✍️#PrideOnThePage (a fun, free, creative community challenge) - runs June 1-30

Join my fun, free 30-day pride month challenge to help us all get to know you better 🏳️‍🌈

Runs June 1-30, 2025 on Substack Notes

🌈 #PrideOnThePage. Come, let's create together.

Queerness isn’t just identity—it’s perception, it’s poetics. It’s the art of seeing what doesn’t fit and making space for it anyway. It’s a language that lives beneath language. A refusal to be reduced. A celebration of contradiction, of survival, of presence.

It’s a story you get to tell in your own voice. Even when no one asks you to. Especially then.

This June, I invite you to join me for #PrideOnThePage, a 30-day writing challenge rooted in queer becoming. It’s open to LGBTQIA+ writers, and to allies who arrive with care, humility, and a listening heart. If you’re here to honor—rather than center yourself—you’re welcome. There’s room.

This is for anyone who’s lived in the in-between.
Anyone who’s rewritten their own definition.
Anyone who finds liberation through language.

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🧭 The Path

The challenge unfolds across five parts, each centered on a stage in the arc of queer voice and self-making. Each part will receive its own essay, setting the tone for the seven days that follow.

🪨 Part One: Rooted

Foundations of Self
We begin at the beginning—with names, origins, first mirrors, and the quiet truths we’ve always carried. This week invites you to write from the soil of your becoming.

🔥 Part Two: Resistance

Power, Protest, and Survival
The second week holds defiance, clarity, reclamation. These prompts ask you to speak from the burn and the boundary—from what you’ve protected and what you’ve risen through.

💗 Part Three: Love

Connection, Intimacy, and Chosen Family
Week three turns toward relationship—kin, touch, devotion, tenderness. This is a space to explore how we are held, and how we hold others in return.

🌈 Part Four: Becoming

Joy, Vision, and Liberation
These prompts center your radiance. Not as decoration, but as declaration. What are you growing into? What freedom calls to you from the other side of survival?

🏡 Final Days: Reflection and Celebration

Crown + Home
We close with return—with naming and arrival. The last two prompts ask: What do you now know? And where do you belong?

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✍️ How it works

Each day from June 1–30, I’ll post:

• One word — a daily prompt that builds on the previous

• A poetic spark — to open the theme and guide your entry point

• A writing invitation — to shape your reflection in any form you choose

This challenge is for writers of all forms and practices: poetry, micro-memoir, lists, lyric fragments, collage, visual art, or whatever your medium may be. You don’t need to sign up.

Just check my Substack Notes or #PrideOnThePage-Hub and the respective Essay for the week each day.

• 🫚 Week 1: Rooted (Foundations of Self) (was June 1-7)

• 🛡️ Week 2: Resistance (Power, Protest, and Survival) (Runs June 8 -14)

• 💗 Week 3: Love (Connection, Intimacy, Chosen Family)(Runs June 15-21)

• 🌈 Week 4: Becoming (Joy, Vision, and Liberation) (Runs June 22-28)

• 🏡 Final Days: Reflection and Celebration (Run June 29 and 30)

The essays for each week will drop
at June 1st, 7th, 15th, 22nd and 29th
16:00 CET, 15:00 GMT, 10AM EST, 7AM PST respectively.

The new prompts will drop each day until latest 16:00 CET, 15:00 GMT, 10 AM EST, 7AM PST. both in the essay for the week, as well as a singular Substack note. Look for Notes of this style.

You can respond right there or in your own space—your newsletter, your notebook, your voice.

No pressure. No perfection. Just presence.

If you choose to share your work publicly, use the #PrideOnThePage and tag me:

Wild Lion*esses Pride from Jay

here on Notes. I’ll be reading, witnessing, and amplifying what I can. This isn’t about platform—it’s about practice.

It’s about voice.

This creative challenge remains open way beyond June 1-30. Whether you move daily, weekly, or whenever space opens up for you, it’s yours to explore in your own time. So, please, don't stress yourself. Sometimes a word, a sentence, a short note is already your answer. You can always return and add to it.

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✨ What becomes of it

By the end of June, you may hold:

• Thirty sparks

• A thread you didn’t know you needed

• A language for something previously unspoken

You might gather what you’ve written and shape it into:

• A stitched poem

• A reimagined About page

• A queer manifesto

• A letter to your future or former self

Or maybe you keep it private. Whole. Undisturbed. That’s writing too.

What matters is that you showed up.
What matters is that you wrote.

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So come as you are.
Bring your story, your pen, your fire.
Let’s put pride on the page—together.

With care,
Jay 🏳️‍🌈✍️

PS – Did you know Mr. Troy Ford over at

is also celebrating Pride month with many cool content? No?? Maybe you like to subscribe to Qstack to find out for yourself!

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• Tap the ❤️ if you read something that moved you—it helps others discover this space.

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Since early 2024, I’ve been navigating the edges of mental health, medical leave, and financial precarity. As I wrote in When Healing Means Losing Everything, I’m in the midst of building something new from almost nothing. This space, and your presence in it, is part of that rebuilding.

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Your support keeps this space honest, independent, and alive.
Thank you. 🏳️‍🌈