As you admire a unique piece of pottery, a wave of sensual awareness begins. Slowly, eyes, fingers, hands and mind caress the chosen vessel.
Shinan: Eric, I’m thrilled to have you stop by on your virtual book tour. Please tell my readers about your newly published book, The Van Gogh Blues.
Eric: For more than 25 years I’ve been looking at the realities of the creative life and the make-up of the creative person in books like Fearless Creating, Creativity for Life, Coaching the Artist Within, and lots of others. A certain theme or idea began to emerge: that creative people are people who stand in relation to life in a certain way—they see themselves as active meaning-makers rather than as passive folks with no stake in the world and no inner potential to realize. This orientation makes meaning a certain kind of problem for them—if, in their own estimation, they aren’t making sufficient meaning, they get down. I began to see that this “simple” dynamic helped explain why so many creative people—I would say all of us at one time or another time—get the blues.
To say this more crisply, it seemed to me that the depression that we see in creative people was best conceptualized as existential depression, rather than as biological, psychological, or social depression. This meant that the treatment had to be existential in nature. You could medicate a depressed artist but you probably weren’t really getting at what was bothering him, namely that the meaning had leaked out of his life and that, as a result, he was just going through the motions, paralyzed by his meaning crisis.
Shinan: Are you saying that when a creative person is depressed, it’s existential depression? Or could that person be depressed in another way?
Eric: When you’re depressed, especially if you are severely depressed, if the depression won’t go away, or if it comes back regularly, you owe it to yourself to get a medical work-up, because the cause might be biological and antidepressants might prove valuable. You also owe it to yourself to do some psychological work (hopefully with a sensible, talented, and effective therapist), as there may be psychological issues at play. But you ALSO owe it to yourself to explore whether the depression might be existential in nature and to see if your “treatment plan” should revolve around some key existential actions like reaffirming that your efforts matter and reinvesting meaning in your art and your life.
Shinan: So you’re saying that a person who decides to be a “meaning maker,” is likely to get depressed because of
that decision? What can a writer, artist or potter do to keep meaning afloat in his or her life?
Eric: I think it is a great help just to have a “vocabulary of meaning” and to have language to use so that you know what is going on in your life. If you can’t accurately name a thing, it is very hard to think about that thing. That’s why I present a whole vocabulary of meaning in The Van Gogh Blues and introduce ideas and phrases like “meaning effort,” “meaning drain,” “meaning container,” and many others. When we get a rejection letter, we want to be able to say, “Oh, this is a meaning threat to my life as a novelist” and instantly reinvest meaning in our decision to write novels, because if we
don’t think that way and speak that way, it is terribly easy to let that rejection letter precipitate a meaning crisis and get us seriously blue. By reminding ourselves that is our job not only to make meaning but also to maintain meaning when it is threatened, we get in the habit of remembering that we and we alone are in charge of keeping meaning afloat—no one else will do that for us. Having a vocabulary of meaning available to talk about these matters is a crucial part of the process.
Shinan: So we don't have to cut our ear off or wait until we're dead to make meaning! Let's continue this interview after some tea.
Send comments to shinan underscore barclay at yahoo dot com.
Part 2 Interview with creativity guru, Eric Maisel, Ph.D
Shinan: Could you explain more about the importance of creating a life plan sentence/statement?
Eric: If you agree to commit to active meaning-making, you need to know where to make your meaning investments, both in the short-term sense of knowing what to do with the next hour and in the long-term sense of knowing which novel you are writing or which career you’re pursuing. Having a life purpose statement or life plan statement in place serves as an ongoing reminder of the sorts of meaning investments that you intend to make, both short-term and long-term, and helps you make the right “meaning decision” about where to spend your capital and how to realize your potential.
Shinan: You list a number of core questions relating to creativity and making meaning in our lives. I’m guessing that we alternate between which question applies to us. Does that question that applies to an artist change over time?
Eric: There is no one question, just as there is no one meaning. The meaning-making process is a process of
constant re-evaluation and ongoing analysis as we not only provide answers to our own questions but also provide ourselves with the right questions. For one period of time the questions may center on productivity, creativity, career, and the like, and during another period of time they may center on relationships, service, and the interpersonal sphere. Even on a single day, we might switch from asking ourselves one sort of question (about what project to tackle) to asking ourselves another sort of question (about how to help our addicted child or what to do about a community problem). Meaning shifts; and so do the questions that we pose to ourselves about how to make and maintain meaning.
