Hi friends. Sending through a wee diary entry. Last week, I spent eight days in an empty house across the border in Western NY, writing all day long in solitude.
It was a deep dive into the creative process. An opportunity to see….could I? And what would I produce…nonsense? Frustrations?
It’s really difficult to not make it sound precious, but, it was a remarkable week.
I made friends…maybe that’s a way of saying it? Friends with new storylines, the hope and then disappointment of 1935, the cryptic singing voice of Italian soldiers, the music of Tami Neilson, Jack White, Stevie Nicks, Margo Price…
I think the creative process is always instructing me on how guilt robs a person of self belief, and how obsessed I become with the need to know and make the unseen seen.
What else? Ideas are wild beasts. Maybe they’re the wildest parts of me? They certainly seem to have history and innocence. And when I follow them they tend to deliver messages or lure me toward new things to read or listen to.
Maybe you’ve experienced the same thing? Would love to know. I’m nearly 300 pages in on my project… The main message sent to me last week was, “your dissonance sounds good to me,” or yes, take that historical time, add those unusual voices, apply the unreasonable and devastating, see what happens. History is always telling us there’s more there than we may have presumed.
These are my thoughts, at this point.
I’ll end here, for now.
Also, here’s a song—one I couldn’t stop listening to while on retreat.