Replay: Pico Iyer and Michael Shapiro share Five Things They've Learned about Deepening the Creative Flow
Check out the first five minutes of their recent class.
“Sometimes creativity involves simply taking things out, sometimes it involves bringing together two familiar worlds to create something liberatingly unfamiliar. Often it means finding ways of crafting lives of value and thinking afresh — thinking, for example, about how best to raise children, how to make a living, and how to honor our deepest selves.”
– Pico Iyer and Michael Shapiro, Five Things We've Learned about Deepening the Creative Flow
Pico Iyer is the critically acclaimed writer of 16 books, translated into 23 languages, on subjects ranging from the Dalai Lama to globalism, from the Cuban Revolution to Islamic mysticism. Michael Shapiro is a journalist and author of two interview collections: A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration and the recently published The Creative Spark. Here’s the first five minutes of Pico and Michael’s two-hour class in which they share the Five Things They’ve Learned — from their own experience and from the experience of the many creative figures they’ve met — about cultivating and deepening their personal creativity and inspiration.
Five Things We’ve Learned about Deepening the Creative Flow encourages you to establish a space for yourself in which you can engage and cultivate your creative spirit – one in which you can begin making that spirit as deep and wide-ranging as possible in your art and in your life. In their class, Pico and Michael explore how to give voice to your creativity on the page and in the world and they address how to develop your creative muscles and your creative confidence; how to break rules and go in unexpected directions; and how to ignore the pressures of society to craft a life that sustains you and those around you.
If you want to practical approaches you can employ right away to cultivate your own creativity, this class is for you.
Pico has spent much of the pandemic writing on writing—which is to say, the subconscious, surrender, and leaps of faith. Pico is the host of the Speaking with Pico series in Santa Barbara, regularly conducts interviews for the City Arts and Lectures series in San Francisco and, over 25 years, has conducted intimate onstage conversations with everyone from Philip Glass to Zadie Smith and from Martin Scorsese to Ireland’s President Mary Robinson. His four talks for TED have received more than 10 million views so far.
Michael has recently written for National Geographic about Nepal’s remote regions and about legendary Welsh writer Jan Morris. His travel and arts features have appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the in-flight magazine American Way. For seven years he wrote a column on gambling for the San Francisco Chronicle.
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