Permission to Explore: Spring 2021

Morgan Harper Nichols ’10 on art, faith and the freedom to create

BY SARAH HUXFORD

A global pandemic. Protests over racial injustice. A struggling economy. A divisive election. It's no wonder, in these uncertain times, that people are turning to social media for connection and inspiration. And increasingly, people are finding that inspiration in the art and poetry of Morgan Harper Nichols ’10.

Nichols, a best-selling author who has collaborated with brands ranging from Target to Coach, shares her work daily on social media, where she has more than 1.6 million followers on Instagram. Through direct messages on Instagram and through her website, Nichols invites readers to tell her their stories. She then translates those stories into personalized poetry and art, which she sends back to the reader before sharing publicly, keeping all names and details private.

But in 2006, when she enrolled as a freshman at Point, Nichols never would have guessed this is where her career would take her. A home school graduate who finished high school at 16, Nichols wanted to stay close to home but be able to live on campus. She heard an ad for what was then Atlanta Christian College on Victory 91.5, a local Christian radio station. Her mother (and now manager), Mona Harper, called to arrange a campus visit, and Nichols soon enrolled.

As an introvert, Nichols was most looking forward to the academic aspects of college. “So many of the moments I think back on are moments in the classroom,” she says, laughing. “I loved the social aspects of it; I made friends there. At the same time, though, just being an introvert and someone who kind of had some obstacles socially, I was really excited about going deeper and reading more literature and just kind of having the freedom to express my thoughts.”

A talented musician, Nichols originally planned to major in music. After realizing that what she enjoyed most was discussing and writing about literature, she made the switch to majoring in English. She recalls taking a class on the Inklings with Dr. DJ Dycus, saying, “That freedom to just express myself through words was huge for me, especially coming from having been home schooled.”

At one point along the way, Nichols transferred to a larger institution, but quickly transferred back. She missed the small community at Point, and the opportunity to try a wide variety of things. “As I get older, it’s harder to give myself permission to do that,” she says.

That freedom to explore extended outside the classroom, too. Nichols remembers working as a referee for intramural volleyball, despite knowing very little about the sport and its rules. She laughs, “I was just, like, who let me do that?! I just loved the permission I had. I’m not that way now; I can tend to be a little more reserved.”

“There were a lot of things starting when I was a student,” she says. “If you’re at a larger school, things are maybe more established in a lot of ways, and you just kind of have to pick your thing.”

She recalls deciding to start a campus book club to read The Alchemist. Three people showed up, including Prof. Wye Huxford ’73. “It was just four chairs in McKinney’s, but that was enough for me,” she says. “Having been a kid who was more introspective and kept to myself, that was a big deal. And it’s still huge for me today, to start something, to initiate something like that. That was the first time in my life where I felt like I really initiated things creatively, and whether a few people showed up or a lot of people showed up, it was really important for me to learn that.”

After graduation, Nichols had a plan: to work as an admission counselor and attend graduate school. Her ultimate goal was to be a creative writing professor, and she felt the pressure common to new graduates: to choose a path and stick with it. So she joined the admission team and enrolled in an M.F.A. program in poetry.

Pretty quickly, she realized she had underestimated the time commitment of having a full-time

job, going to graduate school, and planning her wedding to her husband, Patrick (’09-’10). She left graduate school after one semester, but continued to work in the Admission Office.

“I love educating and helping people find knowledge and acquire knowledge,” she says. “Just being able to help students navigate that period of their lives – it was really special to me.” She continues to keep in touch with some of the students she worked with as they enrolled at Point.

Nichols still knew she wanted to pursue a career having something to do with writing, but she wasn’t sure what that would be. In the meantime, her younger sister, Jamie Grace ’12 had begun gaining traction in her career as a Christian singer-songwriter. “The next best thing that ended up being in front of me was that through her, I learned about songwriting publishing,” Nichols says. “I didn’t even know that existed.”

Getting paid to write songs seemed like a dream job to Nichols, but she soon learned how challenging it could be to build a career in the industry. “If you’re a songwriter that no one’s ever heard of before, it doesn’t exactly pay all the bills right away, so you have to get creative about other ways to pad that job,” she says.

Nichols hit the road with her sister, performing music full time. The sisters performed independently, as well as together as duo Harper Still – sometimes combining all three acts in the same show. Performing and touring wasn’t Nichols’s favorite way to make a living, but it did allow her to have some extra time to focus exclusively on songwriting.

