Discover monthly creative prompts for writing, journaling, art, and reflection. Find fresh inspiration and creative ideas for every month of the year.
We have come all the way round. Twelve months ago, in the first post in this series, we started in January with bare branches, frost, and the quiet of a world at rest. We have been through all of it since then. The pale green of April leaves. The dawn chorus in May. June’s longest…
November gets a bad reputation. And I understand why. The leaves are largely gone. The days are short and getting shorter. The weather is frequently grey and wet and cold, without being the kind of cold that produces frost and sparkle. It is, on the face of it, the least obviously appealing month of the…
October doesn’t ease you into autumn. It arrives and immediately makes its presence felt. The colours that were beginning in September are now fully, extravagantly here. The mornings are cold enough to see your breath. The evenings close in with a speed that still catches you off guard, even when you know it’s coming. The…
Something happens in September that is hard to pinpoint exactly. It’s not one thing. It’s a whole constellation of things arriving more or less simultaneously. The light changes. The air changes. The smell changes. The hedgerows are suddenly heavy with fruit and berries. The mornings have a coolness in them that wasn’t there in August….
August is the month that pretends to be summer but is quietly doing something else entirely. On the surface, it looks like July. The days are warm. The holidays are happening. Everything still feels summery and slow and expansive. But if you’ve been paying attention all year, you start to notice things in August that…
July is summer without apology. It’s the month that commits fully to the whole project. The hedgerows are dense and tangled. The verges are tall and going to seed. The air on a warm afternoon has a thickness to it, a heaviness, that you don’t get in June’s lighter, brighter warmth. I’ve always thought of…
There is a particular kind of evening that belongs entirely to June. It’s nine o’clock, and the sky is still pale blue. The air is warm and smells of cut grass and something floral you can’t quite identify. The birds are finally quietening down after a long day. Everything feels suspended, as if the year…
May is the month I find hardest to write about. Not because nothing is happening. The opposite. So much is happening that it’s difficult to know where to start. By May, the trees are in full leaf. The hedgerows are dense and complicated. The verges are tall with cow parsley and buttercups and half a…
There is a specific shade of green that only exists in April. It’s the green of brand new leaves, so fresh and pale that they are almost yellow. It lasts for maybe two or three weeks before the leaves darken and toughen into their summer colour. If you miss it, you have to wait a…
March is the month that finally makes good on February’s promises. And then some. In fact, March can feel almost overwhelming if you’ve been paying close attention. Because everything seems to happen at the same time. The birds get louder. The trees start to blur green at the edges. The light shifts dramatically. The rain…