John Fanning

Benevolence and Creativity

April 23, 2021 By John Fanning

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non nobis solum nati

That’s a quote from Cicero’s On Duties, which he seemingly got from Plato. It basically means we’re created for the sake of others, to benefit each other as much as possible, from the Stoic ideal of giving and receiving kindnesses.

So, I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there? Hope all is well.

This is Episode 34 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. Also, if this is your first time to the podcast please go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes to get an idea about where I’m coming from on process and everything else and especially as regards to the differentiation between Walls and Doors towards and away from the Imagination and creativity.

Last time I spoke about audience, patrons, and representation, but today I want to talk a little about benevolence.

So this series of episodes has been a process based one. I’ve discovered a lot by unpacking my book and extemporizing on it, learning new things in the interim as the months have passed. In this next part of the podcast I want to do the same thing, make it process based. To try to find out what others think and create so we can all learn from each other. But before I do that I have a few reasons why I need to take a break from the podcast:

First, there’s the many hours of production and research time for all the interviews I want to do. Again, to re-emphasize, this is not because I’ve come to the end of the podcast, simply the end of the first section. Also because I need to follow up on what I promised to all my patrons at the beginning of this project, that I would give it to them in book form. This will take time. I have to edit down what I’ve been talking about. To synthesize it all, make it better, to create a structure that’s clear and helpful.

With that in mind and to practice what I preached in episode 32 on community and feedback I’d really appreciate any feedback you all may have on what chapters should go first, what ones should go last, and what ones need to be edited down or perhaps other’s that need expansion. Like I said with Shakespeare and his company of co-creator friends, a work is even greater the more people around the creator helping to make it even better.

Secondly, I need a little more feedback: I need to know whether all you Patreon supporters would be interested in me reading one of my novels out over time until I’ve had time to start uploading interviews. The novel I’m thinking of reading is a sendup of the noir mystery genre set in a little village much like the one we left in the Black Mountains of southern France. Readers say it’s funny and entertaining but maybe it wouldn’t be so entertaining read aloud with my Irish brogue? Anyway, please let me know either through Patreon or instagram or by emailing me at John@johnfanning.me.

And thirdly, we just bought a new house. I was actually so busy renovating that I forgot to release this last episode on time last week. It only took us a year and half to find one in this crazy market of New England, and of course it needs a lot of work, which means I’ll be getting that done on weekends and some evenings after my day job, which means I’m not going to have the time to write or create podcasts because I’m now creating a house out of what was a shambles of a place, much like what we did with La Muse, but on a smaller scale. Maybe we’ll even turn the barn into a retreat for writers. Who knows.

Anyway, I hope you’ll bear with me as I do this, and then when I come back from renovating and maybe reading out my novel, I’ll start interviewing creators from all walks of life, to learn from them, just like I learned from my own experience and from all the creators I came in contact with at our retreat and since then. Because we never stop learning. Never stop understanding a subject, a field. And creativity, the imagination, is no different. It’s vast.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way there is one more thing I want to talk about, and that’s benevolence.

These episodes got about 30 to 40 likes on social media when I first started doing this. I think it’s far less now. I try not to look. If I were a good business man I would have stopped 20 episodes ago. But that’s not why I am doing this. I’m doing it because I trust benevolence.

We need to help each other more. We need more benevolence in the world. This is the new story we have to start creating, not the myth of rampant capitalism and progress and more and more of the failed Cartesian model. The new myth, the new manifesto needs to be service to others, compassion, benevolence.

We’re living in a form of Italian Futurism right now, a mechanized, destructive worldview, where fear is leading more and more people down the path of nationalism. No wonder Mussolini loved Futurism. We need to embrace the arrogance of the Futurists but for a different manifesto, a different myth, the story of a natural, creative worldview, the present. It could even be called Presentism, a manifesto for only what is needed, not the fulfillment of every desire we have, and the consideration of those around us, even those we do not know, in a compassionate and benevolent way.

Why a manifesto of service though? Why should we become Presentists instead of Futurists? Because our collective experience is under unprecedented pressure. We’ve entered the Anthropocene age because of human business-as-usual and we can’t expect unethical corporations to help with their sociopathic economics. The waves get bigger as the water levels rise. Climate change and all it has caused and will cause. Population rise: Delhi has five times more people in it than the whole population of Ireland. Acceleration of time through our heightened reliance on technology and the continual emergence of new technologies. We’re on data overload, and to make matters worse data has become the new gold rush, the new oil rush. Our organisms can hardly handle it any more. We’re watched online by governments and corporations. We’re analyzed by both. We’re replaced by technologies — everything is becoming automatized, from insurance to banking, yet our population continues to grow.

We saw the effects every month at our retreat on people from every continent coming to create. They arrive, more exhausted, not from travel, but from what they call the pressure of “accelerated living”. You can be contacted all the time, no matter where you are, and everybody wants an immediate response or “update”.

Our culture is no longer biological. It’s becoming a technological culture. Because of this new reality, we need to help each other more, because this change, this ongoing transition, is difficult for everyone. By bringing some form of creative spiritual impulse back into government, like Gandhi did, like Martin Luther King did, like the Quakers did with abolition. This connection, the “religio” in religion, is what’s missing. As Margaret Mead presumably once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” The list is long and keeps growing from the Suffragettes and Rosa Parks to Winona LaDuke, Malala Yousafzai and Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski.

By becoming a creator we can combat the conformism, the servitude to technology, as it needs us creatives to have an audience to use it. To many in business and politics the engineering of consent is the highest expression of democracy, where power leads the people when the people think they are in charge. The growth of the mass-consumer society has made us slaves to our desires, manipulated by corporations and governments. If we are all “seeing” the same reality through devices, usually at the same time, then we really do have to be careful about this conformism. We need to understand how important needs are, not fulfilling desires like public relations departments want us to do. We do not need to buy a better version of ourselves, only stuff we actually need.