“It’s no secret to anybody that a career in music is not the most sustainable financially,” Nichols explains. “It’s very challenging in the arts in general for anybody, myself included, to sustain a career.”

“I was very torn, because I was in a place where I was on the road all the time, I was in Nashville, I was doing all these things to try to create something sustainable for a music career, and I was so exhausted doing it,” she says. “However, I was also broke, and I was like, I can be tired or broke, but tired and broke, that’s a different thing. Something’s got to give.”

By this point, the Nicholses were in their mid- 20s. Patrick had also gotten into the music industry, working as a tour manager and doing merchandise. Both were wondering if the struggle to make a living was going to last forever. Nichols says, “You know you have to pay your dues, but it’s like, okay, when do the dues get paid?”

As the performing side of her music career began to slow, Nichols was doing more and more freelancing work, such as singing background vocals and designing band T-shirts. But she really wanted to get back to writing and making art, and she began to question whether she could even have a creative career.

In November 2016, Nichols was feeling like she needed to give up. “I literally just felt the weight of the world even in my personal life – you know, globally and in the country, I just felt all that tension, all that stress, and just feeling like a failure,” she says.

So she wrote a poem about it. “I actually wrote a poem about giving up on creativity – that’s so Morgan, of course that’s what I did,” she laughs.

After writing the poem, Nichols used her phone to take a photo of it. At the time, she says, her poetry typically just stayed in her journal; she didn’t share it on social media. She felt hesitant to share the poem on Instagram for friends to see. Sitting at home in the midst of a hailstorm, Nichols felt God pushing her not to give up – to share that poem somewhere. She ended up sharing it on Pinterest and promptly forgot about it.

A couple of months later, in January 2017, friends started messaging Nichols to tell her about actors and athletes who were sharing that poem – her poem – all over Instagram. Knowing she had only shared it on Pinterest, Nichols quickly went back to check the pin. The poem had been repinned more than 100,000 times.

“It felt like something had happened, but I didn’t really know what to do with it,” she says. “It was just like, you know, things go viral on the internet all the time; this is just a one-time thing.”

But it wasn’t just a one-time thing. Pretty soon, people starting direct messaging Nichols on Instagram to tell her how deeply the poem had affected them. Many of the messages were from younger women – high school and college students who’d been through significant trauma in their lives.

“That was just such a humbling experience,” she says. “How on earth could something that I wrote about a career failure, or feeling like a failure in my mid-20s – you know, kind of like a typical story – how on earth could something I wrote about that end up meeting somebody in a place where they’ve been through something far more severe than I’ve ever been through?”

Shortly after the poem went viral, someone reached out to commission her to create note cards for the participants in a girls’ retreat. Soon after that, someone asked her to write a poem to hang in their new baby’s nursery, and her career built from there. She began to gain confidence in sharing more of her work as people continued to send her their stories.

Nichols recalls a moment from her freshman year of college, when she says she looked fine on the outside, but felt socially awkward and uncomfortable on the inside. She would spend time sitting on her dorm room bed and staring at the blank wall. Today, when she receives messages from women around that age, she goes back to that moment to imagine what words she would’ve needed to see on that wall.

Some of the stories she receives stick with her long after she has created and shared the accompanying artwork, especially those from young people in times of transition. “They don’t feel like they have that permission to really express what they’re going through,” she says. “I think a lot of people, even people who have really been through intense things, think that their stories aren’t valid or they’re not worth being reflected in some way. If I receive a message from someone that says, you’ve probably received a million stories like this, or you’ll probably never click on this, I’m like, well here I am, I’ve clicked on it, and I wanted to click on it because you said that.”

Nichols’s social media following continued to grow, but Instagram likes don’t pay the bills. She was juggling freelance projects, and so was Patrick; everything felt chaotic.

Near the beginning of 2019, Nichols was commissioned for her biggest collaboration ever. After completing the project, however, she and Patrick realized that she wouldn’t be paid for nearly three months. A surprise pregnancy around the same time added to the pressure.

Nichols went into the closet in her apartment and pulled out some self-published books she’d sold on Amazon a few years prior. She sent an email to her mailing list, which was fairly small at the time, hoping enough people would buy them to tide the family over until the commission check came in.

“I’ll never forget, it was a Sunday morning, and I sent it right before we went to church,” she says. “Before we could even get into the church, our phones started going off. We had sold out of every single one from the mailing list alone.”

Patrick quickly figured out how to purchase more books at wholesale, and Nichols posted about them on Instagram. They sold out again, and then again.

