THE STORYAbout Jill Margo Studio
Everything you see here grew out of a question I've been living with for a long time.
How do I put creativity at the centre of my life?
THE QUESTIONNot fit it in around the edges.
Not save it for weekends.
Not treat it as a reward when everything else was done.
But build a life around it.
For a long time, I thought I knew what the answer looked like.
I thought it meant making a living from my writing. Finding a way to spend more of my time creating and less of it doing everything else.
That question followed me through many chapters. It was there while I worked in literary and arts communities. It was there when I returned to university to study writing. It was there when my husband Andrew and I created an arts space in our city.
The question never went away.
What changed was what I thought the answer required
A SHIFTAs chronic illness and disability reshaped what my days could hold, I began to realize that creativity wasn't happening somewhere outside of my circumstances.
It was happening within them.
Within my body.
Within relationships.
Within changing capacities.
Within the places I inhabited.
Within the seasons I was moving through.
For a long time, I thought many of my struggles were personal failings: not disciplined enough, productive enough, ambitious enough, or consistent enough.
Eventually, I became less interested in fixing myself and more interested in understanding the conditions I was working within.
What I had assumed were personal failings often weren't personal at all. They were responses to expectations about productivity, success, and capacity that I'd absorbed from the culture around me without realizing it.
Instead of asking how much I could squeeze out of my brain and body, I began asking: What am I open and available to today?
That question has become part of the answer.
What I've realized is that putting creativity at the centre of my life has never been about making more things.
It's been about making a life.
A life that can hold creativity at the centre of real conditions, not ideal ones.
That understanding now shapes everything I do
THE WORKWriting remains at the centre of my creative life. It's where many of my deepest interests continue to unfold: attention, care, relationality, and the seasons.
Jill Margo Studio grew from those same interests.
The Commons is where I support writers and artists in building creative practices that can live inside real life.
The Herbarium is where my place-based creative practice is expressed through pressed flower work inspired by the living world around me.
Although the forms are different, they're rooted in the same questions:
How do we pay attention?
How do we stay in relationship?
How do we care for what matters?
How do we honour the season we're actually in?
I'm a writer, place-based maker, and creative practice guide
ABOUT JILLFor more than two decades, I've worked in literary and arts communities as a writer, editor, gallery coordinator, executive director, facilitator, and teacher. Along the way, I've led literary organizations, curated and hosted reading series, administered literary prizes, and supported hundreds of writers and artists.
My writing has appeared in publications including The Walrus and Geist, and has been recognized by the CBC Nonfiction Prize, the Western Magazine Awards, and The Malahat Review. These days, with the support of the BC Arts Council, I'm writing a romantic coming-of-middle-age novel, a collection of essays about flowers and meaning, and a book about creative practice.
Today, I share life with my husband Andrew, a writer and cartoonist, and work from a studio in our suite at Clairden, a historic mansion situated within a remnant Garry Oak ecosystem. The studio overlooks the garden. After years of working wherever I could, this place gave me something I'd long been searching for: space and quiet for the fuller expression of my creative life.
I'm still living the question that began this page.
The answer, it turns out, keeps changing, like the seasons.