Talking back to books.

True confession: I’ve spent far too much of my life reading books about creativity. The word “obsession” comes to mind. Feeling blocked as a creative, I used to rabidly consume anything that promised insight and release.

Back in the late nineties, before creativity became the subject du jour, I happened across Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. A glance at my dog-eared, annotated copy conjures the thrill I felt at first reading about the theories behind the creative process — a process that, in practice, excited and repelled me in equal measure.

And I remained thrilled as the deluge began: books, articles, blog posts, and, eventually, TED Talks, podcasts, and YouTube videos on the creative process — more information than any one person could take in.

Though I did try.

For 20 years I soaked up everything that came my way. I took courses. I even trained with Dr. Eric Maisel, who coined the term “creativity coach” (a title I used to describe my work until I realized nobody knew what it meant).

I was in constant search for the Big Secret that would open my inner firehose of creativity, as promised by all those experts.

And then, I’m not sure when, but one day I reached the point of total saturation. Clearly, I had over-consumed. I could not absorb another list of the “4 steps in the creative process” or the “5/7/10 ways to be more creative.” I developed an allergy to sentences beginning with “studies have shown” and “according to a recent survey.”  The self-proclaimed experts and their “proven” methods had worn me out.

Fie upon the rules, studies, and experts. Turns out that all my reading about creativity was what I was doing instead of creating.

Which is why I’m surprised that I even picked up — let alone enjoyed — a little book called Great Minds Don’t Think Alike: Discover the Method & Madness of 56 Creative Geniuses.

The book comprises a slender 130 pages, half of which are illustrations, with a single page summarizing the creative process of each of these well-known artists, from Leonardo da Vinci to Bjork and Edgar Allan Poe to Lena Dunham.

While the subject appears to be creativity in general, the author’s genius is her focus on concrete details. She is not rehashing the same old theories about creativity and nary a study is cited. Neither are these mini-biographies nor summaries of the artists’ entire oeuvres.

Instead, each entry highlights a single practice that weaves through that artist’s work.

Most of these artists are little known to me, save for their public personas, but the ones I do know I feel she has captured accurately.

David Hockney I’ve followed avidly for decades, and she headlines his entry with “Same thing, different way.” Perfect. “Hockney’s work has always been explorative,” she writes. “What unites it is a joyful search for newness that allows him to return to the same subject again and again … with fresh eyes.” Exactly right!

Gosling summarizes Werner Herzog’s method for becoming a filmmaker as “read everything.” (You can imagine why this is my favourite entry.) “Read, read, read, read. And then read some more,” she quotes.

For Lena Dunham it’s “fiction from reality.” Gosling tells us, “Dunham has not shied away from creating characters, dialogue, and plot points from the people around her.”

Yoko Ono’s art “centers around making the audience active participants” while Gertrude Stein harnesses time by writing in sprints of about 30 minutes each day, making that small window of time work by seeing “writing as a process of discovery, rather than entering into the creative process with an end result in mind.”

Great Minds is a neat little non-preachy book of creative inspiration by an author who assumes the reader is smart enough to take what they need rather than spoon-feeding us pat advice. I like that.

Great Minds Don’t Think Alike: Discover the Method & Madness of 56 Creative Geniuses

By Emily Gosling

Octopus Publishing Group, 2018

I’m always on the lookout for advice about writing. What can I say? I’m obsessed. I have a long shelf of books on writing and creativity — many of which I’ve even read. But I get a particular thrill when I stumble across writing advice in unexpected places. “Found” wisdom, if you will.

Natural writing

Here’s an example. Decades ago, I fell in love with a book on “natural farming” called The One-Straw Revolution, by renegade Japanese farmer Masanobu Fukuoka. This book turned my head inside-out about how to cultivate the land, and even how to live.

Browsing the library shelves the other day, I spotted One-Straw Revolutionary: The Philosophy and Work of Masanobu Fukuoka, written by one of the American translators and editors of the original One-Straw Revolution. I snatched it from the shelf and sat down on the floor right there at Dewey-decimal 631.58 and started reading. Within minutes, I found writing advice I didn’t know I was looking for, given by Fukuoka at a live Q&A in 1986:

Q: “How do you begin to practice natural farming?”

