Beginning Tomorrow Night: Five Things I've Learned about Maintaining a Creative Practice in the Chaos."
Join us for the first session in our new six-part series, featuring Matthew Zapruder, Amber Tamblyn, Victoria Chang, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Daniel Handler, and Maggie Smith
Join us beginning Tuesday night, for six candid conversations about cultivating and nurturing your creative practice – and about how you can keep the faith, keep going, and stay true in a life filled with relationships, responsibilities and distractions.
Something Special: Five Things I’ve Learned about Maintaining a Creative Practice in the Chaos.
We couldn’t be more pleased to welcome poet, writer, and professor Matthew Zapruder and a circle of creative thinkers and artists for a thrilling new series.
Beginning this Tuesday, Matthew will host six conversations exploring the sometimes challenging relationship between an artist’s creative and personal life. This new series begins with a two-hour session in which Matthew shares all he’s learned about the best ways to sustain creativity and adapt your own creative practice to the challenges of a life filled with relationships, responsibilities, and distractions.
Then, in successive conversations throughout the Spring, he will explore these same issues with five brilliant and generous artists at the top of their fields – Amber Tamblyn, Victoria Chang, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Daniel Handler, and Maggie Smith.
Together, these fellow writers and thinkers will share their own creative struggles and successes, and talk with Matthew about the best ways they have found to stay creative. There will plenty of time to ask questions in each session. And – as always – every live conversation will be archived for subsequent on-demand viewing just as soon as it concludes.
Learn more by viewing Matthew’s personal video invitation to this series:
Then, read more about this series – and take advantage of a special series pricing for all six sessions – by following the link below.
Learn More about Each Individual Session – Coming Soon to Five Things I’ve Learned.
This Tuesday: This special series kicks off when poet, writer, and professor Matthew Zapruder shares the Five Things He’s Learned about the practical and spiritual techniques that have helped him to keep the faith and to keep going as a creative artist – and all he’s discovered about adapting his creative practice to a busy life full of relationships and obligations.
Matthew has written remarkable works of poetry, and his most recent personal memoir, Story of a Poem, offers a deeply unguarded examination of a poet’s eternal struggle to transform a moment of feeling into verse, providing in the process a subtle roadmap to the ways in which the practice of poetry finds its threads in everyday life.
In this two-hour session, Five Things I’ve Learned about Maintaining a Creative Practice in the Chaos, Matthew will continue to explore the relationship between his creative and personal life, sharing all he’s learned personally about the best ways to sustain creativity and adapt your creative practice to the challenges of a life filled with relationships, responsibilities, and distractions.
“How to develop and preserve a creative space in the midst of all this chaos, external and external? How to continually adapt my creative practice to what Zorba the Greek famously called with great affection, “the full catastrophe” of a busy life of relationships and obligations? And how to keep the faith, and keep going, with so much instability in the world?” These issues, and others like them, will be the subject of the first session in this new series. Matthew’s conversation partners will address these same questions throughout the Spring.
Find out more, and view Matthew’s personal video invitation to this this class by following the button below.
Tuesday, March 18: Next week, join poet, author, actress, and director Amber Tamblyn in her live, two-hour conversation with Matthew and discover the Five Things She’s Learned about how to harness our emotions into the full force of our creative work — and how to put all that we’re feeling about the state of the world to good use.
Amber is an Emmy and Golden Globe-nominated actress, writer, and director known for her roles in Joan of Arcadia, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, House MD, and Stephanie Daley, for which she won Best Actress at the Locarno International Film Festival. She recently starred in FX's Y: The Last Man and You Hurt My Feelings. Amber directed Paint It Black, based on Janet Fitch’s novel, and has authored six books, including the best-selling Any Man. A contributor to The New York Times and The Cut, she writes on gender inequality and women's rage, and her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
In her class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Creativity – and Harnessing Emotion in the Service of Powerful Art, Amber offers an exploration of how to harness deep emotions— such as anger, grief, and inequality — into powerful and original artistic expression, drawing from her own experiences as a poet, actress, director, and activist. In conversation with Matthew, she will share her hard-won insights on the power of creativity and storytelling, and her strong sense of the power of art as a force for change.
“My unique experiences at the intersection of acting and writing poetry allowed me to radically explore many different outlets and ways to tell a story, or write about a feeling or emotion that was hard to find words for,” Amber shares in her personal invitation to her class. “I’m happy to talk about any and all forms of artistic practice – from acting, to writing, to directing and writing films. We need your voices in this world, now more than ever”
Find out more, and view Amber’s personal video invitation to this upcoming class by following the button below.
Tuesday, March 25: For Part Three of this great new series, join poet and writer Victoria Chang in her live, two-hour conversation with Matthew and discover the Five Things She’s Learned about the ways that following an unconventional path can be a surprising source of creative inspiration and innovation.
Victoria’s latest poetry collection, With My Back to the World (2024), won the Forward Prize for Best Collection of Poetry and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, The Guardian, Lithub, and Electric Literature. Her previous books include The Trees Witness Everything (2022), Dear Memory (2021), and OBIT (2020), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Griffin Poetry Prize. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Chowdhury Prize in Literature, she is the Bourne Chair in Poetry at Georgia Tech and Director of Poetry@Tech.
