Girl on chair, acrylic on canvas, www.carolineallen.com

A multiple-choice question for you.

I will begin and stick to a regular writing schedule when:
A. My children turn 18 and leave home.
B. I find a job and am not so stressed out about money.
C. I finish a big project at work.
D. I finish a big project on the house.
E. I meet that special someone.
F. I break up with that not-so-special someone.
G. I’m finished with my degree.
H. All of the planets align in perfect harmony and make writing so easy, so glorious, that nothing can stop the flow of my pen across the page.
I. My children, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend backs off and gives me enough room to breathe.
J. Never.

If you chose any of the first nine above, you might as well just circle J. If not now, when? If not today, then why make your promises? to quote Tracy Chapman.

This year, for your New Year resolution, why not simply commit to write more? Why not set a writing schedule and stick to it? Why not make a list of excuses and burn it?

Don’t wait for anything to be perfect before you commit to writing. Believe me, it never will be. Ever. I can personally attest to that.

If you have no job right now because of the financial crisis, you’ll be just as worried about not having money if you sit and stare at your online bank account, as you will if you sit and write.

If you’ve got kids, get up an hour early and write. If you think that’s too much, I have two or three clients with small children who’ve written whole novels this way. I’m not saying it’s easy. In fact I think it’s pretty brutal. But your soul wants to write and you’re denying it its food. Your soul is anorexic.

Feed me, as the plant bellows in Little Shop of Horrors. Feed me!

None of us may have that long to live. And what if doing soul work tipped the planet back into balance?

We need you.

A writing coach can help keep you accountable. Contact me for a free initial consultation. carolineallen@aol.com, www.artofstorytellingonline.com

By Beth J. Bates, New Media Special Correspondent

Everyone loves a good story, especially when it’s about them. Stories are full of life and fuel the imagination. They enable your company to connect with its customers on a personal level. That’s how connections are made.

Corporate storytelling is becoming a popular and effective way to share what a company, its employees and its customers are doing. Done right, it can build emotional interest and trust.

There are a number of ways to present your corporate story. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

• Identity stories connect your customers with your brand. They like to know why a company came to be or how you were able to grow a company from a small kitchen-run business to a large corporation.
• Customer stories enable the people who use your service of buy your product to share their experiences. Stories might include how your product changed their life or how they used your service to better their community. People like to share good news and empowering them to connect helps build validity in your brand.
• Product stories explain how your product came to be. You don’t have to give away trade secrets, but customers like to know why a product came from and who made it happen. It puts a human face on your product, and customers like to connect with people.
• Internal stories are a great way to share your company’s greatest assets — your employees — with the rest of the world. Many of your employees, for instance, are probably doing great things within the community. They are volunteering and helping folks who are less fortunate. That can be a great story.

So, encourage your people and your customers to tell their stories … and you just may live happily ever after.

Beth J. Bates consults with Hinge on social media tool selection and strategy and helps its clients find effective ways to leverage these new mediums to meet business goals.

As a writer and a writing coach, I’ve dealt often with fear around writing a piece that exposes someone in the family, or an ex-lover or friend.

A client will say to me: If I tell the truth of this event I’ll never be able to publish it. It would devastate my family.

I say: As writers, we need to write our truths, whether it’s a retelling of the actual story in memoir, or a fictionalizing of it. That’s why we write.

I tell clients: Write it! It can stay just between you and me for now, and you can decide later what to do. Just do not let fear around telling the truth stop you from writing. I believe that fear is the one core reason for writer’s block.

When it comes to what to publish, it’s a tough and real question, and one not to be taken lightly. I chose fiction as a medium so that such a fear would not restrict my creative flow. As every fiction writer will tell you, however, fiction reveals truth that reality obscures, to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson. Every writer cannot help but explore the epic themes of their life, and these themes are often family related, and the characters in the novel even when fictionalized can be a big can o’ worms to put out there.

So if you think it’s just memoir writers who need to worry about this, think again.

I tell clients: You have a right to tell your side of the story. Make no mistake, this is just YOUR take on things. Your brother, ex-husband, father all have a right to write their versions, to tell their sides. This usually frees people up. It’s my right to tell my story, no matter how much a family tries to keep secrets, no matter how much they shame me into the unholy bargain of silence.

I tell clients: When you’re writing a rough draft, be in memoir or novel, it will harm your writing considerably if you avoid the elephant in the room. Write about the elephant . Don’t stop yourself. On final draft, you can choose how much to fictionalize the facts, or to discard it altogether.

Which leads to my third point: Don’t let anyone else tell you what to leave in and what to cut from your finished novel or memoir. If you know someone will be devastated by a certain scene, and you would rather not devastate them, cut the scene. But only if YOU know in YOUR gut, in your truth, that cutting it is necessary. As a coach, I do not have to live with the consequences of your book getting published under your name. You do. So take the decision-making around this seriously.

Personally, I lean toward truth no matter what the consequences. Telling the truth and putting it out there can spark great healing, for the writers and those affected. Writing the truth is the only real way there can be JUSTICE in an epic sense.

I’m a writing coach: www.artofstorytellingonline.com

Malmö sprider ikväll ljus i Malmö Arena, genom delfinal Idol 2009

Foto: Johann Selles
ALLT kan man uppleva i denna fantastiska arena, från ishockey till finstämda toner och Rosa Bandet galan.

Det är lite skillnad sedan jag själv stod där på Näringslivsträff,  tidigt en morgon den 5 november ifjol kl 07.07 på morgonen i ett blåsigt Malmö och på ett lerigt parkeringsområde, men med en välkomnande upplyst jättebyggnad den sk Malmö Arena och inte tänkte man då tidigt på morgonen att där skulle inom 1 år hållas Sveriges största evenemang. Nej mumsande på en ostmacka med kaffe och lite mingel med alla andra förväntansfullt inbjudna på 1:a visning för företagare i Malmö, tänkte jag mest hur ser det ut därinne?

Foto: www.afmalmborg.se

Vi de 1:a åskådarna möttes av en härlig dekor i lila,  ett hjärtligt välkomnande med orden: Godmorgon fakirer! och naturligtvis en stolt arenaboss Percy Nilsson.

Ikväll öppnar sig världen för ett helt annat evenemang….

Foto: www.afmalmborg.se Foto: www.afmalmborg.se

Maine, digital photography, www.carolineallen.com

I have a client who came to me to coach her in the writing of a nonfiction book about kids in foster care, their trials and tribulations, our misunderstanding of at-risk youth.

I knew in my gut this client was also a writer of fiction. I’m not sure she knew it yet, though. People will often come to me with a soulful desire to write fiction that is so latent even they don’t know it’s there. So they will hire me as a coach for a nonfiction book, and before you know it we’re discussing fiction. It’s magical.

At any rate, months into our work together, this woman told me about a clairvoyant friend who ’saw’ one of my client’s past lives when they were in the theatre together more than a decade ago. This friend saw someone around my client, a man who had loved her in medieval Wales, when she was another person altogether. The clairvoyant reading drew up inexplicably strong emotions for my client.

