A guide to have the most creative summer of your life
10 practical ideas to play more and live creatively this season
Welcome back to another issue of apartamento 710, a newsletter about living a creative life. If you are new here, welcome to one of the coolest corners of the internet! If you are a returning reader and friend, thank you sooooooo much for being here!
How to have the most creative summer of your life
I don’t know about you, but every Summer I feel pressure to be out spending more time and money enjoying the long, sunny days. Especially living in Canada, and after a long, wet winter, I want to maximize every minute of nice weather we get.
This year, instead of spending all my time looking outward, I want to use this season to transform Summer energy into both small and big creative endeavours that make me feel excited and connected to my community, so that I can emerge from it recharged rather than depleted.
Here are 10 ideas I’m exploring to have a fun and creative summer without burning out or breaking my bank account:
Romanticize your city: Spend time outside visiting your favorite third spaces, working from the library on a hot day (hello, air conditioning), and heading to the community pool after work. Something at the top of my summer bucket list is joining neighbourhood walking tours and exploring heritage homes to get a peek inside their interiors and gardens. It’s a cool way to learn about the history of the place you live in. I’m making it a goal to visit the home of writer Joy Kogawa here in Vancouver before the end of the summer!
Create a summer curriculum: Make a list of things you want to learn and design your own curriculum (or, as Tahirah Hairston calls it, a summer camp schedule) around them. Maybe you spend June learning about gardening, July discovering new poetry, and August experimenting with printmaking. Having a loose structure can help process curiosity into action. At the end of the summer, host a mini-exhibition for friends and family showcasing what you learned. If you want to take it a step further, make a zine, publish an essay, start a blog, or submit your work to a local gallery or community art show.
Build a summer archive: I can’t stress the importance of having a physical record of your life in the era of cloud storage enough! Don’t rely on apps to keep a record of your life. Print your photos, fill a journal with pressed leaves from a day at the botanical garden, and tickets from a successful date. My mission this summer is to make a photo album-junk journal and keep it as a time capsule of this period of my life.
Find ways to have fun at home: Not every memorable summer day needs to involve spending money or leaving your house! Host a dance party (we need to be dancing more this Summer), learn how to make ice cream at home from a cookbook recipe, have friends over for a potluck dinner, start a backyard book club. The possibilities are endless, just remember Summer can be a restorative season.
Practice intentional offline weekends: Choose one weekend a month to disconnect from social media. This can look like leaving your phone at home while running errands and progressively disconnecting for a full day or two. I experimented with this last week on a trip to the Sunshine Coast. I didn’t post about my trip on social while I was there or search for things to do on TikTok, but I was tempted. I asked friends for recommendations before heading there and grabbed a map at the ferry that listed local gems and must-see places.
Choose in-person connection over online lurking: It’s easy to spend the summer watching other people live their dream vacation through ig stories! This comes back to my previous point of being mindful about how we are using social media. This summer, I want to pay more attention to my life and make new memories with my friends, invite someone new for a walk, and attend community events in my city.
Learn from elders: Talk to older family members, neighbors, or community members about their lives. I’ve shared this before, but going to my local community pool is always the highlight of my week because I get to meet people from older generations. It’s refreshing to hear them talk about with such gratitude, and they have so much wisdom to share about life!
Craft a seasonal reading project: A few themes I’m curious about exploring this summer are poetry, the psychology behind creativity and urban gardening. I plan on seeing if my local library has any interesting titles related to those themes or asking on Stories if anybody has specific books I have in mind. I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that a lot of my knowledge these days comes from social media sources so I want to spend time deepening my understanding of subjects I’m interested in through books and credible sources. Other sources I want to explore for my seasonal reading are Atmos and an Apartamento Magazine subscription.
Become a regular somewhere: Pick one place in your area - a café, record store, community garden, or farmers’ market and visit it consistently throughout the summer. Becoming a regular allows you to develop a deeper relationship with your neighbourhood and creates the possibility for serendipitous encounters and new friendships!
Bonus ideas:
Follow a natural phenomenon all summer long: Get into stargazing or learn about all the different types of clouds!
Collect one thing: Stamps, feathers, postcards, cool rocks, photographs of front doors, library cards from little free libraries, or sketches of neighbourhood houses!
Thanks to readers Eve, Lauren Cooper, Ellabet, Tiffany Wong, Jamie, Zoë, Skylar Allen and Jen for contributing ideas for this newsletter through the community chat.
What else would you add to the list? Please let me know in the comments!
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on the psychology of creativity you should definitely check out syllabus by lynda barry. it’s an actual curriculum (callback?!?!) that she’s set for classes she taught at UW Madison for unlocking creativity through exploring different questions like “is creative concentration contagious?” and “what is an image?”. hope you like it and lmk your thoughts <333
Love this! I'm down in Bellingham and we're planning a long weekend to the Sunshine Coast later this summer ☀️ would love to know if you did/saw/ate anything you'd recommend!