WRITING PRACTICE

I believe in writing practice. Without practice, we’d have no gold medals at the Olympics, no Mozart, no Michelangelo, and no great writers. At our writing sessions, we follow the late Ed Wildman’s workshops that he learned from Natalie Goldberg, (Writing Down the Bones, Wild Mind).

The following is an excerpt from my journal:

June 10, 2004

WRITING PRACTICE

It took me a whole lifetime to be myself and it took another lifetime for me to allow myself to be a creative being. It’s not really my mother’s fault. Looking back, I realize that she's a creative being, too. Her parents harassed her for her creative energy, and she harassed me. I’m not totally blameless, as I harassed my daughter.

I didn’t do this on a conscious level. I never realized that my creative side is the part of me that my mother cursed, as her mother cursed her. All I know is that my mother tried to beat creativity, as if it were a cancer, out of me, and I tried to change my daughter’s artistic personality.

As a child, I learned to despise my creative side, as my mother punished me for daydreaming and not working. I tried as my grandmother did and possibly generations of women to turn my creative right-brain daughter into a logical left-brain child.

It didn’t work for me anymore than it worked for my mother. In 1996, after my second near-death experience, I began to explore my creative side. I followed Julia Cameron’s instructions in The Artist Way.

While doing the exercises in The Artist Way, I realised that my parents thought artists were losers who would die penniless or starving to death. My grandparents didn’t want a creative life for their daughter. And my mother surely didn’t like this part of herself anymore than I did.

Daydreaming is a needed activity for creative beings and is not punishable by death. By acknowledging, that I am a daydreamer, I give voice to my creative side. Yet I have denied my daydreaming habit most of my adult life.

TO BE CONTINUED . . .