This is the third in our series of interviews with writers & artists. Our first two were great: An interview with Jackie Morris: illustrator… and An interview with Clark Strand: Haku Master.

For this interview, I’m really pleased that we’re joined by Lori Deschene. Lori writes for ‘tween magazines, but is probably most well known for the wonderful tinybuddha.com, whose tagline is simple wisdom for complex lives. Tinybuddha.com began life as a tweet stream in 2008 and quickly blossomed into an online phenomenon. In 2009 the website was launched.
Lori has a book coming out at the end of this year, with Corani Press. If you can’t wait for that, she’s got an ebook for sale, called Handbook for Peace and Happiness. You can keep up to date with the latest wisdom from Lori, and her guest writers, on her facebook page.
Lori says that she’s “not an expert on living wisely, but… someone facilitating conversations that affect our individual and collective peace and happiness”

Onto the questions!

 1. What drives your creative work?
If I were to narrow it down to one thing, I’d say that I write to explore the many ways we can cause ourselves and each other less pain. It took me a long time to realize that I have immense power in letting go of things that don’t serve me and creating a fulfilling life.
With Tiny Buddha, I’ve aimed to create a place where we can all empower ourselves, individually and collectively, to be the people we want to be and create the kind of world we want to live in.

2. What would you say to yourself if you could go back in time and meet yourself at the beginning of your creative career?
You can be anyone you want to be and do whatever you want to do—as soon as you’re ready to start.
I have always been a writer. I remember writing a fake newspaper with my sister when I was just six years old (The headline: “Big Flud Strikes Revere!”) I won awards for my writing in high school, and attended college on a writing scholarship.
And then I graduated and hit a major mental roadblock. I didn’t have the slightest idea how to start a creative career and I was terrified of failing, so I didn’t try at all.
In my early 20s I started a private blog, but it wasn’t until I turned 26 that I seriously considered the possibility of writing for a living.

3. How do you keep creating when things get difficult?
Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I simply give myself permission not to create and instead to create the conditions that allow other people to do it.
That’s what I love about Tiny Buddha: It’s a place where I can share my own struggles and lessons, but I also publish posts from lots of other people. Sometimes when I need a break from creating content, I focus on the larger picture—new features for the site, new partnerships, or new tools that will help readers.
In this way I am always creating, but I give myself permission to diversify exactly how I do that.

4. How does your creative work affect the rest of your life?
My creative work permeates everything in my life! Tiny Buddha is my greatest passion, and it bleeds into everything I do, especially since I work from home, on my own time.
I know that what I do creatively influences my overall sense of well-being. If I help people through Tiny Buddha, it’s not just through the act of running and writing for the site; it’s also because I am a better person for actively choosing to do what I love every day.

5. What is it like to send your work out into the world?
It’s different every day, as is everything in life. Sometimes it’s exciting, sometimes it’s terrifying, much of the time, it’s both.

6. What was the best advice anyone gave to you?
Remember that you’re stronger than you think.

7. What helps you to pay attention to the world?
I find that I always pay attention to the world, but sometimes it’s the kind of attention that only causes me pain.
There are days when all I notice is things that frustrate and bother me. It’s usually when I’m dwelling on the past, obsessing about the future, and judging people and conditions as bad or unfair. On those days I’m giving the world my full attention—it’s just filtered through fear.
On other days, I pay attention to the world, but instead I look for love, beauty, and possibilities. That’s not to say the world is all white as opposed to all black. I realize the glass is both half empty and half full. But I know that the quality of my attention dictates whether I see more of one than the other—and that ultimately affects what I choose to do.
When I find myself paying attention to the world in a way that causes me pain, I practice deep breathing, inhaling and exhaling while mentally repeating the words “let go.” I don’t always do this well; but when I let go of the fearful thoughts swarming around my brain suddenly my attention becomes a source of peace and happiness.

