The Reclamation Project
A six-month program for recovering and expressing your creative spirit
The Spring 2024 is now underway.
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Creative practice and creative play are rich sources of meaning, joy, delight, and connection - but the demands of life can make it difficult to hold open the time and space our creative spirits need to do their thing.
The Reclamation Project is a container of inspiration, encouragement, and support for your creative life, whether you want support for an existing creative practice or the chance to build a new one.
Within a structure of monthly themes, weekly meet-ups, and daily practices, you’ll find:
Ample opportunities for joyful connection to your creative spirit
Regular inspiration to find your way back to your inner power and light
Connection to a thoughtful and supportive community of creative people
The Reclamation Project is organized around monthly themes and weaves together:
weekly online meet-ups
daily practices for approaching all of life with creative consciousness
accessible and customizable hands-on creative projects
open studio time online
opportunities for reflection & conversation
The Reclamation Project is for you if:
You have an existing creative practice (writing, art making, or other) and are eager to shake things up, get re-inspired, and find your way back to the sheer joy of creating. The Reclamation Project offers an infusion of fresh creative energy and community support.
OR
You don’t have a steady creative practice, but you enjoy all kinds of creative play and love the idea of monthly prompts to get your juices flowing. Your creative spirit is craving dedicated time and space to express itself, and you know you are more likely to heed that call in the presence of an encouraging community.
The Reclamation Project is for anyone determined to walk through 2024 grounded in the hopeful magic of creative practice in art and life.
The way we live through the time of overwhelm is to learn rituals that center us and ground us, that connect us more directly and more strongly to the deep sense of self.
– Michael Meade
Our Six Themes
Each month of the Reclamation Project, we focus on a different theme through
presentation, conversation, reflection, practice, and creative projects.
January
CONNECTING
Reclaiming the unbroken thread that connects you to your true path,
and creating a relational foundation for our work together
February
ENCHANTING
Recovering our wonder and bringing the world back to life
March
MAKING SPACE
Relinquishing what no longer serves in order to expand and enrich our field of play
April
ATTUNING
Listening for the call of love, joy, and caring communion
May
TRANSMUTING
Owning our power to turn pain into beauty; old into new; fragmented into whole
June
VENTURING
Risking our way to greater freedom
Creativity embeds knowledge so that it can become practice. We move what we're learning from our heads to our hearts through our hands. We are born makers, and creativity is the ultimate act of integration—it is how we fold our experiences into our being.
- Brene Brown
How the Program Flows
Each month, we follow a pattern of weekly meet-ups on Fridays at Noon Pacific Time, interwoven with personal practice and reflection and ongoing sharing in our online community space.
DOWNLOAD THE PROGRAM CALENDAR
FIRST FRIDAYS
12 - 1:30 pm Pacific Time
We introduce the new theme,
new daily practice, and the prompt for the month’s creative project.
SECOND FRIDAYS
12 - 12:30 pm: Connecting
We share experiences with the month’s daily practice and
test ideas about our creative projects.
12:30 - 1:00 pm: Studio Time
Open studio time for working on your creative projects
THIRD FRIDAYS
12 - 12:30 pm: Project Sharing
Early volunteers share the creative projects they’re working on.
12:30 - 1:00 pm: Studio Time
Open studio time for working on your creative projects
FOURTH FRIDAYS
12 - 1:00 pm
More sharing of creative projects and closing reflections on the monthly theme.
NOTES:
January is an abbreviated month with just two Friday meet-ups.
The months of March and May have five Fridays.
We’ll take a break from scheduled meet-ups on those weeks.
Creativity is a magic wand that works two ways. When you set it in action and seek to create something, it does not just bring into existence that object or work, it also raises in your heart a dream, a hope, and a will to achieve that creation. And when all else seems lost and steeped in hopelessness, the magic of creativity can still keep you going. For when all else seems dark, an urge to create something would still give you an aim to look forward to. And if you just take hold of this urge, it will take hold of you and see you through even the darkest times.
