Guest Bloggers

It’s All Grist for the Mill: Weathering the Ups and Downs of the Creative Life

Photo Credit: Erin VonRuden Guest Blogger Mary Kole writes about the creative journey: As much as I wish this wasn’t the case, the creative life is full of ebbs and flows, highs and lows, and any other image you want to ascribe to the push and pull of the artistic temperament. Whether you admit or not, you are a writer, a creative, and an artist, whatever that means to you. If you find yourself grappling with writer’s block or struggling to reignite your passion for writing, fear not. This is perfectly normal, and every writer faces these challenges at some point in their creative journey. And it is a journey. Some writers are only interested in publication, and I can absolutely see where they’re coming from. But they will be in for a long and disappointing ride if they can’t derive pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfillment from the act of writing…

Guest Bloggers

Magic by Rebecca Evans

Rebecca’s writing and her workshops are magical, showing what happens when we let go and are open to making discoveries. Magic by Rebecca Evans: I am an AI Rebutter. I am a Long-Hand-Writer Endorser. I pen pages each morning in a journal, jot a list of tasks to (almost) complete, scaffold essays and poems across composition notebooks. In separate journals, I copy beautiful lines from artists I love, wishing to transfer talent by osmosis. For me, magic begins within this first planting. I lean into an unfolding. Instead of writing towards an idea or theme or popular topic, I follow the words where they lead. It is from this space in my first drafts, I discover seedlings. Tiny sprouts. Sometimes one piece feels as though it could be in conversation with a piece of work I developed earlier. Other times, I might recognize the start of the poem. I rarely…

Guest Bloggers

Best Writing: From the Heart

Guest Blogger Sarah Chauncey writes about increasing energy, exploring ideas, and preventing burnout: You’re driving on a long stretch of highway when you have an insight about your main character’s childhood. Or you’re mid-hair-rinse in the shower, when you suddenly understand how to bring together the braided strands of your novel. Or you wake up at 2 a.m. with the resolution to that thorny plot issue you’ve been wrestling. Have you ever noticed how many ideas arise when you’re not sitting at the keyboard?  As writers, we’ve all experienced the law of diminishing returns—the point at which our writing stops being generative and begins to feel like we’re pulling each word from our synapses by hand. I spent the better part of a decade investigating how to create what I half-jokingly call a “law of increasing flow.” How might writers support our writing practice in a way that doesn’t leave us mentally…

Guest Bloggers

Freeing Your Creativity

Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray writes about: Freeing Your Creativity. Does it feel like your creativity is locked up tight in a box you are afraid to open? You put it in there long ago when your third grade teacher didn’t like your drawing or your father disapproved of you wasting your time writing poems or your grandmother told you that you didn’t have as good a singing voice as your sister. It happened to me in junior high school when my in my design class the teacher exclaimed about a drawing I actually really liked, “Suzanne, you can do better than that.” Decades later I’ve yet to pick up another drawing pencil. The Creative Self The creative self is a tender and vulnerable part of us, so it doesn’t take much to discourage it. I could have left the creative urge locked up with my drawing pad. Fortunately, I found…

Guest Bloggers

A New Beginning

Guest Blogger Tamara Belinfanti writes about a new beginning. A few years ago, I found myself called to write exuberant, colorful stories with riotous characters that defied rational thinking and did not fit the mold of legal academia, which was my background. At first, like so many, I ignored the inner whisper to explore new territory. But the thing about callings is that they get louder when you get really still or something shakes your world. For me, the latter forced the former: my closest mentor in the law field passed suddenly, and alongside intense grief, a new beginning emerged. In academia, I had a built-in community of mentors and colleagues, plus the academic publishing path was fairly straightforward. My tenure process was not a walk in the park, but overall it was relatively hitch-free and went according to plan. Creative writing was a whole new terrain. I had to…

Guest Bloggers

Cavorting With Words

Guest Blogger Grant Faulkner: Since it’s National Novel Writing Month, I wanted to share my thoughts on the creative process that is at its core: writing with abandon. This is a reprint of an essay that originally appeared in Poets & Writers. A few years ago I grappled with a simple question I had never before bothered to ask myself: Did I decide on my writing process, or did it decide on me? Despite an adult lifetime of reading innumerable author interviews, biographies of artists, and essays on creativity, I realized I’d basically approached writing the same way for years. And I didn’t remember ever consciously choosing my process, let alone experimenting with it in any meaningful way. My approach formed itself around what I’ll call “ponderous preciousness.” I’d conceive of an idea for a story and then burrow into it deliberately. I’d write methodically, ploddingly, letting thoughts percolate, then marinate—refining…

Guest Bloggers

Creativity Is A Practice

Suzanne Murray writes about the rewards of engaging our creativity. There is a growing awareness that creativity is a capacity that everyone has, though they may not understand what is involved in accessing it. One of the main things that gets in the way of people embracing their creative gifts is a belief that creativity should be easy; that it should just flow out. They think they should be good at it immediately. If they are not and it’s not easy, there is a tendency to think there is something wrong with them and it’s never going to work. Yet creativity in whatever form you choose to pursue is a complex process that actually asks a lot of us. This is why is feels so good to engage since it helps us discover that we are capable of more than we thought possible, including working from expanded abilities. It is…

Guest Bloggers

Show Up And See What Happens

Photo by Marlene Cullen Guest Blogger Suzanne Murray writes about the power of commitment and practice. Whether it’s for writing, meditation, exercise, or anything you want to do but feel resistance to, establishing a practice can help you move forward in magical ways. It signals to the universe that you are committed. Having a practice means that you show up every day, no matter what. Release all expectations of outcome or where you think you want things to go. It doesn’t matter how good you are or what you accomplish or what happens with the practice. You sit down to meditate and your mind goes wild with chatter the entire time, that’s fine. You show up to write and find yourself whining on the page, that’s okay. The point is to show up and practice. A lot of things are happening when you show up consistently to something. You begin…

Guest Bloggers

The Seasons of Being A Writer

Guest Blogger Megan Aronson writes about the seasons and cycles of life and being a writer. “I’ve been lost and reclusive of late as I deal with the most recent iteration of my grief-growth cycle,” my friend Candace Cahill, author of Goodbye Again, wrote in an online writing group I belong to. “Learning—the hard way, mostly—new things about myself and the challenges still ahead.” My eyes hovered over her words as her thoughts echoed my own. I wasn’t the only one who’d stopped at the words “grief-growth cycle.” Soon the comments were flooded with replies like, “Grief-growth cycle. I feel that. Never thought of it that way before.” In two sentences, Candace had fully encapsulated the collective experience of being a writer. Continually turning ourselves inside out on the page and off, we each instantly recognized the “grief-growth cycle” as the intersection of life affecting our writing, and writing affecting our…

Guest Bloggers

Letting Go . . . An Essential Skill For Writers

Guest Blogger Bella Mahaya Carter: Last week, I went to the dark side. I kept trying to get out of my low mood, which I created by misinterpreting a situation, making presumptions about other people’s opinions about me, and then listening to—and believing—the small voice inside my head ranting about what a terrible person I am. These thoughts looked real. They weren’t. They were expressions of fear. Having been beaten as a small child, I can sometimes be a hyper-vigilant people-pleaser, and when I sense others are unhappy with me, it can trigger the kid who feels unsafe. Last week, when I was in that low mood, I kept trying to do things to get out of it, but nothing helped. I finally realized there was nothing to do except sit with my uncomfortable feelings, be compassionate with myself, and wait for my mental storm to pass. There was nothing…