꩜ an experiment with devotion ✨
welcome to creative portals—a quiet rebellion against creative stagnation, and a love letter to the messy work of building liberatory worlds (inner and outer).
this space is a living archive, a digital sanctuary, and an ongoing experiment with devotion. a place where i trace the spirals of an anti-disciplinary creative life: the questions that haunt us, the rituals that ground us, the freedom dreams that keep calling us, and the communities that remind us why we create.
this work is rooted in the legacy of Black feminist artists, care/cultural workers, and worldbuilders—the Toni Morrisons who wrote rituals into existence, the adrienne maree browns who taught us the survival strategy of “making kin,” the Lucille Cliftons who turned survival into poetic witness. their devotion to craft as a practice of liberation, community care, and radical imagination is the current beneath this spiral.
what to expect:
🌀 dispatches from the portal — weekly(ish) reflections, soft frameworks, prompts + insights from my studio, often in dialogue with Black feminist thinkers + co-creators
🌀 worldbuilding tools — practices + experiments for nurturing a liberated creative life, inspired by the Octavia Butlers and Faith Ringgolds who showed us how to map futures we're fighting for
🌀 community threads — invitations to engage, share, or simply witness in collective presence, honoring the Audre Lorde truth: “without community, there is no liberation.”
this space is free to access—but it’s community sustained. your support isn’t a tip; it’s a small act of grantmaking. if this work resonates, becoming a monthly sustainer helps keep the portal open. your contributions support my research, writing, radical healing lab, and the daily return to creative ritual—even when the world resists soft, spacious work.
thank you for tending this creative spiral with me. may it unfold in ways we can’t yet imagine.
about dr. nick ꩜
dr. nick alder (they/themme/theirs) is a creative co-conspirator, community designer, + healing spacemaker tending to the intersections of Black queer creativity, collective care, + liberatory worldbuilding. through radical healing lab + party noire, their work cultivates spaces where reflection, joy, and ritual become daily acts of resistance and possibility.
a community psychologist + lifelong student of Black feminist creative practice, nick brings a grounding presence and deep reverence for slowness, storytelling, and tending to the tender. their methodology spans digital gardens, speculative gatherings, visual research, and co-created tools for soft disruption.
creative portal is their living archive—a digital sanctuary for tracking the spirals of process, devotion, grief, memory, and communal becoming. their approach to worldbuilding is shaped by Black feminist thinkers, dreamers, and cultural workers who remind us that imagination is a practice of survival and freedom.
brooklyn-born. queen-raised. grown in chicago. ancestrally rooted in guyana—coastal, humid, storied — nick moves through the world shaped by migration, memory, and rhythm. a lineage of crossings, of reinvention, of softness as strategy. they are always seeking ways to make meaning in motion, to build beauty in community, and to map what might bloom when we begin with care.
permission to share ꩜
please feel free to share this newsletter—or snippets of my writing—with a friend, your group chat, or whatever kindred river you find yourself in conversation with. i only ask that you credit me (dr. nick) and link back to this newsletter or my site when you do. sharing this work helps expand the constellation of collaborators, curiosity-driven creatives, and community sustainers who keep this portal alive. (word 2 seeda school)
p.s. if you’d like to dive deeper, share this spiral with a friend, or become a founding supporter.