When people go on retreat to create, some switch off their phones and put away their computers until the weekend. The change in them is radical. They literally clean themselves out.

All technology is not bad, but instead of growing, evolving our societies, our planet, these technologies are being used by many for negative purposes, to manipulate and control rather than ameliorate our lives. Our quality of life could be so positively affected, but instead we are forgetting benevolence.

We set up our writers and artists retreat to help people like us find a space to create. If you weren’t published, with reviews, didn’t have shows in Soho or Manhattan, then where did you go? Yaddo? No. You’re not established. La Muse has people who’re just starting out and people who are well-known in their fields. When we started there was hardly anyone, but with time they came. They’re still going there two decades later.

If you see something missing in the world, then create it. Do it yourself, but more importantly, do it for others. Be benevolent.

We’ve lost this way of being in the world. So, when you become successful, please help others. It doesn’t, pardon the pun, cost you anything.

I used to bored our writers and artists to death with how they need to get websites, Instagram accounts, establish themselves, ask for help. This was another way of me giving back. I found it exhausting. So why did I keep doing it? Because their work, their creations need to get out into the world, and if they’re not putting them out there, nobody else will do it for them. And if I’m benevolent to them they’ll probably be benevolent to others. It creates a sustainable culture of creation, which has positive implications for them, and ultimately, all of us.

Maybe you only listened to an episode here and there. Maybe this is episode is all you listened to. Well if you did or are then you’re the reason I’ve put everything I can down – to help you. I know there are things left out — nobody’s perfect, no work is perfect, and everything is always changing. But I hope something, even one idea, stays with you, helps you, inspires you to continue, or start to create.

Creation changes people. I’ve seen it, in myself, in others. Create and you’ll see it in yourself too. You discover yourself by creating. It’s not about other people, what they want your creation to be. It’s about what you love, what you need to create.

Life’s holistic, not a straight line. We can’t plan everything about the path we’re going to take, but we can be benevolently creative as we make creative steps forward. We can do that through awareness of the walls and how we can move through them with creation, by carefully listening to where inspiration is telling us to go. And we can do that together, by being creative about our futures and the future of this planet, because in the end, we are one people, one planet.

This is why I created this book. I needed to help in some way. Right now though, it’s your creation that matters to me. So, you know: Create!

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a Roman statesman and philosopher by way of a Greek philosopher, but as always I’m going to end the episode with an Irish proverb. This one means:

People live in one another’s shadows.

Maireann na daoine ar scáil a chéile.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. It aint no radio show. There’s no advertisers etc. paying for this, which is great because nobody’s telling me what I should and shouldn’t say or think. Independent. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get paid for doing it then please head over to patreon.com/johnfanning where you can get early and ad free access as well as extra episodes when ya sign up. Ifya can afford it then give me the cost of a price of a cup of tea or pint once a month. Ifya can’t afford it that’s grand too, ya can listen for free, but please subscribe to it on iTunes or wherever you listen to it and leave a review on itunes too or wherever ya listen to it and let your friends know about it so the listenership grows. Thank you! And thanks for listening. If you’re looking for more episodes you can find them on all the usual places like iTunes – or on my website at johnfanning.me under “podcast” where I’ve put up overview transcripts with links to all the people and ideas I mention. If you’re into social stuff and you’re looking to engage with me one-on-one, check me out on twitter @fanning_j and instagram @ johnfanning_. It’s been great sharing stuff with you today so until next time take care out there and do the work but above all be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

Episode 33: Audience and Representation

April 1, 2021 By John Fanning

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I don’t think that an artist should bother about his audience. His best audience is the person he sees in his shaving mirror every morning. I think that the audience an artist imagines, when he imagines that kind of a thing, is a room filled with people wearing his own mask.

representation audience creativity john fanning

That’s a response from the writer Vladimir Nabokov from a July 1962 interview from Strong Opinions, published in 1973.

So, I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there? Hope all is well.

This is Episode 33 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. Also, if this is your first time to the podcast please go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes to get an idea about where I’m coming from on process and everything else and especially as regards to the differentiation between Walls and Doors towards and away from the Imagination and creativity.

Last time I spoke about community and feedback, but today I want to talk about audience and representation.

So, right from the start I want to make something very clear: Yes, look to the work first. To become a master of our work we have to focus on the work, not how many followers we have. We are not important, the work is. Jesus was important, but his message was more important. Hemingway was a character, but his characters are what inspire me. Not his life story, but their life stories. This is encapsulated by the the Italian author Elena Ferrante. Elena Ferrante is the name she uses, not her real name. She’s written about half a dozen novels, but the most well known are her series of novels set in Naples. If you haven’t seen the HBO series you have to. It’s wonderful. Anyway, Ferrante says books, once they’re written, don’t need their authors. Because of this she has consistently requested anonymity as a precondition to having her books published, to be free. In an interview she gave to The Paris Review in 2015 she explains this form of liberation by saying that when a book is complete, and makes its way out into the world, without her, that it allows her to see something new about her writing, as if she’d released the words from herself.

Of course most writers or creators can’t literally afford this position. But again, to use the monetary language, what has the cost of this been? Today, technology has accelerated everything, but at the same time it’s also allowed everyone access to getting their work out there. It would be terrible if the majority of what is put on line were to become rushed too. Which gets back to what I talked about in episode 19 about mentors, where we are literally taught to take our time, to learn our craft.

