Hi all!
How are you?????!!!!!
I’m guessing I know at least part of the answer to that for a lot of you. It’s a pretty weird time in the world. How’s that for an understatement?
I am truly hoping you are all doing as well as possible…
I was trying to come up with something that might conceivably help a little. I mean, that is my official job. Doing therapy, helping people get to their creativity, teaching courses on getting to your creativity, writing a book about it. I’m supposed to help!
So this is one of the things I came up with.
I’ve been in the process of creating an audio recording of my book, which I was going to, and hopefully still will, make available through an audio publishing company.
But, in the meantime, with everyone I know in such a profoundly “different” world from their normal world, I’ve decided to post a few audio chapters from the book on my website. Maybe listening to some ideas about getting to your creative process while you’re walking, or running, or sitting on your couch going stir crazy with cabin fever (depending of course on exactly where you’re located), might be a fun/interesting/useful/encouraging, and on and on and on, thing to do.
I’m hoping…
So, just in case that’s true, that is exactly what I am going to do. I’m going to post an audio chapter from the book in a *.wav file every week or two for several weeks over the summer.
It won’t cost anything.
You don’t have to do it.
Even if you download it, you stilllll don’t have to DO it. J (That’s actually the point of a lot of what I talk about. YOUR CHOICE. YOUR WAY.)
Now I need to say a little bit about the recording itself, especially for those of you who listen to a lot of recorded books from Audible, etc.
I started out working hard to make the recording as professional as possible. Perfect sound engineering. Perfect narrating. NO bumps. No stumbles. No blips. No giggles. No horrible mispronunciations. And an appropriately serious tone.
Then I started thinking about my courses (because what I was saying was so familiar from teaching them). I pictured myself in the ‘conference rooms’ (my favorite choice for classrooms), 10 or 15 students and me sitting around the table, chatting about creativity. And I truly mean chatting. That was the nature of the classes. We talked, we shared, we explored and brainstormed, laughed (a lot!) and cried (a lot!), and engaged in a marvelous journey of digging and delving.
Then when I started writing the book on these hundred or so amazing classes, many of which went on for ages – weeks, months, even years, I realized that writing a regular kind of book, properly written, with a serious instructive approach, just wasn’t going to work!
So the challenge began. I worked as hard as I could to reproduce the true tone of the classes, in the written book.
AND THAT IS EXACTLY the thought that finally occurred to me when I was working on the recordings. They needed to be real. Like my classes. And that meant more casual. More stumbles, more giggles, more blips, mispronunciations, and so on.
I hereby officially declare I did not correct the word ‘art’ in one spot. In that place it’s still pronounced awwwtt…
And the one I am most embarrassed by is pronouncing Guy de Maupassant as ‘guy’ instead of ‘ghee”. I couldn’t believe that came out of my mouth. (I took French lessons throughout high school, for heavens sakes. I guess my teacher, Madame Mahieu, was correct. My French sucked.) But even I know how to pronounce his name correctly!
So that’s what I did.
In short, I allowed the recording to be much more “human”.
Consequently, I hope my more casual approach to the recording is okay for you. It is now officially intentional. I did not fix a lot of it!
I’ve included a written copy of the Table of Contents on this page. It didn’t seen sensible to record, and therefor make you listen, to the names and page numbers of all twenty-four chapters for this particular purpose.
I do hope you download the chapter (and the title page). I do hope you listen to it. I do hope you enjoy it. I certainly hope you get something out of it for your creative being in any and all of the art forms you’re interested in. (There’s been an astonishing amount of every conceivable type of creativity going on during these bizarre times. Quite beautiful and magical.)
AND I profoundly hope that it will help you, even if only a tiny little bit, in coping with our current “DIFFICULTIES…”
TAKE VERY, VERY, VERY GOOD CARE, ALL.
Dari