Hosted by author Nicole Gulotta, Slow Writing helps you embrace the season you’re in, create at your own pace, and care for your mind and body along the way. No urgency. No keeping up. Just a sustainable writing life that honors your unique rhythms and inner wisdom. When we’re not taking a breather, new episodes arrive on the full and new moons.
73. Befriending Time & Belonging to Creativity with Charlotte Donlon
✨ Seasonal shifts offer a gentle invitation to pause, pay attention, and make space for what comes next. THRESHOLDS is the guided reflection ritual I've returned to for years, now gathered into a workbook I'd love to share with you. Download your copy here (https://www.nicolemgulotta.com/thresholds).
Finding time to write is one of the biggest challenges for writers, but what if we're thinking about our relationship to time all wrong? Spiritual Director Charlotte Donlon is here to help us reframe time, freedom, and rest, offering new perspectives to support our writing practice.
Episode Highlights
Spiritual direction as a framework to ask good questions, cultivate belonging, and create pathways into creative mystery
How recognizing that "everything in life is the writing life" helps us stop seeing other responsibilities as competitors and reframes them as support beams
Why naming yourself as a writer is the doorway to finding more time to write
Reframing time from something to battle against to something fertile with possibility—and how 15-minute writing sessions keep you connected to your work
Writing as a basic need and why ignoring our writing practice is a way of ignoring ourselves
Viewing the passage of time as accumulation rather than depletion
Charlotte's a-ha moment in the midst of a grieving period that led to a radical perspective shift and a new narrative about what it meant to be a writer
Unraveling productivity stories around rest and practicing self-compassion when faced with loss of all sizes
Interrogating the stories and rules you've absorbed about what it means to be a writer helps you reclaim agency over your time and energy
Why she doesn't write every day (and doesn't believe in writer's block)
Trusting the magic and mystery that permeates the creative process
Meet Charlotte
Charlotte Donlon (https://charlottedonlon.com/) is a writer, spiritual director, creativity coach, and faculty member for Alma College MFA’s spiritual writing pathway. Her books include The Great Belonging: How Loneliness Leads Us to Each Other (Broadleaf, 2020) and Spiritual Direction for Writers: Everyday Rituals for Your Writing Life (https://www.spiritualdirectionforwriters.com/book) (Here Below, 2026). She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.
Links + Mentions
Spiritual Direction for Writers: Everyday Rituals for Your Writing Life (https://www.spiritualdirectionforwriters.com/book)
Spiritual Direction for Creative Souls (https://www.spiritualdirectionforcreativesouls.com/) (Substack)
Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (https://bookshop.org/a/8148/9780316365215) by Tricia Hershey
Stay Connected
🌱 Free Seasonal Workbook: Download THRESHOLDS (https://www.nicolemgulotta.com/thresholds) and begin wherever you are
🎙️ Slow Writing Newsletter (https://nicolegulotta.substack.com/): Exploring creativity, seasonal living, and the writing life
📚 Curl up with one of my books (https://www.nicolemgulotta.com/books)
9 Oct 2026
72. Japanese Seasonal Living with Alexis Agliano Sanborn
✨ Seasonal shifts offer a gentle invitation to pause, pay attention, and make space for what comes next. THRESHOLDS is the guided reflection ritual I've returned to for years, now gathered into a workbook I'd love to share with you. Download your copy here (https://www.nicolemgulotta.com/thresholds).
"Seasonality isn’t just a feature of Japanese culture; it’s an inextricable keystone of life in this country.”
One of the foundational principles of Japanese culture is kisetsukan, the sense of being present with each season as it happens. In this rich conversation, Alexis Agliano Sanborn shares insights from her new book, Moments in Bloom (https://quarto.com/books/9781577158257/moments-in-bloom), and guides us through the layers of the Japanese seasonal calendar so you can develop your own practice.