As I said in other episodes I know creators who create for their own joy, their own meditative practice. This is wonderful. Nobody, villains, crazy makers, are not stopping her from creating. However, a lot of the time the reason they are in the basement or out in their garage creating and not sharing it with the rest of the world is because they have been conditioned to feel that their creations are not important when of course they are.

Some maths. There will be 9 billion people on the planet soon. Are you trying to tell me there are not at least 90,000 people – 0.00001% – of the people out there who wouldn’t be into what you create? A friend of mine, a really great musician, is a successful businessman and a really good human being, but if he ever goes off in businessman script he’s treated with suspicion, confusion and sadly, laughter at times. Just because he hasn’t made as much money from his music means it isn’t valuable, but the little bit of time he puts into music is what give him the energy to focus a lot on making money through business. This is why he sees music, playing his guitars, as really valuable, even if nobody ever hears his songs, or hears him play.

Again this gets back to my basic tenet from one of my very first episodes: Everyone is creative. We should not feel uncomfortable when someone shows us a part of themselves that doesn’t fit into a singular role. We are all many things, not one. We need to encourage each other to be creative, not discourage each other because of capitalist or systemic conditioning. The more we create, the more kind we become because the more fulfilled we feel. Isn’t it logical to encourage that in everyone, not go silent when someone shares the fact that they’ve created something? Remember, 9 billion people out there. Just because you don’t love what someone you meet has created doesn’t mean there are not at least 90,000 others out there that think it’s amazing!

I don’t hate anything. When I was an angry you man, I did. It simply takes too much of my energy, but if there is one thing I could hate, it would be social media, optimization, advertising. However, when you run a small business you have to think of your audience, a website, social media, advertising. I learned this the hard way when we started La Muse. We thought people would come because we were offering such a wonderful place to create. They didn’t. We had to show people we existed. And yes, that meant a website. So I learned how to build one. Then how to optimize the site so people actually saw it when they put in keywords. Then we had to be on social media for people to see what was really going on behind that professional website, the people photos, that it was actually real. So, when I think of selling one of my novels the same business mentality starts to work, but not when I’m creating the novel. This is an important distinction.

Vladimir Nabokov was once asked what kind of an audience he created for. His response was creators shouldn’t care about their audience, saying the best audience you have is the one that looks back at you in the shaving mirror every morning.

Again, worry about audience after the work is done. Yes, do your research before starting, but not to fit into any idea of what you have to create. If we think of the reader/viewer/consumer during the process of creating we will be creating for someone else, not creating for ourselves for first.

Thinking about what an audience thinks creates pressure, stress, which stops your creative flow. Nabokov actually stopped writing for years after his first book of poetry came out. The negative reviews hurt him that much. One of the most confident stylistic writers there’s been. His inspiration dried up because of what someone else thought.

Thinking of the reader/viewer/consumer during the process also makes you copy, instead of creating. If you keep thinking of your audience you’ll start to create stuff an audience already likes, becoming derivative, instead of creative or inspired. Hey, it may make money, but will it give you satisfaction. It’s important to know your perspective, but also the limits of your field, your genre, but not to allow them to water down your creation.

Your audience will find you, eventually. Even if it’s when you’re dead. At least if you’re into what you’re doing, love what you’re doing, it won’t matter.

However, when the work is done, you can’t expect someone to swoop into your office or garret and offer to publish your book, or give you seed money for your business venture. No. You have to push it out into the world.

How your product — because that is what it is now — is consumed, read, or viewed when it does go out into the world is for the most part outside your control too. People will make their decisions, opinions, based on their own natures and backgrounds, most of which will have little relation to your reality. They will see things in what you have created that you don’t. At times, they will totally misconstrue what it is you were trying to create.

Also, there are as many different consumers on the planet as there are people: Irish, French, American, Asian, white, brown, black, old, young, healthy, weak. Educated. Not educated. And, they’re all at certain emotional stages in their lives. Read a book like “Catcher in the Rye” when you’re twenty. Then read it again when you’re forty-four. I’ve done it. It’s a different book each time. Why? Because I’m a different person each time. Read a novel with a divorce as the central part of the story when you’re happily married, and then again when you’re divorced. The effect will be completely different, because you, the consumer, will be different.

This is very logical, common sense, but as creators we automatically forget this when our creation becomes a product. Readers change. Viewers change. We consume reality differently, depending on who we are right now. This is important to know, to think about, important to accept and be ready for.

When someone dislikes your book, your painting, your cure, it could be because it reminds them of something they find hard to deal with. It may be something they’re not ready to experience, or that they simply hate detective novels, or love them, or hate Macs and love Windows.

Another thing, a lot of creators think self-promotion is a dirty word. Egocentric. Well, it’s not. You don’t have to sell out. You simply need to be accessible. As a creator you have to tell yourself monetary reward is good. It’s a relationship which should be positive. Others are not going to “take care of it” for us. If we allow the emotional baggage of work, parents, peers to tell us we should be living in garrets or on the street then we’re sabotaging ourselves. It’s good to get paid to create, but not to create to get paid.

The rich (business people) and poor (artists/writers, etc.) binary association is incorrect, something I talked about back in episode 11. People love binary relationships because they allow for negative and positive. In reality we connect with our creations even more by not accepting these associations, by embracing community, inter-connectiveness, collaboration, as opposed to us and them.

Poetry is a classic example. Poetry = poverty. This is one of the great staples of conditioned negative reinforcement. Ask the poet Rupi Kaur whether it’s true. Her first collection “Milk and Honey,” has sold over two and half million copies. Her second book, “Sun and Her Flowers,” reached the top three on Amazon’s bestseller list, along with Oprah Winfrey and Dan Brown. How? She represented herself, which eventually translated to sales.