- Jyoti Arora, author in Ghaziabad, India
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I can’t get enough of Sara’s unique perspective and delivery when it comes to creativity and incorporating the whole person. I’ve found her classes to be so nurturing and enlightening, and I want to take in more!
- Lauri M.
Program FAQ
Q: What if I can’t make all the meet-ups?
A: Don’t worry about it! While our community will be most vibrant with active participation by as many of us as possible, I’ve designed the program with a full understanding that our lives will inevitably fluctuate over the six months of our time together.
The First Friday sessions will always be recorded so you can get the new theme and new prompts via replay if you need to miss one.
The Second and Third Friday connecting and sharing segments are just 30 minutes long, and will be the heart of the exchange of the program, so I’d encourage you to come to as many of those as you can.
You can opt into or out of the Second and Third Friday open studio times as you wish. Some people thrive in the gentle container of a set aside time and space to engage their creative practice in the company of others, while others prefer to work differently. Do what works best for you!
The Fourth Fridays when people are sharing their creative projects will be super fun and an important closing to the month, so I expect everyone will plan to be present for those if at all possible.
Q: What kinds of creative projects will we be doing?
Every month the project prompts will be different, and there will always be multiple options for how you might approach the project, so you’ll have lots of room to take each project in a direction that you’ll find sweetly challenging and energizing.
For example, in March, when the theme is Making Space, we’ll be doing a project inspired by the artwork of your choice from the 2017 MOMA exhibition called “Making Space” which featured women abstract artists, including painters, sculptors, collage artists, photographers, fiber artists and mixed-media artists.
In May, when the theme is Transmuting, you’ll be selecting something to turn into something else - this could be turning a memory into a poem or story, or cutting up an old drawing or painting and turning it into a new collage, or refinishing a piece of furniture…whatever fits your available time and excites you! In our First Friday gatherings, we’ll be brainstorming different possibilities.
Q: What if I would rather just keep going on my own creative projects?
Go for it! On any given month, you should feel free to continue with projects you’ve already got underway instead of taking up the creative prompt I offer. You’ll still gain a lot from the daily practices, and I’m confident that the community support and reflections on the theme will bring fresh energy to your creative work! BTW, if you choose to continue an existing creative practice rather than work with a class prompt, you will still be encouraged to share your work if that feels good to you. We won’t care if it is “not on theme” or in process, we just want to be inspired by what you are up to!
Q: Tell me more about how we’ll share our work - is this a critique group?
This is NOT a critique group, and you will not be asked to evaluate or assess each other’s creative products. Our emphasis will be on asking good questions that invite the creator to speak about their process and their relationship to their work. Sara will provide tools at the beginning of the program to help you ask for the kind of feedback you actually want as a creator and we’ll all work to ensure that we are offering only comments that are welcome and helpful.
Got Other Questions? Contact Sara
Sara’s courses have been hugely important to my transformation. Her work has really expanded my awareness of how I am creatively showing up in the world (and not just through artistic expression).
- Elizabeth C.
About Your Teacher
Sara Saltee is a complex creator who helps creators of all kinds connect to their authentic impulses and make their highest contributions. She has been deeply immersed in the study and practice of creativity for more than 20 years as an assemblage artist, writer, teacher, adult learning specialist, curriculum designer, and certified creativity coach. Sara founded the Saltee Academy in 2020 to share her original tools and frameworks and to create a welcoming community for complex creators with multiple creative passions.
Prior to making creativity her full-time gig, Sara served as Adjunct Faculty in Communication at Regis University and Front Range Community College and was a strategic planning and culture-change consultant to nonprofits and public agencies in the Puget Sound Region. For the past decade, she has designed and facilitated dynamic online train-the-trainer programs for a global community of grassroots leaders as the Director of Leadership and Learning Programs for Riane Eisler’s Center for Partnership Systems.
Sara lives and works on Whidbey Island in Washington State and shows her assemblage art pieces at the Rob Schouten Gallery in Langley, WA.
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
- Mary Oliver
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