Welcome to my advent calendar!
Your first prompt can be found below. But first some introductory notes…
Okay. Not really a calendar, but a series of emails between today and the 23rd of December. Each email will be short and sweet and will give you something to nibble on imaginatively and / or intellectually. Given that this is the first email of all, I thought I’d pop in this note of welcome.
I have gathered the morsels in these forthcoming emails from various places over the last two years, with some coming out of my own head. The rest I gleaned from social media, books, articles, websites, and workshops. The last two years have been challenging, but these little gifts have been the result of the positive aspect of (a) life lived via the internet during Melbourne’s six lockdowns: there are a lot of talented people out there generously sharing ideas, inspirations, and provocations. The world is in a state of flux; creative people can read the signs, challenge narratives, and dream up new ones. I wanted to pass this generosity on, share some of my own ideas, and support your own creative instincts and sense-making needs as we wend our way through the last month of the year.
I hope you find these titbits as mouth-watering as I have.
Enjoy.
Some notes on what you will find in the emails:
The morsels are to be consumed however you like, which is to say that you can respond to them in whatever way you choose. You can use them as a prompt to create a journal entry, a blog, a short story, a poem, a drawing, a monologue, a scrapbook. A list of bullet points on the back of a napkin, or a Tweet. Or don’t make anything at all; just turn them over in your head during quiet moments during your day.
My work centres on supporting people to reclaim their creative identities and / or to develop creative process. Therefore, some of the prompts are reflections on how you relate to your own creative life, and some are meant to be starting points or creative prompts. And many are both.
I have an interest in collective imagination, futures literacy, and transformative facilitation so some of the emails will reflect this. And some won’t. Some emails will have a more serious tone. And some will be playful.
Your prompt for today:
In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the miser Scrooge is visited by four ghosts who terrify him into being charitable: the ghost of his former business partner, who warns Scrooge about indulging in greed, and the spirits of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come who further confront Scrooge with his miserliness.
Use your imagination and occupy one of these four characters. In your imagining, relocate the setting to your current time and place. Some questions to get you started:
Who did you choose to be? Scrooge or one of the ghosts?
If Scrooge, what behaviours do you think you need to be terrified into or out of?
If one of the ghosts, who, in the world today and real or imaginary, would you haunt? Who needs to be pushed to behave better?
What else can you think of? Dickens may have started it but this is your story now; you can do anything you like with it.
Have fun and see you tomorrow.
Meredith