Shifting Course // New Editorial Guidelines

We wanted to let you know how we're shifting our editorial approach in this time of the Coronavirus pandemic and how we can work together to get ideas, inspiration, and tools to our readers at a time when our mental health is being greatly impacted. 

Ordinarily, If Lost Start Here focuses on the places we can go to meet our needs, but that being-out-in-the-world piece is much more difficult now. So we're looking to pivot to find ways to meet the critical needs for our mental wellbeing from home. From finding community and connection to discovering our own creative potential, we're reassessing the ways we can thrive (or just cope) while social distancing and in lockdown if that happens where you are like it has happened here in California.

We're now looking to include pieces in our guide on the following subjects:

• Things to do at home: This can be project-specific — from a creative project that you'd like to make available to others— or more resource-based such as a piece on the resources you are turning to sustain you at home like a great online tutorial, a meet-up platform, or a virtual pub quiz. 

• Nature: Many of us are turning to nature to restore balance to our days, and we're fortunate in that we can benefit from being outdoors while social-distancing. Perhaps you know a great hike, a secluded park, a hidden lake, that people can seek out in their neighborhoods (we're minimizing travel too remember). Or maybe you are an expert in forest bathing, are versed in succulent gardening, or know how to go glamping at home. We can be creative about what nature means to you.

• Non-real world (the irony) places: We're looking for creative outlets, online places and innovative ways that support more of what we all need in our lives right now. Just a reminder our focus ranges across these categories (also built out on our homepage): Connection & Community, Mind/Body, Untethering, Purpose, Spirituality & Meaning, Doing Good, Mental Health, Awe & Wonder, Creativity & Culture. 

• Places you want us to know about so that we can support them: This one's critical, as many spaces in the world are struggling with staying open or staying afloat if they've already been forced to close their doors. Tell us about them and how we can help keep the lights on (in spirit sometimes too).

• Interviews with space makers: We want to be able to share stories about how people are adapting to the current moment. Let us know how the people you know in the world who have been brave enough to make space for others, are shifting their vision, their days, their own lives.  

• Places you dream of visiting: We recognize that there is so much longing at the moment too. Some of us are already missing a regular cafe, a beloved family destination, a gathering that recenters you. Tell us your stories of where you imagine being (hopefully one day soon).

• Culture therapy: We have a series where we look to the books (fiction, non-fiction), podcasts, TV shows, films, plays, articles, magazines and visual culture that can help support us across each of our categories. Let us know which cultural resources you turn to when you are lost, lonely, anxious or curious.

• Personal narratives: Tell us about your own experience of trying to maintain your mental health in times of uncertainty. We all need to know that we are far from alone as we self-isolate or social distance. Amanda just wrote this about homeschooling which will hopefully help lots of us now attempting this.

We know that stress is high, budgets are tightening, and our plans are shifting wildly. All those things make writing for us at the moment a difficult ask. But we hope that you may have a moment to contribute so that we can build more of what we need at a moment that we need it most.

Other ways though that you can support our work: share our campaign #iflostkeepthelightson across social media, or support our fundraisers for helping spaces struggling at the moment, or share our prompts for being Lost at Home which will become a printable this week with proceeds going to struggling spaces.

Thank you for reading. Be well. Take care.  

x Amanda & Claire

Co-founders, If Lost Start Here

The Sketchbook Project at Brooklyn Art Library

“A crowd-funded sketchbook museum and community space.”

For the Lost: ‘A Lovely Wander NYC’ by Sara Boccaccini Meadows

For the Curious: ‘Come Travel with Me’ by Jill Macklem

For the Lonely: ‘somewhere across the sea’ by Michael Elizabeth Zimmerman

For the Anxious: ‘Anxiety Sucks’ by Suzie Deplonty

But you could equally be looking for ‘A story worth telling’, ‘Pocket-size memories’, or ‘Trivial retrospectives’. The floor to ceiling shelves of The Sketchbook Project at Brooklyn Art Library contain all those themes and more in thousands upon thousands of identical 5 x 7” sketchbooks. In fact, this Williamsburg storefront houses the largest collection of sketchbooks in the world: 45,000 in all (with 24,000 in its digital library). And most are made by amateurs: 30,000 different people in over 130 countries have so far contributed to this over a decade-old project. Anyone can submit a sketchbook irrespective of background, perspective and, here’s the key, ability. These drawn-out and doodled narratives can be made by a granny in Croatia, a mum in California, a child in England. Even you. 

We’re a little in love with it. 

This is how it works: you order one of their custom designed, Scout-made sketchbooks online and receive along with it a list of thematic prompts: recent calls included: ‘One last chance’, ‘Fearful faces’ and ‘Lamppost Limericks’. Choose one or discard them entirely. It’s up to you. You get to fill 36 pages with whatever you want—abstract squiggles, detailed portraits, maps and landscapes, diary entries, poems, fragments of images and memories, secrets and declarations of lost love—anything that can be contained within its pages (so no glitter or messy embellishments). 

Here’s the genius part—your sketchbook has a barcode, so you’ll upload some details to an online catalog, like search terms and your bio. Then you’ll mail it back to The Sketchbook Project for the next part of its life: most likely it will be part of one of the traveling exhibitions which take place in a custom made Mobile Library (‘like a food truck, but instead of tacos you get sketchbooks’) that tours to schools, music festivals, art fairs, museums, and blue-chip companies, in such places as Melbourne, Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, San Francisco, and even Rapid City, South Dakota. But your sketchbook will definitely find its permanent home on one of those shelves in that storefront in Brooklyn. All sketchbooks are cataloged and kept. There’s no jury, no judgment. 

Founded in 2006 by Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker, The Sketchbook Project questions who gets to create, who gets to be good and whether that idea has any currency, and why creativity still matters. By giving people a blank page, it also gives them the impulse to make and the platform to share. This is art for everyone, and artist as anyone. As Peterman attests: “I wanted to create an informal outlet for anyone to create art, with a purpose. I believed and still believe in the notion that a creative community is stronger than its individual artists and that a project can be impactful in a way that is different than a traditional gallery.”  

All these sketchbooks—made and mailed in from all over the world, collectively form a library of sorts. Visitors to the storefront, which has a very unlibrary feel—yes, there’s check-out cards, but there’s also music, art supplies and memorabilia on sale—can view any of these sketchbooks in its cozy space. Remember that barcode? That makes the in-store librarian’s job way easier: now visitors just search the catalog by theme, figure out what they want to view, and the librarian will pull it from the shelves. As the artist/maker/author you can get updates on how many times it been viewed—you can even get texts when your sketchbook-baby leaves its home on the shelves. The beauty in all this is that the person who made and then the person who viewed the sketchbooks are now in conversation; the sketchbooks forming physical testimonies of lives lived, documented and shared.

The Sketchbook Project gives analog form to some of our most basic needs, namely to tell stories and to connect. As we’re increasingly driven online to spill and share, it’s a real-world kickback. These shelves express myriad lives and ways of being in the world that you can flick through and digest over time and in physical space. It’s collectively made, with all the contributors expressing themselves very differently while working within exactly the same parameters. And it’s collectively understood; visitors can search for what they need amongst the pages or maybe even chance upon something unexpected. Plus it's permanent. These sketchbooks are designed to last, to be an archive of global creativity that endues longer than the time it takes to scroll through your feed. 

(See also the workshops in the community space, on such things as bookmaking and journaling, and other interactive global art projects that aim to connect and dispel some fundament myths around creativity like the Pen Pal Exchange).

To find out more: Website and Instagram