Joyful Practice: Drop-In Community Arts Project

About this event

Meeting Room. Drop in to the Olympia Timberland Library and take some time out of your day to play with typewriters and art supplies. Visit our Snail Mail Station and write a note to a loved one on a manual typewriter. Experience the fun of collective collaboration at our interactive art station where we ask you about your favorite books and your most memorable animal encounters. You’ll be invited to make a small piece of art and add it to a community art project that will be temporarily displayed at the library. All ages and abilities are welcome. Sarah Tavis and Jennifer Berney have developed an approach to artmaking that centers joyful experimentation, and are excited to collaborate with library patrons. Facilitator Bios: Jennifer Berney and Sarah Tavis are writers and teachers with over 40 years of combined experience working with writers of various ages, backgrounds, and levels. Together, they write a weekly newsletter about healing and creative process, The Scrap Heap, and their book, The Joyful Practice Handbook: analog play for dark times, will be released in September 2026. Jenn’s book, The Other Mothers, a memoir of queer family-building, was a finalist for the Washington Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Longreads, Outside, Wired, The Offing, and many other places. Sarah’s hybrid novella, Beyond the Pull of Gravity, will be published in Cosmographia Books’ ‘Famous Orphans’ short book series in September 2027. She is a founding member of The 3rd Thing, an independent publisher of necessary alternatives.