THE MAKING SEASON 🍁
Make room for the creative work you can’t stop thinking about.
Six autumn weeks to give one project your sustained attention, in the company of other people making alongside you.
October 4 — November 15, 2026
8 residents · Six Sunday Studio Sessions · Inaugural Residency · $222
WHAT COULD HAPPEN IF YOU GAVE ONE PROJECT SIX WEEKS?
Maybe there's a creative endeavor you’ve been longing to give real time to all year.
You haven't abandoned it. Not exactly. You think about it. You make notes. You open the document. You buy the yarn. You read another book. You tell yourself you'll get back to it when work calms down, when summer starts, when summer ends, when you have a whole free weekend.
And somehow everything else keeps getting prioritized first, and the project gets whatever scraps of time are left over (aka no time) ☹️ Next thing you know, it’s the holidays and then the New Year and… you’re starting the cycle all over again.
There’s still time to make something.
Not six weeks of perfect discipline, or to finally get your shit together. Just six weeks in which one particular piece of work gets to matter.
The Making Season is a small online creative residency for writers, artists, academics, researchers, makers, and other curious humans.
At its heart are six live Sunday Studio Sessions, 9:00–10:30 AM Pacific. We'll gather in the same small group to explore a small project practice, spend protected time making, and orient ourselves toward the week ahead.
Between Sundays, the residency continues through our digital Residency Lodge, weekly Open Studio Hours, and two Residency Director Office Hours.
You bring the project. I build the container. Our work deserves a season.
What your Making Season residency includes
📬 Residency Welcome Packet
After registration closes, you’ll receive a downloadable packet to help you declare your project, prepare your creative space, and orient yourself toward the season, so you arrive on October 4 already knowing what you’re here to tend.
🏡 Digital Residency Lodge
Our Notion home base holds the calendar, Zoom room, resident directory, weekly resources, playlists, Open Studio and Office Hours info, plus an intentionally old-school message board. No extra community app demanding your attention.
🕯️ Six Sunday Studio Sessions
Sundays · 9:00–10:30 AM Pacific
The heart of The Making Season: conversation, a small project practice, and protected making time with the same small group each week. No matter what happens during the other six days of the week, Sunday gives you a place to return to your project.
🔑 Residency Director Office Hours
Two optional drop-in sessions for questions about project, process, resistance, creative weather, or whatever has you temporarily turned around. You don’t have to figure out every stuck place alone.
🚪 Weekly Open Studio
Optional drop-in communal making. No lesson. No agenda. Just another opportunity for company while you work, because when life gets loud, sometimes it’s easier to show up when someone else is showing up too.
🥂 Closing Studio Salon
Our final Sunday celebrates whatever emerged. Read a paragraph. Show the painting. Hold up the sweater. Tell us about the research rabbit hole. Share something unfinished. Dream up what comes next! You don’t need a finished project to have something worth celebrating.
There is no critique in The Making Season. We'll witness what's alive, offer generative reflection, and then sufficiently gas each other up 🥳
There’s still time to make something 🍂
Meet Your Residency Director (and fellow resident!)
Hi! I'm Sarah from Hawthorn Mountain Tarot! I’m an award-winning author, tarotist, creativity coach, and former lit-mag fiction editor and university professor. I’ve spent years helping creatives reconnect with their spark, especially the ones who are secretly exhausted, overcommitted, or afraid they’ve lost the magic (You haven’t. It’s still there!).
My microfiction and flash pieces have been anthologized in the Best Microfiction series and nominated for the Pushcart and other prizes, and right now I’m deep in the fourth draft of my first novel 👀
I host creativity challenges (hello, 19 Days!!!) and lead workshops, not because I’m interested in standing outside the creative process and telling you how it’s done.
I want to build the conditions that help all of us stay in relationship with our work.
Guess what? I’m bringing my project to The Making Season too! 🍂
From the 19 Days Community 🧡
The Making Season is brand new, but making together isn’t. Here are a few things people have said about other creative spaces I’ve hosted.
“You bring such a warm, generative energy to that collective space. It provided a grounding space for inquiry and self-reflection. Or, dancing in the kitchen. Whatever was needed!!!”
“I haven’t created much this August, but am having a blast following along. Each email has been a small ritual of tuning in and reflecting.”
“Thanks so much for creating and sharing such a fun, silly, loving, weird, and supportive space. I miss and want to be part of something like this more regularly.”
“Thank you to you and the group for a safe and energized space to create!”
