radiant fracture

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}