This week, my husband held our annual discussion to figure out the best day for mentoring. He began mentoring two or three years ago through Hughson Unified School District. They utilize the PE classes, to pull children once a week out of regular life to spend a class period with an adult from the community. The adult acts as a stable presence for that child, another ear to listen, another person to be with. The interactions are student-led. The mentoring room has a multiple of potential activities, but even with all the appeal, some students choose to sit and draw with their mentor or just kick a soccer ball. There is something to the familiar face, seeing the person as the years go by.
Mentoring plays an important role in life.
Our mentors may come in the form of grandparents, aunts or uncles, bosses or HR directors. They might be neighbors who know more about irrigation than we do. Or they might be fellow parents, just one developmental stage ahead of us, with some insight of how it is possible to come out on the other side of raising toddlers or teenagers with a relationship intact.
Mentors help us see a road ahead that we have not yet traveled. They give us courage to face that which is unknown to us, because it is no longer unknown to them, and the good ones probably also help us see that it’s okay, it really is okay that this is a mess right now. It is all part of the process.
Move Slow & Make Things: Pursuing the Delightfully Fulfilling Creative Life by Marian Parsons comes out this September. Marian Parsons is my mentor. She does not know me, although we exchanged a couple email’s regarding upholstery and an antique ironstone chamber pot. But any friend who has spoken with me about anything remotely personal has probably heard me say her name or mention her blog.
I had marriage mentors, but I did not have homemaking mentors, until Marian.
I met her through the Miss Mustard Seed blog, where she painted with her milk paint line, she sewed slipcovers for upholstered chairs, she ran a monetized website. None of this I did, not have I done, nor do I plan to do.
It was not in what she did, which was fun to read and watch as the years passed by. It was in the message she gave. When Parsons started her business, she and her husband had two young children, no spending money, and student debt. Her entrepreneurship came out of necessity, and as she learned over the years and shares in this new book, so did her creativity.
She needed to be creative, for the creative-types, it is a bit like breathing. And according to Parsons, because we are created beings, we all actually have this need.
So after nearly two decades in the business of being an influencer before it was called being an influencer, Parsons has written this book. It feels like the wisdom of the years that I have read from her boiled down and packaged in a beautiful hardbound copy, sprinkled with lovely photos of her art supplies, in her favorite blue, green and white pallet.
We need voices like this in the world of creativity, on and offline.
We need to hear the importance of slowing down, savoring, resting, growing in curiosity, perspective and growth. We need the encouragement to try new things, to make the necessary space to do that, to make a record, to connect with others, and to balance making a living with living a life. All this she talks about.
Without mentorship, we can fall prey to the voices of the world that say it everything needs to be perfect, it all needs to be a hustle, it needs to be photograph-ready, that is useless to be small, personal, and good enough. But Parsons reminds us that small is still beautiful, when you measure the small impacts we make each day through each connection, “At the end of the day, you start to see how large a life that actually is. It is an enviably big creative life,” Parson writes.
And all the joy and sorrow we take with us on the road as we live this life, the new experiences and knowledge we add to it become part of the wellspring whenever we are creative.
“An artist must have experiences to draw from. Your experiences are a well that is full of everything you’ve done, witness, and felt. It’s all the places you visited and lived, the people you’ve met and known, the books. You’ve read, the movies you’ve watched, and the music you’ve listened to, the classes you’ve taken, the food you’ve tasted, and everything you’ve done. It’s all the joy, hurt, love, and sorrow stored in your soul, a cache that’s been added to since the day you were born. Whether you know it or not, that store is what you draw from when you create.”
It’s the well of wisdom, of creativity and mentorship.
I am amazed when I look back at the gift this mentor has been to me over my 17 years of marriage. When I set out to write a book review, I had no idea it would be a tribute. With this book, I am grateful that perhaps it might be possible for others to receive the good I gained from her.
And the good is there for others to give as well. Mentoring via one’s profession is one way. Mentoring through the schools is another. Give it a try. You have no idea the impact you might have.
Move Slow & Make Things: Pursuing the Delightfully Fulfilling Creative Life comes out Sept. 1 at all the major booksellers. I recommend Bookshop or a physical local book shop as way to support local retailers.
And if you’re in or near Hughson, Calif., to become a real-life mentor to a local kid nearby, email Suzie Whitfield at swhitfield@hughsonschools.org.
Originally published in the Hughson Chronicle & Denair Dispatch on August 18, 2026. The Hughson Chronicle & Denair Dispatch is part of MidValley Publications and is committed to the power of the positive press. Reprinted with Permission.
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