A: Stop thinking so much. Make your mind like the mind of a baby. They see the world directly without distinctions or judgements of any kind. When you go outside with a clear mind the trees and plants appear so beautifully. The less you think, the more beautiful things become. When you look with your eyes, you can only see the surface. When you look with your heart you can see everything.

Perfect advice for an over-thinker. Not to pull rank or anything, but I may actually be the Queen of Over-Thinking. I’m reminded of the technique of freewriting, in which you keep your hand moving during timed writings, to cut through the mind’s compulsive noise and get down to the bone of raw experience. Natalie Goldberg teaches a freewriting approach in Writing Down the Bones and all her later books, and Julia Cameron uses it in her Artist’s Way morning pages. The most compelling introduction to freewriting for me, though, is in Peter Elbow’s 1978 classic, Writing Without Teachers.

More transferable advice from Fukuoka-san:

Q: Many people trim ornamental plants and even some perennial vegetables in the fall so they will grow out more vigorously in the spring. Do you do that?

A: I would put that practice into the category of a horticultural trick. I allow plants, even the commercial citrus trees, to grow to their natural form. Trimming plants back and pruning orchard trees is really designed to make the plant bow to human will. It comes directly from the mentality that believes that nature exists solely for the use and benefit of human beings …

Here’s an example. One young Japanese fellow stayed at my farm for more than three years to learn about natural farming. Later he came to California with the idea of making the landscape green. He tried to grow rice on a dry hillside in the Coast Range where there was almost no water. He failed because he decided that he wanted to grow rice without first consulting with the spirit of the land and asking what it wanted. The first question you should ask when you come to a piece of land is, “What does the earth need?” not “What do I want to grow here.” “How can I serve nature?” instead of “What can I get from nature?”

How can I serve this writing idea that’s been gnawing at me? Does it want to be an essay, a blog post, memoir, short story, graphic novel? Fukuoka urges us to take instruction from the spirit of our material and the “terroir” of our own particular creative nature. What kind of writing is most natural to you? What sound does your true voice want to make?

When in doubt, improvise

But what if you’re “consulting with the spirit of the land” and you still have no idea what your material wants you to do with it? Don’t just sit there thinking. Pick up your pen or keyboard and write, even if you’re lost and confused. Especially if you’re lost and confused. Here’s where Sally Schneider, author of The Improvisational Cook, comes in:

Improvisational cooking is thrilling. It’s the key to ease and pleasure in cooking, freedom from recipes and set lists of ingredients, and liberation from other less tangible constraints: perfectionism, the voices of “I can’t,” fear of what will happen and maybe go wrong.

When you’re trying to figure out how to tell your story or write your blog post, when you’re doing your best to listen to your material and you’re up in your head thinking, thinking, thinking instead of writing, remember what Schneider says about the creative process:

Much of the process of improvising involves cultivating a mind-set – open, associative, resourceful – that spurs ideas and lets them flow. It’s being willing to ask: What would happen if? What would happen if I seasoned the pork roast with Moroccan spices instead of Italian-inspired garlic and sage? What would happen if I paired prosciutto with roasted apricots? Then you just go ahead and try out your idea, experiment with an open mind and without fear of the outcome, the mess you make, and the possibly imperfect results.

Schneider defines creativity as “relinquishing total control and allowing an idea to develop organically.” This means you might start out writing a blog post, and then realize it’s really a prose poem. Mess around. Do it wrong. Try stuff.

Learning to chop wood

If I had to choose only one book on the writing process, it would The Writing Life by Annie Dillard, a book about so much more than writing.

Wood chopping, for example. I first read the book when I lived on a small West Coast island just north of a similar island where Dillard had once retreated to finish a book. Like her, I lived in a house heated by a woodstove and, like her, I had not completely mastered the essential skill of chopping wood.

Dillard’s wood-chopping was so inept, she writes, that it became a source of regular entertainment for her neighbours. Until, that is, she had a dream one night that instructed her to:

“Aim at the chopping block, not at the wood.”

The instant I read this directive, which Dillard called “the only useful thing I had ever learned from any dream,” I knew it would work for me. So, there you go, wood-chopping advice in a book on writing.

