What does the art WANT to be? [+ inspiration from Ross Gay]

Hi Reader, 

As creative people, we tend to love learning - there’s an essential curiosity that runs through both.

In line with that, I’ve always been a huge reader. When I got my first library card as a small child, I was maxing it out, lugging full tote bags out of the Minnetonka Library.

These days, I still read a lot, both for learning and pleasure (which overlap, of course!)

I also love reading as a practice for when I’m in a creative winter season, absorbing and consuming inspiration rather than outwardly creating.

🎧 Check out Being A Whole Person S3E18: Feeding Your Creativity in the Winter Season (or read the transcript] to hear more suggestions.

My favorite writing, whether fiction or non-fiction, always contains “nuggets of truth” that illuminate what being human is really about at its core, and Ross Gay’s work absolutely fits that description.

I just finished reading his lovely book of essays Inciting Joy, and “Dispatch from the Ruins (School: the 11th Incitement)” gave me a lot to think about around learning, the education system, and creativity.

In this essay, Ross Gay talks about how, in the college writing classes he teaching, he’s abandoned the typical class format of workshopping, where classmates and teacher offer critiques.

He thinks that this format “ideally would lead to curious questions that incite wonder…[and] might also allow [it] to creep into and even become the ground of the discussion and classroom. What if wonder was the ground of our gathering?”

He contrasts this with how “workshopping becomes about fixing - fix doesn’t only mean “to repair or to correct,” it also means ‘to kill’…[or] ‘to pin down or stick a pin through or hold in place,’ which is also a kind of killing."

"Because isn’t the point of beautiful art—again, like a person, like a life—that it is unfixable and unfixing? That it changes as we change? And that it unmoors us, calls into question what we thought we knew, and who we thought we were?

That’s the art I’m interested in making, teaching, and living with—not fixing work, but unfixing—and I don’t know that methods of creating such work can be taught. …But equally important—or maybe more important, for those of us with some chops anyway—is getting past our desire for mastery, for making it right or doing it well, because a poem isn’t like that.

A poem is often naughty if not outright bad. Disobedient, at the least. Well-behaved, god please no. Hates the clothes you think it should wear. At its best, a good poem, like any good art, is unruly, insubordinate, uncoachable, insolent, and churlish. Surly sometimes, too. Knows your little rules inside and out and thumbs its nose. Sometimes a good poem just don’t wanna.

As you can imagine, this is a puzzle, an unsolvable one if you think of art as something you fix or impose your will on. Something you put a screwdriver to or throw some more parsley or smoked paprika into or squirt a little WD-40 on, to get it unstuck.

But if you think of art as something you wonder about, or listen to, or get lost in the making of, as something that might be trying to show you something you do not yet know how to understand, something that, again, unfixes us, perhaps we can practice making and heeding that.

And if you imagine a classroom as a place where we do this unfixing work together—where we hold each other, and witness each other, through our unfixing—well, that sounds to me like school.”

[I basically want to quote this entire essay, but I’m trying to show some restraint!]

This beautiful definition of art is so permission-giving - the process of art and even the finished product gets to be messy because it’s the process of making sense of life (which is also messy!)

Whenever I get stuck in the paralysis of thinking that my creations need to be perfect, or even just good, it’s always such a welcome shift to go from thinking, “Is this any good?” to “Do I like this?” But sometimes it’s even better to remove myself entirely and just ask, 

“What does the art want to be? What it is trying to teach me?”

Besides helping detach from ego, this is also such a beautiful way to trust the process and be in true collaboration with your creativity.

Like getting to know a person, asking, “Who are you?” might be too big of a question to answer all at once, so you might have to take it a bit more slowly and gradually, asking your project what it enjoys. A friend of mine has said that she needed to take a certain project out on a date, even requesting specific food for it.

Each project is going to be a different relationship, which requires different things from you, as does your overall relationship with your creativity. 

🎧 Check out Being A Whole Person S3E5: How to Nurture Your Relationship With Creativity (or read the transcript) for more perspectives on that.

Do you have a project that has been a bit wily or surly? If you ask it more about what it wants to be, and gain some new information, I’d love to hear about how it went!

📚 Also, fellow book lovers, here’s a list of some of my favorite books on creativity, mindset, productivity, and all kinds of related topics.

📊 And, if you are a fellow Storygraph user (a fun platform for logging books you’re reading) and want to follow me there, I’d love that!

What are you working on lately? I would love to hear about it - hit reply and let me know!

Stay well, my friends - I'm always rooting for you. My inbox is always open, so please feel free to reach out if I can help in any way. 

I always love hearing from you!

Have a lovely week! ⁠

Rebecca

• This interview with Ross Gay on the On Being podcast is quite wonderful - I recommend hearing him speak his own words!
• We Make Everything Harder | Zen Habits - It's really easy to get in your own way, in creativity and other things, so here are some good tips for cultivating more ease.
• Busyness Decoded: How to Limit What You Say "Yes" To | What Works - Tara McMullin has smart takes on so many things, and this is one of them! 

BAWP is currently on winter break, but I popped in with a new year update: 

• Ep. 71: My 2023 Word of the Year + Reflecting on 2022

I still love the practice of choosing a theme word for the year, to help guide new year intentions and goals. It can be a wonderful filter for what feels intuitively right to do and create, whether in place of or along with more structured planning and goal setting.

In this episode I share about my intentions for my 2022 word PLAY, how it turned out in practice, why I’m excited about my new word for 2023, and some tips for choosing your own word of the year.

Join us in Compassionate Creativity Coworking Club 

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Coaching Offerings:

• Rise Above the Overwhelm: laser-focused 1-time sessions

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