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Each month, Curated Reads moves in rhythm. One month a grown-up book; the next a children's story.
River & Ember was built on jointness, connectedness, and reciprocity. The belief that wisdom doesn't travel in one direction. It circles between parent and child, story and reader, moment and memory.
Our grown-up Curated Reads are quiet studies in personal rhythm and inner life. Our children's Curated Reads are reflections of resonance: stories chosen not just for what happens on the page, but for the seeds they plant in us and our children alike.
This Month From My Shelf
Curated Reads took a quiet pause while I've been deep in the creative work of shaping River & Ember and preparing the Spring edition arriving in April.
In that process, I found myself led back to a book already living on my shelf. One that felt especially aligned to this season, and one that was also a favorite of my husband's.
This month's Curated Read is Deep Creativity: Seven Ways to Spark Your Creative Spirit by Deborah Anne Quibell, PhD; Jennifer Leigh Selig, PhD; and Dennis Patrick Slattery, PhD.
What drew me back was its language around ritual, emotion, and the deeper life beneath creativity. This is not a book that treats creativity as output or performance. It treats it as relationship. With rhythm. With feeling. With memory. And with the quieter parts of ourselves that often speak first through image, longing, or story.
That felt especially true to me right now.
The Core Truth
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Deep creativity is not forced. It is welcomed — through ritual, through emotional honesty, and through the parts of us still asking to be heard.
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3 Nuggets Worth Carrying
1. Deep creativity begins with ritual.
One of the passages that stayed with me most was the author's description of a simple morning practice: lighting a candle, opening a journal, creating a space of hospitality before the day begins.
What struck me was not the aesthetic of it, but the posture.
The ritual is simple because its purpose is simple: to tell the soul, the mind, and the body that something meaningful is allowed to arrive here.
Creativity often needs less force than invitation.
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“Ritual creates the conditions where inspiration feels safe to enter.”
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2. Deep creativity is emotional.
One of the clearest lines in the book is this: deep creativity is emotional.
Not emotional in the sense of chaos or sentimentality, but in the sense that creativity is often born where something in us has been stirred, opened, or unsettled.
The book suggests that what grips us emotionally is rarely irrelevant to what we are here to make. Sometimes the image that stays with us, the ache that rises unexpectedly, or the memory that won't let go is not an interruption to creativity. It is the material.
So much of what becomes meaningful in our work first arrives as feeling.
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“What moves us is often pointing toward what wants to be made.”
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3. Creation can be a form of re-creation.
The section on creation as re-creation stayed with me in a deeper way.
The authors write about how our wounds, longings, and unfinished stories can become part of the raw material of what we create. Not because suffering should be romanticized, but because creativity can sometimes help us revisit, reshape, and restore what life once fractured.
That idea feels especially powerful in a culture that often treats creativity as novelty.
This book offers something truer: that we may be telling the same deep story again and again, in different forms, until something in us has been more fully seen.
Not all creativity is repair.
But some of it is.
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“Sometimes what we create is not escape from our story, but a way of re-entering it with more consciousness and care.”
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Carry This Forward
Even if you never read this book, its invitation still stands:
Create one small ritual that signals to your inner life that something meaningful can begin.
Light a candle.
Open a notebook.
Sit in the quiet for five minutes before reaching for your phone.
Return to the same chair, the same hour, the same page.
And when something emotional rises in you, consider that it may not be in the way.
It may be part of the way.
I'm curious about something.
What does creativity look like in your life right now? Not the ideal version. The real one.
Hit reply and tell me. I read every one, and these responses shape what I bring to you next.
River & Ember Note
This book stayed with me because ritual is also at the heart of River & Ember.
Children find safety in rhythm. Adults rediscover themselves in it.
Whether we are tending to our inner world, raising children, or creating something new, the quiet practices we return to shape the life that unfolds around them.
Ritual is not decoration for life.
It is often the doorway through which meaning enters.
And creativity, at its deepest, may be less about producing something impressive than about making space for something honest.
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"Be with things as they are, and they will reveal themselves further."
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p.s. If this book calls to you and you'd like to add it to your home library, here's where you can find it:
Bookshop.org — keeps the heartbeat of independent bookstores alive
Amazon.com — for when life is full and you need simplicity
Both take you to the same wisdom. Choose the path that fits your season.
If this reflection resonated, pass it along to someone tending their own creative life.
The light spreads quietly that way.
With warmth,
Tenisha
River & Ember
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