Episode Highlights
How an early fascination with manga and anime grew into deep study and teaching abroad in Japan
Ways the Japanese practice of kisetsukan (presence with each season) offers an architecture for deepening your own awareness
Seasonality as a counterforce to our urgent, always-on culture
Moving from a technical understanding of the 24 Japanese seasons to noticing what's abundant right now in your own place and time
The joy in hunting for and discovering what defines each season where you live
Seasons aren't just about nature—they're the rhythms and rituals woven through your own everyday life
How noticing the impermanence of all things builds resilience and supports your wellbeing
Finding unexpected support and grounding in seasonal awareness, especially during life's most challenging moments
The evolution of hosting a podcast to writing a book with a co-author
Links + Mentions
Moments in Bloom: Japanese Seasonal Living (https://quarto.com/books/9781577158257/moments-in-bloom)
Foundational Japanese literature: The Tale of Genji (https://bookshop.org/a/8148/9784805314647) by Lady Murasaki Shikibu, and Manyôshû and Kokinshû poetry collections (https://afe.easia.columbia.edu/special/japan_600ce_manyoshu.htm)
Season by Season podcast (https://www.seasonbyseason.org/listen-by-season)
Meet Alexis
Alexis Agliano Sanborn (https://www.seasonbyseason.org/) is an independent researcher, nature enthusiast, and award-winning artist. She is an inventive storyteller who enjoys working across media. Among other creative projects, she directed the award-winning documentary short Nourishing Japan (2020), which explores the impact of food education and the school lunch system on Japanese communities. Alexis co-hosted and produced Season by Season, a monthly podcast that celebrates our connection to nature through sound and story.
She received her bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from UC Santa Barbara, a master’s in regional studies of East Asia from Harvard University, and a master’s in public administration from New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. In her free time, she enjoys gardening and painting. Alexis lives with her husband and their two cats in the Northeast.
Stay Connected
🌱 Free Seasonal Workbook: Download THRESHOLDS (https://www.nicolemgulotta.com/thresholds) and begin wherever you are
🎙️ Slow Writing Newsletter (https://nicolegulotta.substack.com/): Exploring creativity, seasonal living, and the writing life
📚 Curl up with one of my books (https://www.nicolemgulotta.com/books)
24 Sept 2026
71. Layers of Landscape with Jenna Brack
✨ Seasonal shifts offer a gentle invitation to pause, pay attention, and make space for what comes next. THRESHOLDS is the guided reflection ritual I've returned to for years, now gathered into a workbook I'd love to share with you. Download your copy here (https://www.nicolemgulotta.com/thresholds).
"Like seeing the sky, writing allows you to breathe. You ascend the stairs leading to your own thoughts and words the way water runs downstream, always searching for the larger substance from which you came." In Jenna Brack's Pass-Through Place, she explores landscape, home, and the invitations available to us wherever we're planted. Jenna grew up in Kansas, but this expansive conversation encourages you to consider your own relationship to place.
Episode Highlights
The ache of belonging to two places at once
Defining home through a shifting lens of time and experience
How distance reveals what we couldn't see up close, and what announces itself only after we've left
Grief as a doorway into understanding ourselves and our writing more deeply
Home as emotional and spiritual territory, not just physical location
Writing Kansas with nuance rather than cliché
The value of learning to wait and let our work settle while working within our limits and capacity
Journaling prompts inspired by Pass-Through Place
Meet Jenna
Jenna Brack is the author of Pass-Through Place (https://www.meadowlarkbookstore.com/product/pass-through-place-by-jenna-brack/ULPWYB5IDTVIQ7LC2XESVTDC?cs=true&cst=custom) (Meadowlark Press, 2026), a collection of essays shaped by growing up in central Kansas. Her essays and poetry have been featured in Every Day Poems, Coffee + Crumbs, Fathom, The Sunlight Press, and others. A former educator and college instructor, Jenna now encourages other writers through editing and coaching. She holds an MA in English from Kansas State University and currently lives with her family in Germany.
Links + Mentions
Pass-Through Place (https://www.jennabrack.com/book) by Jenna Brack
Wisdom from a Wheat Farmer (https://jennabrack.substack.com/p/wisdom-from-a-wheat-farmer?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=113083&post_id=193387237&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=3jan0&triedRedirect=true) (Substack)
Exhale Creativity (https://www.exhalecreativity.com/) writing community for mothers and artists
Wyatt Townley (https://wyatttownley.com/about.html), former poet laureate of Kansas
Stay Connected
🌱 Free Seasonal Workbook: Download THRESHOLDS (https://www.nicolemgulotta.com/thresholds) and begin wherever you are
🎙️ Slow Writing Newsletter (https://nicolegulotta.substack.com/): Exploring creativity, seasonal living, and the writing life
📚 Curl up with one of my books (https://www.nicolemgulotta.com/books)
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Apple Podcasts (US)
5.0 / 5
16 ratings
Spotify
5.0 / 5
15 ratings
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