Shinan: What I hear you saying is that when creative people in particular maintain a connection to their mission or purpose (you call it a Life Purpose Statement in VGB), a connection to the value of their work, and their own value as creative people in the culture, they will be stronger in their work and in their lives. Is that a fair way to put it?
Eric: Yes. Even before you can make meaning, you must nominate yourself as the meaning-maker in your own life and fashion a central connection with yourself, one that it more aware, active, and purposeful than the connection most people fashion with themselves. Having some ideas about purpose is not the same as standing in relationship to yourself in such a way that you turn your ideas about purpose into concrete actions. Self-connection—understanding that you are your own advocate, taskmaster, coach, best friend, and sole arbiter of meaning and that no one else can or will serve those functions for you—is crucial.
Shinan: Do you think people creating in American culture have a more difficult time holding/making meaning for themselves and their work than creative workers in Europe, let's say?
Eric: Yes. The very construction of European society, where people have more days off and more freedom to sit in a café and write, draw, dream, or chat, makes it easier for people to deeply consider how they what to represent themselves and how they want to make themselves proud. That is why European movies are “more meaningful” than American movies: our culture is dominated by the idea of happy endings and by clichéd and superficial examinations of the facts of existence. Because of our insidious pop culture, mass media, and bottom line-driven dynamics, it is harder for a creative person
here to feel motivated to do the kind of meaningful work that is in his or her heart to do.
Stay tuned for our next set of interview questions. Send your comments
to shinan underscore barclay at yahoo dot com.
Shinan: In VGB you mention some of the difficulties that can occur in creative communities when creators attempt to come together and connect with one another. You also refer to "marvels of relating," a phrase I love. What are some steps we can take to improve our chances of giving and receiving these "marvels of relating" within creative community?
Eric: The most important internal movement is toward the belief that other people exist and that other people count. It is very easy to drift from taking sole responsibility for your meaning-making efforts, which is good thing, to a grandiose, arrogant, selfish, and narcissistic place where “only you count.” On the other side of the coin, if you grew up in an environment where the messages you received were about being seen and not heard, about blending in and not standing up for yourself, and so on, then you need to find the courage to stand up for yourself, to maintain healthy boundaries, and to exert your power as the meaning-maker of your own life. One artist may have as his central task treating others better; another artist may have as her central task standing up taller.
Shinan: You write about the difference between busyness and action. Could you give my readers a sample of the self-talk a writer or artist needs to being thinking when he or she steps boldly into action?
Eric: The first step is to completely stop—not to slow down but to completely stop. Learning how to do this (and it isn’t easy, especially in our culture that promotes speed, fracture, and a short attention span) makes all the difference
in a creative person’s life, as internal busyness is completely eliminated if in fact you actually stop, quiet your mind, and allow yourself to calmly grow present. The self-talk is exactly “I am completely stopping,” followed by the idea that you intend to calmly create without worrying about outcomes—that you are just intending to be present and to do your work. If a doubt or a worry intrudes, you dispute it by saying “I’m not interested in that doubt” or “I reject that worry,” return yourself to deep silence, and continue “just working.”
Shinan: Your books, newsletter and coaching program have made a huge difference in my life and creative work. How can my readers find out more about your work?
Eric: They might subscribe to my two podcast shows, The Joy of Living Creatively and Your Purpose-Centered Life, both on the Personal Life Media Network. You can find a show list for The Joy of Living Creatively here and one for Your Purpose-Centered Life here. They might also follow this tour, since each host on the tour will be asking his or her own special questions. Here is the complete tour schedule. If they are writers, they might be interested in my new book, A Writer’s Space, which appears this spring and in which I look at many existential issues in the lives of writers. They might also want to subscribe to my free newsletter, in which I preview a lot of the material that ends up in my books (and also keep folks abreast of my workshops and trainings). But of the course the most important thing is that they get their hands on The Van Gogh Blues!—since it is really likely to help them.
Google Eric Maisel.
Go to www.ericmaisel.com
On www.amazon.com punch in Eric Maisel and review all of Eric's books.
Ditto for Shinan Barclay
Send your comments to shinan underscore barclay at yahoo dot com.
Dr. Maisel’s continual message is that we are meaning makers. It is our choice and our responsibility to bring meaning to our lives. For me, creativity—via my writing, pottery and art—is essential.
