writing & drawing by hand

A lasting benefit our Benedictine education (ora et labora) brought wonder | wander | women were penmanship classes. Before that we watched our parents writing longhand - admiring their beautiful handwriting and eagerly awaiting our turn to put thought to paper so beautifully. 

"Bayan Ko" chorus in baybayin by Mahala Urra

Long before studies showed the importance of hand writing and how among other things it engages the whole human being - we were encouraged to write legibly and well. 

Being creative ignited our love for cursive early on. Eventually this art form spread into other calligraphic options. Including writing in our own regional native alphabet, badlit - the Visayan version of the better known baybayin, Philippine script of Luzon islands. 

wonder | wander | women creative collaboration

Baybayin is a pre-Spanish 14th to 18th century writing system used in the Philippines to write Tagalog and other Philippine languages and dialects. Baybayin is an abugida, which combines a consonant and vowel into a single symbol that represents a syllable. The name comes from the Tagalog word baybay, which means "to spell".

What is a commonplace book?

Being writers and visual artists, wonder | wander | women love collecting and filling up notebooks. Our post at the beginning of the year talked about our notebook review and the journals we filled up last year. 

Sketchbook with wonder | wander | women’s own handcrafted cover!

Each journal serves a specific purpose: Morning Pages for stream of consciousness journaling, planners for scheduling and keeping track of events, sketchbooks and art books for creative outlets, idea factories and honing our skills. 

studying, resting, writing, learning

Vaccinations are rolling out, variants rampant, summer days hot in one country and damp in the other. What are stay-at-home wonder | wander | women to do? Read, rest, write and learn!

Robin in the garden, watercolours in Paperblanks notebook

world of words

wonder | wander | women are enjoying being in a writing class together. After over a decade of on going classes with writing teacher and author, John McCaffrey - we can finally attend them together on Zoom. 

NYC & Hudson River - Hoboken NJ

Formed our first year in Hoboken, New Jersey - 24 February 2010, where the local middle school was offering some continuing education evening classes. We signed up for a fiction writing class where we met what would be our decade long tightly knit gang. 

John McCaffrey - novelist, columnist, writing teacher

Sadly, the next year Hoboken was low on funds and killed the program. We prevailed on John to continue and moved our venue to the local Symposia Bookstore along the main drag on Washington Street. Through the years we kept to our core group with some new folks showing up once in a while. 

indoor adventures: art journaling

It's Valentine's Day and our feeds are filling up with hearts and gratitude. We want to keep a reminder of life and love as a permanent record - but how to make it special? With our first love - drawing!

journal adventures

There's a secret side to all the adventures we have as wonder | wander | women. We love to share our pictures and mementoes of the places we've travelled as well as records of changing seasons in our neighbourhoods. At the same time we kept a more personal record - our journals.