I knew an artist in New York twenty years ago. He had his own gallery down in the Lower East Side. His art, in my opinion, was okay. I wondered how the hell he managed to find the money to rent the space. I asked him how many paintings he sold a month. He said, “All of them.”

“How do you do that?” I asked. “Do that many people really come in here?”

“No”, he said. “I put out flyers when I want people to come. I print off five thousand, then I go and put them in every coffee shop, bar and restaurant on Manhattan. In Brooklyn too.”

When he had a show he usually had twenty-five paintings. The way he saw it, if only ten percent of people actually piked up his flyer that meant 500 people would know. If only 25 percent actually came to the show that meant 125 people. And if only half the people wanted to buy a painting then he would sell everything. He sells everything every time. He also had patrons. Even with the patrons he still spends three days walking the streets of New York, to represent himself.

How many times did I hear this at our retreat: “I’m a (insert the type of creator), not a businesswoman.” I respond: “Yes, but you are in the business of (insert the creations).”

So, yes, creation in the right jobs can get you money, and getting well known can make you money. However, the kind of creation most people talk about, artistic creation, usually leads to minimum wage. Even well known creators can have a hard time of it making money. What can we expect when the internet means so much content out there is free? It’s natural then that free intellectual property means less opportunity to make money. But if you’re not even on the internet, then how can you make any recompense?

A few questions: Do you have a website? Do you have an Instagram account? If you only have those two things then you have places where people can find you. If you keep putting up content that you love and they’re interested in it as an audience, then they’ll keep coming back for more, and you’ll keep posting it. That way, people can find out about you, when you’re busy creating other work.

But, as with your creator community, you have to create a reader/viewer/consumer community. That’s why you’ll see all the ways of connecting with me at the end of each episode, at the bottom of my website, etc. I’m Irish. We don’t like drawing attention to ourselves, even if people think we’re outgoing. But I know that stuff has to be there, so that people can connect with me. It’s logical. How I use that is my decision.

So what do you show, represent online? Whatever you want. A lot of social media people say people love it when you represent your process. An artist painting their painting. A car being built. If that’s what you’re into, all the better. It seems to be what people enjoy.

But if you’re not into taking selfies with your novel or crochet then go back to the question again: What do you love? Take photos of that. Write about that. Talk about that. How can you be selling out if you’re representing what you love?

Also, if you advertise to one hundred people, on average, one or two people will respond. Why is this important? Because then you know it’s not because what you created is sh*t, it’s that only one or two people in every one hundred are actually going to respond to your add. This way you don’t get discouraged, because you know it’s not you, it’s just the way things are. It’s the facts of advertising.

Shift your mindset. You create something, it’s your property. If it’s a book or idea, it’s your intellectual property. Change the language. Power lies in words. If we use the wrong words we create a negative reality, devoid of the healthy, positive opportunities.

And opportunities aren’t as impractical as you think. Some more maths: To hit the “New York Times Bestseller” list, you need to sell 9,000 books in the first week. Again, there are over 7 billion people on the planet. If only a fractional percent of them love your stuff then you’ve got 70,000 people who’ll buy your book, painting, car, product.

Rupi Kaur chose to succeed by giving her creations the opportunity to succeed, by putting them on Instagram. That artist is still in the East Village, but he has someone else putting out his flyers now.

So, a few things:

• Put your work out there, share it with others.

• Meet up with other creators in real life, not just on the Internet.

• Don’t be afraid to make money off your creations. Enjoy it.

• Keep creating, you can only get better.

• Keep a damn e-mail list.

• Give credit when you refer to other creator’s work, and help others.

• And lastly, when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing and need help then, as Amanda Palmer says, Ask for help!

I’m not going to get into talking about crowdfunding and Patreon or pay what you want or all the other many things out there to connect with your audience, a community. In the end, that’s up to you to look into. I’m just saying do the basics if you can, because in the end its gratifying, satisfying when someone, even if it is just one or two people who tell you well done.

So thanks for listening. I started with what I think is a quote from an Irish writer, but as always I’m going to end the episode with an Irish proverb. This one means: Molann an obair an fear The work praises the man.

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

Episode 32: Community and Creativity

March 18, 2021 By John Fanning

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“It has nothing to do with me.”

“But it must hurt you?”

“Why would it? It has nothing to do with me.”

That’s a back and forth the writer and academic Umberto Eco had when being interviewed about critics and criticism, on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs.

So, I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there? Hope all is well.

This is Episode 32 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. Also, if this is your first time to the podcast please go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes to get an idea about where I’m coming from on process and everything else and especially as regards to the differentiation between Walls and Doors towards and away from the Imagination and creativity.

Last time I spoke about voice and vocation, but today I want to talk about feedback and community.

It’s hard to share something you’ve created. It’s personal. It’s like saying, Here, this is something from inside me, from my tripes, as they say in France, from my emotional guts. And when someone doesn’t understand, get, or like what you’ve put out in front of you, on a page, canvas, it’s hard to hear negative feedback because it’s your inner life, something important to you.

And at the end of the day it’s exactly what Eco said in that conversation I quoted, “Why would you let the criticism hurt you? It has nothing to do with you.” It’s like the Dude says in the Cohen Brother’s movie The Big Lebowski:

Yeah, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

I could talk about criticism and negativity again, about trolls and crazy makers, but I covered that more in depth back in episode 12. Right now, I want to talk about what I think is a solution, a Door towards creation, that is, community.

Community comes from a latin word which means “shared in common”. So how do you know who your people are? They share a common need and love for the same things as you. Which means you have to find your people. Peers. Mentors. They will give you insights, encouragement, support, kindness, gentleness when you’re down. Community helps you with the inevitable wall of rejection and failure. Your creative identity and sense of purpose will be transformed because you will inspire and validate each other.

