Each Of Us Is Our Own Country
On originality and self trust.
Hi Folks,
I am in the process of moving this week, so for the sake of everyone’s overly-busy summer schedules, I’ll keep this short.
Does anyone else feel like they’re struggling with the transition back to normal life, especially in how sudden it seems to have come on? I’m an introvert, but my preference is to be alone in public spaces. I produce my best work when I am at a coffee shop or hiding in a hotel lobby, which meant that quarantine forced to me to consider my creative production and find ways to cultivate it in isolation. My creative work, which had long relied on the energy and inspiration around me, suddenly had to come from within myself. This was both challenging and, once I did the work of sitting with it, incredibly gratifying. For the first time in years, I found myself writing fiction again, not caring about genre or trope or what the work was “supposed to be”, and just writing what I was interested in. Now, a year later and only five chapters from the completion of this novel, I find my creative production stalling. I spend plenty of time in the outside world these days, and very little in my own internal worlds. I keep asking myself how to get back to that.
This past spring, as the world began to transition back, I helped support a twelve week course of Julia Cameron’s The Artists Way, a much-lauded book designed to help catapult you on the course to creative production and artistic freedom. The course allowed me to rethink many of my own misconceptions about art and life, largely that I couldn’t have a valuable, happy life as an artist. That I would never make enough money to survive and my art would always source from pain. In Chapter 8 of the book, she writes this about originality and source:
“If the demand to be original still troubles you, remember this: each of us is our own country, an interesting place to visit. It is the accurate mapping out of our own creative interests that invites the term original. We are the origin of our art, its home-land. Viewed this way, originality is the process of remaining true to ourselves.”
I’ve been thinking about this ever since. Originality does not have to have a single source, but can instead pour from every part of me. I am a place to visit, a new landscape to explore. There is always something new to be found, and furthermore, I do not have to fit any conventions of “originality.” I do not even have to be original. I just have to think of myself as my own home-land and remain true to that. All the rest will follow.
I don’t have answers to any of these questions, but they are things I have been thinking about a lot, especially in how we can diversify the range of stories across media and literature. If nothing else, we begin with each other, and we begin with believing that, like any new country, there is something of value to find in visiting. I hope that writing— and art and music and film and conversation and all the other creative forms— can help serve as your passport there.
Your prompt this week will branch out from writing a bit, but hear me out. You are to create a mind map. Examples here and here. If you are a country, think of this as your guidebook. Your map can take any form, written or drawn or both. Start with a blank page. Write your name in the center, and branch off from there. Think of the most important things about yourself. Write out song lyrics and quotes that feel important to you. Doodle. Show us something important.
If you’d like to share your map with us, as always, feel free to email it below. Or any other stories and questions and comments. We— and by we I mean mostly myself— love to talk to you.
See you Friday,
Spencer
This week’s song is Golden Age by Ethel Cain. Ethel Cain is a musician raised “a backwards churchgoer in the deep south” who “combines elements of rock, country, & cinematic nostalgia.” I can’t stop listening to this song. I spent at least 3 hours this week wandering around Charleston in the rain listening to this. The continued repetition of I’ll be coming along… as the music swells. These lyrics: Do you just want my blood / Am I just that damn hard to love / Cause it feels like all I have is still just not enough / I guess that I’ll just go outside and watch the fire and fields of gold fly farther away from me / Got what I wanted but it’s never enough for me / Darling don’t you see / I’m so beautiful and it’s wasted on me… Wow. Just wow.