TAP YOUR TRUTH
My mission is to honor your creative well-spring, to encourage you to believe that it is sacred, to help you experience it as your best resource, and to then provide you with tools to share the gifts that will rise forth as a result.
Berkshire Botanical Garden
Flowers on Paper:
Plant Dyes and Book Art
Saturday through Sunday, September 27-28, 2025
Advent Dark Journal
November 30, 2025 - January 6, 2026
Push back on the pressure to perform the holidays in picture perfect ways by sprinkling your days with creative gestures designed to inspire and comfort.
Backyard Art Camp
AUGUST 2025
Dive into the artful experience in my backyard in Great Barrington, MA!
100 Day Project Community
Follow Suzi at @Suzibb on Instagram to keep track of her 100 Days
With each weekly lesson in our online learning platform, Suzi urges us to reflect on the journal page, to be outdoors and watch the Moon, and to venture into art through collage and paper-y explorations.
Advent Dark Journal offers room to be messy, intuitive, and metaphorical, but accountable to a group of others.
This year, we have a community space within our learning platform in which to share our work and connect with others away from social media.
To be part of a collective engaged in artistic behaviors regardless of organized religion or other affiliations brews empathy and growth in our ordinary lives. We feel threaded to one another in a new way. We are not alone in a season when we are often expected to be cheerful no matter what is going on in our inner life.
This workshop is not religious, though we follow Advent as a time frame. This workshop is rooted in nature, designed to feed you spiritually and creatively. The Moon is our guide. We create a new tradition that seeks to solve the places that current traditions leave us empty. We carry out handmade rituals that connect us to nature and each other.
- Six lessons released weekly on the Kajabi learning platform. The lessons include prompts for creative practice in the journal and with collage, a weekly centering meditation, video lessons on techniques, and other tantalizing provocations which complement a vibrant package of sumptuous supplies that comes to you via the postal service.
Four Live Meetups on Kajabi for community gatherings plus a preparatory gather on Zoom on Saturday, November 22 at 11 AM EST.
A Spotify music playlist
Treasures from the community of Rising Forth include miss polly of herban enclave, Mary Lofgren, and Georgia Wall, The Ceremonialist.
The invitation to share your experience of ADJ in a private community space within the learning platform. This space is facilitated weekly by Suzi and another ADJ guest leader.
ADJ begins with a preparatory Live Meet-Up on Kajabi on Saturday, November 22 at 11 AM. The first lesson is released on Sunday, November 30. Following week one, each week’s lesson is released on a Friday. The course concludes on January 6, 2025. Materials on Kajabi will be available to participants until March 31, 2026.
Register here
A Note about this course
Once you are registered for this course there are no refunds issued. There are limited spaces available for this course which is conducted on the Kajabi learning platform and supported by a handmade package of art supplies.
Please honor the creation of this course by not sharing access to Kajabi or the prompts with people who are not registered for this course.
Suzi reserves the right to expel anyone who does not comply with this request or who does not conduct themselves by the Kajabi community agreements about hate speech.
What People Are Saying from 2024
Join Rising Forth's
WORD CHURCH
Thursday December 18th at 7 PM EST
These creativity sessions are ripe with prompts & poetry & a shared sense of insight borne of time spent quietly writing together. These events are free. They are not recorded. Registration is required.
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/R3e3ECjyTaq2RvhuJIxvbQÂ
BACKYARD ART CAMP
AUGUST 2025
My backyard in Great Barrington, MA!
Backyard Art Camp is an outdoor book art & ritual workshop in the Berkshires
Backyard Art Camp will take place in August 2025. The first session will be a book arts intensive from August 20-27th with one rest day. The second session will be three full days of colorful book art August 29/30/31. Please join Suzi’s mailing list for news of enrollment.
Link to frequently asked questions is here.
Backyard Art Camp September 2024
Photo credit to Pearl Elsbach
BYAC SBB LJ Session
BYAC Session Puzzling Eco
BYAC Brece and Caitlin
BYAC Caroline and Laura
BYAC Caroline and Mary
BYAC Karlee
BYACÂ Laura and Sarah
BYAC LJ SBB Cyanotype
BYAC LJ SBB Cyanotype
BYAC SBB Altar Session
BYAC SBB Helen Eco
BYAC Session Amy Maricle
BYAC Session Brece Focus
BYAC Session Group
BYAC Session Jeanine hand
BYAC Session Jeanine and Julia PE
BYAC Session Julia and Karlee PE
BYAC Session SBB Listening PE
BYAC Session Studio Susan and Karlee PE
BYAC Session Unbundling
BYAC Session 2 Altar Table
BYAC Session 2 Cyanotype PE
BYAC Session 2 Group
BYAC Session 2 Raul and Ginny
BYAC Susan and Caitlin Paste PE
"Camp is sacred, essential, delightful, expansive, generative, meaningful, and such a messy-in-the-paint good time! This was a return to a familiar place, both in the magic that is Hollenbeck, and the familiarity of sisterhood, mudra flow, process, and celebrations with alumni sisterhood. Camp plants seeds in my heart - they root while I make paste paper - then they bloom all year long as I return to what we've created here in my daily practice." ‍
KARLEE FAIN
All supplies & printed instructions included in Camp fee. Also includes libations and bug juice.
You cover housing & travel & lunch. Look for rentals/hotels in the Great Barrington, MA area. Closest airports: Albany, NY & Hartford, CT.
Public transportation from the New York City & Boston area is convenient. My home is three blocks from Main Street, Route 7.
This program is for you if you...
- comfortable working outdoors in all weather
- want to nourish your attention and work with your hands-totally no tech situation here
- want to replace the nasty messages you got about how messy or wrong your art making is
- are an established artist seeking to fine tune your skills
- want to explore mixed media techniques, learn about inhabiting a journal, and are willing to play at the intersection of literary and book art.
- yearn for creative community and sanctuary where your creative expression will be valued above all else.
Flowers on Paper
Plant Dyes and Book Art
With Suzi Banks Baum
Join Berkshire artist and writer Suzi Banks Baum in BBG’s Mother Earth Lodge for a hands-on art workshop on Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 27 and 28 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. We will harvest from the grounds of BBG just as the gardens reach their glorious peak of color. Expect to immerse yourself in the world of natural dyes and make intimate rituals of floral art. You will depart with a beautiful hand-bound book to inspire your creative practice. Along with harvesting and preparation of dyes, participants will be offered a daily centering meditation and writing prompts. A short materials list will be provided upon registration. There will be a materials fee of $15 per person, payable on the day of the workshop. Participants should bring an apron and their lunch.
Register here
Suzi Banks Baum is a protector of imagination, nurturer of attention and devotee to the handmade. Her work dwells at the crossroads of literary and visual art. She creates fresh traditions through the ceremony of daily creative practice. An award-winning author of creative nonfiction and a national workshop leader of book art, Suzi brings an embodied approach to artistic expression with deep respect for land and community.
Join Suzi Today