Not every creator wants to make money from what they create, but every creator enjoys being around other creators who love what they love doing. Some of your community will create without every trying or even thinking of capitalizing on it. Some will create to make money. Whichever it is, community helps, and all the more if you want to make money from your creations, because other creators in your field will help you move forward with that too.

For example, do you live in the middle of nowhere? Then create a group online and go meet them, once a month. La Muse, again, the retreat I founded with my wife Kerry nearly 20 years ago, is in the middle of nowhere. People go there from all over the world. It doesn’t matter where you are. If it’s a mountain retreat like La Muse, with walking trails all over the place and silence, then you’ll find people on the same wavelength as you because they have the same loves. They don’t want to be in an urban setting. They like trees. They like France. To find your people, sometimes you have to leave where you are.

Shakespeare had a community. They helped him make his work better in the provinces before the king ever got a chance to see one of his plays. He acted with these people, owned a business with them (The Globe Theater), took money at the door from creatives, before he ever wrote a play. He had friends to support his creations. His plays didn’t just drop down from the sky on his desk fully formed. He got experience by creating with a very supportive creative community.

The French New Wave, the American Beat Generation, the Bloomsbury Group, the American Folk music revival, the Impressionists, the Scandinavian Dogme 95. These are just a few examples of many communities that helped each other, inspired each other to create great works. These artists, creators, filmmakers, writers, didn’t come out of a vacuum. They had community that created conversation, dialogue, feedback and inspiration and enthusiasm.

Cafes, universities, cities. And now, conferences, book festivals, courses, book groups, workshops. These places can bless you with your people. And there are countless meet up groups online.

The saying, “You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” Here the fleas are beneficial. Whether you’re into creating business plans or novels, people on the same wavelength will help you enjoy being a creator in your field because you are surrounded by people doing the same thing. By simply hanging around with people in the same field as you you feel more comfortable, more inspired to create even more. Simply having another creator in the neighborhood, across the river from you, in the next town, makes you aware of your own creation, spurs you on to create even more, because it’s normalized, naturally encouraged.

An example: nearly very retreat at La Muse someone pulls an all-nighter writing and is exhausted for two days. They would have gotten the same work done in two days. Now they miss out on the next day’s work, and feel depressed. When they realize this, there is always another creator on retreat to help them through it. It could be something as simple as, “Oh, I did that last week.” Or, “I used to do that all the time.” It starts a dialogue, and usually both people learn something from it.

Community also helps with the process of withdrawing from the world. It doesn’t seem so bizarre when you have another ten people from all over the world across the corridor, above you, beside you, doing the same thing. It doesn’t seem weird to write every day if you meet three other writers in a coffee shop to talk about writing, agents, characters, life as a creator. It doesn’t seem weird any more when you meet other creators at car shows, business conferences, gallery openings, wool stores.

So, if you want to get inspired, find other creators on the same inspirational path, because a pilgrimage can become boring and uninspiring without other pilgrims. Find your people. Get feedback before you send a creation out into the world. Find your beta readers. Find your mentors. They’ll make you look better by helping to make your creations better.

I just talked about retreats, and I also talked about it more in Episode 24. However, if you can’t get enough done on a retreat then maybe find community in a course or program near where you live. You don’t have to abandon your family, but you will need their support.

For example, in writing it could be a low-residency MFA. That way you can still do your 40 hour a week job but advance your creative passion by going away twice a year for a week or so to be around mentors and people, other writers on the same wavelength trying to do the same thing. As friends have told me, an MFA is not for business, or making connections, unless you go to a very established program, and even then it’s not always a given. Contacts, connections in those programs is to meet people, a community who will inspire you to write, to create, people who will be there when that nasty Walls eventually rise in front of you, as they always do, the negative voice that says: You’re no good at this, and you never will be. Stop. Now.

The important thing is one, that you learn from your mistakes, but two, you also learn from other people’s mistakes. Much of the same problems in one person’s creation can be seen in another’s too. With community we learn to grow, together. At the very least you learn to eradicate the most common mistakes from your work, things it may have taken you years to discover on your own. I am a classic example of this. As I said in an earlier episode I never went to an MFA. I didn’t even know what they were back in Ireland, because they didn’t exist there. So, it’s been a long two decades of making many of the same mistakes over and over to get to the realization of, Oh, ok, right, I’m not going to do that again. And it’s not just the mistakes either. With community we can see the positive aspects of other people’s creations. We can go, Why the hell didn’t I think of that? Why can’t I do that with a book of mine? Rejection, criticism is no longer an enemy then. It becomes a learning tool. We all make the same mistakes, but not always at the same time, so it’s important to see someone else make mistakes so you don’t, or for them to see you make mistakes for them to learn.

Another thing: Look for feedback, but only from people you trust. It’s not personal. If you get feedback it means someone is taking your creation seriously. You’re inspiring them to respond, or react.

You feed your community — other creators and creatives — your work, so that they can give you back constructive criticism. Not criticism. Constructive criticism. You don’t want creative negators in your community. You want people you can trust. When they give you feedback, let it be what a Norwegian writer on retreat at La Muse once called a “critical sandwich”. If you’re going to give negative criticism, at the very least point out all the positive things first, then get to the meat, the center of the sandwich, the actual point you want to get across. And when you end, remind them again about all the positive things you got from their work. If they’re a mansplainer it won’t matter what kind of a sandwich you give them, they’ll only see your effort to help, as negative.

As I said, you can’t function in a vacuum. You have to see how you’re doing. Ask your peers. Creators, after a retreat at La Muse, often create a creative community to talk about their music, writing, surfing, cooking, from anywhere to a cafe to a kitchen or book group. As John Donne once wrote, no man is an island. As opposed to being a creator, you become a co-creator. A lot of writers on retreat end up reading each others work — beta readers. They’ll go back to Maine or Dublin or Melbourne and create a writers group that meets once a month, to listen, read and give feedback.

