Julie Püttgen: Writing & Books

108 Eyes

I set out to embody eyes all over, during a 108-day embroidery and performance extravaganza. This book is available through Blurb.com.

Stories from the Road

This is a blog I started in September 2015, just as I was heading out on the Inner Beauty Pilgrimage to the Sacred-Ordinary Everywhere.

Warrior Suit, Healer Suit

Transforming a found WWII American Red Cross Service nurse’s uniform into the Warrior Suit/Healer Suit over a period of 108 days, I embroidered, moved, wrote, and photographed – every day. I was inspired by the fierce, compassionate energy of the Tibetan Buddhist Dakinis and their iconography of skulls, flames, lotuses, garlands of severed heads, and bone ornaments. This book is intended as a reminder to author and viewer alike of the transformative power of daily, embodied creative practice. It is an invitation to show up as ourselves in the world – sacred, whole, fiery, tender, and more than a little bit weird.
This book is available for sale & preview through Blurb.com.

Rebelle Society

In January and March 2017, Rebelle Society published essays that originally appeared in my Stories from the Road blog.

The White Dress Project

The White Dress Project, a one-hundred-and-eight-day commitment to daily creative practice, required devotional work in embroidery, photography, writing, and movement - every day. This book is available for sale & preview through Blurb.com.

Stories from the Now

…is an older blog, started as a path of reflection & refining the weekly writings I produce with my beloved Notebook Club.  

Storysmuggler: Sewanee Stories

The Fall of 2011 was my last semester of teaching drawing and painting at Sewanee: The University of the South, in Sewanee, TN. During those four months, I wrote stories and recorded them, as a way to see this beloved and complex place more clearly before moving on.

The World Is a Strange Choice
​Right Now

In the infancy of the pandemic,we all found ourselves sudden immigrants to a new land whose rules we knew weren’t the only way to live, whose shores we found it impossible to leave. The ensuing Mental Health Epidemic could also be described as "everyone is displaced, all at once." Calls for help built to a crescendo. Something I didn’t know when I signed up for a Google Voice account for my therapy communications: Google AI would be archiving, transcribing, and in many cases distorting the words of anyone who left me clinical voicemails, for posterity. Like so many new immigrants, these callers’ attempts to share their experiences were altered and encapsulated in unpredictable ways.

This book can be described as a series of dialogue-form visits to a pandemic-era archive at the threshold between the spoken world and the secrecy of the therapy room. It can also be described as a series of dialogues within one immigrant therapist’s soul, as she navigates a new world and her role in it.

This book is available for sale and preview through blurb.com
Forty Words & Forty Days is a collection of forty 40-word essays on The Day My Life Changed (aka every day), written over the course of forty days. Ten Thousand Joys & Sorrows takes ten of those pieces & expands them into ten 100-word essays each.

​For more information about the books - including excerpts & information on how to buy them - please click here.

Goddess is in the Details

I was invited by National Geographic Traveler: India to write a first-person travelogue of my studies at Thangde Gatsal Studio, in Dharamsala, India, and so I did!  

How To Make a Green Goddess

This illustrated book chronicles my studies of Himalayan thangka painting in Dharamsala, India, and shows the process step-by-step.  A full preview is available through Blurb.