Reassembling the pieces

A short creative prompt

Dear reader,

Just a short post today. I’ve decided to re-jig a post I wrote for my paid subscribers back in 2022. I think it’s worth revisiting. And, at the end, I have a special announcement.

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A reflective prompt…

… inspired by the following quotation from Light the Dark: Writers on creativity, inspiration, and the artistic process (edited by Joe Fassler. New York: Penguin Books, 2017).

“It also describes what a monumental work of art does: takes the pieces of you, reassembles them, and hands them back to you in all the right order. Literature can also heal us relationally. If a relationship with a person, someone we know for just a short time, can forever alter our lives, then why not a book?” – Junot Diaz,

So, I want to ask you this: How are you all in pieces?

For example, I could describe myself as the following right now:

Bad temper + generosity of spirit + lethargy + fierce work ethic + wild imagination + intemperate gloom = me.

You are not constrained to describe yourself as a mathematical formula, of course. But what are the pieces of you, and how would you describe them or represent them?

And what, for you, puts those pieces back in order? And what was the last work of art that did so?

Self Portrait by Rene Magritte.

Let me know!

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Announcement

This Sunday I will be publishing a guest post by Kathryn Vercillo. It’s an excerpt from her new book, The Creative Health Cartography Workbook.

This book is a self-guided framework for understanding how your health shapes your creative life. Built from twenty years of research and interviews with more than one hundred artists, writers, and makers, it works through six domains of creative practice with reflective exercises, composite real-world stories, and a six-archetype pattern system. It’s available as a PDF download and in print. And because, as a reader of this Substack, you are special you get to use the WorkbookTour20 code for a 20% discount.

I’m sure you’ll enjoy Kathryn’s essay!