Story Telling
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Is there anything from our workshopping sessions you’d like to fold into your piece? Start finessing what it is you’ll share in our final class celebration.
If your schedule allows, also bring a dish to share!
Offer your reflections to this week’s Book Club in the comments
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Use these prompts to shape a personal plan for your post-class creative momentum.
1. What small creative practice can I commit to weekly?
2. Where can I find support/accountability?
3. What is one creative goal I’d like to work toward over the next 3 months?
4. What can I do when resistance shows up?
5. How will I celebrate or honor my creative progress?
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Step 1. Statements of Meaning
Responders state what was meaningful, evocative, interesting, exciting, and/or striking in the work they have just witnessed.
Step 2. Artist as Questioner
The artist asks questions about the work. In answering, responders stay on topic with the question and may express opinions in direct response to the artist’s questions.
Step 3. Neutral Questions
Responders ask neutral questions about the work, and the artist responds. Questions are neutral when they do not have an opinion couched in them.
Step 4. Permissioned Opinions
Responders state opinions, subject to permission from the artist. The usual form is “I have an opinion about _____, would you like to hear it?” The artist has the option to say no.
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Ways to stay involved and in momentum at Story Parlor…
Come share your story or creative piece at our (free!) All Arts Open Mic (held first Sundays from 5:30-9pm)!
Join us for our “Creativity Mixers” on final Sundays (6-8pm) where we engage in a collaborate 1 hour creativity workshop, followed by a creative salon where you have the option to share your work. Donation based.
Recommend Readings
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Excerpt from No More Secondhand Art
By Peter LondonFeelings: what a maudlin, hack word. What a mess of sloppy behavior and muddled thinking here. Yet how is one to account for the human experience if one expurgates feelings from consideration? We can substitute other, more eloquent words for this adolescent-sounding term, feeling. One could speak of inclinations, sensibilities, impressions, susceptibilities, sensations, perceptions, sympathies. But I like the nasty little word, because it refers to a significant dimension of the mind. The body literally does feel different, palpably different, in different emotional states. This connection between states of mind and body is most important for our thesis that the hand guides the eye and eventually guides the mind in creation of transformative images.
Although every act of mind is accompanied by parallel emotions and physiological states, particular events provoke heightened emotional and physical reactions. Here we want to investigate how provocative events can be employed to enhance the creative process and the process of personal transformation. Events that strike us to the quick do so in a holistic manner; that is, whatever the single point of initial entry into our realm of awareness, intellect, emotion, or physical body, the resonance is experienced in all dimensions of our being. Things that really matter to any one dimension of our self matter to all. And the converse is equally true: mosquito bites may be annoying, but they are a surface and passing bodily impression, and as a consequence we rarely get excited about them intellectually, emotionally, or spiritually. A bop on the nose (or the soul) is another matter. Creative Encounters require provocations that set not only our body to swatting and jumping, but our souls. For that we need to invite Creative Encounters that do provoke us to reflect upon the meanings—not simply the data—of our lives.
...We are constructed in such a way that all our parts and all our traits are interconnected at the most profound level of intricacy. This is our nature. This is probably the nature of nature. There is an inherent reciprocity among our dimensions. Poke our system in at any one point, and it pops out in another place, not only once and in one place, but over and over again in many echoing reverberations. If we train ourselves to become cognizant of what our bodies already know and are expressing, we will have important accurate information that can guide us along our way. Any event will set us to reacting, but some events (or questions, in this case) call us to greater things than others do. What interests us is the way the entire self vibrates to any single event, because we intend to utilize this phenomenon to nurture and extend the creative process, and because this same creative process, art can be understood as the externalization of interior states of mind and body.
Big events set up big reverberations—big not only in scale, but in depth, complexity, and subtlety. If we desire art that has great depth, complexity, and subtlety (and we do), then we will do well to initiate its creation through the design of major Creative Encounters that in turn precipitate deep feelings. Big feelings touch upon significant episodes of our life and touch those memories at a great number of points, so that we re-experience the original and now layered episode with substantial fullness. This can provide very rich material for the creative process, while at the same time it makes available large amount of expressive energies. It sets the mind-body-spirit to vibrating sympathetically and heightens acuity in these same dimensions. We can then channel this animated, synchronized, altered self in an energized state into creative encounters.
