Author Archives: Kaspa

Creativity Interview with Roger Housden, writer.

Kaspa writes: It’s my great pleasure to welcome Roger Housden to our Creativity Interview series. I’m sure that I don’t need to introduce Roger very much, as I imagine his work is very well known to you. However for those few of you that don’t know him, Roger has published twenty books, including the six volumes of the best-selling Ten Poems series, which began with Ten Poems to Change Your Life in 2001.

All his books, whatever the subject – poetry, art, or travel – aim to inspire himself and others toward the examined life. Maria Sharapova, the tennis star, has called his book, Seven Sins for a Life Worth Living (2007, Harmony) “one of the most inspirational books I have ever read.”

He runs small weekly writing classes in his home on writing as a spiritual practice, with an emphasis on memoir. He will be running online writing courses with a spiritual perspective later in 2013. Join his mailing list for details: www.rogerhousden.com or visit him on facebook.

What drives your creative work?

Irrepressible curiosity coupled with the need to clarify and articulate my own responses to the world around me.

What would you say to yourself if you could go back in time and meet yourself at the beginning of your creative career?

You have no idea where you are going, and that is exactly as it should be.

How do you keep creating when things get difficult?

If you mean when life gets difficult, then that can often be grist for this writer’s mill. If you mean when the writing gets difficult, I very rarely experience that, and when I do I take a walk in the woods.

How does your creative work affect the rest of your life?

It helps me to be more alive to the sense world in which I live and also to the inner world of thought, feeling and reflection. It encourages me to see possibility in seemingly intractable situations.

What is it like to send your work out into the world?

When I have finished a book it disappears pretty quickly from my inner view, and reappears almost as a surprise when I first receive a finished copy. Then I feel anticipation and interest in how others are going to respond to it – because I really have no idea what impact it will make on anyone else.
What was the best advice anyone gave to you?In writing, be personal and self revealing ( Philip Roth said a writer must be shameless.) In life, Rumi, when he says that

This longing you express
is the return message.

What helps you to pay attention to the world?

The willingness to be without an agenda, to do nothing, especially nothing useful. Then, walking helps me return to the pace of the animal world, which encourages my senses to come alive.

Thank you Roger.

Creativity Interview with Jamie Catto – genius music-maker

Why it’s good to let the customer choose how much to pay!

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Kaspa writes: Bendy pricing. Let the customer choose how much to pay! What a strange idea…

I first heard about it back in 2007 when I went to buy In Rainbows from Radiohead and they asked me to choose how much to pay. Radiohead released the album without a record label, and on average people paid around £5 for the download. I seem to remember that this worked out pretty well for them. A large cut of most artist’s profits go straight to the label. Once you take that out of the equation, £5 per record isn’t bad.

It wasn’t until we interviewed Tad Hargrave from Marketing for Hippies back in 2011 that I actually heard the phrase ‘bendy pricing’.

Something about the idea kept drawing me in and I finally implemented it this week with the launch of my new email package, 31 Days of Positive Action.

Watching Amanda Palmer’s recent TED talk was the tipping point. She was talking about the power of asking. She talked about the fear many people have of asking – it makes you vulnerable, and exposes you to rejection – and also about how it helps create trust, and to create real connections with your community.

I am asking for your help. Pay something decent for the course and not only will you have a great experience but you’ll be helping us to keep creating all this good stuff.

What do I like about the idea?

It opens the product up to anyone regardless of their financial situation. I want to be able to pay my bills, and go on holiday now and again (and do this by working at something I love), but I don’t want to turn someone away if they genuinely don’t have much money.

It’s an act of trust. This is the part that makes me vulnerable. I worked hard to create something and not only that – the content of the course is important to me. I believe in it. One voice in my head worries what people will think… another voice knows that it’s good material.

Part of the philosophy of the email package is that it’s good to act in ways which value your most important work, whether that means taking the phone off the hook while you write or buying a set of supportive emails that will provide a daily nudge to action. It feels like there is a connection between this valuing and asking you to decide how much to pay for yourself. Choosing how much to pay is practising respecting yourself and your work.

Why pay at the beginning and not at the end? Surely you won’t know how much it’s worth until you’ve done it? Passing a hat around at the end of a day workshop is different to bendy pricing for an email package. At the day workshop you engage with the facilitator and the other participants. It’s hard not too when they are right there in the room with you.

