Cultivating Joy

The Cultivating Joy campaign aims to empower participants and audiences through writing as they explore their relationship with nature in the lowest quartile California Healthy Places Index communities of Southeast San Diego, National City, and Paradise Hills. Partnering with San Diego Writers Ink, de Castro will lead multiple writing workshops in area libraries. Participants will reflect upon the power of writing, nature’s impact on their lives, and how nature embodies transformation. Participants will build community, develop sustainable writing practices, and read their work in public events. De Castro will model her practice by workshopping a play based on interviews with urban gardeners and farmers and commission youth from A Reason To Survive (ARTS) to design and build a soundscape and puppets embodying nature’s cycles, from seed to seedling, growth and decay, and back to seed. The culminating play will be produced in collaboration with Asian Story Theater and performed in the communities that inspired it. The play's content about death, grief, and healing through nature will draw inspiration from the community gardeners, neighborhoods, cultures, and experiences. Afterward, the cast and artists will be available for informal conversation with the audience. The respect given to the communities as they are and the invitation to dream and create on their own terms are hallmarks of social justice.