So, we decided she should write this past life as a novel. There was a lot of information about the people to begin with, their names, where they lived, how they were separated, death and longing. The emotions around it for my client were intense. The emotions around writing fiction were intense. When your soul wants something, some creativity, some expression of it, the emotions around that artistic need are huge and should not be ignored. Just as you wouldn’t ignore a suspected illness, ignoring the soul’s creative needs, I believe, can take years off one’s life.

I started thinking about where our creativity comes from. What if every time I write a character in my novel I’m channeling a past-life? Who’s to say where inspiration comes from? Who’s to say I’m not channeling another dimension as I write? Could the very land upon which my building sits be dictating my creativity? What if the wide lugubrious river out my kitchen window is dictating to me as I pen Chapter 7?

Don’t try to analyze with your brain where inspiration comes from. It comes from myriad dimensions – past lives, other dimensions, trees, a television commercial, future lives…what a glorious mystery and one that makes me love being an artist.

I’m a writing coach. www.artofstorytellingonline.com

Ingrid Hofve Partner/ VD för hofv2 metalldesign WORKSHOP med metaller, ett företag med 1 år på nacken. Det började med en otrolig idé och en stark passion för metaller och hantverket bakom.

Idag är mitt mål ”störst, bäst och vackrast” med metaller, exteriört, interiört och landskap. Utmaningen för hofv2 är att kunna erbjuda ett helt unikt koncept som materialinnovatör och väcka den okunskap som finns om vilka former metall kan trollas fram i och helt magiskt bearbetas.

Jag träffade (7 år sedan) och gifte mig med en plåtslagare och såg potentialen i materialet och hans yrkesutövande – som mycket duktig plåtslagare och konstruktör. Jag kunde följa med honom till verkstaden, jag med idéer och han med hantverket och ALLT blev bra som han tillverkade. För mig var det som att se en sömmerska med sitt tyg, i detta fall en plåtslagare med sin plåt. Detta hårda vackra material som bara förhandlas i en plåtslagares händer.

Idag är det business, där hofv2 metalldesign har en bred kunskap om material och bearbetning. När min man och jag reser runt (var vi än är), tittade vi på tak och fasader och värderar är det bra är det dåligt? Vi siktar alltid högt och ser allt som falkar, på gott och ont.  Överallt har vi ögonen med oss för metall och plåt.

bild copyright Sandvik (samarbetspartner)

Vägen är utstakad, bred och jämn!

hofv2 metalldesign vill lyfta vårt nordiska arv som den stålnation Sverige är, varför vi väljer att handla med stålverk i Skandinavien, Tyskland, Italien.

www.hofv2metalldesign.se

Jag är för nya applikationer och s k “verktyg”, inte bara gå på det gamla beprövade utan att våga testa nya grepp.

Innan jag startade mitt företag hofve metalldesign i augusti ifjol, tog jag kontakt med ett par 3 företag som kunde hjälpa mig med webdesign, nyhetsbrev utskick mm. Jag träffade dem men det sa aldrig “klick”. Jag nämnde lite löst för någon av dessa företag, att jag bloggade och det kändes kanske inte riktigt OK från deras sida. Detta var kring årsskiftet 2007/2008 och idag kan jag säga att många företag bloggar med framgång.

Idag kan jag berätta att jag fått två av mina största jobb via min blogg, vilket jag är oerhört glad för. Jag bloggar inte så ofta för jag ställer kanske för höga krav på mitt bloggande som företagare, men jag vill ändå vara personlig och ärlig mot mina läsare.

I förra veckan besökte jag ett stort event på Rådhuset i Malmö, där en av punkterna var storytelling och jag blev faschinerad, men hur går det egentligen till, det är det jag tänker ta reda på

Vad krävs för att berätta en bra historia , mer än att det naturligtivs skall vara sann just för det företaget s k “corporate storytelling”. Berättelser tagna ur vardagen om hjältar och kunder, om misstag och visioner och om hur det egentligen började för hofv2 metalldesign

palette, www.carolineallen.com

I taught Mystical Hands to 5 year olds last week, at a progressive private school called Wheeler in Providence.

We talked about the importance of our hands, how much we need our wiggling fingers, pinkies, thumbs and wrists. We traced our hands on cardboard and then collaged them with images I brought and carefully organized in baggies. And finally, we shellacked them all to a wondrous shine.

The profundity of the finished product was shocking. One shy girl glued deep sea creatures at the wrist, land animals at the palms, and birds flew up every finger. Us practiced adult artists have to work hard to be so tapped in.

Usually when I teach the class, I run around collecting up the art supplies and images so as not to make a mess. I was shattered from my novel-writing week, and just let the images there on the pint-sized white tables. After they finished their hands, some of the kids spontaneously grabbed sheets of construction paper and collaged the unused images. One boy named Boo, honestly that was his name, used a stapler to connect two sheets of paper, and the staples were like railroad tracks or some wacked looking quilting stitches and he collaged a massive castle surrounded by tiny people doing various types of work. It was unbelievable!

After this workshop, later in the week I had my weekly therapy session with Gordon. My cheap artist’s insurance will only cover therapy at these down and out clinics, full of beaten up rough looking tattooed men, and recovering crack addicts. I sit in the lobby listening to talk about baby daddies and hearing things like: ‘I’m going to get my kids back, you just wait.’ Many of Gordon’s clients are foster kids. He says I am a grown up version of his foster kids. Whoa!

We did an inner child activity. Truly, I hadn’t thought that this inner child activity had anything to do with the teaching of 5 year olds earlier in the week. Yeah, I was THAT tired. We put two chairs facing each other, and asked an inner child to come have a seat and a chat.

My 5 year old showed up in the plaid and white dress she wore for her kindergarten picture, bobby socks, patent leather black shoes with tiny buckles.

She wanted us to do projects together, like the Mystical Hands. She wanted a special folding table set up just for her. She wanted colored paper, a decorated soup can for colored pencils, a child’s pair of scissors, and any other bits and bobs, like toilet paper rolls, etc, that she could use.

Most importantly, she wanted to do art that didn’t need to be perfect, that didn’t need to be hung on the wall of some studio for passersby. She wanted to play. She wanted me to suggest ideas, but to back off and let her goof off.

I had a deep creative shift with this session. I realized that every Mystical Hands class I’d taught, up to this one, had been extremely controlled. I wanted the children’s hands to turn out professional and high end and, ridiculously enough, not messy and kid-like. I realized that this ‘perfectionism’ had been interfering with my visual art process for years. I thought I’d already learned this lesson.

What does this have to do with writing? The very next day, after setting up a folding table for my 5 year old with all the required goo-gahs, I coached writing clients and the way I coached seemed to shift.

I let go of working on finding the exact right vocabulary word with a client, of their path having to look a certain way. I loosened up.

I said, let’s stop controlling it all. Let’s stop editing so much. Let’s stop sweating the small stuff. Just tell the story. Just tell it. You’re a storyteller and you need to tell your story. The inner writer child wants to come out and play. Let her.