[pp. 99-100]
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Excerpt from Big Magic
By Elizabeth GilbertThe final—and sometimes most difficult—act of creative trust is to put your work out there into the world once you have completed it.
The trust I’m talking about here is the fiercest trust of all. This is not a trust that says “I am certain I will be a success”—because that is not fierce trust; that is innocent trust, and I am asking you to put aside your innocence for a moment and to step into something far more bracing and far more powerful. As I have said, and as we all know deep in our hearts, there is no guarantee of success in creative realms. Not for you, not for me, not for anyone. Not now, not ever.
Will you put forth your work anyhow?
I recently spoke to a woman who said, “I’m almost ready to start writing my book, but I’m having trouble trusting that the universe will grant me the outcome I want.”
Well, what could I tell her? I hate to be a buzzkill, but the universe might not grant her the outcome she wants. Without a doubt, the universe will grant her some kind of outcome. Spiritually minded people would even argue that the universe will probably grant her the outcome she needs– but it might not grant her the outcome she wants.
Fierce trust demands that you put forth the work anyhow, because fierce trust knows that the outcome does not matter. The outcome cannot matter. Fierce trust asks you to stand strong with this truth: “You are worthy, dear one, regardless of the outcome. You will keep making your work regardless of the outcome. You will keep sharing your work, regardless of the outcome. You were born to create, regardless of the outcome. You will never lose trust in the creative process, even when you don’t understand the outcome.”
There is a famous question that shows up, it seems, in every single self-help book ever written: What would you do if you knew that you could not fail? But I’ve always seen it differently. I think the fiercest question of all is this one: What would you do even if you knew that you might very well fail?
What do you love doing so much that the words failure and success essentially become irrelevant?
What do you love even more than you love your own ego?
How fierce is your trust in that love?
You might challenge this idea of fierce trust. You might buck against it. You might want to punch and kick at it. You might demand of it, “Why should I go through all the trouble to make something if the outcome might be nothing?”
The answer will usually come with a wicked trickster grin: “Because it’s fun, isn’t it?”
Anyhow, what else are you going to do with your time here on earth—not make things? Not do interesting stuff? Not follow your love and curiosity?
There is always that alternative, after all. You have free will. If creative living becomes too difficult or too unrewarding for you, you can stop whenever you want.
But seriously: Really?
Because, think about it: Then what?
[pp 257-260]
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Excerpt from Living an Examined Life
By James HollisWe all know that Socrates urged us to live "the examined life" and added that the alternative was not worth living. What is the examined life, and what is wrong with the unexamined life? What's wrong with hanging out, watching the telly, talking to friends online, getting stoned, and maybe getting laid from time to time? After all, we're all headed to the same place.
Isn't the idea to pass the time as pleasantly as possible, especially since the world is always going to hell anyway, and there is nothing we can do about it?
As pleasure-seeking, pain-avoiding animals, we are also animals with the capacity for self-reflection, including being divided against ourselves and neurotic, as most of us are. But we can bring issues to consciousness and alter their course. The truth is, the unexamined life means that one is living not only unconsciously but also probably living someone else's life as well. Why? Because we are making choices every second, and if the choices are not the products of some differentiated consciousness, they will be driven by the complexes, by the archaic agendas of the past, remaining subject to the pressures of the moment. Either way, such a life is derivative, not generative, secondary, and not really ours.
We are the animal that suffers disconnection from meaning. We drift into avoidant patterns, we fall sway to the loudest voice in the crowd around us, or we slavishly serve the inner tapes that we inherit from family of origin, religious and cultural inculcation, and the persuasive powers of popular culture. In short, it is a derivative life, driven by invisible winds and subject to missed appointments with the soul, lost opportunities to explore the mystery we are in during this short time we have.
