Jenna K Funkhouser has traveled the world as a nonprofit storyteller and encountered courageous and luminous souls in every beautiful corner of it. Her work explores the contours of what it means to be human: all the profound, terrifying, terribly real ways life splits us open and makes us whole. Poems of hers have appeared in Ekstasis, Spiritus Journal, The Wheel, and Relief, among others. Bright, Inhabited Lives was released by Kelsay Books in June 2024, with a forthcoming collection in early 2027.
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Jenna’s Links:
How do your creativity and spiritual life help you belong to yourself, others, your places, and the divine?
To me, both poetry and spirituality attempt to clothe with words what is beyond words. In this way, it's hard to imagine trying to separate their influence within me: this practice of attentiveness to others and the world. Places exist within us beyond words: grief, awe, hope, joy. The more we welcome both our sacred unknowableness and our deep belovedness, the more we can respond to ourselves, others, and other places with a hospitality and curiosity of belonging.
How have your creative expressions and spiritual practices helped you become more of your full self?
Both of these practices have taught me attentive witness, curiosity, holding space for both/and, and I suppose a sense of attunement towards the world and others outside of my normal patterns of assumptions and language. Beyond this, it seems to me that we don't just shape our creative work: it shapes us. We write not just because we have something to say, but to find the thought we wouldn’t say without our searching. We write to teach ourselves what we know, circling again and again around the catch in the thread of our being in the world, believing the question can only be answered in the asking. In the same way, the regularity of a spiritual practice is meant to make us more and more deeply at home in the world and in ourselves, finding doorways in everything.
What do you behold regularly that nourishes your creative soul? (Nature, art, music, TV shows, etc?)
I try to get out for a walk each day in my neighborhood - I love the blend of nature and community I briefly join on those strolls. Nature is an incredible healer, but there's also something beautiful about being reminded that I am part of this vast ecosystem of humankind, with all our gorgeousness and foibles. I also spend time each week with another writer or artist with whom I feel some sense of kinship - whether it's a good novel, another poet, a sculptor or painter, an anthropologist or a mystic. My last poetry collection was primarily ekphrastic, and in a way that is how I try to encounter the world.
What good things are you bestowing on yourself, others, your places, and the broader world?
I hope the words I write; but along with that, the self it forms me into.
What do you want more of for your creativity and spiritual life?
Spaciousness
What do you want less of for your creativity and spiritual life?
Preoccupation
Is there anything else that you'd like to share that defines or represents this current season for you creatively and spiritually?
My next poetry collection titled "Selves / Seeds" is so amazingly aligned with some of these questions, I was tempted to quote from poems to answer them. It releases in early 2027 from Kelsay Books and is the fruit of a several-year journey tracing the luminous, equally among awe and grief.
Thank you for the chance to ponder these questions - I look forward to reading how others have responded!
Learn about the purpose of the Spiritual Direction for Creative Souls™ Checkup Series here. And if you’d like to participate and be featured in this series, please complete this Google form. I’ll reach out within a week or so to let you know when your checkup responses will be published.
Want to Connect with Other Creative Souls & Feel Less Alone in Your Creative Practice?
Become a paid subscriber to participate in Group Chat for Creative Souls with at least three prompts and facilitated group chats each week on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
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Co-Working + Co-Writing for Creative Souls at least five times each week. Co-Working + Co-Writing schedules will be sent out every Sunday for the upcoming week.
Thank for being here. Please let me know if you have any questions. You can email me at charlotte@charlottedonlon.com but know it may take a week or so for me to respond. This is a lovely and full season for me, but I also need a lot of rest, solitude, and breaks from email.
Much love to the creative souls. May we flourish anyway and take some time to reflect on our creativity and spiritual life.
💚 Charlotte