When we dreamed NewStories’ Artist-in-Resonance role into being, we were reaching toward creating something we at the time could fully conceptualize: a way to support community-rooted practitioners not just in doing their transformative work, but in bringing us inside it—into the tricky experiments, the doubt-filled pauses, the sudden exhale of breakthrough, and the weight of struggle.
We hoped to model what it means to reflect publicly and creatively on process, not polished outcomes. To sit with questions until they crack open. To stand in the vulnerable center of learning where others can witness—and maybe find permission for their own becoming.
My recent conversation with jesikah maria ross (JMR), our inaugural Artist-in-Resonance, brought this vision to life with unexpected depth.
jesikah had set out to document a series of participatory virtual convenings hosted by the News Futures CARE Collaboratory on how to design “care-full” gatherings. As the Collaboratory founder and facilitator, jesikah had a clear vision for the document: a digital zine capturing what the interdisciplinary group of 34 participants experienced. But as she poured over transcripts and breakout group learnings puzzling over what to publish, she was deeply challenged by a question that stopped her cold:
“I’m wondering, really, is it needed or worth it? If my priority is designing the in-person experience or the online face-to-face experience, if I’m already putting everything into that, do I really need something else?”
This is the kind of question most of us bury mid-project. We push through. Keep our promises. Deliver what we said we would. But our Artist-in-Resonance exists precisely for these moments—to honor the questions that unsettle us, to follow them into uncomfortable places where certainty falls away.
jesikah’s willingness to voice this doubt—publicly, mid-process, without resolution—is its own form of courage. She’s showing us what it looks like to stay true enough to the work to let the questions reshape everything.
The Challenge of Translating Magic
What jesikah discovered reveals something many process artists and conveners know but rarely name: some of the most powerful aspects of our work resist capture.
“Creating that care-full space, which I believe we did incredibly effectively in the CARE Collaboratory, is hugely difficult to translate to the written page,” she shared. “When you’re in a room with people, you feel the energetics of that room. You know when something has been said that lights up the group.”
The evaluations from participants glowed—people described feeling transformed, finding new friendships, experiencing deep belonging. But when jesikah turned to the actual breakout session documents, she encountered a sobering reality: “You would never get that from these documents. There’s not a lot here that I can actually share that is rich information that would make sense.”
This gap between lived experience and documentation isn’t a failure—it’s a fundamental tension in community-rooted work. Illuminating this tension, rather than glossing over it, creates opportunity for mutual learning across the field.
Who Is Documentation Really For?
Another crucial shift emerged through our conversation—one grounded in jesikah’s years of “designing from the margins” in public media, always centering communities most affected in the reporting process as opposed to the typical public media reporting that centers a more mainstream audience.
Initially, she’d imagined the zine as a way to give back to the people who participated in the CARE Collaboratory. She wanted to reflect and honor their experience first. But our dialogue surfaced a different truth: “The people in the room already got what they wanted and needed from the experience. They told me so in emails, calls, and survey responses.”
This led to a significant realization: “I had to rethink who I was designing this zine for. Instead of focusing on the people who were in the room, maybe I needed to design it for the people that weren’t.”
The participants had already experienced the transformation firsthand. The new margins were those who hadn’t been in the room yet, those looking for models and language for this kind of relational practice.
“I think that writing this for the people who weren’t in the room is going to help the people who were – and others in the civic media field,” she explained.
This key shift didn’t come from a manual on community process; it couldn’t. It emerged through sensing that something wasn’t working, questioning why, and exploring possibilities with her zine editor Alisa Barba.
“I do my best thinking in dialogue,” jesikah confessed. “My creativity requires midwifery. Alisa challenged me to consider the audience for the zine being different from those who were in the room. But it took me a lot of mucking around to see the wisdom in her suggestion.”
This kind of experimenting and exploration is exactly what the Artist-in-Resonance is here to reveal and make visible.
When a Metaphor Unlocks Everything
The most generative moment came when jesikah named what had been causing her quiet struggle: the difference between what’s “core” and what’s a “layer” in her work.
“The core is what happens live, face-to-face,” she said. “But for that experience to have a shelf life, to make a difference over time, documentation is the layer—for people in the room, but mostly for people who aren’t.”
Then came the image that shifted her perspective: “I’m now thinking about doing what’s core and then adding to it, like putting on a shawl.”
Suddenly it crystallized. The live experience—embodied, relational, happening in real time—is the body. The zine is the shawl wrapped around it; it adorns, accentuates and enlivens.
“Talking this through helps me embrace that the shawl, or documentation layer, is something different,” she said, relief in her voice. “I don’t need to try and replicate the core. I can’t. And that’s what’s been my struggle.”
She’d been wrestling with transcripts, breakout notes, chat logs—trying to capture the vibe of what happened while also making it actionable. Attempting to make documentation do the same work as the live experience itself.
But a shawl serves a different function than skin. It has its own aesthetic, its own purpose.
“The IRL vibe matters for the core, but for a layer, the tools and key ideas need to be conveyed in a different way—that’s what a written piece can do.” The zine doesn’t need to recreate the gatherings’ warmth and sense of connection. It needs to be its own thing: useful, actionable, beautiful.
This opened another insight about what “useful” really means. As jesikah reflected: “In the arts, one of the things we often talk about is that one can be transformed not by what is said or done, but by what is felt. A painting isn’t necessarily talking to you or a dance performance isn’t giving you actionable information. But it is getting you to feel and understand something in a very different way.”
Sometimes illumination offers connection, inspiration, and pattern recognition that allows us to find our own next steps—rather than prescribing them. The shawl doesn’t have to be a guidebook, walking others through how to accomplish something. It can be an art in and of itself, transforming and resonant.
This metaphor, born through dialogue, offers something to anyone doing documentation work: The shawl doesn’t replicate the body. It safeguards, broadens, and beautifies in its own way. And sometimes we need someone else in conversation to remember why we’re putting on the shawl at all.
The Vulnerable Parts Matter Too
NewStories’Artist-in-Resonance role has been developed to illuminate successes as well as the lesser-seen failures, uncertainties, and breakthroughs. So it matters that jesikah shared this:
“I was raised in a capitalist culture, so unfortunately I sometimes equate my self-worth with the products I produce. And as a result, it can become very important to me to create the “best” product, working way overtime and negatively impacting my quality of life.”
She’s using this zine publication project to practice “right-sizing”—aligning her work with available resources rather than working endlessly or paying out of pocket to achieve incredibly high standards. “I’m working on changing that,” she said.
This is the work of transformation we often keep private. By illuminating it, jesikah models something crucial for those of us navigating similar pressures.
An Invitation to Resonance
Part of our purpose is to be in relation to others doing similar work. So I want to extend some reflection questions for our community:
- What tensions do you navigate in your own community-rooted work that rarely get illuminated publicly?
- How do you distinguish between core and layers in your practice—between what must happen live and embodied, and what can extend through other forms?
- When have you had to follow an uncomfortable question into unexpected places? What did you discover?
We’d love to to hear from you.
We’d love to hear what you are discovering.
We’d love to seed more conversations on these questions.
About jesikah maria ross
jesikah maria ross is NewStories’ inaugural Artist-in-Resonance, a process artist and participatory mediamaker exploring how care-full gatherings can generate connection, belonging, and possibility. The CARE Collaboratory is an initiative of News Futures. Learn more about jesikah’s work at jesikahmariaross.com.
About SPARC
NewStories created the Artist-in-Resonance role to support community-rooted practitioners in their experiments and to illuminate the nuanced trajectories of their creative journeys— successes, failures, uncertainties, breakthroughs and all— for mutual learning and growth.