As children we all asked the elemental questions: Who am I, who are you, why are we here, what are we to do, and whither do we go? These questions are mostly forgotten, pushed into the suburbs of the busy metropolis of modern life. But they rumble on in the unconscious of us all. We look for them unconsciously in each other, in novels, in television shows, movies, and so on, or we anesthetize their loss in the thousand forms of busyness and distraction our culture provides.
This human animal is a creature of desire, and what it most desires is meaning, and what it most suffers is the loss of meaning. The autonomous judgment going on within each of us is a function of our psychospiritual reality. We can and often must mobilize ego energy and intentionality to address needful tasks, and the maintenance of society often requires us to do so. But mobilization that does not attend the needs of the soul inevitably leads to burnout, ennui, depression, and finally a deadening life. Such a life is sadly more the norm than we wish to acknowledge. Such a life is generally filling time until the guy with the scythe shows up at the door, as he invariably does.
When young, we believed the big folks knew what was going on, that there was a collection of knowledge that we could access to help us understand life, that explained what we were about, how we were to live, and how life could make sense to us. Little did we imagine in those hours of yearning that we grew more through the questions than any answers we might have received. Oh, the world had answers enough-there was no shortage of answers-but none of them fit anymore. After a while, one begins to suspect what is so obvious now: there are only answers to small questions. There are only answers that make sense to you at this moment in your life, and they will fail you later in your journey. What is seemingly true today will be outgrown tomorrow, when life or our own soul brings us a larger frame through which to view them.
One of the problems with complexes is that they have no imagination; they can only repeat the image latent in their formation and the epiphenomenal message that rose to account for that moment. But those moments are surpassed by other moments, other experiences, and other narratives that reposition our sense of self, our sense of world, and our relationship with each other. The plans, models, and expectations of yesterday are the prisons of today. And as Shakespeare noted, no prisons are more confining than those we know not we inhabit. Thus, good souls continue to assiduously apply old understandings to the new terrain of their lives with increasingly diminishing results. And the symptoms intensify. What the new terrain requires, the new stage of the journey demands, is as yet unknown, and thus sometimes we suffer the terrible interim between.
A substantial gift of the therapeutic arrangement is to construct a holding place whereby the deconstruction of the old may take place, exigencies of the moment be attended, and watchful attendance upon the emergent be supported. When approached in good faith, this process normally works because there is always a new plan that emerges from the depths of the soul, when we grow humble enough to wait upon it. Most of the people we admire most throughout history had difficult lives, but they share a common trait namely, that they hung on until the new purpose of their lives emerged for them, and they found the courage to live those new challenges. That is why we admire them and also why we are called to do the same in our lives. What matters is that you live this life by the best lights you have, by what really matters to you, whether or not anyone around you understands or supports that.
What was most troubling to me as a child and as a young adult—namely, the presence of ambiguity and uncertainty—is today almost comfortable. This is because I have learned whatever makes sense today will be insufficient tomorrow when I have larger questions, larger contexts, and more consciousness to bring to the table. I also know, wherever there is "certainty," there either is naiveté, unconsciousness, or defense against doubt. Wherever there is a hysterical certainty, and there is much in our land, it is because doubt has already planted its black flag inside the soul and the ego is running away like a child.
In childhood, simple questions led to simple answers. Because the large questions led to ever-larger uncertainty, many of us shut down, stopped asking, and thereby stopped growing. But the same questions are still being asked in the unconscious: Who am I? Who are you? What is all this about? Whither are we bound, and how am I to live my life? When they percolate to the surface, they bring each of us a summons. The only question is, Will we keep the appointment? Many, perhaps the great majority, never keep the appointment, never show up, and thus lead lives of quiet desperation, suffer anesthetized souls, and have to continuously palliate distracted consciousness. Others show up because they have to. Keeping that appointment is where our lives find their purpose-not in answers but in living large questions that are worthy of the soul's magnitude.
And that is why the examined life matters.
Sources
Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. National Geographic Books, 2016. Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Shambhala Publications, 1986.
Hollis, James. Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey. Sounds True, 2018.
London, Peter. No More Secondhand Art: Awakening the Artist Within. Shambhala Publications, 1989.