Now, he is on a virtual book tour for his latest book, The Van Gogh Blues, the creative person’s guide through depression. Eric will be visiting both my Rainmaker’s Prayers blog and my pottery blog. He’ll be answering some tough questions about both climate change and aging. And, you’re invited to join us. Stay tuned!
Foot, belly and lip are terms that describe the human body and the pottery form.
POTTERY, WRITING and LIFE’s VALUES
During my mid-life writing crisis, the summer of 2000, a friend sent me Marry Your Muse. The author, Jan Phillips, suggested trying a new art form. So I took a respite from writing and signed up for a summer school class in ceramics.
As a child I'd absorbed a sense of color, design and invention from my artist parents. Even then, earth intrigued me. Show me a mud wallow and I'd squish in it. During fourth grade geography, I’d imagined myself as a mud man of New Guinea, and in sixth grade, I’d made my first clay pot while working on the “Dabbler” badge in Girl Scouts.
Twelve years later, as a counselor at Camp Romaca in Massachusetts, I’d spent my days off in the ceramics studio, first pressing clay around my Styrofoam coffee cup and then creating colorful mugs by dripping glazes over the bisque shapes.
Years passed. Back home in Southern California, Glen Ivy Hot Springs opened, inviting my mother, my sisters and me to slather ourselves with red clay and bake in the sun until our skin wrinkled like lizards. We all relished our reptilian personas. That profound experience was such a relaxing stress reducer for us all, that I wrote my master's thesis on “The Historical Uses of Muds and Clays in Healing.” A San Diego editor heard of my work, encouraged me to write about mud, and eventually published my first article “Mud as a Healing Art” in the Holistic Living News.
After I married, a friend gifted my husband and me with handmade ceramic mugs. I thanked her, yet envied the kick wheel in her basement. Then, when I was teaching storytelling at the Sedona Art Center, the evening class happened to have been offered in the ceramics room. Although pottery making has always been on the fringes of my life, it took me twenty more years to explore my connection with it.
***
As a new ceramics student at Southwestern Oregon Community College, the instructor, Sue Scott showed us around the studio. Her enthusiasm was contagious. And, something magical was happening. One woman pressed leaves into clay, then made a vase; another whacked the side of her pot with a ruler, creating a fascinating texture; still another pushed bubble wrap onto the surface of a clay wall-planter.
By draping clay slabs over potatoes, stones and balloons, I too began creating unusual forms. The clay was alive and inviting; I felt its energy, an earthy pleasure. Its response to my touch nourished a primal part of myself missing from my career as a writer. Instead of spinning, my mind was peaceful and clear as I intuited the next finger movement or received suggestions from other students and the teacher. As I learned the craft, I felt a harmony, a resonance, a passion. I fell in love with the ease, beauty and usefulness of clay.
“You're so creative,” students commented. Finally—something comes easier than writing, I thought. With writing, approval often takes months, even years before publishing recognition, and often, not at all. I stared at my stained hands and the dirt lines beneath ragged fingernails. Rough and chapped, my hands flowed as my fingers pursued the clay.
That next fall term, I learned to form shapes on the potter’s wheel. Bowls, bottles and mugs developed in my hands as I watched, awestruck. It was as though my soul, through my hands, had an innate familiarity with centering, opening and shaping clay. It was so easy that I thought perhaps I’d had a past life as a potter and that as the cells of my hands retained the gestures, my DNA retained the memory.
One bowl had a lop-sided wobble that gave it such personality I couldn't toss it out. I trimmed away its surplus clay, until the pile of muddy scraps grew larger and larger and the bowl became a new creation. That moment, I had a flash of insight. “This is what I need to do with my writing—trim the flab.” The next day I attacked a manuscript with scissors, cutting the excess, rearranging paragraphs and reshaping the story. Like the lopsided bowl, my story took on new life as I discovered its heart.
Pottery making is a tangible art. Someone has mined the raw clay, added stabilizers, mixed it to a
uniform consistency, bagged it in twenty-five pound sacks and shipped it to the community college for my use. Sometimes I wish the college writing center could sell me, like magnetic poetry, a twenty-five pound sack of well-turned phrases. But the raw work of writing—ideas and rough drafts—doesn’t come pre-packaged. Writing is obscure, abstract and intangible until the black letters appear on white paper. After that, the raw materials of writing like clay have to be reworked, reshaped, trimmed and polished.