The Details 📌
Inaugural Residency
October 4–November 15, 2026
Sundays · 9:00–10:30 AM Pacific · Zoom
🕯️ Six Studio Sessions 🍂 Nov 1 Integration Week 🚪 Weekly Open Studio
🔑 Two Office Hours 🏡 Digital Lodge + Message Board 🥂 Studio Salon
8 residents · $222
Pay in full or in 3 payments of $74.
Registration closes September 28, or when the residency fills.
Full refunds available through September 30. After September 30, registration is nonrefundable.
Why I made This
This August, I spent two weeks as a writer-in-residence at a scrappy little art center in Mendocino CA, working on my novel.
For those two weeks, creative work wasn't the thing I squeezed in around everything else. The writing and the daydreaming and the imagining was what I was there to do.
The work didn't magically become easy 🤡 But I woke up every morning asking the question: “what will help Sarah (meee!) advance this draft today?” And then I did that. Other people knew I was doing it. And I lived alongside fellow artists pursuing things entirely different from my own.
“What are you making over there? Holy shit. Tell me everything.”
I came home thinking about the kinds of conditions that invite creative work to flourish:
time + space + structure + witnessing + weather 🌦️
Time devoted to the work. Space where the work is allowed to exist. Structure that helps us return to it. Witnesses who know what we're attempting. And an understanding of our creative weather, so we can learn how to make within it.
Most of us can't disappear to an arts center every time our work needs tending 🤷🏻♀️
So what if we made some of those conditions together, right where we are?
This is a residency, not a course.
I'm not going to teach you how to make your project.
There are no modules, grades, productivity metrics, or assignments accumulating guiltily in your inbox.
There are no Zoom recordings at all. This is a room, not content.
We return to the same people and projects every week. We make. We talk. We notice what's happening. We help each other keep going.
You don't have to finish your project (though we’ll celebrate you if you do!). You just have to be willing to spend six weeks in your project's company.
The thing we share is making!
Bring your project 🎨
Brand new. Halfway done. Avoided for three years.
A novel. Zine. Dissertation chapter. Scholarly article. Poetry manuscript. Painting series. Body of research. Translation. Screenplay. Quilt. Photography project. Music album. Puppets. Tarot deck. Archive. Something interdisciplinary and strange.
The question isn't whether your project “counts.” It's whether you want to give it six weeks of sustained attention.
Be amazed by what other people make 🖌️
You might be revising a dissertation chapter while another resident is knitting a sweater, composing a song, researching an obscure historical figure, drafting a novel, making photographs, or building something none of us quite knows how to describe.
Good.
We're not gathering because we're experts in one another's disciplines.
I get to be amazed by your particular artist-weirdo pursuits. You get to be amazed by mine. Someone else's devotion gives us permission for our own 🧡
The Making Season isn't organized around a shared medium. The thing we share is making.
Have questions? 🧐
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No, but the live gatherings are the heart of the residency, so this is the best fit if you expect to attend most of them.
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Almost anything you want to spend six weeks making, researching, writing, revising, building, or figuring out. You do not need to be a professional artist, and your project does not need to fit neatly into an artistic discipline.
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That’s up to you. The Sunday Studio Sessions give us a protected place to return to the work each week, and Open Studio offers another optional pocket of communal making time. Beyond that, you decide what fits your project, your life, and your creative weather. There are no required hours or productivity quotas.
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That’s right! If you miss a gathering, that week's resources will still be waiting in the Lodge 😊
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You always decide what you share, and there is no critique. We're practicing witnessing, curiosity, generative conversation, wonder, and positive regard.
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Then you don't finish it. Some projects are six-hour projects. Some are six-year projects. The goal isn't completion at any cost. It's relationship.
OUR WORK DESERVES A SEASON! 🍂
There will always be email. Laundry. Obligations. Deadlines. Weird Tuesdays.
We don't need to wait for perfect conditions. We can make some conditions of our own.
For six weeks this autumn, we'll make them together. Then, in mid-November, we'll close the Studio and head toward the holidays, the end of the year, and winter's quieter season.
Maybe you'll carry a finished project with you, or maybe you’ll come out with only 12 glittering diamonds for pages 💎 Perhaps a body of research that finally has a shape? A quilt! A painting that's beginning to tell you what the next painting wants to be...
Maybe it's simply a different relationship with the thing you're making. That's enough.
You bring the project.
I build the container.
Our work deserves a season.