Finding the wisdom that Is yours

You might have noticed that the advice I “found” has a theme: letting go, jumping in, improvising, messing about, allowing the nature of the plants/ingredients/stories to determine the structure. This is the kind of advice I tend to find because it’s the antidote to my particular poison of perfectionistic over-thinking. I need to get my hand moving, pour the words out of my head and onto the page, make a mess. The only way I can begin is to say YES to chaos and uncertainty.

The advice you find might be entirely different, but take heart, it’s out there: the exact wisdom you need in this moment about writing, photography, fashion design, colour theory – whatever your creative practice.

Keep your eyes open. Let it find you.

The One-Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka

One-Straw Revolutionary: The Philosophy and Work of Masanobu Fukuoka by Larry Korn

The Improvisational Cook by Sally Schneider

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

Ultrasound of my grandson, Henry, 2015

Ever fall out of touch with a friend and then put off contacting them because you’ve waited too long? And the longer you wait, the harder it gets? That’s how I feel about writing this blog post.

The priest of blogging solemnly inquires, “How long has it been since your last blog post?”

I must confess: it’s been three long years.

Time to get back in the groove. I’m retooling my business, away from editing and towards creativity coaching, and I need to be walking the talk about the importance of sharing what we make.

But when I sit down to write this post (or anything else, for that matter), a few little problems arise.

My distraction problem

When I sit down to write, I am overwhelmed by one or more of the following:

• Fatigue
• Anxiety
• Fear
• A sense of impending doom
• Confusion
• Hunger
• Twitches, aches, palpitations, spasms
• A mysterious smell coming from the kitchen
• A sudden intense craving for Inspectors Morse, Lewis, Stanhope or Barnaby. And for chocolate.

My past-failure problem

When I sit down to write, I think, what’s the point? I told myself three years ago that I’d keep writing my blog, and I didn’t, so I’m bound to fail again.

(But, what kind of message is this to give my clients — or, for that matter, myself?)

My obligation problem

When I sit down to write, I remember that I haven’t attended to:

• Last year’s taxes
• Keeping in touch with distant friends and family
• Doing my qigong routine
• Putting the beans on to soak
• Learning to speak French
• Finding the source of that smell in the kitchen

I do not actually DO any of these things, you understand, but writing a blog post while they remain undone seems inappropriate somehow. Uncouth.

My idea problem

When I first sit down to write, not a single idea appears on the horizon, I picture myself alone on a vast, empty beach. Then, a distant rumble. I look up and see a towering tsunami of ideas thundering towards me.

Megatons of ideas.

I take the only sensible action. I flee.

My age problem

When I sit down to write, my 58 years heckle me:

So much time wasted! Oh, the things you could have done, the books you should have written!

Margaret Atwood has over 65 books to her name, not counting libretti, TV scripts, anthologies and collected poems. And what have YOU got to show?

What I’ve got is 10 linear feet of journals (I measured), plus all that writing in other people’s books and 18 blog posts from 3 YEARS AGO.

My grief problem

I’ve been creatively blocked for too many years. Now, when I sit down to write, a toxic grief pulls me to it like flypaper. Once I make contact, I feel like I’m stuck fast and cannot get free.

I am just getting started at this “sharing my work” thing. I am late. But am I TOO late?

For women in our reproductive years, the words “I’m late” signal pregnancy, the very acme of fertility.

But at midlife and beyond, doesn’t “late” imply the opposite?

Late bloomer (wasted all that time).

And, eventually, the very acme of “late,” when I someday become the late Marial Shea.

Sorry, am I bumming you out?

Can the biological imperative save me again?

I first experienced the gale force of the biological imperative at age 19, when I was suddenly, inexplicably, compelled to conceive a child. Looking back on the perilously troubled young woman I was, I shake my head at her decision.

Yet, I know it’s one of the few totally unambivalent decisions of my life. No doubts whatsoever. Three years later, I would have a second child. Somewhere in me, I knew these children would save me from myself (thanks, guys).

I used to think “biological imperative” meant our urge to reproduce. But now, well into midlife, I see the true depth and reach of this primal urge.

