THE BLESSING OF A LIMINAL DAY by Penny Dolan

                                                                    

 Last Friday,  I had a gift: a day's space when everything stopped.

 On Tuesday, I had driven, at rather short notice, down south.  On Wednesday I had attended the funeral of a long-lived but complicated relative  Thank you for your kind thoughts but but no sympathies needed.

 On Thursday, I visited a once-known house. I was able to walk through rooms and  into the garden I remembered  from a decade and more before. I could go all the way down to the huge oak tree that still stood by the gate that led to the field beyond and remember who and what what I wanted to remember.

                                   

 I collected a few old photographs and personal memorabilia, had coffee with my even-further-down-south brother and called in on an old friend who lives in the village.  All done, and a blessed sense of completion and closure. Friday was to be another, slightly nostalgic visit.

However, as I queued in my car going north through the Blackwall Tunnel, the first radio rumblings began. Something about a possible lack of petrol? Ah. Well, yes. By evening the rumblings were louder. We were not to panic.

Friday arrived. Definitely don't panic! I had petrol for Saturday's drive back to Yorkshire, complete with A1M traffic jams, but that was all.

So I opted out of the intended visit - but what was I to do with the unexpectedly free day ahead? My complicated WIP was at home, so I was out of reach of its mutterings and grumblings and the horrid loopholes in its latest version.                         

I was also in a space that wasn't mine so nothing in the house or garden was shouting at me to Be Sorted Out or Done.                           

                                                                                                                                     

Instead I spent an idle day sitting around, doing almost nothing, enjoying the garden, the sunlight on the pond, mulling over a few of the memories stirred by the funeral, and walking around the neighbourhood for a while, admiring the last of the roses. Being, I suppose, in the moment. 

 

                                

What exactly was the day? Not lazy. Not useless.  It felt as if an awkward thing was over and the new pattern had not quite arrived. It was a day "between" - and suddenly a more lovely word popped into my head; 

"Liminal."

A photographer had used this term, describing his image of a misty beach, where the water and the land met, neither one thing nor the other. 

                 

I'd heard the word used for the narrow semi-wild strip of land that lay between the built-upon areas and the farmland not far from my own home: a  place waiting and not waiting for another turn of the planning rules, the habitat of half-hidden wildlife and determined plants. There had even been a book written about it.

                                     

 

That Friday was almost like time suspended, a day when all I could do was accept that knowledge, wait out the liminal hours, and enjoy - without guilt or anxiety - the beauty of that moment.  I could think, I could imagine I could be.

Liminal, that's what the day was.

It was a welcome reminder to take time out now and then, to value the creative moments where energies can rest before the whatever-next starts to happen.

 

  * * * * *

After I signed this post off a few hours ago, I thought about picking up my latest project tomorrow. Suddenly, the act of writing seemed to fit in with this concept:  work done when one is neither totally in this world nor entirely in the world of one's own imagination.

Yes, that's it, don't you think? 

Writing itself a liminal activity?

 

Penny Dolan

@pennydolan1

ps Written with apologies to and sympathy for all those people who did have serious trouble or sadness or were in danger or had appointments cancelled as a result of the lack of petrol.

 

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Sustaining a Lifelong Creative Practice - Heather Dyer

Following a creative pursuit can sometimes be lonely and frustrating. Here are five books I’ve found particularly inspiring because they contain practical advice from other writers and artists who’ve ‘been there’:

Three Marriages: Reimagining Work,Self and Relationships by David Whyte

David Whyte is a poet. Only indirectly about creativity, this book is about integrating our work, our relationships and inner selves in order to live a fulfilled and productive life. Writers often talk about finding 'balance' between day jobs, family and creativity - but Whyte's advice seems to be to knit them all together rather than think of them as separate. He includes nice examples pulled from authors’ lives.

The Everyday Work of Art: Awakening the Extraordinary in Your Daily Life by Eric Booth

Booth explores that small ‘pull’ that makes us want to make art in the first place, and shows us how to fan those flames. This book, ‘illuminates the artistry we all practice, and it enables us to reclaim the fun and satisfaction that is already happening unnoticed right under our noses’.

Creative Quest by Questlove

This book might best be described as a riff on retaining your creativity throughout your career. Questlove is a musician. One of the things he says is that, as emerging creatives, we are hungry to be influenced by others, but as we solidify our practice we become more concerned with influencing others. Stay open to being influenced, is his advice. I also like his description of what collaboration should look like: “Collaboration isn’t about what’s there so much as what’s not there. It’s the jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing and a pile of bright pieces nearby.”

Creating a Life Worth Living: APractical Course in Career Design for Aspiring Writers, Artists, Filmmakers, Musicians and Others by Carol Lloyd

This is an accessible how-to-sustain-your-practice guide for emerging creatives. The book is described as helping the reader ‘search memory for inspiration, understand his or her individual artistic profile, explore possible futures, design a daily process and build a structure of support.’ In the past I’ve drawn from this book for exercises for an 8-week ‘Developing Your Creativity’ course.   

Creative Calling: Establish a Daily Practice, Infuse Your World with Meaning, and Succeed in Work + Life by Chase Jarvis.  

Chase Jarvis is a photographer who now runs a successful online learning portal. The book includes a lot of advice about how to find your 'tribe', network virtually and in person, and market your work. 

What all these books endorse is listening to that early intuitive pull, exploring by doing, drawing inspiration from living, creating a regular practice (however short) and staying open to flow by letting go of expectations and setting out anew, each day, into uncharted territory. If you have your own recommendations, I'd love to hear them.

