Sometimes creativity “just happens.” A random spark igniting a flurry of experimentation and invention. Marty Carroll, full-time nurse and sometimes seamstress, talks about the inspiration and process of creating fabric bowls.
Continue reading “Creativity Talks: Bowled Over, with Marty Carroll”
During our MFA residencies at the Bennington Writing Seminars, I often noticed a tall, radiant woman. She was in the fiction cohort, so I didn’t work with her, but I always noticed her because of her aura. I called her “The Siren,” because she seemed blessed with an unflagging, joyous spirit.
After graduation, Suzanne founded Gateless Writing, a national organization based on creative brain science and ancient Zen that supports writers to the point of publication and beyond.
I recently caught up with her to learn more about her inspiration for founding the organization, and about her creative process…
Continue reading “Creativity Talks: Suzanne Kingsbury, Discovering the Genius Within”
In January, I announced a new feature of my blog: Creativity Talks, short interviews with creative people about what drives them to create, how they work, what advice they might give us, and whatever else comes up…
Pamela Viola is a photographer and mixed media artist who lives in Old Town Alexandria, not far from me. I met her about 14 years ago, in creative writing classes at Duke University, in North Carolina. I recently reconnected with her.
Continue reading “Creativity Talks: Pamela Viola”
2018 was, for me, a wasted year of missed opportunities and lost ideas. A time of hibernation and suspended animation. Besides the mid-term Blue Wave, there wasn’t much I was happy about. So I’m moving on. It’s a new year. A new focus for the blog. Continue reading “New Year, New Feature”
I was talking to a tech person today about SEO, and how I could improve my blog’s presence in the world.
“How often do you post?” she asked. Continue reading “By Spits and Spurts”
A recent experience attending an exhibit of “Outliers,” self-taught artists, reminded me how the act of observation, of really seeing, is a form of communion. Communion, meaning: the “sharing or exchanging of intimate thoughts and feelings, especially when the exchange is on a mental or spiritual level.” Like the Christian religious ritual, really seeing is a profound, deeply meaningful experience. Continue reading “Communion; The Art of Observation”
I was relieved to learn that I am not damned by my life-long fear of being discovered to be less intelligent than everyone else. According to “Wired to Create,” by Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, a cognitive psychologist, and the scientific director of the Imagination Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, and Carolyn Gregoire, a Huffington Post writer, you don’t have to have a high IQ to be creative, to be an artist: