Teton Wellness Festival: Julia Cameron debunks creative myths, monsters

Friday, October 13, 2006

By Richard Anderson

Millions of artists - not to mention lawyers, doctors, therapists and perhaps a fair number of plumbers, auto mechanics and ditch diggers, too - are familiar with Julie Cameron, the author of "The Artist's Way." They've all proven that her straight-forward method of unblocking creative juices works in a thousand different contexts, not only allowing writers to finish their novels, but also allowing people who previously never thought of themselves as creative people to unleash the force of creativity and bring it to bear on a whole host of problems.

But don't accept anecdotal evidence as proof: Listen to the woman herself. She's living proof that her simple tools work: Since the 1970s, Cameron has had successful careers in journalism, screenwriting, fiction, TV and theater. She still teaches workshops based on "The Artist's Way" and her other creativity-inspiring titles, "A Vein of Gold," "The Right to Write" and "Walking in this World," and on Sunday morning will teach her three-hour "Creative Myths and Monsters" workshop. Even a short conversation with her is inspirational and motivational:

Planet Jackson Hole: For starters, would you recap your career as a writer?

Julia Cameron: I was living in Washington, D.C., writing short stories and poetry, and a friend of mine called me and said, "How would you like a job as a letter opener for the Washington Post?" I went for the interview and the editor hiring said, "I hope you don't think you're a writer," and hired me. About three weeks later, I was typing up the section's Sunday work and he walked by me and said, "You look pretty disgruntled, what's wrong with you?" I think I said, "Well, I could do a better job." So, he went out to dinner and I wrote my first piece for Post. He came back from dinner, read it, apologized to me, asked if he could run it on front section on Sunday, and I started writing a lot for the Post.

While I was writing for the Post, I was being read by an editor at Rolling Stone. This was during Watergate, so everyone was reading the Post ... Rolling Stone contacted me and asked me write for them.

PJH: What did you write about for Rolling Stone?

JC: I wrote a piece ... called "Life Without Father." It was about E. Howard Hunt's children. It was a cover story for Rolling Stone, and it scooped the Post: It was the first time that a Watergate family had stepped forward to speak. ... Then I began writing for the Village Voice, New York, New West ... a whole plethora of hip publications. And Rolling Stone asked me to write about movies, the politics of movies ... I was then sent to write about Martin Scorsese. ... and fell abruptly and deeply and madly in love. He was making "Taxi Driver," and "Taxi Driver" had a lot of Washington politics in it. So I took pen to page and wrote some scenes, just because they sort of had the politics a little funny, and Marty used my work and that started me writing for film. He fell in love back, we got married, and while I was married he made "Last Waltz" and "New York, New York," and I was a writer on both of those films. ... In the midst of all this I moved back to New York and started writing for theater, and while I was in New York I started teaching creativity workshops, and that was the beginning of "The Artist's Way."

PJH: Was that a result of some of your own issues with creativity or was it just your method that seemed to be working with you?

JC: I left out that during my 20s it was pretty much alcohol, drugs, rock and roll, movies, Hollywood, cocaine ‹ a pretty Hotel California lifestyle. In 1978, I had a daughter and I got sober and I needed to find some way to be able to work sober that didn't have to do with just trying desperately to be brilliant and hot ... maybe to be a little bit more of service to the people I was writing for, a little bit less about my brilliant career. ... I started trying to write in a sober-minded fashion, which meant writing one day at a time, a small quantity, getting in touch with a spiritual source, trying to let it write through me rather than just writing out of my ego. And I quickly began teaching other people. ... I blame that on my coming from a big family, where you automatically taught the other kids, "Here's how you tie shoelaces." It was similar; it was, "Here's how you tie your creative shoelaces." ... [I] kept on writing for the movies, and as often happened I started having scripts being bought but not made and I was very frustrated and I remember praying one day: "Dear God, help with my work," by which I really meant, "Send me another idea." Instead I heard, "You should teach creative unblocking." It was really a marching order, a directive ... I called a girlfriend and said "I'm getting told I'm supposed to teach people how to stay functional," and she said, "I'll call you right back," and she called me back and said "You're now on the faculty of the New York Feminist Art Institute and you start teaching Thursday." ... It really sprang out of my own lessons having to do with my frustrations, difficulties, hopes, dreams, sheer survival in the trenches as a working artist. I thought I was going to help my friends ... actors actresses, directors, people who were struggling with the difficulty of "the business."

PJH: And instead?

JC: What happened was the tools and techniques that I devised for working artists worked on many people who had never declared themselves fulltime artists. I began to learn that with just a couple of very simple tools, a substantial creative blossoming could take place. I began to see very clearly ... .

PJH: These tools and techniques, was there some precedence for them in your life ... or were they just things that you developed on your own?

JC: A little bit of both. There were precedents that were taught to me by other sober alcoholics, the concept of do a little bit each day ... try to let a higher force work through you. And then ... it turns out I loved making up games. That's been true about me ever since I was a little kid. So I kept trying to figure out ways to sort of trick people into being creative. ... I've been writing nearly 40 years. I started at 18 and I'm 58, and I've written plays and novels and songs and books. ... Essentially, the tools I use to stay unblocked myself ... are the same ones that I turn around and teach. ...

PJH: Do you find that "blocked" artists, no matter what their art form, their blockage is a manifestation of the same ailment?

JC: It's interesting: The same little tools that work on a writer work very well to unblock a painter or for that matter a lawyer. The essential tool ... is something called morning pages, which is three pages of stream-of-consciousness first thing in the morning, long-hand. That's pretty much the greased slide to having a more creative life.

PJH: What is it that is so effective about that?

JC: It does a couple of things: It puts the practitioner in touch with the deeper flows of their own personalities -their deeper desires, wishes, yearnings ‹ and it gives them a very good look at what in their present life is blocking them. It's a remarkable thing: I'm in week four of a 12-week course right now, and I will say "How many people cleaned up their desks this week?" and 80 hands will shoot up. ... "How many people had reconciliations with old long-lost friend? And the hands will shoot up. A creative unblocking is teachable and trackable and has certain common denominators. For example, Week Three we tend to call "Anger Week." There are weeks that are characterized by grief and weeks that are characterized by breakthroughs.

PJH: You're visit here to Jackson includes a three-hour workshop. What do you cover in three hours?

JC: I cover what I think of as our myths and monsters. We have a lot of really toxic ideas about artists: Artists are broke, crazy, lonely, neurotic, miserable. ... We don't have too many role models that say artists are cheerful, artists have good relationships, artists are user-friendly. A lot of what I work with when I do a smaller workshop is dismantling the unconscious ideas that we have that stand between us and making a piece of art. A lot of time people will believe, let's say, that artists are broke. ... It makes it hard for them to sit down and write novel, because they believe they are going to lose their house and kids. It's hard enough to write a novel. ...

PJH: Can you make the connection between creativity and wellness a little more explicit?

JC: One of the things that happened when "The Artist's Way" came out ... is that therapists and healers began teaching "Artist's Way" circles. ... It has to do with the fact that a lot of times when people are unhappy it's actually because they aren't functioning in their creativity and this looks like neurosis. ... If you get people up and running on their creativity, a lot of what looked like neurosis turns out to have just been creative resistance and it fades right away and therapists go "My God, you're healthy! What a shock!" Making art isn't therapy, it isn't cerebral. Actually cerebration is the enemy of art. We can be too smart to make art. We can have too many intellectual reservations. ... Morning pages trains people to be in touch with their spontaneous mind and to trust it. For writers, morning pages miniaturizes the censor ... trains your censor to stand to one side and allows you to get onto the page. ...

PJH: Have you ever had someone who came back and said this wasn't working?

JC: Usually in a very public situation someone will stand up and say "I've been doing morning pages for 10 years and nothing has changed," and I will think "Well why are you doing them then?" ... The truth is that what we're trying to do is build us a spiritual toolkit. It's like building a radio kit. I teach people how to build the radio kit and then it picks up all sorts of useful signals. I'll go out to teach, and somebody will typically come up to me and say, "I used your toolkit and here's my book," or "I used your toolkit and now I have a radio show" or "Now my ¸greeting cards are sold in 1,500 shops all up and down the West Coast." They use the toolkit on very individualized dreams.

- editor@planetjh.com

PERMALINK:
Teton Wellness Festival: Julia Cameron debunks creative myths, monsters | Planet JH News Article: General Health And Fitness

Leave a Comment