📝 THE FOUNTAIN FLOW 📝

April 17, 2025 Edition

👋 HELLO, WRITERS!

Spring is in full swing, and so many of you have been sharing how your creative practices are shifting with the season—noticing fresh patterns, unexpected insights, and exciting inspirations popping up as you dive deeper into your Fountain practice. 

🌟 COME TO OUR CLASS

We're thrilled about our upcoming live community meetup!

April's theme is "Are You a Fountain or a Drain?" Get ready to explore and honor your fountain and drain parts and connect with our vibrant community for our inaugural monthly members-only meetup on Zoom Friday, April 25th at 10 am PT! Can't make it on Friday? The meeting will be recorded and a link will be accessible to members.

This class will focus on the powerful mindset shifts that transform your writing practice from struggle to flow. Discover how the choices you make moment by moment can either nourish your creativity or block its natural expression.

What to expect:

• Identify the "drain" thought patterns that deplete your creative energy and lovingly integrate them

• Learn practical tools for strengthening your "fountain" neural pathways

• Community-building discussion to connect with fellow writers

• Q&A with The Fountain founders Chelsea and Kim

This is your chance to experience firsthand how changing your relationship with writing changes your writing itself—while building meaningful connections with writers who understand your journey.

🔑 NOTE: This monthly meeting is exclusively for current Fountain members. Not a member yet? Join The Fountain today to access this event (and all forthcoming monthly meetups!), our complete library of writing resources (including guided audio tracks and deep inquiry exercises), and an amazing community of like-minded writers. See below for more membership info.

Current members can find the Zoom link in your members' portal today. Think a friend might be interested? Pass it on! All of this is more fun with friends 💞

🧠 NEUROSCIENCE NUGGET

Creative resistance often stems from heightened amygdala activation—your brain's threat-detection center working overtime. When you encounter resistance, your neural pathways interpret uncertainty as potential danger, triggering protective responses that manifest as procrastination, perfectionism, or self-criticism.

Research shows that brief mindfulness practices can reduce this amygdala reactivity by activating the prefrontal cortex, which helps regulate emotional responses. This explains why our Buffer Clearings can quickly shift you from creative stagnation to flow—they're literally helping rewire your neural responses to creative challenges.

🔍 MEMBER SPOTLIGHT: 

ERIKA GALLION VELASQUEZ

This month we're celebrating writer Erika Gallion Velasquez, whose essay "Paradise is Ours" will be featured in the May issue of The Cincinnati Review as the Robert and Adele Schiff award-winning essay. Erika was kind enough to answer a few questions for us about how The Fountain has been impacting her work. We’re so happy you’re here, Erika!

What are you processing right now with The Fountain?

I'm currently in the Deep Dive section of The Fountain coursework, which has really been a journey of trusting myself in my writing. As a nonfiction writer I sometimes face looped, paranoid thoughts about how my book will be received, especially by family. Will they be upset I've exposed family 'secrets'? Will they question the worthwhileness of me doing so? Is this even my story to tell?

The Fountain has really helped me understand where these thoughts are coming from (fear of failure, fear of rejection, etc.) and I am learning how to gently set those thoughts aside. Tactically, The Fountain has also helped me better realize what environment feels best for my writing-- I've been intentionally using different scents in my diffuser, listening to the frequencies The Fountain provides, and moving my body before and after writing (I'm a big fan of 20 min walk or 20 min of unencumbered dancing).

I've also loved the Clearings, particularly on rejection and disappointment-- these feel like liminal spaces between writing and reality that I love to live in. I find it easier to believe, now more than ever, that my book is worthy of being told and I am its shepherd-- it's powerful to have this intrinsic knowing that The Fountain reminds me of in every lesson.

What are you working on?

I'm in a long process of rewriting my memoir, transforming it from a collection of essays into a chaptered memoir. The book follows two storylines: one of myself growing up in a low income area of Northeast Ohio with an alcoholic father and the other in 1966 when my paternal grandfather was found guilty of attempted murder of my father, aunt, uncle, and grandmother.