In her class, Five Things I’ve Learned About Creativity – by Being an Outsider, Victoria will focus on the the ways that embracing an unconventional path — in life and in creative practice—can open new possibilities for artistic growth. Drawing from her own diverse experiences across disciplines, she’ll share all she’s learned about the ways that curiosity, interdisciplinary thinking, and the deliberate defying of traditional definitions of creativity can lead to creative innovation and originality.
“I used to think that there were all sorts of things wrong with me, my approach, my constant switching of majors, but decades later, I see the benefits of living in the world in a horizontal versus a vertical way,” Victoria writes in her personal invitation to her class. But, she says, “this way of living, thinking, studying, perceiving, has really opened up the possibilities in my mind and in my creative work.”
Find out more, and view Victoria’s personal video invitation to this upcoming class by following the button below.
Tuesday, April 8: For Part Four, join writer Ingrid Rojas Contreras in her live, two-hour conversation with Matthew and discover the Five Things She’s Learned about writing and creativity – and about the artistic necessity to write from the emotional landscape of crisis.
Ingrid was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It tells the story of the author's lineage of curanderos, healers who know plant medicine and talk to ghosts, and her mother, who was the first woman in her family to become a curandera. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, and Zyzzyva, among others.
In her class, Five Things I’ve Learned about Creativity – by Writing Through Crisis, Ingrid will offer key insights on the ways in which personal and collective struggles specifically shape artistic expression. Joined by Matthew, she’ll detail her own strategies for writing from an emotional landscape of crisis and talk at length about the ways in which she’s found that even in difficult times creativity is something essential.
“When we discuss writing and creativity, we always seem to be leaving behind the body, which maybe many people can — leave behind the body — and many of us cannot,” Ingrid writes in her personal invitation to her class. “Five Things I’ve Learned about Creativity – by Writing Through Crisis will focus on the strategies I’ve found have worked for me, and on the ways creativity during crisis is not only possible but necessary. It is life saying yes.”
Find out more, and view Ingrid’s personal video invitation to this upcoming class by following the button below.
Tuesday, April 22: For Part Five, join best-selling writer Daniel Handler in his live, two-hour conversation with Matthew and discover the Five Things He’s Learned about Creativity – or the five things he had thought he’d learned, until life and experience suggested otherwise.
Daniel is the author of several novels, including We Are Pirates, The Basic Eight, and the Printz Honor-winning Why We Broke Up. As Lemony Snicket, he wrote A Series of Unfortunate Events and All the Wrong Questions, along with acclaimed picture books like The Dark. His writing appears in The New York Times, The Believer, and other publications. He has worked as a screenwriter, established the Lemony Snicket Prize for Librarians, and collaborates in music, including The Composer Is Dead with the San Francisco Symphony.
In his class, Five Things I’ve Learned About Creativity – That Turn Out to Be Wrong, Daniel will explore the misconceptions about creativity that he’s found most often lead artists astray. Drawing from his eclectic career as a novelist, screenwriter, and musician, he’ll share how embracing being wrong and learning from mistakes has been an essential part of his creative process, insights he thinks essential for anyone navigating the unpredictable journey of artistic growth.
As Daniel writes in his personal invitation to his class, “I’m wrong almost all the time, about all sorts of things, and I’ve learned to enjoy that somewhat, at least most of the time. I like where being wrong leads me, and I keep a notebook and a mind full of scraps of things I can’t stop thinking about. I make my books from these things.”
Find out more, and view Daniel’s personal video invitation to this upcoming class by following the button below.
Tuesday, May 6: In the final session in the series, join best-selling writer and poet Maggie Smith in a live, two-hour conversation with Matthew and discover the Five Things She’s Learned about what it means to prioritize your creative practice in ways that allow you to stay productive and feel most like yourself – no matter what the rest of your life looks like.
Maggie is the author of eight books of poetry and prose, including the memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a New York Times bestseller. Her poem "Good Bones" went viral, was read by Meryl Streep, and was named the Official Poem of 2016 by Public Radio International. Maggie has received a Pushcart Prize, a Creative Writing Fellowship from the NEA, and numerous other awards. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Paris Review, TIME, and The Atlantic. She writes a bestselling Substack newsletter, For Dear Life, and teaches at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing in Columbus, Ohio.
In her class, Five Things I’ve Learned About Creativity – During Times of Upheaval, Maggie will share all she knows about how to maintain and even grow your creative practice through personal and professional challenges. Drawing from her own experiences, she’ll focus specifically on the ways that creativity can serve as an anchor and a catalyst for personal growth during turbulent times – one that can help you stay dedicated to your work even when life feels uncertain.
Maggie writes in her personal invitation to her class, “My last four books — Keep Moving, Goldenrod, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, and My Thoughts Have Wings, — came together during a brutal six-year stretch. My marriage ended. The pandemic hit. I became a solo parent. None of these events scream “time for art!” But I learned something about myself during those years, which is that I can and will prioritize my creative practice regardless of what the rest of my life looks like. I feel the most like me when I’m writing, so in times of upheaval, it’s a way of coming home to myself.”
Find out more, and view Maggie’s personal video invitation to this upcoming class by following the button below.
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