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” ~ Pablo Picasso

I’m a writing coach: www.artofstorytellingonline.com

nude, oil bar on paper, www.carolineallen.com

In the film Batman Begins, a theme that fascinated me was how to create an aura of superhero around the man Bruce Wayne, so he’d become the superhero Batman, so that he’d be respected, feared, left alone, taken seriously and finally, be a successful crime fighter.

I thought this is what a writer needs to do to become an international household name. Aura. Mystery. Superhero status.

How can a writer create such an energy?

Express the poetry of your soul not just privately in your novels and short fiction, but publicly. Live the poetry of your artform. Write a soulful blog. Create a gentle web presence full of pathos. Talk to people from your soul place, the same side of you that appears in the voice of your prose.

Fight ‘crime’ by keeping your finger on the pulse so that your writing reflects the most serious and pressing issues facing the world. And boy are there plenty.

People need to be awed by you, your mysterious superhero writing powers. Keep your life mysterious — not just to become a New York Times bestselling author, but because life is mysterious.

And don’t lose the magic in your writing by analyzing it to bits, tearing it to shreds and debating every little fact. Magic requires loosening the angry pedantic ego.

Two days ago, I came across a Tim O’Brien piece Telling Tails in the Atlantic Monthly. Using Batman as an example, he says writers are too worried about the ‘facts’, and lose the magic, the swirl of imagination.

When my godson/nephew Alejandro was 6, he LOVED superman. Superman lunchbox, Superman PJs, Superman comforter. I’ll never forget that little boy disembarking at Seatac and walking across the airport in a Superman cape over his Superman PJs. I wanted to run toward him, hug him, fly him around the terminal.

Later, over mac and cheese I turned to him jokingly. “Come on, be realistic, how can Superman fly? How can a man fly?” I truly wanted to see what a 6-year-old would say to that question.

He grew upset and confused. He looked at me with pained eyes. I realized what an ass I was being and backed off. Of course, Superman can fly. Of course. It’s called imagination.

We are writers. We fly.

www.carolineallen.com

I’m teaching a one-day workshop in Seattle November 1st called Shamanism and Writing.

I wanted to offer an explanation of how shamanism might work to help writers explode open their creativity, how it might help them figure out a plot or a character in their novels, how it might show them where to go to find support for their writing.

First, an explanation of what shamanism is. I’ve taken this explanation from the shamanic expert I like the most, Sandra Ingerman.

A shaman is a man or woman who uses the ability to see ‘with the strong eye’ or ‘with the heart’ to travel into hidden realms…The shaman divines information for the community. Shamans have and still act as healers, doctors, priests and priestesses, psychotherapists, mystics, and storytellers.

…Everything on earth is interconnected and any belief that we are separate from other life forms including the earth, stars, wind, etc is purely an illusion. And it is the shaman’s role in the community to keep harmony and balance between humankind and the forces of nature.

One shamanic technique is to do a journey (a deeply spiritual creative visualization) to meet spirit guides for information and healing. I believe our Writer Archetypes and our Ancestors are our creative guides. I believe if we set a greatest and highest good intention, and are humble, we can access these archetypes and ancestors with amazing assistance in writing our novels and memoir.

As Ingerman says, as storytellers we are healers of the planet. Shamanic guides want to help us succeed as the historical chroniclers of our ‘village’, as the storytellers who make sense of the world. Information and assistance is readily available, as long as we are open, humble and willing to receive it.

In the Seattle class, I will teach a basic journeying technique that participants can use on their own after the workshop. I have found that when I engage the spirit guides with my artwork, things start to shift in my external world in unexpected and very positive ways.

Let me give you an example. I did a journey to ask for more empowerment around my visual art side. I have a woundedness around the visual art that I won’t explain here, but this fragility has made it difficult for me as a visual artist. I went on the journey and met an Ice Queen. She was frigid, ice blue, alabaster white. She jangled when she walked. She was stunningly beautiful. She took me to an all white frozen room. It was an art studio.

“This is yours. Use it half for writing, half for painting, if you want,” she said. I looked around in awe. The walls were covered with ice. The windows frosted. I could see my breath.

“Touch the walls,” she said.

I did. As I touched, the ice melted. The walls grew a warm color. Then the windows. A touch defrosted them and the green flowering trees showed through. The room was pulsing with organic colors after I’d finished touching everything.

Within a month of this journey, I rented my first art studio. It happened against impossible odds. I was on a long waiting list. I was nowhere near the top of the list. I could afford it. I did 14 months of art in that space, art that melted a heart stuck in past trauma.

Come take the class and watch your writing and your life open in ways you never thought possible. Here are the logistics. (Please note that because of the financial crisis, I am offering a payment plan of $50 per month, paid via PayPal.)

What: Writing and Shamanism
When: Sunday, November 1, 2009. 10:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.
Where: BodySong Healing and Arts Center, 943 N. 89th Street, Seattle, WA 98103
Cost: $200 if paid by October 15th, $225 if paid on the day. Credit cards accepted via PayPal.
Contact: carolineallen@aol.com, 978.228.6617
Coaching site: www.artofstorytellingonline.com

]]> http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/i-dont-know/ Tue, 15 Sep 2009 16:22:53 +0000 caroline allen http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/i-dont-know/

www.carolineallen.com

All writers have to learn to live in the place of “I don’t know”.

Novels are complex unweildy animals. If you know how every scene is going to unfold, you’re being too controlling. Perhaps you have a general idea of where the novel is going and that’s fine, but to know too much is a sure prelude to writer’s block. If you think you know how it SHOULD go, you won’t let the novel go where it WANTS to go.

Live in “I don’t know”, let the characters tell you what they want to do. Stop controlling the process and watch magic unfold.

When I work with clients, at first many think I know where their novel is headed. I don’t. I don’t know. I’ve practiced long and hard to be comfortable in the zone of “I don’t know”. My power as a coach lies in the fact that I’m so happy in the “I don’ know” place.

I don’t know what will happen next with their characters or plot. I don’t know when they’ll finish the novel or memoir. I don’t know if it will sell. All of these considerations are about the future. If you stay deeply in the present with what you’re writing, plot, characters, themes, etc really will work themselves out.

I’m also quite psychic (in fact have worked and still do sometimes as an international tarot reader). People ask: “How do you see the future?”

I just see the present very deeply, and it’s like seeing the past and the future. But it’s all just one perpetual present. The same can be said for novel writing.

I’m a writing coach: www.artofstorytellingonline.com

]]> http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/the-ruler-approaches-the-meeting-place/ Sun, 13 Sep 2009 11:58:16 +0000 caroline allen http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/09/13/the-ruler-approaches-the-meeting-place/

Maine sunflower, www.carolineallen.com

I read an English translation of the I Ching almost daily. I find the ancient Chinese way of putting things quirky and exotic. “The penetrating (wind) moves above the profound (water) forming the condition for Reuniting.”

I mean, ponder that for a while and see where it puts your mind!

