Experiri: Introduction
An introduction for paid subscribers; a sneak preview for free subscribers
Hi there,
Starting from tomorrow, paid subscribers to this Substack will receive an excerpt from one of my books or pamphlets every fortnight.
The first few extracts will be from Experiri: Notes on creative process, which is a collection of articles about creative process and what it is to live a creative life.
Today, I am sending through the Introduction to give you all some context. Tomorrow we’ll get into the juicier stuff.
Free subscribers, you’ll be getting the odd extract too (which is why you’re seeing this). Meanwhile, I hope that you continue to enjoy the creative prompts every other Friday.
So, without further ado…
Introduction
“Experience: late 14c., ‘observation as the source of knowledge; actual observation; an event which has affected one,’ from Old French esperience ‘experiment, proof, experience’ (13c.), from Latin experientia ‘a trial, proof, experiment; knowledge gained by repeated trials,’ from experientem (nominative experiens) ‘experienced, enterprising, active, industrious,’ present participle of experiri ‘to try, test,’ from ex "out of" (see ex-) + peritus ‘experienced, tested,’ from PIE *per-yo-, suffixed form of root *per- (3) ‘to try, risk.’ Meaning ‘state of having done something and gotten handy at it’ is from late 15c.” – etymonline.com (my emphases)
I work as a mentor and transformative facilitator, focusing on creativity, especially on people’s experience of being creative and how this experience informs the development of creative identity and / or creative practice.
This is a collection of short articles, many (but not all) of which saw their first iteration as blogs on my websites. I decided to refine them, add to them, and collect them here due to positive responses from both readers and clients of mine.
I am fascinated by practice, and the processes that people follow when they attempt creative work. I am particularly interested in the interplay between conditions imposed by the material world and how this affects our self-confidence, sense of potential, agency, and resilience, and how this in turn affects our relationships to our creative selves and activity. It goes back the other way too: the ways in which we identify as being creative, and how we manifest this in our creative process, feeds back into our sense of being resilient, of having agency, of being capable of learning and adapting within the material world.
This is a theme that sits behind these little articles, which talk to different aspects of creative life. These aspects are things that have surfaced during my own experience (in performance, choreography, arts management, creative facilitation, and writing) and the lives of many creatives that I have talked to and worked with.
Why ‘Experiri’?
I’m an etymology addict; I love looking up the histories of everyday words. When I checked out the etymology of experience, I was struck by the words “an event which has affected one” as quoted above. The articles in this zine were all generated by events that affected me over the years. I also loved that ‘experiri’, a Latin ancestor of ‘experience’, meant “to try, test” and that the great etymological granddaddy of them all – the Proto Indo European ‘per-yo’, meant “to try, risk.”
This notion of experience being linked to trying, testing, and even risking moved me. Despite full time dance studies when I was very young and a Graduate Diploma in Arts Administration when I was a little older, like many other creatives I have mostly learnt by doing: by trying, testing, more trying, and then risking. In other words, making work, parking it in front of an audience, and seeing where the wheels fell off.
It is this experience of trying that furnished the thoughts in the following articles. Because they were initially written to complement my mentoring practice, they do contain little bits of advice, but they are not meant to be prescriptive – please take them on board as provocations.
We all have the capacity to be creative, and we all manifest our creative nature in our own unique ways. I believe that we live in a society that mitigates against people exploring and expressing their creativity, so forming a sense of creative identity and then trying to make creative work can be a lonely journey.
Whether your experience of trying to be creative is lonely or collaborative, fluent or halting, joyful or frustrating, I hope that these little notes give you some sense of companionship. Even if you do not tackle creative challenges in the same way that I do, or encounter different challenges altogether, please know that there is someone out there who is making a similar journey.