A Painter’s Garden: Cultivating the Creative Life, by Christine Walker is one of my all-time favorite books. But don’t just take my word on it. Here are what other readers think. ***** The parallels between lessons in the garden, the studio, and life in A Painter’s Garden ring true. Christine Walker’s writing is intelligent, evocative, elegant, and articulate. She addresses universal truths about the creative process in an accessible and fresh way. And she renders very complex emotions in beautifully simple terms—weaving her experience of motherhood into an examination of her working methods in the studio, “feeling a cadence as measured as the breathing of a sleeping child.” —Eleanor Coppola is an American documentary filmmaker, artist and writer. She is the director of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse and other documentaries. Eleanor is the writer and director of the romantic comedies Paris Can Wait and Love is Love is…
Tag: Mary Mackey
Innovative Technique for Creative Writing
Today’s guest blogger, Mary Mackey, is a gem in a treasure chest filled with innovative inspiration for writers. Mary shares her unique perspective on accessing creative writing. Your unconscious is packed with ideas, metaphors, visions, plots, dreams, colors, characters, emotions—in short, everything you need to write a great visionary novel. But how do you get to it? How do you step out of the social agreement we call “reality,” and dip into this incredibly rich resource? You could go to sleep and try to mine your dreams, but even if you dreamed an entire novel, the moment you woke up, you would forget most of it within seconds, because you hadn’t processed the ideas into your long-term memory. Worse yet, when you dream, you are not in control, so you can’t do specific things like talk to one of your characters or work out a specific plot problem. Granted, some…
The Village of Bones
The Village of Bones by Mary Mackey reviewed by Jonelle Patrick: Built on meticulous research, this prequel to Mary Mackey’s “The Year The Horses Came” delivers a fascinating and believable glimpse into what life might have been like in long-ago Europe, in a society where the gods are female and women rule. It’s a page-turner of a journey, steeped in ancient beliefs and prophetic visions, given an all-too-human urgency as the priestess Sabalah faces an enemy whose fierce, unstoppable technology could destroy her society’s way of life. Jonelle Patrick, is the author of The Last Tea Bowl Thief and the Only In Tokyo mystery series. The Village of Bones reviewed by Kate Farrell: Ever since I read Merlin Stone’s book, When God Was a Woman, I’ve been fascinated with goddess cultures and what became of them. So, when I discovered Mary Mackey’s Earthsong Series, I devoured every one of the four books and…