My favorite paragraph in the translation by R.L. Wing is this: “Those involved in creative projects should now concern themselves with commmunicating. Avoid elitism or egotism in your work, or you may lose the true thread of creativity. Look for the symbols, rhythms and patterns that have long inspired mankind, and incorporate them into your work. Make a sincere attempt to meet the social responsibility of the artist: Reuniting people with their reality.” (emphasis mine)

How as writers do we “reunite people with their reality”? I believe we do this by being honest, by delving deep, below ego, below social expectations, beyond even worldly matters. We go to our core selves and express it. You know you’ve “reunited people with their reality” when someone reads something and the universality of it brings tears, or sudden light, joy. Simplicity. You’ve written something that’s broken through the allusion, the delusion, of modern life. You’ve helped them remember how much they love life.

When I teach or coach writers, I always come back to this: Tell the truth. What is your truth? Tell it. Don’t be politically correct. Don’t be clever. Keep is simple. Don’t try to be profound, just be yourself. It is in the core of your uniqueness that you find the universal spark.

Of course, it may take a lifetime of excavation and exploration for any of us to come to know our true selves. It may be a lifetime of work to reunite ourselves with our own reality, let alone be able to express in a way that reunites others with their reality. The I Ching reminds us that it’s our job as artists to take on such a task.

I’m a writing coach. www.artofstorytellingonline.com.

]]> http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/do-you-want-the-good-news-first/ Mon, 07 Sep 2009 13:03:39 +0000 caroline allen http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/09/07/do-you-want-the-good-news-first/

The barn in Maine, www.carolineallen.com

I just returned from meeting my literary agent Jon Sternfeld in New York City. He took me to lunch at a place called Punch, with double doors that opened onto the street. As we ate chicken clubs and steak tips, I noticed the restaurant’s sign, a jester’s hat made of flexible bronze that bobbed and jiggled as it hung from a post.

That night in a cheap hotel room overlooking railway tracks on 42nd Street, I had a dream. Punch in his jester’s hat stood in front of me. I sat on a straight-backed chair on a massive empty stage flooded by a spot light.

Punch said: “Do you want the good news first, or the bad?

I usually ask for the bad news first, so that I’m left with a lighter taste in the mouth, but this time I stared up at the massive velvet curtains held back with grand tassles and said: “Good news, please.”

Punch leaned in with his huge eyes, and large crook of a nose and said: “The good news is you’re an artist.”

“What’s the BAD news,” I quipped.

Punch pulled back and put his fingers in his clown pants pockets and said: “The bad news is…” he paused, “you’re an artist.”

My mind flew with what he meant. The good news is that as artists and writers we get to feel the universe, the world, in all its glory and pain, and we get to register those feelings with our souls and with our hands and create something from nothing. We get to have a profound soulful impact on the world. And we get to go to New York City and meet our agents. How exciting is that!

The bad news is we cannot be anything else. We must suffer through brutally low income (I had to pack enough PB&J for three meals in my luggage on the trip to NYC, because I could afford nothing but the train fair and the cost of riding the subway once I got there). We must suffer through channeling a brutalized planet. Often, if we’re ahead of the game, which most artists are, we are misunderstood, maligned, or worse, ignored. I personally find it very difficult to see what I see, to understand what I understand, and to try to live on this planet, which seems to be stuck in one perpetual loop of mindless small talk.

Good news? Bad? You’re a writer. You’re an artist. Write. Paint. Be.

I’m a writing coach. Contact me for a free initial consultation. www.artofstorytellingonline.com

]]> http://historieforteller.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/dette-med-organisasjonsfortelling/ Thu, 13 Aug 2009 06:16:51 +0000 historieforteller http://historieforteller.wordpress.com/2009/08/13/dette-med-organisasjonsfortelling/

Det foregår en bitteliten (bitteliten fordi det i prinisppet egentlig er bare en eller to som diskuterer – vel egentlig kan det ikke kalles en diskusjon eller, mer at det er noen som har behov for å formidle sin kompetanse, hvilket jo er OK) diskusjon om fortelling i organisasjoner og næringsliv på det nordiske nettverket ratatosket.

Et av mine problemer med å se på muntlig fortelling i den sammenheng, er agendaen – enten den er skjult eller åpen, videre hvordan den muntlige fortellingen slutter å forvandles i den konnotasjonen. Se hvordan det gikk med fortellingene som ble de utvalgte for Bibelen. De ble normerende, uten evne til forvandling og rommet for tolkning er minimalt – tettpakket med metaforer og minimalt med refererende arketyper!!!!!!

]]> http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/downtime/ Mon, 27 Jul 2009 17:38:54 +0000 caroline allen http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/07/27/downtime/

Strawberry medley, mosaic in paper, work in progress, www.carolineallen.com

I’ve hit a wall with writing. It’s not writer’s block; I’m bombarded moment to moment with ideas for working the plot and characters of the novel, on both a spiritual and practical front. I simply cannot write. I’m too tired.

As an artist, I’ve found the notion of taking breaks, having downtime, to be extremely confusing. I worked my ass off as a journalist, running around big cities like Tokyo and London BEFORE the internet, when you had to be a gum shoe to get information from sources. And even then, after a week off, I’d pop right up and be ready for another wild and maddening year.

Creative downtimes follow no such easy pattern. Downtown for artists is a completely different beast from vacations needed by full-time workers. As a novelist, you could write one page and need two weeks off! You could write a thousand pages and not need a break at all. I’ve gone years cantering at a brisk pace, and then I write a sentence that works like an acupuncture’s needle and hits some sore spot, and I’m down for the count for a week. (Is that too many metaphors for one sentence?)

There’s no rhyme or reason for understanding Artistic Downtime, and coming up with a philosophy can be really difficult.

Some downtime is about leaving the soil fallow for a replanting at a later time, some is about “Beginner’s Mind”, and some is simply about being triggered and tired from all the healing that happens when you write your truth.

Downtime reason #1: The material needs to gestate. Ideas are percolating just below the surface and need time to come to fruition.

Downtime reason #2: “Beginner’s Mind” is a Buddhist concept of remaining simple and present and innocent. You get too into a novel and you become hard assed and cynical – you become sharp with the language but you have lost the soul of the work. Go into the woods and meditate. Eat organic veggies. Come back to that innocence.

Downtime reason #3: Rest and regeneration. I cannot believe how invigorating artwork can be on one level, and how much it requires of you on another. I distrust people who tell me that writing or visual art never makes them tired. Or those who say that such sessions ’shouldn’t’ make you tired. Hogwash. It’s hard work, both intellectually and spiritually.

You may have to honor that you need a solid month of putsing around before you can get back to work. You may even have to honor that you need a year! I’ve seen it happen with clients.

Meanwhile, while you’re taking an enforced rest, let the soul soar, be grateful for the glories of the universe, the planet earth, the creative force that has gotten you this far. Sink your toes into the dewy grass and review how far you’ve come over the past year, or five years, over 10. The only way through such downtime is gratitude.

I’m a writing coach: www.artofstorytellingonline.com

]]> http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/politically-incorrect/ Sun, 12 Jul 2009 18:44:38 +0000 caroline allen http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/07/12/politically-incorrect/

Tokyo on Ecstacy, tempera paint on canvas, www.carolineallen.com

I’m lying on my sofa at about 10 Sunday morning with a hangover. I went to a party last night where the host, a man, brought out a paper mache giant pink penis and hauled it up the branch of a Maple tree in his driveway.