Stephen King, one of the last people you would think needs beta readers, has his wife Tabitha and many others. He knows they will find flaws in what he thinks is perfect, because none of us are perfect.

Tolstoy rewrote the beginning of “War and Peace” fifteen times, over the period of a year, until he got it where he wanted it. Of course, his wife, Sofya, who re-copied out everything for him, was there as his first beta reader.

Community is one thing, but people you spend nearly every day with is completely different. You “commune” with them in a different way. And oftentimes it is these people who empower you to embrace your creative community. When I said in an earlier episode that I go on retreats to write I don’t do it on my own. My wife encourages me, literally “gives me the heart”, to go. She tells me I need to leave, now. She does this out of love because she can, as they say in Ireland, see it on me, the need to create.

She’s supported me so much that I can voice these words, these ideas. Who do you think is minding our kids right now as I speak this? When I went to my office to write my Create book she was with our kids, homeschooling all three of them. She sees life as a whole, as a co-creative venture, and our children as the most creative thing she’s ever done. She was a magazine editor in New York and wrote for “The New York Times”. She used to write poetry. Now she creates wonderful meals, rooms, renovates with me, crochets, gardens, and nurtures our children. She says she will return to her writing and I know she will. As she puts it, right now she’s writing in her head.

When my novels were getting rejected by editors, she encouraged me to keep writing. When I don’t want to write, she encourages me to go to the office. She was the first person to tell me: “John, you don’t need to be published to be a writer. You write. You keep doing it. You’re a writer. Why do you need the world to tell you what you know you are already?”

You will need someone to share it all with. Why? Because life, especially a creative life can get lonely. And you want someone there to talk to about your loneliness, hopefully as much as you listen to them talk about theirs. I’m not saying it’s easy to find someone, and I’ve seen a lot of people choose the wrong partner and swim around in misery but if not a partner then friends, a community, your people.

For the most part, it is women who suffer the burden of not being able to create. I met women every retreat who had finally created space-time to get back to creating, writing again, painting again. Why is this? Because like my wife they see the twenty years it takes to create a human being, “to get them up on their feet” as one woman once told me, as the most important creation there is. Only when their kids are gone to college do they feel comfortable, free to leave. Cleaning, teaching, feeding, counseling, encouraging, driving, and loving: that’s full-time creation.

Sometimes a woman in her thirties with small kids will go to La Muse. How is that possible? Because the father has encouraged her to go. So, there are encouraging husbands, but no way as many as there are encouraging wives. I know. I saw who went to La Muse for the last twenty years.

Don’t believe me? What about Marie Curie, Cleopatra, Simone de Beauvoir, Eleanor Roosevelt, Coretta Scott King, Rachel Robinson, Yoko Ono, June Carter Cash? There are so many. These women are wonderful creators in their own rights. But they were not just wives. They were also great creators who encouraged and supported their lovers and spouses to create. Indeed, would those men have been as “great” without them?

Encouragement is one thing, humor is another. If you find the person or people who encourage you most, then they’ll probably make you laugh the most too, especially when things are very difficult, when it all seems like a farce. Everything today has gotten super serious, from gender to climate change to nuclear proliferation to pandemics. It’s hard right now.

And what’s the thing that can keep us from going crazy? Having a good laugh. By laughing at how ridiculous it all is, this world, at how ridiculous we are in the privacy of our brains, then we release stress and anxiety. When we laugh with others, and laugh at ourself then we relieve tension. Everyone talks about how important it is to cry, to allow feelings and emotions to come up and out of us. It’s also important to cry with laughter. I find that there’s a lot of seriousness when I get out of Ireland. I think the Irish are famous for craic, not because they drink so much, but because they know how to laugh at themselves and with others. For the most part they don’t take themselves too seriously. They had a colonizer for nearly 800 years being serious with them. How are they supposed to take things so serious after that?

Mediocrity and malice can’t fight humor. When we laugh at the stupidity of political or cultural pretentiousness then we release ourselves from it. We free ourselves from the seriousness of it all but at the same time comment on it, without someone killing us for it, as Shaw put it. If we don’t laugh at political fools then how will we ever get them out of office. If we don’t laugh at the fools we encounter in whatever creative world we work in then we won’t be able to deal with them, or continue our work because it will all be too serious and morose.

Even here away from La Muse I have friends who encourage me by email to continue doing this podcast. They are few, but a Longfellow once said somewhere, Friends are like books, I’d rather have one or two great ones than a library of bad ones!

So who are your creator friends and mentors. Who encourages you? Who makes you laugh? Who allows you to play? Hang around with them more. Create a community.

So thanks for listening. I started with what I think is a quote from an Irish writer, but as always I’m going to end the episode with an Irish proverb. This one means:

There is no strength without unity.

Ní neart go cur le chéile.

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

Episode 31: Voice and Vocation

March 5, 2021 By John Fanning

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Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less. Then, you make — oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another — some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.

That’s a quote from a James Baldwin anthology The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings, from the essay The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity.

So, I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there? Hope all is well.

This is Episode 31 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. Also, if this is your first time to the podcast please go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes to get an idea about where I’m coming from on process and everything else and especially as regards to the differentiation between Walls and Doors towards and away from the Imagination and creativity.

Last time I spoke about play and humor, but today I want to talk about voice and the idea of vocation.

