It lives in a place that’s beyond social conditioning.
Many years ago, a friend talked me into attending a creative writing workshop. Since I’d never done anything like that before, I had no prior expectations. I was totally unprepared for what happened. We were given some topic to write about, I put my pen to the page and I found myself writing a fantasy-fairy…
One of the biggest misnomers about creativity is that we need to have “clarity” about something before we begin. The other day I received an email that read: Every day I think about a written book, so I know it is coming. However, I do need clarity in order to bring it into manifestation. I…
This coming winter I’m teaching Psychology of Metaphor at the Institute of Imaginal Studies. In December of 2006, I was interviewing with the Director of IIS and he asked me what I wanted to teach. I found myself blurting out, “Metaphor.” But the truth was, I didn’t know anything about metaphor as an academic subject,…
I’ve always had trouble voicing things… speaking up for myself, calling out deception, and owning my own value and worth. When I was growing up, my mother would always tell me, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” I wasn’t sure that whatever I was thinking was nice, so I stuffed my…
More than anything else, creating something new requires space. Our rational, thinking selves believe that “creative space” means making time in our schedules and physical space in our homes or offices. (You could call this “linear space.”) But the truth is, the creative process works on a different level and requires a different kind of…
There was a child went forth every day. And the first object he looks upon, that object he became. –Walt Whitman The late poet Stanley Kunitz believed that writers often have a “key image” that keeps working them over and over again in their writing. In fact, writers may spend an entire lifetime working one…