Hi Vizzy D’s, Writing to you today from Kabi Kabi Country on the Sunshine Coast, Queensland. I’ve been immersed this week in Artlands, Australia’s biggest gathering of regional creative practitioners. It’s part symposium, part think tank, part workshop. A big, beautiful gathering of artists, cultural workers, First Nations knowledge holders, thinkers, policymakers and collaborators asking some pretty big questions about the role of creative practice. And I’ve found myself thinking a LOT about death care. Because what if creativity isn’t just something we bring TO death care? What if creativity is one of the ways we actually change it? Whilst I have an Arts degree and have worn many creative hats over the years, it’s clear to me now that my current creative practice is death. It’s what I pour my heart and imagination into: funeral ceremony, participatory rituals, designing experiences that help people navigate grief, belonging and the enormous liminal space between what was and what comes next. Even the punish of creating social media content - it’s all part of thinking about death care in creative ways. And the more I work in this space, the more I see that we’re not just talking about designing better funerals. We’re talking about systems. A funeral industry built around particular assumptions about who holds the knowledge, who makes the decisions, what a funeral looks like, what a family’s role is, what happens to a body, where grief belongs and how much participation we’re allowed. And systems are notoriously good at reproducing themselves. So if we want something different, we need to be able to imagine something different first. And that’s where creativity comes in. Artists have always been pretty good at asking: What if? What if the family held the ceremony? What if a funeral could happen somewhere other than a chapel? What if children were welcomed into the ritual? What if the coffin was made by the community? What if grief was something we made space for rather than something we tried to move people through?

Hello my darling Vizzy D's - ! We just ticked past 200 people in this little community. And we only started dreaming into all this eleven weeks ago. Eleven weeks. I keep sitting with that number, turning it over. When I started this I thought it was about visibility 'out there'. Being seen in our communities, online, in the industry. And it still is that. But watching this group take shape week by week, I'm noticing something else happening. We're becoming more visible to each other too. There are threads of connection forming here that I don't want to lose or let sit quiet in the comments and scroll past. So this week I want to slow down and ask you something honestly, because I don't want to build this community on guesses. 🐦‍⬛ Visibility Prompt for this week: What would genuinely serve you here? What do you actually want to get out of this group and the people in it? We're all coming at this work from different angles, different stages, different corners of the industry, so I know there's no single answer. But I'm keen to understand how we support each other well as this thing keeps growing... To get the conversation started, here are some shapes this could take. Pick as many as take your fancy, add your own, tell me what's missing... 1) Themed Deep Dives - ticketed online calls where we sit with one specific topic properly, instead of skimming past it in a scroll. Things like the trend toward direct cremation, VAD, business models in death care or the inner work this job demands of us. Sessions get recorded and made available in the classroom as ticketed Masterclass recordings afterwards, so the conversation keeps earning for the people who showed up and did the work. Profits shared amongst presenters. 2) Regular free drop-in calls - maybe every 6 to 8 weeks, no agenda beyond showing up. 3) One-to-one sessions with me - ticketed audit or planning sessions where we look at where you're at and map out what's next for you. 4) More self-paced courses - websites, newsletters, that kind of practical groundwork.