Dear reader,
I was cleaning up my laptop today and wading through the billions of bookmarks I have collected and thought that I might pass on a few resources that may be of interest to some of you.
Resource 1:
“Practice any art – music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpture, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage – no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame but to experience becoming.” (With apologies for any punctuation mistakes; I copied this off the video transcription which doesn’t have any punctuation.)
Listen to Ian McKellen reading an inspirational letter that Kurt Vonnegut wrote to some high school students. It’s lovely.
Resource 2:
“The social and ecological issues that humanity currently faces are so severe that they call into question the fundamental stories that societies are based on. Ecolinguistics provides tools for revealing the stories we live by, questioning them from an ecological perspective, and contributing to the search for new stories to live by.”
The Stories We Live By is a free online course in ecolinguistics. I think that delving into the stories and narratives that we make and tell ourselves about the world we live in, and our interpretation of the present and our imagining of the future, is an intriguing, if not necessary, thing to do. I must admit that I haven’t done this course yet; if you do it then let me know what you think.
Resource 3:
Um.
Resource 3 is me.
I can dress up what I do in all kinds of fancy words – transformative facilitator, creative process mentor, experience designer, creative non-fiction writer. But fundamentally, and apart from writing, what I do is design and guide conversations.
Generally speaking, I am in service to roomy conversations that provide supportive structures and plenty of space for people to explore what it means to be creative and how we might harness our imaginations to explore things like developing new things, envisaging the future, making sense of grief. You know, the easy stuff.
I work one-to-one or with groups and am equally comfortable working online via Zoom or face-to-face.
So, if you would like
Some help shifting your writer’s block
Some help banishing impostor’s syndrome
Some help in planning a creative project
A presentation to inspire your team’s creativity
A workshop to help your co-creators debrief your latest creative project
Some mentoring around experience design or creative facilitation
Or anything else…
Then give me a hoy. I have recently had some cancellations and my calendar is wide open for the next couple of weeks. I am happy to negotiate fees with those of you on low incomes.
And, as always, I would simply love it if you bought one of my booklets or became a paid subscriber to this Substack.
Or just make a donation to my Ko-Fi. My personal micro-economy is pretty flat at the moment so that support would be most appreciated.
But if none of the above appeals to you or you are unable to help out, then please enjoy the other two resources and the rest of my Substack posts.