He made a list of the women who wanted to thwack it, brought out the leopard skin blindfold, spun us one by one and handed us each dowels. He’d bought the sticks in various sizes and many of them broke in the fury of our beating the colossal pink member.

We screamed as each woman went up. Go girl. Hit him where it hurts. Slam down hard on one of the balls! Harder! Faster! That’s the way, ahuh ahuh, he likes it, ahuh ahuh.

My teeth were bared, my breathe shallow and fast. It was cathartic. But even my feminist friends wouldn’t dare pull such a stunt for fear of being called men haters. The host was a big burly 6 foot 3 inch lawyer. I went up to him and drunkenly asked: Isn’t it weird to watch all these women slap the hell out of a penile effigy and why would you DO something like this at your party?He shrugged, but his friend slurred: Because we have a deep hatred of our male selves.

I’m lying on my sofa this morning hung over and can’t get that response or the pink cock out of my face. It was so huge and visual. It was filled with silly sex toys and I’ve hung the small rectangular packet of Get Harder gel on my bulletin board.

I’m thinking about how politically correct writing has become in America. Some fiction is so boring because we all feel it necessary to appear ‘good’ and ‘nice’.

But good and nice is boring. Good and nice is a killer.

My cat Fin jumps on my lap and flops on her back. I take one ankle between thumb and forefinger. I think about the passage in my semi-autobiographical novel Earth I revised this week, based on a true event:

I followed him out the screen door to the back yard. I’d never skinned before. I was 6. An outside light threw a halo and turned the burnt grass to lime. Father threw the line of squirrels down in the grass.

“We ain’t got time for nonsense,” he mumbled. “We won’t have any of that nonsense around this house.” He knelt on one knee. He untied the legs of the dead squirrels and took one and put it on its back in front of him. “Get on down here and grab them legs,” he said. “You old enough for acting like a fool, you’re old enough to be working.”
I sat on the grass and took the squirrels tiny ankles between index finger and thumb.

He took a hunting knife out of the stained leather pouch at his belt. The knife was brown and gray like a late autumn field. He leaned forward, his thin angular hands steady. He held his tongue between his teeth. He bent his head, his hair like a slather of wet red paint upon his head. His face was rough and pockmarked, like a dry landscape full of craters and cracked river beds.

With the tip of the knife, he nicked the squirrel at the crotch, slit from crotch to throat, made arcs around the nails of the paws, tore the fur off like a miniature coat.

We finished one squirrel, and he tossed it in the grass. He grabbed another, slice, yank, toss, and another, and another. The pile of uncovered squirrels grew, fleshy embryos nestled in an emerald halo. On the other side of us, a pile of intestines and next to that bloody pelts.

I look at how thin and frail Fin’s ankle is. I rub her exposed belly. She purrs. I think of how important it is to write and to live the dark stuff, because it’s real and true. Writing or living with political correctness makes love mean nothing at all.

I’m a writing coach: www.artofstorytellingonline.com

]]> http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/from-neglect-to-nurturing/ Sun, 07 Jun 2009 17:45:20 +0000 caroline allen http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/06/07/from-neglect-to-nurturing/

Doodle, www.carolineallen.com

I posted this blog earlier today with a digital photo of verdant nature. After I finished the blog, my inner little girl artist mentioned in the blog below said it wasn’t that she wanted me to hang up my ‘professional’ works of art around the house, she wanted me to hang the hundreds of doodles I make a week and usually throw away as irrelevant. These are our voice too, she told me. I’ve included such a doodle above. Keep reading to see what I mean.

I did a reiki ritual at my art studio about a month ago. I used an empowerment ritual in the manual given to me by my Reiki Master, following the guidelines to the letter.

The ritual affected the space so profoundly, I haven’t been able to do a single moment of art in my studio since. I can barely enter the space. I was doing visual art three to four times a week, and post-ritual I haven’t been in the space for a month.

Admittedly, I’ve been revising my novel as first priority, but I’m Type A and can do many things in my life at once. The inability to do art at my studio has left me extremely curious as to what happened with that empowerment ritual.

Slowly I think I’m understanding. I think the empowerment brought the space to my highest potential. I was neglected as a child, my artistic side actively downgraded by parents who were scared of the power and wanted me to be a good little helper not a mind-blowing artist. Where I’m at right now in my self esteem around visual art does not match the power in the space. I have to go from neglect to nurturing, so that I can rise to the potential the ritual invoked. (There may be more going on with the studio — it used to be a textile mill and a LOT of women in it were kept low in a repetitive job. There may be some deeper things happening — I can’t be completely sure.)

What does this have to do with writing?

Are you the sort of writer who gets blocked often? Do you find the concept of sitting down to write so overwhelming you feel like sobbing? Do you know you are a writer, and you’ve had long phases of writing, but then you shut down for months or years?

From my own experience and in working with clients as a writing coach, I know that 99 percent of the time this has to do with childhood neglect, both the absence of basic love and more specific neglect around our creative selves as children.

So how does one reparent that little girl artist? That little boy writer? The answer will be specific to the trauma. I did a meditation and one real bruise in my soul is this: my mother hid my artwork in the bottom of a dresser drawer saying it was too messy. My siblings’ art was hung on walls, magnetized on refrigerator. My meditation told me to hang my art up at home. I have a few pieces here, but most are at the studio. I need to reparent that little girl by putting up my art at home.

How can you reparent the inner writer? Get copies of your favorite children’s books and reread them. Take your journal and glue a collage on the front. Let a truly trusted friend read something you’ve written. Match the nurturing to the specifics of the neglect. Do the opposite of what that parent or teacher did that shut you down.

Take action. Don’t think, act. Mulling doesn’t help. Do one physical act that will bring you from neglect to nurturing, so that you can have the creatively fulfilling life you were destined to live.

]]> http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/what-is-truth-what-is-memoir/ Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:58:18 +0000 caroline allen http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/what-is-truth-what-is-memoir/

Found object sculpture, made of tree branches, and a burlap sack, www.carolineallen.com

I’ve just picked up James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, the ‘memoir’ that caused such a fuss a few years ago, because it wasn’t a memoir but a piece of fiction. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here to read a Vanity Fair article on Frey, Oprah and the book.

First, it’s a fantastic book if you’ve ever dealt with serious addiction. I have, over my family’s long history of alcoholism, spending a few years in an Al-Anon 12 Step Program. The book is a powerful testament to what addiction does to an individual and what it does to the family members.

I never had a problem, none whatsoever, that this author had written a book that was called a memoir but was actually a novel. (Frey sent it to the agent as a novel, and the agent and publisher knew that memoirs sold better and convinced Frey to call it a memoir. He would fully collude in this lie, standing behind facts that weren’t real in interviews, especially with a vengeful Oprah.) At any rate, I never had a problem with any of this.

Why? All memoir is fiction. And I don’t think that’s a problem.