It’s much easier to ignore an email. And if you leave them unread you won’t have a great experience of the product. Our experience is that when you pay at the beginning of the course you are much more likely to engage with the material – after all you’ve already paid for it. (Think how much easier it is to miss an event where you buy the tickets on the door, as opposed to when you’ve bought them in advance.)

Is it working for me?

Since we launched the produce a few days ago the average amount people have paid is £14.40. We usually charge £15 for this type of package. So yes – it’s working for me at the moment…. I’ll keep you updated. (Radiohead went back to charging a fixed amount for their records, but I think our community is better than theirs.)

Is it working for you?

Perhaps it’s too early to say. No-one has completed the course of emails yet, but do leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Will we do it again?

Maybe

Sign up for the wonderful 31 Days of Positive Action and receive an essay on goal setting and how to take action as well as 31 emails supporting your most important work, nudging you into action each day and encouraging you to work better.

Image: Some rights reserved by epSos.de

What great art does

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Kaspa writes:

“…art should enhance our interest in the world, not push us toward greater irony, disinterest, lack of humor and a sense that everything’s all been done before and we can only laugh at it or waste away.”

~ David Rothenberg, Survival of the Beautiful

What does your writing/painting/sculpting do? Does it take you into the world or away from it? Does it take you towards enchantment or disenchantment?

There’s an image doing the rounds on Facebook that made me think . A small boy is standing on a heap of books looking over a wall. This side of the wall is scattered with litter, and the wall is covered in graffiti. On the other side of the wall is a fantastic land full of colour and light and beautiful things, space rockets and butterflies. The caption reads, “Books: This is exactly how they work.”

My heart sank when I saw this image. I guess that I read the picture back to front, compared to everyone who was sharing it.

When I was a child I read books that took me away from the world into lands where heroes were always heroic, and the very act of being part of a story seemed to help the world make sense for the characters. Their world making sense didn’t particularly help mine make sense though, it just made me long for the beautiful land on the other side of the wall… when I felt like I was stuck with the litter and graffiti.

My childhood world wasn’t all litter and graffiti, but the literature I was reading didn’t help me appreciate the world that was right in front of me.

When I look at that picture of the child standing on the books again I realise that you can write about both sides of the wall in helpful and unhelpful ways.

Great literature can come from both sides of the wall. Reading about the land of space rockets can encourage us back into our own worlds with a sense of adventure and interest in the world beyond our small horizons. Reading about the graffiti artist’s life, reading the conditions that led to them painting on the wall, and even the conditions the led to the wall being built, can help us to understand the world around us. Reading about this side of the wall can help us see the world in a whole way – a way that is much more likely to guide us towards knocking a hole in those bricks…

Poor literature can come from both sides of the wall too. The space rockets can take us into a world of cliché, a world of fantasy where the hero gets the girl and everything that goes with that. It can lead us to a world that leads us away from reality, that gets in between us and the world – that keeps us in our place of non-engagement. Non-engagement can come from the littered side of the wall as well, works of irony and satire that undermine the world without offering alternatives.

Practising mindful writing leads to the first kind of literature on both sides of the wall. When we pay attention to the world our writing comes more alive and (fingers crossed) takes the reader to a place of aliveness too, rather than a place of disinterest and deadness.

Where is your writing going?

What is ‘home’?

small stones – The final day of the Challenge

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Kaspa writes: What an amazing month we’ve had together! Writing each day, and reading each others small stones. It has been wonderful to read what you have been creating, both here and on the facebook group. Wonderful to see a real sense of community growing too. It’s been really lovely to see old friends writing, and to be introduced to people who have just begun to write small stones.

We’d like to keep writing them throughout the whole year, and encourage you to keep writing as well.

Following the suggestion of one of you we’d like to introduce small stone Sundays. Every Sunday we’ll create a small stone blog post here, and we’d love for you to write post a small stone.

Keep writing. Once a week (or more) for the whole year. Sounds good to me.

I’ve copied some of your comments about this months practice below. It’s both gratifying and moving to hear how writing small stones has affected your Januaries.

