Creativity and Gratitude: Doodle Edition: Exercises and Inspiration for a Year of Art, Hope, and Healing

Embrace your journey. Share your story. Unlock the power of creativity. In addition to a year’s worth of artistic prompts, this new doodle edition of Creativity & Gratitude features a wealth of space to draw and write, so you can document your creative transformation and manifest a life rich in artistic self-expression.

Sometimes life takes a detour. No matter how much we plan, we encounter bumps in the road that can be frustrating, confusing, and unpredictable. Whether it’s our health, stress at work or home, or current events, we all contend with challenging moments and the occasional curveball. When Amy Oestreicher faced her own detours--including twenty-seven surgeries over ten years and PTSD--she harnessed the power of art to make sense of her shifting roadmap and learned that even when we face the unexpected, we can create something more beautiful than ever imagined. In this transformative, four-color activity book, Amy provides fifty-two prompts--one for every week of the year--in addition to a wealth of encouraging tips and practical guidance, to give you the tools you need to unleash the artist within, heal your soul through creativity and gratitude, and find a positive path forward ripe in artistic self-expression.

Through sections on hope, gratitude, creativity, and storytelling, you will:

• Embrace creativity as a mindset and learn to look at the world through a creative lens


• Challenge old ways of thinking and redirect negativity into creative growth


• Draw, sing, write, collage, paint, and dance your feelings


• Hone the life-changing art of gratitude lists


• Find magic in everyday objects


• Learn the four keys to resilience


• Have space to draw, write, and document your creative transformation


• See inspirational examples of Amy’s art and learn her remarkable story

Whether you are a seasoned artist or novice doodler, working to overcome tragedies or reshape the way you manage everyday stress, this workbook will inspire you to engage a creative mindset that allows you to embrace your journey, share your story, and harness the power of positivity.

Amy Oestreicher was a multidisciplinary creator who overcame a decade of trauma to become a sought-after teaching artist, author, international keynote speaker, RAINN representative, PTSD specialist, and advocate for people with disabilities. She dedicated her work to celebrating untold stories and the detours in life that can spark connections and transform communities, and gave three TEDx Talks on transforming trauma through creativity, which garnered tens of thousands of views, and shared her story on networks such as NBC (The Today Show), CBS, MSNBC, and ABC, and in more than seventy publications on the arts and community transformation. As a visual artist, Amy’s multimedia creations were showcased in galleries in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Chicago, San Diego, and New York. As a playwright, she received several awards and accolades, including Women Around Town’s ＂Women to Celebrate＂ 2014, BroadwayWorld’s ＂Best Theatre Debut,＂ Bistro Awards’s ＂New York Top Pick,＂ and the ＂Singular Award＂ at the Sarasolo Theatre Festival. Her one-woman autobiographical musical Gutless & Grateful toured to over two hundred venues. She was also an Audie award-nominated playwright and her plays were used by a wealth of theater companies and performed across the country by students for immigration festivals, academic projects, and during Sexual Assault Prevention Month. Her writing was published in the Washington Post, Glamour, Seventeen magazine, and the Huffington Post, her story was in the Daily Mail, and her memoir, My Beautiful Detour: An Unthinkable Journey from Gutless to Grateful, was published in 2019. Amy was the founder of the campaign ＂LoveMyDetour,＂ which is used for seminars, workshops, curriculum, books, music, and performances, and is part of the National Initiative for Arts and Health in the Military. At the time of Amy’s death in 2021, she was a candidate for a Master of Fine Arts degree from Goddard College. Find out more about Amy at her website, www.amyoes.com. She lived in Westport, Connecticut.