Why? When we write memoir, we explore our passions and hurts and ourselves, and we all tend to embellish and polish. We all manipulate through words how we are perceived by others, and we are deeply subjective about our truths.

Why? Because why spank this guy for writing a memoir/novel on addiction that had a few untruths in it, a book that in its essence is healing to the world, when our entire planet is falling apart because of lies. We’re surrounded by lies on all fronts — politicians lie, journalism is a lie, in Capitalistic societies, ads bombard us with lies about our lives, we destroy the earth by lying, there so much lying in the financial sector it’s bringing the world to its knees — so who cares that someone wrote a passionate hearfelt piece on addiction and made some things up? Who should we really be angry at here?

At any rate, if you are writing memoir know that it is a sort of fiction. Writing about your childhood, you will be an unreliable narrator. There’s no way around that. You’re subjective. You’re putting the story forward in only your view point. You’re using creative license. You can’t remember the color of the curtains, so you make that up. You don’t remember the dialogue word for word and you fill in the blanks with your own words. That’s fiction.

Memory is a foggy unreliable thing. So even something you remember very clearly is still not ‘real’. It’s still partially made up.

But all of this is OK. Just accept that you are subjective. This was one reason I gave up journalism. It was called fact, and it wasn’t fact.

I realized that every article I wrote was based on a Western Capitalist perspective. I’d do an article on a farm that was going bankrupt, and I’d think: How would an early Native American have covered such a story? An Eastern European? Certainly very differently from the way my editor demanded I cover it. So, how is my factual journalism article anywhere near the truth?

What is truth? I decided that purely subjective self expression through art — novel writing and visual art — owning fully my subjectivity as a white woman born in a Western culture, was the only truth I had a right to convey to the world.

Even in the art world, I’m grappling with what truth is. I seek teachers and find a plethora of those who believe in classical painting styles, where one tries to capture a model or a still life. This is the way it’s done, I’m told. But who said so? Somebody from centuries ago, a white male? One could say just ignore these teachers, find others, but they are a force to be reckoned with, as is any other mainstream paradigm. They do not tend to support those who buck that system.

Frey has long said he has a deep artistic need to f*&#ck with the rules, to play with our notions of truth. I get that. I see that. I agree with that. According to the Vanity Fair article, a few months prior to publication, Frey wrote, “I think of this book more a work of art or literature than I do a work of memoir or autobiography.”

And that is what every memoir is, a work of art, a piece of literature. Subjective. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

I’m a writing coach: www.artofstorytellingonline.com

]]> http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/using-journalism-techniques-in-fiction/ Fri, 24 Apr 2009 19:33:53 +0000 caroline allen http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/04/24/using-journalism-techniques-in-fiction/

One of the best techniques I learned in journalism school and later as a practicing journalist was the ability to see a piece of writing as ‘the’ writing instead of ‘my’ writing.

With fiction writers, I try to convey this technique for successful revision. If it’s ‘the’ writing, you distance yourself, your likes and dislikes, from the piece of writing and see the writing as an entity separate from you.

If it’s ‘my’ writing, you’re so attached to it that you’re less likely to kill your darlings, to cut out some favorite scene that doesn’t fit the plot. You’re less able to go into a writer’s group and really hear the feedback.

For example, because I do try to see Earth as ‘the’ novel instead of ‘my’ novel, when someone I didn’t particularly like criticized it, I was able to hear her feedback (albeit begrudgingly). I was able to delve into the criticism, parse out what WOULD help the book, incorporate those changes, and bring the novel to a higher level.

This is more difficult than it sounds, especially with memoir and fiction, where we are exploring our voice more than, say, in a journalism article. But it’s a good discipline to practice. Back up. Think of a chapter as separate from you. Look as clearly as you can at its weaknesses. Revise until it shines as a stellar piece of writing.

Being able to understand a piece of writing as ‘the’ writing can also help you give feedback to other writers, for example, in writer’s groups. If I see another writer’s chapter as ‘the’ writing, I can focus on the work, and what makes it better, instead of on the person who wrote it.

This is a particularly good practice if you don’t particularly like one of the writers in a group. Don’t focus on them, or you’ll throw in hurtful personal criticisms. Focus on the work. Discipline the mind to just see the chapter. How could the writing be improved?

The ability to do this is a professional skill, and practicing it will make you more of a professional writer. People can sense such professionalism and it helps further your own writing career.

]]> http://wordofmoss.com/2009/04/24/using-stories-as-corporate-flight-simulators/ Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:03:34 +0000 wordofmoss http://wordofmoss.com/2009/04/24/using-stories-as-corporate-flight-simulators/

My company supported the Woman of the Year  lecture given by Baroness Greenfield this week. It was a fascinating presentation looking at how childrens’ brains may be changing as a result of the hours spent playing video games.

The opening introduction was especially interesting to those corporate storytellers amongst us. The Baroness shows via brain scans how simply thinking about an activity (in this case playing the Piano) has as positive an impact on the brain as actually doing it.

This of course is why corporate and brand storytelling works. It gets people to mentally simulate the situation you are describing, making messages stick. Pretty valuable stuff in this cluttered world of ours!

]]> http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/artistic-depression/ Sun, 12 Apr 2009 20:59:39 +0000 caroline allen http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/04/12/artistic-depression/

London Textures, www.carolineallen.com

A friend once accused me of hiding how hard things have been/are for me in my artistic process. I highlight the successes, rant at the small-mindedness of other people, but never really detail how hard it’s been.

At the very real risk of exposing my soft underbelly (especially in brutal New England), I’m going to write about my own artistic depression. My hope is that this is not a gratuitous exercise, a feel-sorry-for-me rant. My hope is it’ll help others who have such depressions to get up, walk across the room, sit down at their computer, and do their writing.

Since an agent in New York City expressed interest in my novel Earth this week, I’ve plunged into an artistic depression. I wrote my friend Leah in Armenia/Republic of Georgia www.leahkohlenberg.com about my bottomless low self esteem this weekend. She wrote back:

I think your low self esteem is a normal reaction, believe it or not, to the success you are having right now in life. The novel being considered seriously by an agent, the beautiful art you are making, the spiritual growth and family stuff you are healing, the work you are doing with the school children, all of it! Sometimes, I think the struggle to achieve is easier to accept than the achievments themselves!

Yes, I wrote back, having my voice heard and recognized reminds me of all the times I was told to shut up, the times I was beaten up for what I had to say, the times I’ve nearly died because I’ve expressed myself.

I just went into Lowe’s to get nails and screws for my art studio and had to avoid the aisle where they sell rope because my mind bounced madly over how one might buy such rope, where one might find a beam to throw it over, how one might tie a noose knot, how one might…

Here’s where I worry this may sound gratuitous…oh poor little white girl who’s doing her art…what does SHE have to be suicidal over?

That’s what my friend was saying about how I hide how hard this is for me — people somehow have the notion that I find this all easy. I don’t. I really don’t.

I grew up with barely literate parents on a farm. From when I was little, they told me the way I saw things was wrong, even dangerous. When I was as young as 5, my father would hide in the hallway and whisper insults in my ear, stupid, loser, idiot. He used to look at me, grimace and tell me how ugly I was.

