A blog for writing and ideas from Iskra Johnson

Taos, 1990

Just four months into 2025 the United States – and much of the world within its sphere of influence – has been transformed beyond recognition. As my ability to focus on my own life has imploded under the barrage of political bedlam I have been struggling to find equilibrium. It is all too easy to begin my day lost in the news feed’s convulsions, my awareness derailed and monopolized by the attention economy. Before the internet gate-crashed life, I spent time very differently. My days were built on habits of immersion, attention and focus. When I read books it was a timeless dive of page turning, forwards and back, my scribbled notes in the margins the only resemblance to today’s blinking links to elsewhere – the notes, importantly, placed by me, the original search engine.

Creating a home for writing on this platform is a way of committing to that previous life, and to gathering like-minded tribe. I chose a blog rather than Substack because blogs still allow a writer to create a room of ones’ own, free of clutter and distractions, with some control over the placement of furniture. No screaming reels or videos or ads, and a curated space in which to read and think. Although the writing will sometimes address politics, and modern life – which is almost always touched by digital technology – its sensibility is of another time.

I have been known as a designer and visual artist for most of my professional life. Yet over the decades it is my other avocation, writing, that has given me my greatest sense of purpose. In my thirties, at a writing retreat in Taos with Natalie Goldberg, I found what I did not know I had been missing: “my people.” The days in retreat were structured around formal lessons, readings and excursions to the surrounding Pueblo and Trujillo. For an hour in the morning and evening we came together in small groups for the heart of Goldberg’s teaching: writing practice, moving our pens across paper in concentration and silence, and forming a powerful bond of trust that continued for years. On the last night my group wrote without moon or lamp in the Penitente’s trail beneath Taos Mountain, by that time having no need to even see the paper to form the words. A part of this writing family became a long-term circle in Seattle that wrote together weekly for years, mentored by writers Omar Castañeda, Rebecca Brown and others in the Pacific Northwest literary community.
 
Over time the pressures of career took me away from that world, but writing has always been present, collecting in the stacks of journals begun when I was in my teens. In the 2000’s I began experimenting with expressive narratives about signs and communications on my first blog, Alphabet Roadtrip. In the early days before social media the words flowed with no sense of self-consciousness and little awareness of the expectations of audience. If I had subscribers they came through Feedburner, and I had no idea if someone had subscribed or unsubscribed. I had eclectic and fascinating correspondents from around the world who left comments, curious confessions and love letters.
 
As my career evolved into photography and fine art and the blog became a newsletter I began to get many more responses, including helpful notes saying “This one was just right—not too long!”  or “Never put an image in the middle of the page—have you considered studying design?” The impulse to write with the abandon of Wild Mind became constrained by rules for brevity, actionable bullet points, coupons, keywords, and the terror of overstaying an inbox and getting the dreaded unsubscribes. Yikes! What’s a born over-sharer to do??

Facebook and Instagram to the rescue, or ruin – take your pick. Since the advent of social media I have for the most part abandoned blogging to focus on Writing Captions That Exceed Caption Length. Some of these short pieces have been refined into essays and poems that have made their way onto Medium, Post Alley, and performance at Centrum Writing Conference and venues for Pacific Northwest spoken word. It has been exhilarating to develop a voice “in public,” and to allow the less formal expectations of social conversation to shape the flow of words. Often I have found an ease in social media writing that opens new associations and doors of thought. It feels like it is time now to take what I have learned and push the words further, with longer essays and dedicated experiments in form.

The launch of The Iskra Journal is provoked by the urgency of the political moment. We need political clarity and action. But we need – equally– psychic survival. The core practice of writing I learned with Natalie Goldberg is a direct path to finding that. Navigating today’s blistering pace of change requires a wide and wild mind that allows us to make leaps and connections to meaning from an otherwise exhausting chaos. This blog is dedicated to that path.