I am again feeling the imperative, as visceral as when I conceived my babies. But now I yearn to conceive and birth my own creative soul.

These words of writer Linda Kavelin Popov greeted me when I crossed over into menopause:

“As a woman moves beyond her reproductive years, she is ready for her productive years.”

And I am ready for MY productive years or, as I think of them, my creative years.

Not just ready. I feel compelled now to be a maker, as I felt compelled to conceive my children. The force is just as powerful, and when I refuse it my life becomes difficult at best, impossible and grief-laden at worst.

When I say yes, life flows. What more do I need to know?

I am ready, and I am right on time.

P.S. Are there any ways you feel like you’re running late in your creative life, anything you regret not doing? Is there one small step you can take this week towards getting started? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.org is partnering with the stock-photo giant Getty Images to provide a library of new images that better represent women.

Why does this matter?

Well, in Sandberg’s words, “You can’t be what you can’t see.”

I think the problem is bigger than that, though. Even the roles that women are already filling, with competence and acceptance, are not represented in stock photo images. So, obviously, we CAN be what we can’t see. But how does not seeing ourselves affect us … all of us, young and old, male and female?

So What?

Not everyone finds this endeavour worthwhile. If you research the announcement online, you’ll see many comments questioning the need for new stock images. For example:

“This is so dumb …  if there was an incredibly pressing desire for this equitable stock-art as the media informs us there is, someone would already be producing this material and it would be a non-issue.” [Found here.]

And

“Let [’s] get on with our lives ladies and gentlemen. Men don’t compare themselves to advertisements or that ideal image that advertisers try to push down our throats. — we just say to ourselves ‘who cares it’s an advertisement.’” {Found here.]

Should we care about the images in stock photos?

I might not have thought so if I hadn’t gotten such a rude awakening last year when selecting photos for a new legal website.

I’d been hired to write new content for this website. The designer had already chosen and placed a raft of stock photos on the site under development. And the more I looked at the images, the greater my sense of disconnect with the realities of my client’s business and clientele.

When I broached the subject with my client, I realized that nobody else had noticed, including the designer.

“What’s the demographic of your clients?” I asked. “All the photos on your new site are of people in their early to mid twenties. Is that an accurate reflection of your client base?”

“No,” the client assured me, “all our clients are at least in their thirties. Most of them are in their forties or fifties.”

Once alerted to this disconnect, the client asked me to hunt down more representative photos.

But before I solved the age problem, I noticed another one.

The services page for their financial specialists pictured a male professional advising a couple across a shiny glass desk. But the two financial specialists I’d interviewed were women. Were they the exceptions? Is it a male-dominated profession? Back to the client.

“So, are most of your financial specialists men?” I asked.

“None of them are men,” my client informed me. “All women.”

I confess to you that, at this point, I had some petty thoughts about the designer’s competence. Why did they select images of young clients for an organization that serves older ones? And why did they place images of male professionals on pages that describe a female-dominated profession?

Then I started looking at stock photo sites. Go ahead, try it yourself. See how many photos you can find of non-twentysomethings. I’m here to tell you: not many.

And photos of women dispensing expert advice in a professional setting? Really, really hard to find. Believe me, I combed the Internet for hours.

Am I the only one looking for images that better represent women, of all ages, in a diversity of roles? Apparently not. Today’s NYT article reports that “the three most-searched terms in Getty’s image database are ‘women,’ ‘business’ and ‘family.’”

I did manage to find a few new images that added some age and gender diversity to the website. And by “diversity,” I really mean TRUTH. Because the financial specialists really ARE women. And the clients really ARE older.

But to this day, the photo on the financial specialist page depicts a handsome young man in a business suit pointing to a spreadsheet and explaining something to a beautiful young blonde woman wearing a t-shirt and jeans.

The folks at Getty and Lean In have selected 2,500 new images, and plan to keep adding to the library. I applaud them.

I’ll give Ms. Sandberg the last word.

“At Facebook, I think about the role marketing plays in all this, because marketing is both reflective of our stereotypes and reinforces stereotypes. Do we partner into sexism or do we partner against sexism?”