Such whispered hate bowed my head down. Despite years of healing, sometimes it still bows my head down.

I was yelled at continually for speaking my truth. Somehow what I believed about the world, about the earth, engendered rage in mainstream, sexist Missouri. I just felt the earth was all we needed. That the rest of the striving was just so unnecessary. And I’m still not sure how this triggered so much rage. I still get confused about that.

At any rate, I learned to shut my mouth. And when I didn’t learn that lesson well enough, I was beaten. Many times. Once when I was a teenager, I was driven off the road by an enraged boyfriend, because I said I wouldn’t marry him, because I said I wanted to go find out who I was. He slammed into my car at 50 mph. He nearly killed me.

In my extended family, many have committed suicide. So many people have shot themselves in the head that I went through a phase where I counted as a success in my family anyone who was still alive. It’s epidemic in our genes. An acceptable way of not living. A consequence of so many sensitive souls (like me) being insulted, beaten down, told to shut ourselves up til we no longer exist.

When I was 30, and I gave up London and my husband and journalism to again try to find myself, I suffered my first artistic breakdown. I spent three months on a futon in a studio apartment I’d moved into in Seattle. Oh God, how I hated Seattle. (Now, I can’t believe how lucky I was to live there and meet so many unbelievably loving people who are still part of my life).

But at that time, I thought it was such a podunk, isolated, depressing place. I wanted my husband back, my jet-setting career. I missed London! Despair rocked my body. I sobbed endlessly. I didn’t want to explore myself, my past, the abuse, the estrangement from the abusive family. It was too hard.

I hit bottom one day. I awoke at 3 p.m., sheets sweat-soaked, the apartment filthy. Either you choose to die, a voice said, or you choose to live.

There was no great urge to live, just a choice. But I knew that to die would be just too hard on the people I loved. So, I said: OK, I’ll live.

I will make this promise, I said to the cracks on the ceiling, I will not kill myself and I will do my art.

I got out of bed. I took file cards and wrote on them: Eat every day. Have you brushed your teeth? Is your hair combed? Did you bathe today? Do your laundry.

I taped them around the apartment. I slowly painfully started to take care of myself. I slowly painfully started writing fiction every day…sobbing at the computer on a rickety table in the corner of the kitchen. I took my healing practice more seriously. I studied different healing modalities.

It took three YEARS to come out of that funk. Three years! As I came out of it, I met a writer woman in London where I went for a short visit. She told me a story of spending three months on the hardwood floor with depression over her divorce. When she stood up finally, she said it looked like a policeman’s chalk outline of her body. Her tissues, ashtray, tea cup, lighter, fags, ganja, rolling papers, wine glass all formed the shape of her body on the floor. She was looking down upon the outline of her depression.

I LOVED her for telling me the truth of her depression. I laughed and fell in love with her.

I told her about the time I couldn’t work because I was so low and had to go to the food bank. How I sobbed about having to go to a foodbank. My parents were right — the way I saw things DID make me a failure. As I stood in line in the drizzling rain, I cried and thought: They were right I am a failure because of the way I perceive the world!

When I got to the front of the line, they gave me a frozen chicken. I told this friend that it was so frozen and hard, all I could think of on the walk home was how it could be used to kill someone. One swing of the chicken and someone would be dead!

She burst into hysterical guffaws. She was a writer too, and right then she came up with a mystery/thriller where I killed someone with the frozen chicken and then went home and thawed and boiled and ate the evidence. I was laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes.

Things have certainly gotten easier/better since those days, but I will say this: when I hit bottom, when I felt the existential angst at that moment at age 30 when I had to make a choice to live or die, when I suffered the realization of being sensitive in such a world as this, with all its murder, rape, war, with all its small niggling brutal insults, when I hit bottom, that feeling of existential angst has never really left me. I think it is really how I feel about the world…that despair is as real as the light and the glory that I also feel, when I’m doing my art and writing.

Now, I just choose. To get out of bed, to sit, to write, to make art, to help others express themselves.

Now, it’s just a constant choice. To live.

]]> http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/ego-vs-spirit/ Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:05:50 +0000 caroline allen http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/04/10/ego-vs-spirit/

Flower dribble painting done by a middle school girl in Lowell, MA, public schools.

A week before posting the blog Just Be Yourself, I was speaking excitedly to another artist about the artwork I was doing with kids in public schools.

When I saw her again a few days later, she’d processed the information, and she told me what I was doing wasn’t such a big deal, inferred it was a menial job, and I shouldn’t be getting so excited about it. I think she took my excitement as bragging, when it was just pure excitement.

I was blown away. Am still in shock. She’s an artist and she’s telling me teaching kids art isn’t important? I could see right through what she was saying. If I had a show at a gallery then I’d be important, then I’d have the right to be excited. (Although I’m thinking she would probably have found a way to crush the spirit of that too.)

You’ve got to love New Englanders for their passionate clinging to status. Whereas on the US West Coast, an artist friend might grapple inwardly with their ego demons, here people just say it all out loud. I feel like everyone here has one of those squeaky plastic mallets and they keep bonking each other on the head with them.

I’ll also put out there that this woman suffers from depression. Clinical depression. I always wonder how much such depression has to do with the rabid constraints, the voracious demands of the never satisfied ego.

I know as I’ve followed the simplicity of my soul message, my depressions have disappeared. These soul messages have urged me toward very humble pursuits, not toward some fancy university education in fiction, but toward teaching writing in community college extension programs (which led to a successful and edifying writing coaching and teaching career).

Or these messages led me to explore my own spiritual connection, to study mysticism and read tarot cards in the back of an independent bookstore — Santoros Books in Seattle (which led me to read independent authors extensively and fostered a friendship with another lover of words, Carol Santoro, the owner, who then supported public fiction readings of my work and my students’ work).

I don’t want to underestimate depression. I’ve been through hell and back so many times I’ve got frequent flyer miles. All aboard! Next stop hell! No charge! So, please don’t think I speak of freeing myself from depression lightly. But I see it again and again, the humbler and more open to the simplicity of the spirit we are, the less likely we are to suffer depression.

Spiritually, deep down, I think I knew I had to give hundreds of kids in a ‘normal’ school setting permission to be themselves, so that I would give myself permission to be myself as an artist.

And I know that doesn’t mean a gallery show. Anyway, I’ve always known I won’t be showing in any sort of gallery that wants reproductions of bucolic lighthouses and seascapes. It’ll have to be a pretty radical gallery. But I’m not going to live my life in depression waiting for that to happen.

I’d rather be happy now, and splash some paint around with sixth graders. Yesterday, after I finished a quite brutal two and half hours of painting with 40 middle schoolers (Miss, should I use blue or red on the hat? Miss, does this eye look OK? Miss, Miss, Miss, Miss…) anyway, after we’d finally finished our boards and this cacophony of color pulsed up from the 40 boards lining one of the tables, the teacher blared music from a stereo. And we danced. We danced and danced.

We did the maquerena.

