As I have sought to invite the feeling of creativity into my life this year, I have encountered a lot of advice on “how to be more creative.” In truth, I have been reading such advice for years now, typically in the search for enhanced “productivity,” which I as an overwhelmed graduate student saw as a panacea to all my ills. In fact, there is a great deal of overlap between creativity and productivity advice. There are good reasons for this, but they are a bit beyond the scope here.
Read moreArtist's Dates
Toward the end of 2020, I decided to pick up a copy of “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. “The Artist’s Way” is a celebrated book for reason, it is a powerful guide to enhancing your creativity. In many ways, “The Artist’s Way” led directly to me choosing creative as my Feelings Collector feeling for 2021. In brief, “The Artist’s Way” is a twelve-week program designed to help its readers overcome their creative blocks and to learn to self-actualize through creating art. Cameron has an implicit theory of flow that aligns quite well with much of what I read and studied throughout 2020 and I will certainly be expanding on that in the future.
Read moreCsikszentmihalyi on Creativity, part 1 of n
I’m putting up an abbreviated post this week, as I will be helping facilitate a Jubilee School for the Debt Collective on Thursday evening when I normally would be writing. Fortunately, I have a lot of drafted and semi-drafted material banked up from playing the Feelings Collector last year to work with when there is less time.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—author of “Flow” and one of my early guides in this adventure—wrote a book about creativity, which I also read last year. “Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention” had a powerful effect in drawing me toward creativity as my chosen feeling for 2021, but I didn’t annotate it as extensively as “Flow” for a couple of reasons that seem somewhat unimportant now. At any rate, I will likely come back to this text, because there are some very useful chapters based on an extraordinarily rich set of interview data. Many of the conclusions in the book—and indeed the quotes below—are based on the collective insights provided into the creative process by the hundreds of individuals who were interviewed for this study.
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