Creative Work: A Report

[radiantfracture]

So. Creative Work. The program is ending. How well did it work?

I would say – it worked.

…Folks! It worked.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of improvements to my creative life:

Structural / formal changes

• I have a daily writing practice I jealously defend rather than constantly sacrificing and deferring.
• I’ve had the longest while-actively-employed writing streak of my life. I want more, but I have some, which is a huge deal for me.
• I have begun to be able to think about the other two parts of creative practice – what the instructor calls “setting up for success” (creating your own infrastructure) and “building your career and platform” (sharing your work, whatever that means for you).
• I have a weekly and quarterly structure I can use to sustain the practice.

Creative progress

• I’ve not only written and drawn something (anything at all), I’ve finally started to turn towards what I think of as the work. Whatever that work ends up being worth, it’s at least what I feel I’m supposed to be doing.
• Hey, know what? This journal and your generous thoughts and comments have been vital to that process. You are the best.

Mindset shifts

• I’ve started distinguishing frustration with external problems from frustration as a sign that I need to move towards more authentic work.
• I have the gumption to apply to a writing residency in Banff (!!). (See below)
• I just feel like I've actually done it, stepped into a full identification as a writer at last.

Community

• I met some really lovely and thoughtful creative folks with interesting practices of their own in fiction and nonfiction writing, collage, painting, and music.
• Telling my friends about the course has elicited offers of collaboration and assistance.
• I have plans to create events that may extend and strengthen my sense of community.

Life Changes

• I'm asking for a 25% leave over the next year to write a book. I've already informally asked -- now I need to do the paperwork.

What Did We Actually Do?

The program ran for 11 weeks. There were three weekend intensives that each ran Saturday and Sunday for 6.5 hours, plus weekly Wednesday night check-ins (2 hours) in person and Sunday night check-ins online (the last one is today). Also, delicious, delicious baking, which is a signature of Good.

The selling point of this program, and it is a big one, is that it provides to the creative person the big-picture visioning, organizational, structural, and entrepreneurial information that creative writing programs largely ignore.

The first weekend was about creative self-discovery – finding what motivates you, what unites your creative practices, how you manifest them in the world. This was probably the most overtly emotional, as it meant digging into the reasons we don’t create, or don’t create what we really want to make. The instructor (Jill) builds a really good container both to feel the emotion and to move on from it into getting excited about change, visioning and planning. It was probably also the most purely joyful, since self-discovery is a favorite activity of many people and has relatively little requirement for follow-through except to feel more aligned with your true purpose, which, hey.

Do not fear, though, coz the program is all about follow-through.

The second weekend was about time. Self-organization, that second piece of the practice. This was, perhaps surprisingly, also emotional / semi-traumatic. I had in my head two kinds of time – fluid, formless time that feels good to me, and structured, rigid time that doesn’t, the latter usually given over to duties to other people and institutions, rather than to the real work. The weekend shows you a third kind, productively ordered creative practice. It takes you through planning a whole creative project, and does it in terms that work for a more fluid creative mind – not rigid outlines, but measures of success – emotional or psychological measures as much as temporal ones. This stuff I’ll have to revisit, because I feel like I didn’t actually come to terms with it until almost the end of the intensive. “I feel like I should go back to the beginning and start over,” I said, a bit haplessly.

For one example, there was a great exercise drawing on the book Designing Your Life (Dave Evans and Bill Burnett), where we listed all the obstacles to our creative practices. The instructor improves on the original model by explicitly including oppression, internalized and external, as obstacles/burdens. You write down all your obstacles, and you sort them out into different kinds of problems, including "gravity problems", which are problems you can't negotiate or positive-think away, like the need for an income, or the cultural fact of transphobia. I found it very helpful to think seriously about what I logically could change and what I just had to work around.

The third weekend was about the final piece, sharing your work. This was a giant download of technical information, design, and branding in the better sense of creating a presence in the world for yourself and your art, rather than promotion for its own sake. This was also very good and productive and requiring of further reflection (hence all my confused posts about newsletters).

Much of the program adapts the concepts of entrepreneurship for creative workers, and a lot of that language is already familiar to me because of my parents' work. I can see that someone else might find it alienating at first, but it's so much in train to right purpose -- creativity, fulfillment, sustainable lives -- that I think anyone would see the benefit.

