Summer vision-boarding, juggling ritual, creative picnics, community chats, & more!
A sunny lineup of creative July happenings
Let’s get right to it!
July 2: What I Learned When I Learned to Juggle by Dan Ward
Tomorrow, we’re inviting Dan Ward (who spent much of his youth performing magic shows at birthday parties, libraries, and hospitals) to share a piece of advice from learning (and teaching others) to juggle. And, it might just be the life metaphor you didn’t know you needed!
In addition to being a juggler, Dan Ward is an engineer, a punk... and was Time Magazine's Person of the Year twice (2003 and 2006, look it up!). He served for more than 20 years in the US Air Force, testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and the British House of Commons, and authored four books (Punk, Lift, The Simplicity Cycle, and F.I.R.E). He's a co-founder of The SparkLit Group, a small consulting firm that helps people ask bolder questions and build better futures.
This piece will be available to paid subscribers only.
July 8: Community Coffee Chat with Gretchen Robards and Nicole Rangel (12pm PST)
As part of our monthly Community Coffee Chat series, where we invite creatives from the Tomatokind community to share candidly about the messy middle of their creative journeys, we’ll be chatting with Gretchen Robards and Nicole Rangel.
Gretchen Robards is a multi-disciplinary creative working across photography, creative direction, and design, with movement, music, and writing woven into everything she does. Equal parts artist and community-builder, she uses each medium as a doorway to genuine connection, turning collaborations into safe spaces and creative work into shared experiences. Whether behind a camera, on stage, or designing for a brand, her through-line is the same: create with intention, connect without pretense.
Nicole Rangel, Ph.D., is a holistic educator, papermaker, and daughter of Colombian immigrants, proud to come from a long lineage of green thumbs. She handcrafts (and teaches others to handcraft) plantable paper goods that are designed to be shared and planted to grow organic flowers, herbs, and food-bearing plants. Her work is an invitation to slow down, play, give with intention, and practice a more regenerative relationship with the land that sustains us.
Together, we’ll be sharing our honest feelings across topics including: how to overcome the fear of being seen, inviting more joy into our work, and the complexities of financially investing in ourselves.
This Substack live is open to all, so feel free to share this newsletter with a friend!
July 10: Making this Podcast is Hard by Vanessa Li
For the past 6 months, I’ve been working on a podcast that is really more of an audio-documentary than a traditional podcast. Each episode will introduce you to a creative person somewhere in the world and you’ll step into a week in their life through an immersive audio diary experience. But, it’s been a long production process of figuring out the technology, timeline, creative partners, and…honestly…just prioritizing and making time for the project. It’s the longest-form content that I’ve ever made, and I have been dreams for it. But it’s taking forever, so I’d love to bring you along for the ride.
This piece will be available to paid subscribers only.
July 22: Live Conversation with Nicole Garfunkel (11am PST)
When I first met Nicole many months ago in a creative community we both were a part of, I was struck by her story and the mission behind her work in fashion. So, I am beyond excited to invite her to the community to share the story behind her work.
Nicole Garfunkel is a personal stylist who helps people use fashion as a tool for showing up fully in their lives in eating disorder recovery. Her approach goes beyond aesthetics. It's about aligning your personal style in a way that feels authentic, empowering, effortless, and fun, and without changing your body for the sake of “looking stylish.”
This Substack live is open to all, so feel free to share this newsletter with a friend!
July 24: Creative Lunch Club Picnic (12pm PST in Berkeley, CA)
In collaboration with Creative Lunch Club, a worldwide community of creatives meeting up in-person every single month, we’ll be hosting a picnic at Strawberry Creek Park in Berkeley, CA. Bring a blanket, some food and drinks, and join us for a relaxed afternoon. Meet other multi-passionate creatives, and maybe walk away with a new friend.
This meetup is open to all. RSVP below!
July 27: On Writing & Creativity by Sophie Davies
You may recognize Sophie from our Substackers Meetup last month!
Sophie Davies is a culture-obsessed British woman living in Marin County (between San Francisco and Napa Valley) who is fueled by tea, culture, and community. A lover of film, books, magazines, and most things secondhand, she was born and bred in South London and came of age in the 90’s, an exciting time for creatives who broke through the British class system to make something of themselves in the exciting worlds of music, fashion, art, and design (that were exploding at the time).
Sophie is also the founder of Cuppa Culture, a Marin County, CA-based community for women that hosts networking events, speaker series, and editorial partnerships supporting female-owned businesses in the SF Bay Area.
In this guest piece, she’ll share a bit about her writing practice (something she doesn’t share too often in her work), and how it has helped her unlock a new chapter of creativity.
This piece is available to paid subscribers only.
July 29: Summer Vision-boarding (6pm PST, Berkeley, CA)
Oh, Summer: the season for road trips, reading romance novels in your sunnies, outdoor concerts, delicious grilled veggies...and, dare we say....vision-boarding??
For me and fellow-creative Sasha Purdy (founder of Manifest Creative Club), summer feels like the perfect time for an expansive, reflective, and hopeful intention-setting ritual: a chance to pause and tap back into our visions for this one big beautiful life. So, we will be hosting a summer vision-boarding session that will feel like an afternoon community sleepover. Imagine: a creative meditation with art supplies galore and friendly faces all gathered round.
This event is open to the public. RSVP link coming soon!
July 31: Possibilities Club (3pm PST, Zoom)
Join us for our monthly Possibilities Club workshop: a playful, expansive workshop for anyone pursuing a dream.
In this interactive and reflective hour, you’ll:
gain clarity in your squishy ambitions
step into an expansive version of you
have a heart-to-heart with your future-self
and, give/ receive support from fellow multi-passionate creatives
This month’s theme is: ALIGN
So, ask yourself: What currently feels off in your life or creative practice? What parts of your life feel most like you right now, and which feel like a facade? What are you ready to realign, release, or recommit to?
This workshop is available to paid subscribers only.
In addition to these July events, we’ll also be in your inboxes every Monday with our new Dream-Board column! If you haven’t seen this week’s, check it out here!
Alrighty, creative friends…hope to see you soon!
With zeal and gratitude for this creative life,
Vanessa Li
P.S. Here are some reminders on how to make the most of this community!
Join our subscribers-only community chat - Think of it as a friendly group chat to hang out with fellow multi-passionate creatives and converse about all things worth dreaming about. The chat has been live since January and folks have connected through sharing creative rituals, advice on business/life dilemmas, book recs, physical and digital resources, and also cat pics. 😺 New in the chat: Possibilities Pings! To keep things light and breezy this summer, we’ll be sending you a short-and-sweet “Possibility Ping” with an inspo from our world or other corner of the internet.
Check out our Creative Journey Library - People are always coming to us for book recs on how to design their life (a.k.a., how to do more art, ignite their creative joys, start a dream project, tap into their inspiration, live more fully), so…we’ve compiled a list! If you decide to dig into one of our recs, or have titles to add, we’d love to hear about it!
Follow us on Instagram (@tomatokindmagazine) and LinkedIn (Tomatokind) - We share daily creative and life tid-bits there, plus offerings and announcements. Plus: fun things like giveaways!
Browse our Creative Spaces Map - This is our dynamic, open-source map of creative spaces, studios, and hideaways across North America. It is curated from our editorial adventures as well as reader submissions, and designed for you to get into the community and make stuff, co-work, and experience creative adventures! We have a ton of listings in our backlog waiting to be added to the map, but please send us more (it might just be the kick in the booty we need to update the map!).