Filling My Creative Well on a Rainy Saturday
By Nancy Colasurdo
I was going to write on Saturday.
With each passing day/hour last week, The Felon in the White House was trying to satisfy his insatiable craving for attention and for once I couldn’t be bothered putting together cogent thoughts about it.
Instead I decided to fill my creative well. Not consciously, mind you. But I’ve reached a point where my instincts pivot there when needed. Thank you, Julia Cameron.
In The Artist’s Way, Cameron introduced the concept of seeking out and consuming others’ art or, say, taking walks as a way to address being blocked or burned out. I’m neither, but I did experience an overwhelming desire not to feed the screeching man baby for a while.
So on Saturday I was like, sorry, Dictatorship, I’ll get back to resisting you in a bit. Let me center myself first and get my soul brimming with some creative magic.
After exercise, coffee, and journaling, I decided to watch A Complete Unknown, the movie about Bob Dylan’s start, and it didn’t disappoint. While not a fan of his musical genre, I do appreciate him as an artist with a distinguished body of work.
Watching him settle into New York City in 1961 (the year I was born), seek out artists, write, smoke, play his guitar, and evolve into a legendary musician was uplifting. I like witnessing the realization that hewing closer to one’s creative instincts is almost always the better idea than trying to be what people want.
At the same time, to have artists like Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger to aspire to, yet at some point realize you’re ready to depart from somewhat, requires self-realization and ultimately confidence. It’s heady to watch.
Not to skip over that other layer of artistry, the creation of the film itself, I liked how writer/producer/director James Mangold described the gist of the movie in an interview – “being an artist and how we find our way in the world.”
As a writer spanning decades myself, I know how joy and pain mix when we hit those creative crossroads. What’s next? What do I want to express and how? Will it be well received and should I even care about that? Hard not to, but it’s almost never productive to let the audience be the focus.
Next up on my rainy spring Saturday was homework for the free Harvard online course I’m taking called Justice. A lecture and some reading on moral and political philosophy, served up by a compelling professor – Michael Sandel.
It is something, listening to Sandel serve up a story, form an opinion about which side you take in that story, and then rethink it as he builds one concept on top of another, asks probing questions, and invites others to support and refute.
Ping pong for my brain, which keeps it sharp.
By the end of that assignment it was almost time for CNN’s live airing of Broadway’s Good Night, and Good Luck starring George Clooney as legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow. Still in the lounge wear I’d had on all day, I made some dinner and settled in.
As the description of the play says on its website, it “chronicles a time in American history when truth and journalistic integrity stood up to fearmongering and disinformation -- and won.” Again, history shown in smoke-filled rooms.
What matters, Murrow famously says, is “honesty, facts, integrity, accuracy, and truth.”
A provocative discussion on our current state of affairs and journalism’s role, led by Anderson Cooper, ensued. Later they cut in to report on breaking news – protests in Los Angeles.
I had come full circle on a random Saturday. Time to turn my lens back on the man baby and his minions?
I think so. Yes.
There is fresh truth to unearth.