So if I’m going to get into voice I feel like I need to get into the literal first, that is, my Irish voice. The thing is, if you were to ask Irish people about my accent they’d probably say I sound like an Irish fella speaking like a yank. The truth though is I’ve been gone from Ireland nearly as long as I lived there now so it’s bound to have had an effect on my voice. Especially when you consider the fact of being in France for nearly twenty years speaking southern mountain French. Serving on the municipal council meetings meant not understanding anything for the first two to three years or so, what with the bureaurcratic acronyms, mad Occitanie accent, and the fact that I had atrocious French back then. Connected to all this is the fact of where I was born, on the borders of Meath and Dublin, two of the most urban and rural counties in Ireland, sitting right beside one another, and then the fact that I went to Louth to school, which is a place nearer to northern Ireland than southern Ireland. The Meath, Dub, and Drogheda accents turned my voice into that of a cameleon. When I first listened to it on my first episode it sounded very like what I associate a Dublin accent to be, a kind of lazy unease, almost bordering, pardon the pun, on a mumble, as opposed to a Meath or Drogheda accent, but in end it doesn’t sound like a very strong Irish accent anymore, to me. Which is another part of this. Others think me very Irish even though I see my voice as a watered down one, and thereby ascribe associtions to it when my experience of different locales makes me feel completely like more of a mongrel, Irish, French and now American. But you can’t hear that in a voice.

Anyway, I ramble on about this to draw attention to the fact that even in the sound of our voice is our voice, with different associations for ourselves and others. Someone like James Joyce or Brendan Behan was able to represent that Dublin voice onto the page. So how we sound when we speak gives us a certain presence just like my voice gives you associations about me linked to Irishness. Voice is hard to get away from, and there are many subtleties that can create very nuanced presences. For example, I try in my novels to transfer that voice to the page when I can, because it’s distinctive, and a reflection of where I come from and who I partly am. So voice is a root, literally, one where you can use your cultural, familial roots as a way to color or populate your creations, in your songs, your books, your videos.

From another angle though: we’ve all heard what I now think has become a pretty tired question: How do I find my creative voice? How do I find my creative voice? Which is usually followed by scrolling through blogposts with optimized words of five or ten or whatever amount of tips on how to hook into or connect with your original voice. Well, as I said in a previous episode on difference, we all arrive at this in different ways and of course we all have different voices, and in real life oftentimes different ones for different people, so it’s often very hard to comprehend or recognize our own specific voice or what we’re actually talking about when we talk about voice, what Baldwin named “your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.”

As I always do I want to start by investigating the word itself a little first because many things come out of it. For example, in grammar even a verb has a voice. It describes the relationship between active and passive states. You can have a passive voice, a middle one or an active one. Subjects, us, in the real world alternate our voice, like I said earlier, to the situation.

But there’s a big difference between voice and vocation, or how society often demeans vocation, by calling what we love doing: an avocation, or hobby. Personally, I think avocation demeans vocation, your voice. And this is normal. It’s simply something society does the minute you try to express, to use your voice. It wants you to think your imagination and creations are avocations, not part of a vocation. This goes back to what I talked about in many of the previous episodes on walls and especially in my long earlier episode on captialism and the imagination, how it tries to value your creation from capitalistic, individualistic perspectives. But in reality, irrespective of financial gain, we have to find our voice by passing through that low wall into the garden of imagination by first becoming an apprentice then journeyman, and finally honing our creations until we’ve become a master. Again, these are stages and nomenclature I talked about before in episode 19, Mentors and how Talent Borrows and Genius Steals.

But getting back to the word itself, vocation. In Ireland when we use the word it usually means someone in the family is going into the priesthood. As most people know, Ireland is mostly Catholic, so it makes sense. Of course it’s not used in the context much any more because hardly anyone goes into the priesthood in Ireland now.

However, from a broader Christian ideology Christianity would see each individual created with talents which they harness to create a living, and from an even bigger perspective that love itself is the vocation of all Christians, especially when committed to the common good of all. So, vocation has a positive religious connotation on a few levels in Christianity but it can also be reflected in other religions too.

Buddhism sees pain, suffering, as life. Life is suffering being a tenet of Buddhism, where we find our vocation like Christianity, through love, but also through joy, compassion, and equanimity. Which brings me back to Baldwin. In the opening quote he spoke of this pain, again and again. Pain. Not to allow pain to beat us down. To use it. To understand that pain is what we all have in common, that we’re not as individualistic as modern society would have us think and that we have to come to “some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.” This is voice. This is vocation.

Society says we’re all apart, when quite simply we’re not. This is something I’ll explore more in the next episode, that we basically need each other. But we’re taught through junk morals, junk ethics, blue screens and social media that we are the exact opposite, divided, alone. We’re not. It’s a lie. And the lies lead to disconnection from each other so that the ego is no longer balanced, so that we lose touch with our voices and vocations amidst all the noise.

So, how do you figure out the difference between that loud voice creating all the noise and the quiet little inspirational one? Mostly, the loud one will be telling you how sh*t you are at creating. The quiet one, it’ll be saying to drill a hole here, take out that chapter, put the color blue in there. Yes, I know. This is an oversimplification. But, simple things can be very complex, and very helpful.

So, is the voice telling you to stop creating what you’re doing because you’re useless? Okay, by now you know from listening to earlier episodes that that’s natural. It’s simply a wall your mind/ego creates to stop you doing the work. When you listen to that voice you block out the other quieter voice, the unconscious, the Mind with a capital M, the heart.

What’s inside you has to come out. If it doesn’t then it’s being suppressed, and suppression is unhealthy. But, it’s difficult to listen to the quiet voice inside you when all around you the louder ones outside of you, are constantly vying for your attention. So that idea again of “finding your voice”: it takes practice, work, and hardship to find your voice, the quiet one, the little powerful one. That’s your real voice, your inner creator speaking to you. Emotional scars can be healed, by listening to that quiet voice. If we create from there with the emotional memory I talked about in episode 27, with time and repetition, we will create something beautiful.