Heather Dyer is a consultant in writing for children. She provides writing and publishing advice through The Literary Consultancy, The Writers' Advice Centre for Children's Books, and privately. If you’re ready for feedback on your work-in-progress contact Heather at heatherdyerbooks@gmail.com. 

Heather’s children’s novel The Girl with the Broken Wing was one of Richard and Judy’s book club picks, and The Boy in the Biscuit Tin was nominated for a Galaxy Best British Children’s Book award. Heather also teaches creative writing for the University of the Creative Arts, and facilitates workshops in creative thinking techniques for creatives and academics.

Feeling the Way - Heather Dyer

“I think, therefore I am,” said Descartes.

In response, Milan Kundera writes: "I feel, therefore I am, is a truth much more universally valid, and it applies to everything that's alive." But Kundera is quoted less frequently. Why? I suspect it’s because we live in a culture that values thinking over feeling - and this inhibits our creativity.

As we get older we learn to control and suppress our inner feelings. It's necessary that we don’t take our feelings out on those around us – but if we continue to deny our inner experiences, we become desensitized to them. This damages our creativity because creativity relies as much on feelings as it does on intellect.

The education expert Ken Robinson, in his book Out of Our Minds says that "the persistence of this apparent dichotomy between reason and emotions presents real problems for education and for the general development of creative abilities." If we want to continue to grow and to be creative, we need to stay open and responsive to what we feel.

Being responsive is hard work. "In workshops," says Eric Booth, author of an incredible book, The Everyday Work of Art: Awakening the Extraordinary in Your Daily Life, "I am always struck by how hard it is for participants, of all ages, in all fields, to notice they are indeed having experiences. They do the activities, do them well, and have fine insights, but they resist considering what happens inside them during the experience as if it were important, worth noticing. Many have an ingrained bias that dismisses those inner events as inconsequential because they are intangible."

But we can learn to notice our feelings again. "As workshop participants are prompted to start noticing their experience,” says Booth, “their awareness flashes in fragile and ephemeral glimpses. Slowly, participants get a sense that those inner events are full of important, surprising information and accomplishments."

And noticing begets more noticing. When my mother started watercolour painting she became someone who noticed cloud formations and colours in the sky - and pointed them out to the rest of us. As a result, we began noticing them, too.

My friend Dounia is a herbalist. On a walk she’ll point out tiny flowers growing in the hedgerow, or berries on a tree. The way that she touches the delicate fronds or runs her fingertips along the bough of a tree, makes me see these things with fresh eyes, and has given me a new appreciation of their complexity and beauty.

© Wester Ross

In the same way, when we become more attuned to how we feel inside we are better able to hear our intuition. We become alert to our hunches and can follow our bliss. In this way, we exercise our ability to 'feel' our way through our storylines - both in our writing and in our lives. 

© Colin Bryant

Heather Dyer - children's author and Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellow

• For enquiries about creative writing workshops for children or adults, or editorial services, go to www.heatherdyer.co.uk
• For enquiries about academic writing workshops, go to:  http://rlfconsultants.com/consultants/heather-dyer/

Painting and Writing and Life - Heather Dyer

 

 © William Cho

 

I visited the studio of an abstract painter once. There was a group of us. All the others were painters; I was the only writer. We started flicking through a portfolio of abstract paintings, and I have to say that they all looked much the same to me: like wallpaper samples. But every now and again when the next painting was revealed, these other painters would collectively say: “Ah! Now that’s interesting!” Their reactions were spontaneous and genuine – and I realized then that they were seeing something that I was missing.

I’m certainly no expert, but I’ve come to understand that appreciating abstract art is about how a painting makes you feel. It’s not about what you think it is. But this is a difficult mindset to get into. Like a lot of people, I like to understand something. I like to know what it’s about. I need to be able to articulate what it is telling me. I’m not used to asking myself how a painting makes me feel.

I visited another abstract painter’s studio yesterday. She had a canvas leaning up against the wall that looked unfinished to me. There was an outline of what could have been the figure of a woman in the middle, and a pool of yellow in one corner and some bright splashes in the other. I wanted to know what it was about: was the woman falling? Was this the sky and this the ground? Which way up was it supposed to be? I wanted to be about something – I wanted to understand the message. “It’s not about anything,” said the artist. “It’s what it is, that’s all.” 

 

A Young Lady's Adventure by Paul Klee

 

This painter works by feeling. She doesn’t know what she’s going to paint before she starts a canvas, she only knows the colours she wants to use, and which brushes. Then she’ll ‘play around’ until some combination of colours appears that she can ‘have a conversation with’. Then she follows the conversation to see where it leads – which might be nowhere. Or it might become something bigger than she herself was capable of, if she’d tried to impose a plan on it beforehand.

Painting and writing are both creative activities, and I recognized parallels in how she described her process. I know that my trouble with writing is that I need to know where it’s heading, I need to know what the message is, well before it appears. I know that this inhibits my creativity, and presents me from feeling the ‘conversation’ that the book might want to have with me.

I asked her how she managed it. “The first thing you have to do,” she said, “is stop. Then, you have to feel with your heart where you need to go next. You need to be playful, you need to be brave, and you need to take risks. And you mustn’t be afraid to make mistakes.”

I know she’s right. The best stuff is always the stuff that we never intended to write about. The best things can’t be articulated, and the most wonderful thing about writing fiction is when a story surprises you, and turns out – to your delight – better than you feel you could have made it. The same process would seem to apply both to painting and to writing – and also, in fact, to life.

www.heatherdyer.co.uk