Small stones make me look at the world differently and take a moment to pause… Fi

The best thing about small stones though is waking up and reading everyone else’s, or taking a break from work, and spending a good twenty minutes reading through them. The sense of community is wonderful – but then it always has been on WOWH. Truly grateful to you both for putting so much effort in and bringing all these lovely people together. Steenie

I have found that writing one often leads me to others on the same day… Some days it was difficult to find anything to write about but I’ve plodded on so I hope to keep going until the end. Reading others poems is great too… This has been great for me, a lovely challenge and so many people taking part which is wonderful. Heather Walker

It is a wonderful experience…Some days I’ve written four or five, which has surprised me. It’s been more automatic–though only “automatic” because of the daily prompt. I am very glad I signed up for that. They are not only lovely slow-down pieces themselves, but since they arrive in the mid- to late-afternoon for me, they’ve become a signal to slow down, take a break, split the day, see (really see) something. That has been good. Cynthia Reed

Almost every day I’ve thought that nothing could possibly come, yet every day something has made me wake up and take notice. frankie carboni

This practice —of first noticing—then translating to words—has given me great joy this month! Wabi Sabi

I am finding life feels much richer for noticing and committing a few words to the page every day! This has been the brightest January I can remember. Claire Zoghb

I have written one every day. Some are really bad, some are OK, and there are several that I am proud of. Mostly, though, I am happy with what the writing has brought to understanding myself. Wilma

So many wonderful comments from you all about writing small stones. I’ve had to stop copying them for fear of creating a post which is pages and pages long. If you’d like to read more check out the comments section of this blog post.

So what next? smalls stone Sundays will start on this Sunday and carry on throughout the year. If you didn’t take the Mindful Writing Booster (30 days of small stone prompts) you could sign up for that, or if you’d like to look a little deeper into yourself and into your world sign up for one of our e-courses.

Starting tomorrow we have Journalling Your Way Home and Writing Towards Healing, as well as the Creative Boost Package The Way of Getting Things Done for all of you who need a little boost with your projects…

Thank you again – it’s quite overwhelming to have helped Satya introduce this practice into the world, and to see so many of you joining us and being affected by paying attention and writing.

Enjoy the last day of the Mindful Writing Challenge, and keep writing!

photo by Tony Hisgett

small stones day 30 – why writing is good for us

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Kaspa writes: The penultimate day – post your small stones below…

Satya’s alarm goes off. Her phone buzzes against the hard surface of the bedside cabinet. It’s dark outside. I groan, roll over and go back to sleep. When I wake up the sky is a flat grey. Later, looking into the garden I see how much the tulip shoots have grown. A few slivers of blue cut through the cloud.

These days I tend to look forward to waking up and beginning the day, but this transition time has always been a dangerous point for me. I know that if there are things weighing on my mind it is at this time of day, between waking up and getting up, that these worries become inflated. I remember mornings in the past where I would lie in bed and my mind would create whole stories around these worries….

The difficult conversation I had to have with my boss would become twice as difficult in my imagination. The mistake I made in my work the previous day would become proof of my own uselessness… That second one is a self-fulfilling truth, the more useless I felt – the more useless I would act.

On these mornings I would come down the stairs like the character from some children’s book called The Grump. Huffing and puffing, and grumbling my way to the kettle and the first cup of tea of the day.

The rest of the day would go one of two ways, depending on what I did next. If I dwelt in these stories and added energy to them, then I wasn’t going to have a good day. If I put my attention on something real (instead of on my imagined woes) then my mood would shift and I could begin to enjoy the day.

This is where small stones comes in. Writing a small stone asks me to look into the world at something real, and pay attention. I start to notice things that I haven’t seen before: the pattern of the fuchsia splatter on the inside of the white hellebore, a few yellow primroses nestling in the front garden, the goldfinch at the feeder. All of these things bring me out of my self and into the world.

Sometimes this is enough. To put my attention on something real is enough to shake me out of the blues and settle into the day. Sometimes it’s not enough.

When the small stone practice doesn’t shake me out of my worries, there’s something else that might. If I can become curious, without judgement about what is going on for me, I can start to untangle the worries, and they start to lift. “Is there a message in this anxiety?” I wonder, “Am I upset about someone not keeping their word, because I haven’t kept my word recently?”

These sorts of questions can often lead to insight, and when I get an idea about where the feelings are coming from, I can usually accept them more easily, and then, in time, let them go.

