Willow Mata

I’m a writer, designer, and teacher based near Madrid. I write about building a writing habit and share prompts to help you (re)start your practice. Along the way, I explore creative writing, teaching, mental health, technology, and life across cultures. Subscribe for a weekly prompt in your inbox!

Latest posts from Willow's Daily Fieldnotes

• Resisting a Future of "Write-Nots"

  Dec 07 ⎯ ❤️1

  Why write at all, when we can use AI to write texts that make sense and may even make us sound smarter than we feel?  Last year, the entrepreneur, investor and writer Paul Graham proposed that thanks to AI, we are heading for a world where fewer people write. In a blog post titled Writes and Write-Nots, Graham argued that writing skills have always fallen on a spectrum from good writers to ok ones…

  

• The Smallest Possible Writing Practice

  Dec 01 ⎯ ❤️1

  Let’s build a habit that stays! wrote the Fika team in their blog post announcing the 4-Week Writing Challenge that introduced many of us to the platform. And looking at the best-of posts from Week 1 and Week 2/3, it’s obvious that while new bloggers in 2025 come from different backgrounds and write about different things, we share one desire: to write more. To build a writing habit. For a lot of …

  

• Raising Humans in the Age of ChatGPT

  Nov 21

  It’s funny that Daddy likes AI and you don’t, my eight-year-old daughter says, looking over my shoulder as I add photos and links to my first Fika post, What AI Can’t Know.  Her comment surprises me. Why do you say that? She bounces next to me on the couch. Because Daddy talks about ChatGPT all the time and you don’t.  You think? My concentration broken, I consider what she’s just said. Do I disli…

  

• What AI Can't Know

  Nov 14

  There’s nothing quite like the pleasure of a midday Sunday coffee at the end of a weekend away with friends. The richness of two days spent laughing, talking, thinking, imagining. Three pairs of hands wrapped around warm cafes con leche. Jackets we pull tight against the autumn air. A question, a topic, a world of ideas to explore before we part ways. What do you think of using ChatGPT for life a…