You also get a one-on-one consult with the instructor about any topic you want. I sorted out some ideas about online presence and also about the challenge of audience (which I think I discovered, grumpily, was more about self-censorship than actual audience).

The only thing left now is to make my last Sunday check-in (which I will do after finishing all of my work at the last minute tonight, as per usual) and the final closing ceremonies, where we all present work we've made during the program (!).

The Residency

Folks. Oh my god. Look at this: Poetry, Politics, and Embodiment. A two-week Banff residency with Billy-Ray Belcourt.

BILLY-RAY FUCKING BELCOURT. Two-spirit Driftpile Cree poet, Griffin Prize winner, Oxford scholar, creator of exactly the poetics I wish existed in the world, and now they are there.

It's fucking perfect. It's the exact thing. And -- I'm putting together an application.

A completely amazing discovery is that, because of the work we did in this program, when the application form asks me to provide terrifying things like a description of my current project, my artistic statement, my reasons for applying -- I actually know what to say. I've already written
it.

To Sum Up

Whatever else is on fire or drenched with freezing rain, creatively this is such a fucking exhilarating moment.

Of course I'm worried I'll jinx it in a thousand ways -- I'm still me -- but just this much is so much.

I have a lot of work ahead, struggle and grumpiness, backsliding and self-rescue, but I can see a shape to it now, and I have a place (Good) to check in about that shape and recalibrate.

I hope to use posts here to do some of the structuring side of things once the program is officially over. I'll tag those so they can be avoided/found, according to preference.

Thank you for the creative support during the program. Your conversation around the new work I've posted has been of enormous value.

{rf}

Comments

[anne]

I'm so happy for you!

[radiantfracture]

Thank you! It's weird to feel excited about life.

[anne]

It is! I just got back from my company's holiday cocktail party, at which I had actual fun! It's taking some getting used to.

[radiantfracture]

Laughing. That is an achievement! Hurrah for us both, then.

[cmcmck]

Huzzah! :o)

[radiantfracture]

Cheers!

[delight]

This is great stuff!

... How much does it cost. >.>

[radiantfracture]

Right? That's the big question.

I was offered a spot at half price because they were having trouble filling this session, so it was $550 (Canadian) for me, which included six hot cooked lunches on the six intensive days. Full price would have been $1100, I think.

For that, a student got an introductory session, six days of intensive, nine evening sessions, one 1.5 hour one-on-one coaching session, a closing ceremony with champagne and homemade cake, the six aforementioned lunches, fifteen home-baked snacks, a facilitated Facebook group, and a giant pile of really useful reading materials, workbooks, and handouts. And a pen.

The sheer labour the founders put in over 11 weeks is worth that and way more, but yeah -- full cost would have been a barrier. They do have payment plans, and are generally lovely people who care about these things.

[hamletta]

This is great to hear! :)

[radiantfracture]

Thank you!

[sonia]

Yay!!! You took a big risk with time and money and vulnerability, and it paid off! So pleased for you!

Best wishes for that Banff residency!

Looking forward to hearing more about your creations and your process. This update was great to read.

[radiantfracture]

Thank you! I've felt very supported through journal comments and discussions.

It always feels a little bit like tempting fate to say that something went right -- but things going right is also fate -- so -- thanks, fate.

[sabotabby]

All of that is so great to read but OMG I hope you get that residency. That would be incredible!

[radiantfracture]

Right? JFC. I want to go so bad.

[sperrywink]

Wow that sounds intense! Go you for powering through it and building good habits!

[radiantfracture]

Thank you! The course makes it pretty easy by creating attainable goals.

[ursula]

Yay!

Banff is a lovely place to work--fingers crossed.

[radiantfracture]

Ooh, have you done work there? I would love to hear more if you have time.

[ursula]

I have, but not in exactly the same way? There's a mathematical institute at the Banff Centre and I have done several programs through it. It's where I started my current collaboration! I also did a workshop on creative writing in mathematics that involved a heterogeneous group of people. Two interesting poets I met there are Robin Chapman and Madhur Anand. I know Robin has done other writing retreats in Banff--she introduced us to a puppeteer, one evening.