]]> http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/just-be-yourself/ Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:05:49 +0000 caroline allen http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/04/08/just-be-yourself/

Dribble Doggie, painted by a 6th grader in a Lowell Public School, who swore up and down he wasn’t an artist and had no artistic talent. He is and he does.

I’m working on a project with middle schoolers in Lowell Public Schools in Massachusetts.

It’s my unenviable task to spend two 2-hour sessions with the kids and have a finished mural by the end of it — a mural that will hang in a Lowell Park.

I teach up to 50 kids at once. You can imagine the chaos.

I just started the work, so I’m figuring it out as I go along. What has amazed me most about it can be summed up in the following scenario.

I come to the front door of one of the public schools, a drab, pockmarked undernourished looking building. The door is locked. You have to buzz to be let in.

The corridors too are drab, brightened up here and there by colored construction paper on bulletin boards. Everywhere are signs about Respect and Responsibility. These are multi-ethnic schools and getting everyone to get along must be a big issue.

Finally, I face the kids. We are dribbling paint on 1′x1′ boards, random lines we then look at to ’see’ a picture and paint it in. We’re dribbling the paint from one board to another as a metaphor of ‘we’re all connected’. I have only two hours per session and I want to have a soulful impact with the kids, besides the very real mural we have to paint and finish on deadline.

Finally, I ask them: Who thinks they’re an artist? Two hands go up. I ask: Who thinks that you’re only an artist if you have pictures up in galleries? Lots of hands fly up.

I say: We’re all artists in our souls. Just be yourself.

You could hear a pin drop when I said: be yourself. I’m quite psychic, and even the psychic noise calmed significantly from the kids.

Just be yourself. As a writer, just be yourself.

Just like these kids have to prep for state-wide tests that have nothing to do with who they are deep down (not that I’m against holding education to some standard — but there’s got to be a balance), just as these kids think there’s a right way to do something, a way decided by someone else, so too do we as adult artist/writers think there is a right way, a standard way.

If we could just learn it, follow it, then we’d be a success. The only real success as an artist comes from being yourself. It’s a lifetime journey of finding out who that self is. We need to excavate it because we’ve been told for so long that this institution or that KNOWS the right way. No, they don’t.

When you are your true creative, eccentric self you may feel fragile, shy. That’s OK. That’s because you don’t have whole organizations touting what you’re doing. Your real self is just this one person with this one vision. But then single people with their own vision (a vision that’s gone up against the mainstream standards), have profoundly impacted the world. Ghandi, Jesus, Buddha to name spiritual leaders. Pollock, Cézanne, Van Gogh, to name visual artists.

Even in the building where I have my art studio, you wouldn’t believe how many people still believe there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing art. The right way is the institutional way, the grad school way, the mainstream way. Is it?

Is it?

Let’s just be our creative selves, shall we? The rest is all just so depressing.

]]> http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/give-to-receive-2/ Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:39:38 +0000 caroline allen http://artofstorytelling.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/give-to-receive-2/

More traffic in Costa Rica, www.carolineallen.com

After receiving a few emails on yesterday’s blog Give to Receive, I’ve decided to further explore the issue of support.

First, why do we find it hard to congratulate success in others? We absolutely know in our souls that the more open and loving we are, the more that energy comes back to us. But still we close down. We see another artist/writer needs a few words of encouragement and we don’t give it. We close down the other person, further shrinking any chance of a creative dynamic.

Such small behavior almost always goes back to an unhealed place in ourselves when we were not supported as children. Why should I congratulate her when no one ever gave me any artistic support? I can give you about a hundred examples from my own life, but I’ll just try to stay with one.

When I was a young girl, I was a spontaneous visual artist. Even as young as six, I was winning awards. I’d do these insanely intricate doodles and win a first prize ribbon. Once I made a doll by hand — it looked like something a voodoo doctor would use — and won a major prize — at a science fair! It was as if my art could be anywhere and it got attention. That is, until my sister and mother decided to nip my budding talent.

For some reason my mother didn’t like me being an artist. She hid any artwork I did in the bottom of her sock drawer. She told me it was too messy to display. I was 6. My siblings’ artwork was hung on the walls.

I supposed she was extremely busy with the farm, and I was a particularly good helper. If I did art, I wouldn’t be such a good helper. My older sister was also an artist, but she was allowed because she wasn’t particularly good at doing the chores.

Don’t get me wrong. My sister is a really good artist. The mulch of her profound creativity enters the room before she does; it’s so thick you could cut it with a knife. But she demands all the attention, all the air in the room, until you cannot breathe.

The resentment in me over this is as large as a barn, as raging as a bull in heat. I’ve had much much worse happen, oh the stories I could tell, but this really sticks in my craw. OK, I’ll carry the bucket of animal entrails and slop it over the fence to the dogs, while SHE sits and paints. F#($#&(@P)!!!

Phew. OK, coming down here. So, last year, at age 44, when I moved into a studio with 185 other artists, what should happen? My nextdoor neighbor is just like my older sister, as gifted and as used to having the spotlight on her.

How in the heck am I going to say: “Congratulations! You’re so awesome!” to another artist when for so long I’ve been craving support for my own art? I screamed at the universe: What about me? What about my art? Am I going to have to spend the rest of my life fighting for a crumb of attention and support?”

Because of my childhood, at the studios I immediately assumed the position of bucket slopper to the stars. I heard this voice yell: “Caroline, ASSUME the POSITION!”

I believe it is this sort of background gunk that goes through all of our minds when another artist/writer succeeds. And I know there are a lot of women out there who were not supported in their creativity — good girls becomes wives and mothers. Doing art is selfish. Blah, blah, blah, blah naseum.

I know these women are out there because I’ve taught and coached hundreds of them. In doing so, I’ve seen that the support we all need is so very basic, so deeply fundamental and has been so missing for so long. For years, for centuries…and it turns some of us voraciously needy and others of us small and mean.

So, what I did at the studios was this. I immediately pulled in my energy. I asked the universe for help. I got clear on what was happening. I journaled about my sister. I meditated. I shamanic journeyed. I taroted.

I believe the universe gave me this nextdoor neighbor to help me heal this childhood wound. As I’ve worked on the issue I’ve started to put down the slop bucket. Picked it up again. Put it down. Down. Put it down!

I moved my studio down the hall so I’d have more breathing room. I turned inward, toward my own light. I made myself less available. I asked: How can I focus more clearly on my own art?

And lately I am able to go into my neighbor’s studio and congratulate her. I never say a negative word to her about her art.

I keep the balance, though. If I feel myself reaching for the slop, I pull back again.

I have had to learn to congratulate myself first, then I have the real soulful energy to come from an authentic place when I congratulate someone else.

What I ask of other writers is this — even if you feel the resentment over lack of support, try to convey goodwill to other women writers. Truly, I’ve made the greatest leaps forward when I let go of all the anger. Spirit moves through us all, transforms into color, shape and form. If we hold onto resentment, at the very least, we miss out on the magic, in others, in ourselves, in the world. We also aid in shutting down our sisters, and by extension ourselves.

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