In our e-courses we use small stones and other forms of written reflection to look both into the world and into ourselves. We are curious about what is happening in our own minds, and what is happening out there in the real world.

Having done this sort of thing for a while now, my grumpy mornings are much less frequent, and when they appear, I can usually shake them off, either through having some sense where their roots lie, or by looking into the world.

If you’d like to spend time looking deeper into your self and your place in the world, sign up for one of our Writing Our Way Home e-courses now – Journalling Our Way Home, Writing Towards Healing or my new Creative Boost package The Way of Getting Things Done. They start on Friday and as soon as you register we can send you out your materials. We look forward to working with you.

photo by Mike Legend

Doing the work. small stone Day 27

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The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work. ~Emile Zola

Kaspa writes: Inspiration is all around us. One of the questions writers and artists often get asked is, “Where do you get your ideas from?” But my experience of talking to artists and writers, and of my own writing, is that there is often an abundance of ideas. A better question might be, “How do you take this idea and make it into a piece of art?”

I’m also reminded of those writers who talk about getting letters which say, “I’ve had a great idea for a novel, why don’t you write it for me?”

The gift of inspiration is nothing without the work.

I’m really interested in how this process happens. It’s why we set up the Creative Interview series, and why I investigate my own creative process, and enjoy learning from others. What works? What doesn’t work?

If you’d like to join me in exploring your own processes, and get some support in the work of bringing your gift into the world, join me for The Way of Getting Things Done. There’s a 25% discount until the end of today.

We’re into the final week of the mindful writing challenge. If you haven’t written a small stone yet, now is as good a time as any, if you have written lots – keep writing!

Do post them in the comments below

Day 25 and Zen and the art of writing

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Kaspa writes: Hello small stone writers. Looking forward to reading your stones below. I’ve copied a post from the archive today, about the difficulty of ‘just write something’, and yet how that is the only instruction that works.

Remember the early bird (25% off) offer for my new Creative Boost package The Way of Getting Things Done ends on Sunday, so register now to get your discount. Check out the rest of our e-courses here: WOWH e-courses

Zen and the art of writing

“Just write something.” Much easier to say, than to do. When I run drama workshops I know that the most paraylising instruction I can give to someone is “Just go and perform something”. A blank page, or canvas, or an empty stage, can freeze our creativity.

If we have this experience more than once, we can start to believe that we simply don’t have any creative powers, or that any powers we did have dried up.

In the theatre it’s much more empowering for an actor when I give them a more specific instruction. When their creativity is given limits, it is much more able to produce work. “Perform something, but don’t move outside of this small square.” Or, “Perform something using these few words.” Then magic can happen.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Pirsig tells a story about one his writing students. She doesn’t believe she can write; faced with a blank page she is frozen. Pirsig instructs her to go into the main street, and to look at the bank there. He tells he to look at a specific brick in the bank’s wall, he tells her how many rows in this brick is, and instructs her to write about this brick.

She brings pages of writing into the next class. She had begun writing about this one brick, and it had led her to explore the history of brick-making in the town, and how the demise of the industry had affected the whole society. Starting from this one brick, she had become fired up (excuse the pun) and created something interesting and wonderful.

Someone else starting from the same brick would have written something completely different. Any object, or writing prompt, is like a gateway into our own personal imagination. Wherever we start from, something that is important to us will appear on the page.

This is why the various writing prompts here are so good, they give us a seed and unlock the door to our creative powers. With the same prompt each of us produces something different.

There are prompts all around us in the world as well; the shout of the scrap-man, “Any old iron”, opens one world, the Sylvia Edwards print of Noah’s ark is a gateway into another, and I have talked before about just how much there is through the office window.

Pick one thing, and start writing.

Here’s the link for The Way of Getting Things Done again, if you want to register and get your discount before Sunday.

small stone day 10

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Kaspa writes: Sorry for the delay in posting today. Satya and I have spent the morning in the garden shifting laurel and conifer branches from the front garden to the back. Someone’s bringing a lorry around later to collect them all. Yes – there’s a lot.

There was a lot of potential small stones too. From the way the branches themselves move when you hoist them into the air, to the flopped over yellow grass beneath the heap, to the first bulbs shooting through the earth, or the single white hellebore flower.

What have you noticed today?

Post your small stone below, or in our flourishing Facebook group.

image by hozn