“Of course, if you’re an artist or you make something, have an online shop,” Nichols says. “It seems so obvious now.”

“I think a lot of creatives deal with this – because we’re creative, we can overcomplicate things, like, I’ve got to build this thing somehow, and yeah, okay, do that, but there’s also a practicality, something practical that can help sustain you and have cash flow. I learned about that word,” she laughs.

As they counted down the weeks to the birth of their son, Jacob, Patrick suggested taking some of Nichols’s art from Instagram and turning it into art prints. Nichols was originally resistant to the idea, but she eventually came around. Those sold out, too. Next, someone asked if they offered stickers, so they sold those as well. The growing online shop freed Patrick up to join the business full time.

Publisher Zondervan also found Nichols’s art on Instagram, and they reached out to her about creating a book of art and poetry. All Along You Were Blooming: Thoughts for Boundless Living was released in January 2020 and became a Wall Street Journal bestseller. Another book of art, essays and poetry, How Far You Have Come, releases on March 30.

“I felt like my poetry wasn’t on par with the poets that I loved, so that was an internal struggle the entire process of working on the book, and even working on future books,” Nichols says.

Even now, moments like singing on stage with her favorite band, Switchfoot, or learning that celebrities such as Reese Witherspoon have shared her work on their social media, seem surreal to Nichols. She recalls going to follow singer-songwriter India.Arie on Instagram, only to realize Arie already followed her. Nichols mentioned one of Arie’s songs on her Instagram stories, and the singer responded to tell Nichols how much she loves her work.

“I really am a firm believer, especially with women, that we pave the way for each other,” Nichols says. “And even though what I do is different than what India.Arie does, she paved the way for me and my sister to be able to do what we do, as a Black woman with a guitar.”

“As I’ve had these moments with people that I’ve looked up to, or people that I just know have paved the way for me in some way, it’s so interesting, because if I had tried to manufacture my way to that, I never would have arrived there,” Nichols adds. “And I have to remind myself of that now. Sometimes I try to plan things too much, and it’s like, no, just let it go and stay faithful to the work, and we’ll see where it goes.”

Today, Nichols and her family have relocated from Southern California to Phoenix, where they’re better able to run their online shop during the pandemic. She is focused on her art, though she and Jamie Grace do still write and perform music as Harper Still. “It’s still a lot of fun, and that is what bonds us as sisters, that we have that common thread,” she says.

Much of Nichols’s work centers around giving ourselves permission – to explore, to be seen, to feel. She says the roots of that sensibility, both as an artist and as a Christian, began during her college days. “I always felt permission and felt free to ask questions,” she explains. “I never felt like, okay, here’s what you need to believe. It’s – let’s go on this journey together, and let’s look at all of this, and then let’s talk about it. I can see threads of that in where I am today.”

During the 2008 presidential election season, Nichols was a sophomore. She remembers gathering in McKinney’s Coffeehouse for a series of discussions on important election issues. Dr. Kim Macenczak (’80-’82) even asked her to moderate one of them. Those times of sharing ideas on campus seem invaluable to Nichols now.

“Yes, there was tension; yes, there was awkwardness; no, everyone was not on the same page,” she says. “But this is us being humans together; this is being the church together; this is what it’s supposed to be about, and I think that gets harder to find, the older you get.”

“I still think back on that moment, and I know we’re in a pandemic right now, but I wish we could have more moments like that. Not that we’re going to be able to sort everything out in that hour of being gathered, but I do think that there is something about just being able to sit with one another and have civil conversations,” she adds. “And whether we walk away with answers or not, at the end of the day, we’re all human here, we are all working through this, it’s messy and it’s awkward, it has to happen, and we’re all going to walk away stronger. Now that I’ve graduated, I can see, you know, all these years later, that that was rare. You don’t get to do that a lot. You don’t get to sit around with peers who come from other walks of life and have conversations about these things. Now it happens on Twitter and Instagram comments, and I’m not sure that’s the best way. It comes out differently face to face.”

College students today have the benefit of being in communities where these conversations can happen more naturally, Nichols says, but we can all create space for that in our lives. And when has it ever felt more important than now?

As Nichols says, “Let this be the season that you just feel the permission to try new things.”

Limited-Edition Print

Support Point by ordering an 8” x 10” limited-edition print featuring Nichols’s rendering of the Lanier Academic Center! The artwork is featured on the cover of this issue; prints will not include the magazine headlines. Prints are available for $25, now through April 30. Order yours today at: point.edu/mhn