There is a permanence to both of these creative forms. Paragraphs of my written words linger long after the ink has dried and shards from my pottery could last a thousand years. As I form abstract ideas and physical shapes and abstract ideas, I celebrate both arts, the verbal domain of words and the nonverbal kingdom of clay.
My pottery bowls are containers, varying in size, shape and form writings hold the spirit of the story and my writings are also containers, holding the spirit of the story. My handmade pots hold steamed rice and salad; my hand woven stories hold life’s values. Persistence helps me mold and refine both words and clay.
Turn, turn, my wheel! Turn round and round
Without a pause, without a sound:
So spins the flying world away!
This clay, well mixed with marl and sand,
Follows the motion of my hand;
For some must follow, and some command,
Though all are made of clay!
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Keramos (l. 1)
Rhythms of the Drum
My hands thump a strange rhythm on my bottle-shaped Udu; I feel my great-great African grandmother sitting beside me. My roots include the Irish, English, French, Sioux and Afro-American. Besides freckles, a wide nose and curly red hair, my ancestors have endowed me with rhythm. Catch me doing dishes and you'll hear me thumping out a rhythm on the cups, plates, pots and pans-stainless steel knives in each hand become my drumsticks.
In Peter Elbow's Writing with Power, I read that "Sound, rhythm, energy and individuality are basic to a writer's voice." Mmm, drumming and writing share the same elements. Robert Hass, another writer, "thinks of rhythm as a power because it has direct access to our unconscious and because it can enter our minds and bodies and make us move." Hass is talking about the rhythm of language. However, the same unconscious, motivating power is also found in drumming rhythms.
A friend told me that she drums prior to writing. Although I light a candle, say a prayer and ring a little bell to bring my mind to focus, I longed to drum as a warm-up for writing. Then, while house sitting for friends, I borrowed their elk skin instrument and drummed before each writing session, drumming when I was frustrated with the process, drumming when I was overwhelmed with numerous things to do's. Drumming helped me center and enabled me to return refreshed to editing Rainmaker's Prayers Anthology.
"I want my own drum." I saw a Native American drum at an auction and decide to bid. It went for $300. Too much for my budget. Then, in From Mud to Music, I saw the mid-eastern, hourglass shaped ceramic Dhoumbeks. But one musician warned that as the leather dried, it pulled too tight, cracking his ceramic bases. I read about Udus, water bottle drums from Nigeria and, since I'm a potter, decided to make one. Nigerians shape the Udu with clay coils. I don't like manipulating long coils, so I decided to use the potter's wheel to form mine. "Start with nine pounds of clay," the Mud to Music author said. I can barely manage seven. Inspiration! Make bowls and put them together. Bingo. I've made hundreds of bowls. I love their round utility.
"Instead of trying to match circumference to circumference," my ceramic instructor advised, "make several similar bowls and pick two that match. Use the rest for gifts." I ended up with four matching bowls. I put those together, added a cylinder neck, a bottom stand and decoration. I want my drums to be art pieces as well as musical instruments.
Now, a novice drummer, I surprise myself as I sit with my brightly glazed "Udu." This long necked, rounded belly ceramic drum echoes and reverberates. My hands, palms and fingers cup, slap and beat, producing different tones. "Do-ray-me-fa-so," I laugh, knowing that the notes aren't a musical scale, but five percussion sounds.
My hands fly over the Udu's neck and belly holes. Once again, like swimming, gardening, painting and writing, my hands provide pleasure. I drum in the morning, drum when feeling scattered, drum to focus, drum to think, and each time, whether for five minutes or fifteen, I feel centered, peaceful and present. In Drumming at the Edge of Magic, Mickey Hart writes that for shamans, a drum becomes a vibrational vehicle of transport. I like that idea and file it under "advanced drumming."
Drumming creates an ancient rhythm similar to the nearby ocean tides which reverberate up the beach and through the earth to my cottage. Drumming is my heartbeat and breath, the unconscious power of life itself.
People say I'm the most creative person they know. When I house sit, or visit friends, I do watch T.V. however, soon I notice that I feel stupid, my mind stops working as all the images speed shoot into my brain. My dad always said that TV destroys creativity, communication and the family. I could add culture, values and soul nourishment/intamacy.
best of luck in your venture,
shinanpottery.vox.com
shinanbarclay.vox.com
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