Book: The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad
Genre: Self help
Publisher: Random House
Publication date: 2025

Source: E-book and hardback borrowed from the library

Summary: The Book of Alchemy contains 100 short essays by 100 authors. Each essay is followed by a creative prompt.

The Book of Alchemy grew out of a COVID project called The Isolation Journals. Jaouad asked a bunch of collaborators to write essays with prompts and sent them out as a newsletter each day for 100 days.

Through these essays and prompts, which were interpreted in so many ways beyond the typical pen-and-paper diaristic entry–from daily sonnets to songs and drawings–the alchemical properties of journaling showed us how to turn isolation into creative solitude, confinement into connection, and confusion into clarity and calm. (p. xxiv)

The 100 days concept came from designer and teacher Michael Bierut. He writes about it in the third essay in The Book of Alchemy called “The Art of Dailiness.” He assigned a project to students, The 100-Day Project: “Starting tomorrow, do one creative act that you can repeat for 100 days.”

Here’s the result of one student project to dance to a different song in a different place every day — he put snippets of each together to create this video:

Thoughts: Yesterday, I completed my 100 days, responding to the 100 journal prompts in The Book of Alchemy. Yay! The first thing that I’m noticing is that I have a sense of accomplishment. This was not difficult for me and, yet, the consistency of effort was rewarding.

The first essay, “Here Goes Nothing” by Dani Shapiro is the perfect first prompt — write for ten minutes as if you aren’t afraid.

Of course, I liked some prompts more than others. Some prompts triggered a huge amount of resistance. If nothing else, I wrote about the resistance which encouraged me to explore interesting places in myself that I usually ignore.

Most of the prompts led to results that held meaning for my day. Many prompts helped me recover memories that I hadn’t thought about in years. Some prompts gave me a delightful opportunity for a moment of creativity in my day.

Since today is the last day of National Poetry Month, I’ll share two prompts that encouraged me to write poems.

In “Breathe Out,” by Sarah Ruhl, poet and teacher, she talks about the relationship between the breath and a haiku.

Over the years, I’ve picked up various meditation techniques. One is the simple 5-7-5 technique; you inhale counting to five, then exhale counting to seven, and then inhale for five again. Exhaling  for two seconds longer than inhaling relaxes your nervous system. When I learned the technique, I thought, Wow, it’s like the haiku in breath form—5-7-5 syllables.

The prompt is to do the breathing technique for a minute with eyes closed and then “write in haiku form about whatever is most present with you.”

Here’s what I came up with that day:

What if it’s a dance?
Lilting, lush, light, powerful
Save democracy.

That gave me a new perspective on how to engage with activism. Of course, it’s serious business but I can take on each task with a light heart.

Twenty days later, I encountered the prompt to “write a bad poem.” This was from author Adrienne Raphel to go with her essay “The Badder the Better.” I enjoyed investigating what a bad poem meant to me and, then, I wrote another haiku. My understanding of haikus is that they aren’t meant to rhyme and they are expected to provide a nugget of something profoundly observed.

I’ve nothing to say
But I’ll write it anyway
Such a bad haiku

Now that I finished my 100-Day Project, I miss it. I’m already figuring out what I can do next.

Have you read The Book of Alchemy? What did you think?