Author: Emily Woodward

In December, I returned from a long-overdue trip to visit family in Taiwan. It was my first time back in Taiwan since 2016, and my first time being there with my mom since I was a teenager. The experience was beautiful and energizing. We spent most of our days wandering the streets of Taipei, perusing the markets, and taking the subway everywhere.

Here are some of my favorite photos from the trip.

Returning to these pages to post an overdue life update: In August, I moved to Austin, Texas for grad school. I plan to write more about what this transition has looked and felt like over my winter break, but for now here’s a brief summary:

Reading, writing, learning, thinking.

Biking, running, exploring, looking.

Connecting with new people, missing the familiar ones.

All in all the most beautiful spectrum I could really ask for 🙂

Heading back home to Chicago for the rest of the year feeling full of gratitude.

One of my absolute favorite things to do on the Internet is fall down a rabbit hole of interesting people working on interesting projects. Naturally, while the link that sparks the initial chain often comes from a Google search or from a platform like Twitter, most of what I subsequently “stumble upon” lives outside of these dominant internet spaces – in the parts of the web that still feel homey, creative, endlessly intriguing.

I experienced this feeling over and over again over my winter “break” this past holiday season, much of which I spent focused on building out a proper site for myself and for Contemplation Club. It was during this (admittedly very challenging) period of fiddling around and trying to get a handle on the web development landscape that I stumbled upon web developer Piper Haywood’s work. Specifically, I came across her site while searching for ways to embed Are.na channels onto my own site, and found not only an answer to my specific dilemma but also some great personal website inspiration in and of itself.

I was immediately drawn to the way she uses her personal website as a sort of working scratchpad — a place to record the progressions of thoughts, ideas, projects, and daily life. And much to my excitement, I discovered that she had not only designed her beautiful, functional WordPress theme herself, but that she had published it on Github for others to enjoy. If you’ve already clicked into Piper’s site, you’ll see that hers is theme I’m currently using (and loving). (**Update I also believe it is important to point out that Piper has included the ability to support her work by buying her a “cookie”)

Somewhere on Piper’s blog, she shared this piece from The Creative Independent that presents a really compelling argument for utilizing your corner of the web in this way.

The piece surfaced memories of the way I used my Tumblr page as a teenager — even Instagram, before it became a hyper-commercialized catch-all. But at the same time, its central argument is decidedly anti-platform, viewing the maintenance of an “unfinished,” independent site as a way of resisting the domination of tech monopolies across the web. Coming at a time when I’ve been feeling the exhaustion of scrolling, publishing, and just simply existing on mainstream social media platforms very acutely, these ideas really spoke to me.

In the spirit of this approach, I’m making it a goal to use this space as a true journal of my creative processes over the course of the next year. I don’t think I’ll stop preferring tactile notebooks like my bullet journal, but I intend to use this site as an accompaniment. My hope is that it will become an energizing exercise and a fulfilling space — one that might help me recapture some of that early Internet magic and start to experience the potential of the web in a new way.