Stepping Off Now: Lessons in the Art and Craft of Creativity

This is my final update on this strange summer that was full of change, growth, and pure panic, if I'm honest! I'll be returning to my regular type of programming in a couple weeks, and in this episo…

I finally have some excellent news to share! I've had a creative breakthrough on my novel and am on track to finish it by mid-September. In this episode I share what led to the breakthrough, what it …

This is a grab bag of an episode in which I tell a long and rambling story about what getting my house tented for drywood termites has to do with the Empire State Building, share my thoughts on what …

In which I talk about how I'm working through my current writer's block and the importance of surrendering to the ebb and flow of creativity.

Here is the newsletter by Nick Cave that I discuss in this…

In which I discuss some recent developments in my life and the steps I am taking to deal with the circumstances.

Many creatives and artists have a bit of the lone wolf in them. But generally speaking, being a lone wolf is looked down on in society. In this episode I mount a defense of this personality type and …

What do you do when you lose steam with your creative projects or practice? Nothing will block you faster than feeling bored with your work. When your inspiration and motivation go missing, though, t…

I've never been able to figure out if I'm a highly ambitious person or not ambitious enough. What I've settled on is that while my culture tells me I should be ambitious, at heart I'm just not. When …

Will AI-created art change the way we view art and our relationship with it as consumers and creators? I contemplate this question in light of Frank Ocean's ostensibly disastrous but possibly brillia…

Following your intuition when you are being nudged off course is a vital creative skill, but many of us are held hostage by plans and struggle to accept interruptions as positive. We feel derailed an…

Lately I've been struggling with a growing awareness of pessimism and negativity around me in the world. It seems we are in an age of insecurity, fear, and suspicion. Then the other day I read about …

When we get stuck in life we can easily find reasons why we can't make the changes we need to make. But those aren't the real reasons we remain stuck. It's our feelings of powerlessness over our circ…

Do you ever feel like you have lost your creative inspiration, or worse, that you don't have enough to begin with? In this episode I talk about how to cultivate inspiration by doing the opposite of w…

It's a common assumption that highly creative people are more prone to mental illness. Van Gogh is perhaps one of the most famous examples of the mad creative genius archetype. But is there a scienti…

I recently saw a play called Women Playing Hamlet (by William Missouri Downs) that explores the idea of playing roles others cast us in versus choosing the roles we play and inhabiting them fully thr…

Creatives are often told they need to take risks in order to reach their full potential, but what does that mean, exactly, and how does one do it? If you google creative risk you'll find tons of reso…

There is no question that we are now in the era of AI, and everyone is talking about what AI-generated art means for the art industry and individual artists. In this episode I talk about how creative…

Why does the magic disappear from our lives as we grow up and mature, and how can we get it back? In this episode I contemplate what we mean when we talk about magic, why as adults it is required tha…

For my birthday weekend I decided to re-release one of my favorite previous episodes as a way of giving myself both a break and boost! This episode was previously released in March 2022 (E66). I'll b…

How do we know when we've finished a creative project? Sometimes we know because we have deadlines or explicit, concrete goals to work toward, but what about long-term and fairly open-ended projects …