What is The Scrap Heap?

The Scrap Heap is a collaborative project by Sarah Tavis and Jennifer Berney, a generative space to explore what might normally be discarded––the bits and pieces of everyday life, the beauty and the decay. We believe in the transformative power of the compost bin and the integrity of the scavenger. We seek a community of readers and fellow seekers who want to dig through the mess and integrate our creative, wild minds into all aspects of life.

Since launching The Scrap Heap in 2023, we’ve been developing an approach to creative process called Joyful Practice where we center the values of analog play, pleasure, and exploration. Through essays, podcast episodes, prompts, and community workshops we offer our subscribers tools for building their own joyful practice.

Join our experiment. Find us in your inbox every week by subscribing.

About Jennifer Berney

Jennifer Berney fell in love with the Pacific Northwest on a family trip to Astoria when she was thirteen years old. Now forty-six, she falls in love with Puget Sound over and over and over. She lives with her partner, two sons, and many animals in a farmhouse on the edge of town. She wrote a book about queer family building, The Other Mothers (Sourcebooks, 2021) and is now working on a book of strange and meandering essays. Her work has appeared in Longreads, The Offing, Tin House, and many other places.

About Sarah Tavis

Sarah Tavis has been a Texas punk girl, a teen mom, a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, a bookseller, an artist, and a teacher of writing. Sarah’s hands are often stained from watercolors and ink and full of garden soil or flour. Everyday she learns more about living creatively in a middle-aged, chronically ill body. Sarah’s novella, Beyond the Pull of Gravity, will be published in Cosmographia Books’ ‘Famous Orphans’ short book series in 2027. She is a founding member of The 3rd Thing, an independent publisher of necessary alternatives.