[radiantfracture]

A mathematical centre? I had no idea. That is extra cool. I wonder if I could do something with them about poetry.

I would love to hear more about the collaboration and/or workshop and/or poets, as you feel inspired.

A propos of nothing, I met a puppeteer on the ferry to the Sunshine Coast once. She was very cool.

[musesfool]

Yay you!

[radiantfracture]

Ha, thank you!

[calimac]

Looks like that was really useful for you. Congratulations!

Residency at Banff? You get to eat at the Vistas Dining Room? Oh, goody. The food there is worth the cost of the program by itself: believe me, I've been there (for the string quartet competitions).

[radiantfracture]

Ah, tell me more, if you have the time!

[calimac]

Oh, sure.

So the Banff Arts Centre is a collection of buildings - lodging (mostly hotel-style rather than dorms), concert halls and meeting rooms, library, etc. And one central building has the gym and a quick-stop cafe on the lower floors and dining up on top. There's a sit-down restaurant which I didn't go to, and the cafeteria. The program you've applied for gives credits good for 2 meals a day; my program gave 3. Cafeteria is buffet style with unlimited serving during meal hours, with lots of seating usually segregated by program, so you can find your fellow participants, by full-span windows with the most stunning mountain views ever.

Food is really excellently cooked. Hot food varies meal to meal (except breakfasts, typical North American hot breakfast), there's also salad, and cold meat for lunch. Often the menus are cuisine-influenced: Indian, Mediterranean, Mexican, etc. Not authentic, of course, but really good. There's always plain veggies and rice on the side if you don't care for the mains. Varieties of meats and veggies. Always quickly replenished. After a few days you'll notice how they're repurposing yesterday's leftovers, but it's still good.

Water and ice tea on the tables; servers come around frequently to ask if you want coffee etc.

[shewhomust]

Yay! It worked! Wishing you luck with the residency - but the good news is thst you are ready to apply for it, right?

[radiantfracture]

Yes! And I must try to remember that in the remote event that I don't get in.

[intertext]

You are inspiring. I've been thinking about the Good program for myself, but (and this is not just wibbly wobbly talking) I almost feel like I need to get doing something BEFORE I go there. I have pretensions, but no actual practice (except scholarly work, which I seem to be quite good at). I do hope the Banff thing works out for you, that would be so awesome. And, as I'm sure Kelly would tell you, the powers CAN'T turn you down for a leave for any reason (as long as it's without pay). At least for two years. They have more discretion in the third year. Just so you know.

[radiantfracture]

Thank you! I often feel inspired by your pursuit of a PhD while teaching.

You could always ask Jill what she thinks. In fact, you could book her for a creative consultation.

Would it be photography, or another art, you'd want to pursue? If photography, I think you could safely say you already have a practice. The others I don't know about.

[lb_lee]

That sounds like it was a super great experience for you! Congrats! I know some of my colleagues have done residencies and also spoke highly of it, so it seems a good thing for folks!

[radiantfracture]

Awesome! What sort of residencies? I have never really followed that path.

[lb_lee]

I don't know, since I've only ever applied for one, which is for the comics school up in Vermont. They're generally too expensive for me. But I know they exist!

[radiantfracture]

What's the comics school? I don't know it.

[lb_lee]

It's the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction. A few of my friends and colleagues have gone there, and seemed to like it a lot, but I can't afford it myself.

[green_knight]

(Bah. Thought I'd posted this, but apparently not. Or it was eaten by gremlins).

Thanks for posting a detailed plan. It sounds like the right programme at the right time - how inspiring! I'm wishing you all the best for the next steps on your path and hope the residency works out. But even if this one doesn't, the'll be another, and I actually know what to say is absolutely a milestone to celebrate.

[radiantfracture]

Bloody gremlins.

Cheers for this -- and for the point about residencies! I have to remember that nothing is the be-all end-all. (There's a funny phrase. (Brief jump into rabbit hole) Ah, Macbeth.) It's not the advent of perfect results from fate, but of better preparation on my part for fate.

Yes, the timing means a lot, for sure. I think I have often been waiting for permission to exist. I know you're supposed to just give yourself permission, but I haven't had much facility with that.