Search Results for: creative spark

My religion is the creative spark, my faith the obligation to find my zeal and follow it, and to encourage others to do the same when they are open to it and ready for it. I see in the luminousity of flowers the creative spark calling to us to keep faith and free our inner spirits.

The Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop came to the farm this afternoon to plan the first public reading of our works at Hubbard Hall on Friday, May 21st. There will be a reception at 6 p.m. – you can see their photos, videos, poems, and then at 7 p.m. a reading of our works.  You can order tickets from Hubbard Hall, the Cambridge, N.Y. arts center. That night, I will read from my next book “Second Chance Dog: A Love Story,” and the writers will show their blogs on video screens and read from their works. The Writer’s Workshop began last year and was supposed to last a few weeks, we are going to keep going indefinitely. It’s too creative a group to disband. This is a remarkable group of writers, bloggers, animators, poets and thinkers, one of the most talented and enthusiastic and supportive group of creative people I have meet.

The writing workshops I have heard about are rarely fun. We are having a blast, and moving forward with our work.

I asked each of the writers to start a  blog, and boy, did they ever. Diane Fiore (from left) began writing about her extraordinary relationship with her father, who she did not got along with until he got Alzheimer’s. They had ten wonderful years together. Her’s is a love story told on her blog every day. Her mother has Alzheimer’s now and Diane has moved into her home with her husband to help care for her. Home is where the heart is. People all over the country are finding her poignant writing about her family helpful and riveting. John Greenwood started his career as a milkman and now runs Stewart’s milking operations. His blog, Raining Iquanas is colorful, honest and amazingly creative, a spectacular explosion of writing, video, photography, a powerful new kind of memoir from a creative warrior.

Kim Gifford is a brilliant artist, photographer, writer and teacher. On her blog, she celebrates her quite wonderful art and her all encompassing love of pugs and her search for a meaningful life. Jen Baker-Porazinski is a compassionate and dedicated family physician struggling to keep her humanistic view of medicine in the midst of a complex and sometimes dehumanizing health care system. She writes about her determination to help people heal with great clarity and passion and her perspective as a doctor is very powerful. The writing workshop has helped give Jen a voice about her life in medicine.

Rebecca Fedler is a young poet who grew up on a Washington County farm (she works on the farm and also is a waitress and bartender.) Her blog is new, her poems are powerful, wrenching and honest. I call Rachel Barlow the sustainable Erma Bombeck. She writes about motherhood, family life, and life itself with great humor and insight and especially her two sons, Thing 1 and Thing 2.  Like so many fine writers, she is open and eloquent about her own struggles with depression on her increasingly popular website. Rachel is a talented animator as well as a writer.  She will shortly publish some of her original stories as e-books from her website. She and her family are committed to environmental consciousness and living.

I hope you will check out and follow the work of these very gifted and determined people, and if you can, please come and meet all of us (Red, too, he is the workshop dog) at Hubbard Hall on May 31. There is a suggested donation of $20 a person to benefit the Hubbard Hall Scholarship Fund. You can order tickets on the Hubbard Hall website. This is a celebration of the creative spark, in fact that’s what we are calling the evening “Creative Sparks.”

 In the Kabbalah, the writings of the Hebrew mystics in their lost caves, God tells the prophets that he has endowed every human being with the creative spark, something he has given to no other living things. The only thing people have to fear, he warns, is failing to heed the call of this spark, ignoring this gift, turning their backs on the light and love he gave them and them alone to want and cherish. It is through this spark that people can talk to me, he said, and I will answer, wrote the mystics thousands of years ago. And I will love you, he said.

Talk to me, My Lord,

 Show me the this light this gift,

 Help me to speak with you,

 And I will answer you,

heed your call, consider your warning.

I see your light and love and color everywhere,

even on windowsills in the afternoon sun,

though a humble bottle.

hearing the hum of the sewing machine in the Studio,

in the light that comes through the trees,

and frames the clouds in the open sky.

In the doors and windows of an old and simple barn.

In the bray of a donkey, the bark of a dog,

the beams cutting through the dark forest,

the sunlight sparkling off the poor puddle.

I am so blessed to be talking to you.

Hello, Lord, I love your work.

Can you love mine?

Teaching can be an inherently selfish process, it can do much more for the teacher than the student, but perhaps works best when it benefits both. Once in awhile you get to light the creative spark, or more often just encourage it when it appears. My Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop has been one such experience, everyone in it lighting up, sharing, freeing the inner spirits and lights that most people keep locked inside, and are rarely encouraged to free. Most of us are taught from our first days the great lie of our time – we can’t do what we love. It is a monstrous lie, and when we awaken, we see it for what it is.

When I met Rachel, she told me she never expected to get into my class. Battered by a series of writing workshop that made her feel dumb or hopeless, she was shocked to be accepted and I was shocked when I looked at her website and saw describe herself as a “wannabee writer.” What, I asked is a “wannabe writer?” Anybody who writes is a writer, and anyone who writes as well as Rachel is a writer period. We took it from there. Rachel started a blog, “Picking My Battles.” Then she told me she was an animator, but wasn’t drawing. Why?, I asked. Because, she said, an instructor told her she couldn’t be a writer and an animator at the same time. I spit up my soup at that, and she began drawing. She takes ads. She barters. She shares and links, searches and likes. She won an award. She is building an audience. Her sketches are on theater programs. One day, she wants to be a full-time writer. One day, she will be. If she can make this much progress in six months, I can’t even imagine what she will be doing in a year or so. She is working on e-books, children’s stories, themes that explore family life, and real life.

How do I know she will get where she wants to go? Because every single day, she asks her self what she can do to have the life she wants, to be a writer, to do what she loves. And everyday she does it. She has every gift she needs, every tool required. She needed only one thing, a thing we all need – encouragement, the most powerful fuel on the earth.

Like most real writers, she’s a bit crazy. She has the usual writerly neuroses, she has suffered from depression and anxiety disorders. She is funny and insightful. She is brave and determined.  She doesn’t know it, but she is fearless. She is a devoted mother and wife. A good friend. She writes every day, grows every day. This week, I was shocked to go on  her website and see that she was doing moving animation. She grows and grows, this great creative spirit inside of her finally free and cutting loose. She is not the only one, the other students are doing the same and I will get to them in good time. But I would encourage you to meet this remarkable person and see this sacred thing, her blog, her work,  this creative spark – a gift given to all of us, I believe – glow and grow.