The violent act was done via dynamite, creating a True Crime-esque fascination with the trial. This family history, explained to me once growing up, became a reference point for me as I aged and wondered about the origins of my father's addiction. With archival documents such as court records and prison records, I was able to piece together the events of September 1966 and what came after. The book, titled Paradise is Ours, is a loving attempt to look at familial trauma.

I had some positive interactions last year with literary agents but nothing quite panned out, which is the impetus for my revisions. The rewrites feel very right for the project and I'm excited to see where it goes. The title essay of my memoir will be featured in the May issue of The Cincinnati Review as the Robert and Adele Schiff award winning essay. 

What is one recent win you'd like to share?

I applied for a few summer workshops this summer, and readying those materials has felt super generative for me. I did get on the waitlist for Tin House but ultimately did not get in-- I'm still considering the attempts to be wins because the applications made me intimately familiar with my project and what I want it to be. With the work in The Fountain, I am really trying hard to view these small inches forward as major wins, even if outside validation isn't achieved.

👩‍💼👩‍💼 FOUNDERS' CORNER

Kim: I've been having a blast playing with a cinema-scoring tool in Ableton Live that's letting me create some seriously lush soundscapes for our upcoming Walking Anchors. The music for these will maintain all the benefits of our frequencies but will also be a more dynamic and energetic soundtrack for your walks. We can't wait to share these with you!

On the writing front, I've been experimenting with different frequencies during my daily two-hour writing blocks, and I've noticed a significant difference in how quickly I can drop into flow. I've been continuing my work on new story drafts for my collection with a renewed sense of clarity about what this project needs. 

Chelsea: I've been immersed in research about how movement impacts neural pathways related to narrative thinking. The Walking Anchors we're developing incorporate this research, helping writers physically process creative blocks and open new pathways for story development.

I'm continuing work on my third novel and finding that the 3-Step-Flow Practice has been instrumental in helping me navigate some challenging scenes. There's something really important about these bookending activities—The Buffer and the Daily Reflection—and they create a lot of momentum. I'm very much in the thick of the process and remembering what a dance of trust this is. Trust that if I stay with it, I will eventually hold the book in my hands, and trust that I will be able to bring whatever it needs forward. It's been a surprising and humbling project so far. 

Really practically, I'm holding myself more accountable for scheduling things during my idea writing hours, 8am-12pm and trying to find ways to shift things in that regard.

📅 UPCOMING EVENTS

• Once again, we’re thrilled about our first The Fountain Monthly Live Meeting: "Are You a Fountain or a Drain?" on April 25th, 10 AM PT. Hope to see you there!

• New Clearing Release: Good news for those of you who've made it to the 3-Step-Flow Practice—we're about to release Buffer 4, especially for use on those days when motivation is playing hard to get! This new track will be available in the Clearings Library on Sunday, April 20th.

🖋️ OUT IN THE WRITING WORLD

• Oregon Book Award Finalists Reading—Kim will be giving a reading with the other fiction finalists at the Corvallis Museum on Tuesday, April 22nd at 7pm. The winner will be announced at the Oregon Book Awards Ceremony on April 28th.

• Oregon State University Reading and Talk—Kim will visit Nicholas Dybek's graduate fiction workshop and give a talk with the OBA finalists on Wednesday, April 23rd at 10am.

• Substack Live: Chelsea recently did a Substack Live interview with the fabulous poet Joy Sullivan all about the emotional experience of being a writer in the world and ways we can approach things like the vulnerablity of rejection, processing impermissable emotions, energetic boundaries, and writing true work. 

• Raphael House: Chelsea taught a special writing workshop "The Alchemy of Fiction: Transforming Lived Experience into Fictional Gold." The Raphael House is near and dear to Chelsea and she is so inspired by the profound work they are doing for survivors of domestic violence.
• Substack Bestseller! Chelsea's substack, Make Up Your Life was listed as fiction bestseller recently. Find it here. 

🎯  WRITING PROMPT

And finally, here’s a quick little writing prompt to send you on your way. 

Sensory Memory Dive

Set a timer for 10 minutes. Choose one sensory memory (the smell of your childhood home, the sound of rain on a tent, the texture of sand). Write continuously about what emerges, following connections between memory and imagination.

So happy to connect with you,

Chelsea and Kim