remember joy.
the joyfire project
cultivate joy
At the Joyfire Project, we believe joy is a natural resource that fuels our resilience, ignites our humanity, and sparks community connections.
We facilitate in-person experiences using a combination of art, creativity, and nature to guide people back to joy.
While our events take many forms, they all balance gravity with levity to help people feel lighter, leave rooted, and become a more authentic version of themselves.
Joyfire
noun
1: the visceral, transported feeling you get when your body, your mind and the moment are perfectly aligned
See also: The feeling of being truly alive.
2: a playful ritual of release and renewal, designed to fuel resilience, ignite our humanity, and spark connections
if joy feels particularly hard to access
right now,
you are not alone.
we’ll find it together.
our team
Jenny is an outdoor guide, speaker, professor of creative writing, and an award-winning writer whose work has appeared in magazines across the U.S. Her Substack, Wild Story, is a collection of essays on staying wild, tender, awake, and connected in this world. Wildheart, Jenny’s debut adventure memoir, traces her solo trek across Finland beyond the Arctic Circle, and will be published by DK Books at Penguin Random House in June 2027.
Jenny’s 17-year career as an outdoor guide has taken her around the world leading backpacking, sea kayaking, cultural exchange, winter adventure, and river expeditions from the Peruvian Andes to the wild waters of her home state of Maine. Her 100-mile source-to-sea kayak expedition for clean drinking water was featured in the film Follow the Water.
As Joyfire’s “Joy Astronomer,” Jenny maps pathways to joy as a storyteller, facilitator, flashmob & dance party commander, outdoor expert, and co-dreamer. She never leaves home without a trusty pair of adventure pants and a waterproof ukulele.
what lights Jenny's joyfire:
ordinary magic, old growth trees, wicked good dance parties, goosebumps, the smell of the first snow, whale song, pocket rocks, good cheese, wearing the contents of my flair bag in public, disc sports, bodies of water, singing, getting lost, wonder-crying at the night sky, petting every dog, the northern lights
we are storytellers and playmakers on a mission to get fierce about joy.
Jenny O’Connell
Kate Garmey
Kate is a joy igniter, a skill she honed on solo treks, during kitchen dance parties, and in blanket forts with her kids.
Kate is also a learning experience designer, entrepreneur, and creative coach. She has guided executives through humor and storytelling courses at Stanford LEAD, taught graduate and undergraduate classes in human-centered innovation at Northwestern University, and designed workshops and cross-platform experiences for tech companies like BetterUp and Grubhub. Kate started a community-powered innovation studio, Drink Tank, to connect people with civic causes, community, and the power of playful thinking.
Kate has been a featured global storyteller on PechaKucha.com, and has trained and performed comedy at The Second City and Lincoln Lodge in Chicago.
After decades “away,” Kate has entered her Miss Rumphius Era. She has returned to Maine, where her story originally began, and is enjoying the process of planting seeds.
what lights Kate’s joyfire:
picking right up where we left off, finding tide pools, connecting ideas and people, making up recipes, salsa dancing, a purple winter sunset, a flaky croissant, slicing a paddle into water, the smell of hand-plucked raspberries, having an appropriate use-case for sporks, cuddle puddles, whenever kids want “skabetti” for dinner
let’s light
it up!
want to play? perfect. we do, too.
we would love to hear from you.
