Goodness Gracious
All creative work is becoming; it is more alive or less alive, and our job as artists is to nurture life.
Art Making
Liberating Stories
We jam our experiences into a box and come to love that box, but the work of writing—the work of evolving—requires unpacking the box and building a new one, perhaps a bit more fitting, and then discovering a cloth bag works better, and finally realizing that all these containers are marvelous but incapable of holding the true glory which is our story.
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Play with Me!
Without carving space between and within our necessary activities to engage the world spontaneously, for its own sake, there’s no life-spark. Play is how we come spiritually alive.
Seeking Justice Through Stories
As writers break apart single stories on the page, they also exercise this muscle of multiplicity, strengthening their capacity to withhold judgment and embrace paradox and remain open to new layers of understanding.
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Enduring the Discomfort of Writing
A writer’s capacity to tolerate discomfort, along with violent busts of elation and anguish, determines how deeply and for how long he or she can reside in the generative state.
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What Others Think–What I Think–No Thought
Even an audience of one may be one too many. The self that is vigilant in me is also my monkey mind, and my spiritual practice involves releasing this self again and again. What if the self of my most intimate writing isn’t my real self?
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Intercourse with the World
The main drama of memoir is not what happened in the past but what happens when we consider the past and allow ourselves to be changed by the consideration.
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Writing as Deep Listening
Every story has a hidden life—a soul, if you will. How writers tend this soul significantly affects our work and our well-being. This tending is really active listening. It’s both willful, sprung from the self, and responsive, heeding that life-force beyond the story and its readership.
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Walking On Air
But this is our progression when learning an art, and (I suspect) when living life: First we’re unconscious, then we’re self-conscious, and then we’re aware of being self-conscious, which is truly agonizing. Only then can we come into consciousness and make conscious choices that shape our lives.
From Will to Inspiration: The Creative Spectrum
Both inspiration and willful exertion bring gifts and weaknesses; neither one is more worthy or more likely to produce art. That said, I’m convinced that an artist who inhabits an extreme on the spectrum at the stubborn exclusion of the other extreme is certain to stumble. The best art-making slides up and down the scale.
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