Podcast: Arrested Creative Development

Dec 1

We wanted to have a candid chat about where we both are in our lives and in our creativity, because we know you are having that same chat with your friends, your writing groups, and your own self on a near-daily basis. What did 2020 look like creatively? How do we wrap up this year well? What are we setting ourselves up for in 2021?

Resources we shared with you:

Claire Danes narrating the Odyssey is part of what helped Sonya consume good stuff when she couldn’t create after her first surgery.

Sonya has been working through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. Abbie has tried, but found she couldn’t do the emotional + time work of TAW and also do anything else productive.

Need an affordable time-out from your family? See if you can find a monastery or silent retreat center in your area!

We highly recommend rage-journaling. We don’t know if that’s a technical term, but it’s pretty self-explanatory.

Sonya started a newsletter! You can get on the list here in the right-hand sidebar.

Our prompts for you:

List your creative accomplishments -- EVERYTHING counts. There might be more than you think when you actually write it down.

Write a letter to yourself absolving you from creative pursuits - OR - write a letter that’s a healthy pat on the back for what you did do (there are some of you who really had very productive years!).

Knowing what I know now, what would I have done differently? (maybe the answer is nothing!)

If we have another year like this, where does creativity fit? And how?

What pain of this year do you need to let go of? What hard part of this year revealed something in you that you want to take with you in 2021?

What will you do in the rest of December to make space to end the year well (YOU get to decide what “well” means!)? Write it down.

Spend time writing AND Listening for answers

Submission opportunity:

Coffee + Crumbs will be open for submissions in January!

Our quote we shared with you:

“Life is perhaps after all simply this thing and then the next. We are all of us improvising. We find a careful balance only to discover that gravity or stasis or love or dismay or illness or some other force suddenly tows us in an unexpected direction. We wake up to find that we have changed abruptly in a way that is peculiar and inexplicable. We are constantly adjusting, making it up, feeling our way forward, figuring out how to be and where to go next. We work it out, how to be happy, but sooner or later comes a change-sometimes something small, sometimes everything at once -- and we have to start over again, feeling our way back to a provisional state of contentment.” --- Anne Giardini, The Sad Truth About Happiness

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