possibility of bright action
Monday Monday art is by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo
Take a look at the archive if you’re new here : Friday Thread Archive :
Tomorrow : Tuesday February 6 I am hosting a meet up (other newsletter platform creators welcome!) at the Leland Library with from 3-5pm. It’s totally free, totally low key, and will be a nice way to get to know other people in the Northern Michigan area. If you don’t write a newsletter but want to know more about writing one you’re welcome to join us!
Photo by Cody Sells
I’ve spent the last six months single and celibate and I’m not having fun. There is something underneath this, something about how the old ways don’t work anymore. I download the apps for ten minutes every other month to see if some miracle is waiting and there never is. I don’t know if miracles wait in the apps.
I just got back from a craniosacral appointment where I felt so much shake out of me, mostly in my pelvic floor and womb area. I really need a better non binary word for womb. Center of the pelvic girdle. Area where I bleed. Tender little cave of pain. Curled up zone of past trauma. Or you know, womb.
I am wrapping up my first week of grad school here in Vermont before flying back to Northern Michigan. This week has been profound, to say the least. I feel so grateful for my classmates, professors, and staff here at Goddard College in what has been a tenuous time for the organization as a whole.
Thank you so much for all the love on my name change, I really can’t thank you enough. My readers are so amazing and loving and magical.
Hello and a blessed Monday to all of you. After years of using it as a nickname I have officially changed my name to Cody and started using my last name Cook-Parrott. This is the last email you’ll receive with my old name in the “from” line, which for almost thirty six years served me well and built me a life of magic, success, abundance, grace, and connection.
One helpful action item is I can’t change my Instagram username and would like to. If you work there or have a direct contact there I’d love to be in touch.
You have heard little hints of Cody in this newsletter and on social media the last few years, as its been the name that some of my dearest friends call me and the name my parents had picked out for me if “I was a boy”. Spoiler alert I am boy, and a girlie, and whatever I want to be as each hour passes.
Monday Monday is a reader supported newsletter that comes out every week for paid subscribers. Today’s installment is free for all subscribers. Enjoy. XO.
Photo by Cody Sells
The other day I was voice noting with my friend who told me about a global strike for an immediate ceasefire happening this week. I immediately felt myself get hot in the face and embarrassed like, why didn’t I know about this? Why is my finger not on the pulse enough? In the past this could lead me to freeze up instead of just be humble and ask more questions. I asked for more information and spent some time thinking about how to participate.
I’ll start by saying how in awe I am of my friends who are putting in so much work to disrupt business as usual, hold vigils, make signs, march, and continue to voice and act upon their dedication to a Free Palestine. This big public work fuels my small private work and writing, folding it all together as a cultural worker, artist, and writer.
My dearest readers I have great news : I’ve given up! About a week ago I started giving up and it is the most free and surrendered I’ve felt in years. Trying was so exhausting. Initiating was killing me softly. Giving up has made everything much easier.
You may fear that giving up means not caring but I assure you it is the container for the most generosity and care that you can have inside you. Giving up is the key to the door of your dreams! To look outside is to dream but to give up is to awaken.
Surrendering, turning it over, dropping the rock, letting go of the rope, loosening your grip, loving with an open palm - these are all the gentle ways to say - just give up! I promise to not give up on living but I will give up what wipes me out and takes me to the edge of despair. Giving up has given me more time and energy to turn toward the things that do fill me up, rather than what doesn't.
In December I taught a class and it was my most successful course I’ve ever taught. I measured success by how many people signed up, how much I got to pay my guest teachers, the enthusiastic response and feedback from students, my own inspiration levels sparked, paying myself, paying off debt, and doing it all without using Instagram. I work best in these big seasonal spurts, but the crash afterwards can disorient me.
I was able to pay three months of my mortgage ahead of time and save up to remodel my bathroom, as well as take time off from teaching while I focus on grad school. I’ve never given myself this type of flexibility and break in my job, especially to move towards learning and dedication to my own art practice.
The thing is, grad school doesn’t start for another two weeks and I don’t do well in the in between. I don’t do well with the down time I worked so hard to give myself. I suddenly don’t remember how to open a book or watch a movie in the afternoon. Everything I had built around rest while I was working seems to have disappeared and I have a few hunches as to why.