In this video, writer, martial arts teacher and zen priest Keith Martin-Smith interviews his brother, celebrated fine artist Mark T. Smith. The brothers talk about the challenges facing artists today and inquire into what’s shifting as Millenials take on the art world.

“For me,” says Smith, “art is about ennobling the public.” He bemoans the fact that, in today’s upper-echelon art world, he’s not seeing much that’s ennobling.

When his writer-brother asks him what advice he’d give to artists just starting out, Martin-Smith replies, “Get out of the fucking coffee shop and go to work … Get to the studio, start working.”

Now, that’s advice that applies to all of us, whatever our medium or message.

This interview is part of Martin-Smith’s current writing project, a novel-in-progress called Only Everything: A Novel (All About You) for which he’s seeking crowdfunding. Check out his Kickstarter page.

Martin-Smith sold his house to fund his last novel, A Heart Blown Open, which was promptly rejected by his agent. He realized that he’d been subconsciously holding back, “so I could tell myself, ‘Yeah, but I didn’t really try’ when rejection inevitably came.” Discouraged, but only temporarily deterred, he got back to work.

This time I held nothing back, and if the writing wasn’t good enough now, I could at least say that I could do no more, write no better.  This was me at my best, and there was no more to give.  I put everything into this book — time, money, sense of self, purpose for being, and every single ounce of talent I had.

At 38 years of age, I finally became a writer because I finally understood what that meant.

The book went on to be published and to win the Silver Medal Award from Nautilus Books for 2013.

Tonight I attended Vancouver’s 28th Pecha Kucha Night. I’ve been going to Pecha Kucha for nearly two years now, and it’s become my favourite cultural event. If you haven’t yet been to a Pecha Kucha Night, do yourself a favour and go. No matter where you are in the world, there’s probably a Pecha Kucha near you.

Think of Pecha Kucha as a local, informal, affordable version of Ted Talks. Ten presenters show 20 slides each for 20 seconds per slide. I learn things about my own city I never imagined and get inspired by the amazing, creative, transformative things people are doing.

Pecha Kucha was started in Tokyo in 2003 by a couple of architects, Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham, who wanted a way for people to share their creative work with each other. Pecha Kucha has since spread to well over 500 cities worldwide. It takes place in bars, restaurants, churches, beaches and prisons. Pecha Kucha Vancouver is one of the biggest, selling out the Vogue Theatre every couple of months or so. Tickets are a bargain at $15.

If you’re curious or can’t attend in person, you can watch online. But this can’t possibly match the electric buzz and human connection of the live events.

Tonight I learned that:

• Elephants grieve, flirt and make jokes
• Vancouver has one of only two jewellers in North America that uses fair trade gold
• A talk at Pecha Kucha #5 grew into a documentary film and photo-history project on Liberia
• Vancouver is considered the most Asian city in the world outside of Asia
• Lives are being changed and saved around the world by soccer camps, a simple water filtration system and a funding model that feeds photo royalties to development projects

If you get a chance, check out your local Pecha Kucha Night. Or, if there isn’t one near you, get in touch with the PK organizers and start one yourself.

Winnipeg painter and activist Wanda Koop has been making art for nearly 40 years. She is regarded as one of Canada’s most inventive artists.

Koop’s mother, an oral historian, fled the Ukraine during the Russian Revolution. She and Wanda returned to the Ukraine together in 1997 in search of family roots, and Wanda captured their journey in her searingly beautiful documentary film, Wanda Koop: In Her Eyes. (If you’re in Canada, you might find a copy through your local library. It’s a National Film Board production.)

When I first viewed the film, well over ten years ago, I jotted this passage down. I keep coming back to it. Koop’s comparison of the art process to being a refugee stays with me:

When we come to a new place and when people are forced to start over, in many ways that is the art process … [I]n order to create a body of work, we have to be incredibly brave and we have to start from nothing, in a sense, and we have to go to a place that’s as foreign as a new country and we have to learn a whole new language.

How does this relate to all the facile advice on creativity that assures us we can make art without ever leaving the comforts of home?

Koop says it another way in this video clip:

When I’m actually painitng, I’m painting something I’m seeing in my head, not something that exists in the world. I paint it, and then I look at it.