Thanks for taking the time to speak to us Lori,
Kaspa & Fiona

This is the second in our series of interviews with creative peopleI’m really pleased to introduce Clark Strand. Clark is an American haiku master and a former Zen Buddhist monk who writes and lectures on spirituality and ecology. His work has appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers, and his books have been widely translated across Europe, Asia, and South America. Clark currently writes a weekly column Green Koans, for Tricycle magazine. His books are available at amazon and other places.

What drives your creative work?
My haiku poetry is driven by Nature and always has been. I started writing haiku in the mid-70s as a way of responding to the beauty and wisdom I saw around me in the natural world on my daily walks. Starting around age 8 I was in the habit of walking for an hour or so each day, and by the time I got to high school I was often covering 10 miles or more at a time. About that time my girlfriend gave me a small book called 100 Haiku from the Japanese and said, “These reminded me of you.” After that I was hooked.
My nonfiction writing is also driven by Nature, although this realization was a longer time in coming. I always thought it was driven by Zen or the various other spiritual philosophies and practices I had studied, but that turned out not to be the case. These things were an expression of my drive to be in relationship with Nature and always had been. It took over 30 years to get really clear about that.

What would you say to yourself if you could go back in time and meet yourself at the beginning of your creative career?
I’d send back a single sheet of paper with a simple formula written on it. That formula came at the end of a very long search. It goes like this: t/e = 1
Where “t” is the value of theology (very broadly defined to include any cultural idea, thought, ritual, or practice…in other words, as a kind of stand in for human thought) and “e” is ecology, the planetary ecosystem, or simply the Earth. That formula says that t and e must have the same value. If not – if t > e or t < e - then the value of "t" is in error. The Earth will never be wrong.
I could have saved myself 30 years of wandering if I could have understood the simplicity of that formula when I was a teenager. I knew it even then, but I didn’t know that I knew.

How do you keep creating when things get difficult?
I can’t help it. Writing is how I solve many of my problems and difficulties. I haven’t ever encountered an obstacle I couldn’t write through, if only in the sense of finding the right relationship to it. If anything, obstacles are what keep me creative, rather than the thing that prevents it.

How does your creative work affect the rest of your life?
I write and lecture for a living, so my creative work is simply what I do. There’s no balancing act between the practical and the creative in my life. They’re the same thing.

What is it like to send your work out into the world?
There is always a lot of hope. In the beginning I thought that was you did when you finished a big project and sent it out. In the early days I’d hope it was going to get published, and so I would wait to hear if I’d met with success. Later, when publication was more of a given, I’d wait to see what the reviews were like, or whether my writing generated any other opportunities. Nowadays I learned not to even break my stride. I never stop creating, and just let matters take their own course. I’ll do my best on a project, but once it’s ready to go, I forget about it and immediately go on to the next thing. It’s important for a writer to have three books at any one given time: the one they’ve just finished, the one they’re working on now, and the next one they’re going to write. It’s like riding a bicycle. If you stop, you fall over. I’ve learned to keep moving. It’s good exercise, and I enjoy the ride.

What was the best advice anyone gave to you?
The best advice anyone ever gave was to write what I wanted to write and how I wanted to write it -in other words, to never write for the market. People who aren’t professional writers or artists often have a very skewed notion of how one meets with success. And there are enough successful hack writers or hack artists out there just feed the market with a steady diet of what it’s already eating, that it’s easy enough to forget that each trend in art or publishing was created by someone creating something they really believed in.
The advice given me was to be that person. Writers and artists often start from that place of self-expression or conviction – it’s what usually motivated them to embrace the creative life-but they often fall away from it at some point in their career. And some people never even start there. I think you can be a journalist or a commercial artist and probably never really feel the disconnect from what you’d really like to be writing about or painting or whatever. But even here, I suspect, the people that do it best, and most successfully, are driven by what they love.

What helps you to pay attention to the world?
Nature helps me pay attention. It’s my principal inspiration in life.

Thanks Clark, Kaspa & Fiona.