The great documentaries of Adam Curtis show this contemporary malaise I mentioned, this strangeness and rigidity of individualism, which has failed us, in that the very compassion Baldwin referred to disappears for conspiracy facts and conspiracy theories as alternative realities to the pain. This pain Baldwin talks of can also be found in many other creators. For example, Beethoven. In a letter known as the Heiligenstadt Testament – Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations – Beethoven wrote about this difficulty of vocation and voice, in October of 1802. The letter was supposed to be read after his death. He was 32 years old at the time and had just finished his 2^nd symphony:

Born with a passionate and excitable temperament, keenly susceptible to the pleasures of society, I was yet obliged early in life to isolate myself, and to pass my existence in solitude. If I at any time resolved to surmount all this, oh! how cruelly was I again repelled by the experience, sadder than ever, of my defective hearing! — and yet I found it impossible to say to others: Speak louder; shout! for I am deaf! Alas! how could I proclaim the deficiency of a sense which ought to have been more perfect with me than with other men,–a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, to an extent, indeed, that few of my profession ever enjoyed! Alas, I cannot do this! Forgive me therefore when you see me withdraw from you with whom I would so gladly mingle. My misfortune is doubly severe from causing me to be misunderstood. No longer can I enjoy recreation in social intercourse, refined conversation, or mutual outpourings of thought. Completely isolated, I only enter society when compelled to do so. I must live like an exile. In company I am assailed by the most painful apprehensions, from the dread of being exposed to the risk of my condition being observed… What humiliation when any one beside me heard a flute in the far distance, while I heard nothing, or when others heard a shepherd singing, and I still heard nothing! Such things brought me to the verge of desperation, and wellnigh caused me to put an end to my life. Art! art alone, deterred me. Ah! how could I possibly quit the world before bringing forth all that I felt it was my vocation to produce?

So, what I suppose I’ve been trying to say through this whole episode is that it’s hard. We suffer. It’s painful to find our voice. And equally painful to find a vocation. And we all suffer when we try to create something, no matter how amazing the creation or creator is or was. Beethoven did. Baldwin did. Van Gogh did – simply read his wonderful letters. And it’s suffering that they transformed into art. By showing up to create every day they learned to listen more and more to that little voice inside them and like a muscle, the more they used it, the stronger it got, using the pain, the hardships to create something beautiful for themselves and ultimately for all the rest of us.

voice vocation john fanning creativity suffering

So thanks for listening. I started with what I think is a quote from an Irish writer, but as always I’m going to end the episode with an Irish proverb. This one means:

What pains the heart must be washed away with tears.

An rud a ghoilleas ar an gcroí caithfidh an t-súil é a shilleas.

I love that one because it shows the Irish working at a deeper level than English. What touches the heart has to drain the eye, which is even more literal. What pain we put into our hearts has to be drained out of it. In its constructions Irish is not as detached as English when it comes to emotions, the classic I’m sorry in English becomes “Sorrow is on me”, in Irish. Tá brón orm.

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

Episode 30: Play and Creativity

February 19, 2021 By John Fanning

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We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.

So that’s supposed to be a quote from George Bernard Shaw. I don’t know where I came across it first but it has a Wildean way about it that I’ve found hard to get out of my head. I couldn’t find where it came from, what play, or article but it’s not important. What is important is that it gets into what I want talk about today.

So, I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 30 of my series of episodes on the Imagination, based around my book Create. Also, if this is your first time to the podcast please go back and listen to some of the earlier episodes to get an idea about where I’m coming from on process and everything else and especially as regards to Walls and Doors to the Imagination and creativity.

Last time I spoke about spirituality and creation, but today I want to talk about play, and a little bit about humor.

When I talked about inspiration I talked about how it’s usually the starting point for any creation, and that thereafter we hone our inspiration into a fully formed creation. But before inspiration, or for inspiration to occur, for spirit to engage the imagination, we not only need ritual, we also need play, we need fun, we need humor, we need playfulness.

Why? Because the genesis of nearly all imaginative leaps, nearly all creative leaps, is when we start to play. As I said before, for Nietszhe that was walking like so many other creators. For others it’s painting before they write, or listening to music before they start composing or sitting in a bath like Dali, or dancing, or singing or simply doodling in all its forms. Then, something comes out of the playfulness and we become inspired.

The word play usually conjures up an image of a sandbox, with toddlers, buckets and shovels. Then there’s the theatrical perspective of the player on the stage, the theater of play, play as theater. But there are other forms of play. For example, in Hinduism, there’s a word, “Lila” or “Leela”, which means “divine play”. So Lila is when we channel the godlike, again what I talked about in the last episode when I talked about spirituality – so Lila channels the godlike, when the dancer (Shiva) and the prankster (Krishna), in a spontaneous movement instead of a mind-making effort play.

This is not telling the body what to do. We simply do, whatever comes. The twirling dervish is a great example of this. They dance, turning and turning, to forget the mind, and become one with inspiration, flow, God, Brahman, freedom, play. So, play is freedom. Freeing your mind, an art, the greatest art, when inspiration flowers, when it flowers with freedom, with play.

This is why a lot of creators have practices to clean their brain out before they get started creating. They literally get all the negative trash (usual defeatist thoughts) out of their head. Some people do it by journaling, or doodling, others hike, meditate or dance. To use the theatrical idea again, they become the player on the stage, but the stage is the field they love creating in. What’s important is become the player, to let the play take you over, so that you can arrive at those magical moments of flow and inspiration I talked about in previous episodes.

Probably best that I give an example. Once, when I was walking in the woods with my boys I started talking to them about a short movie they were making. It was based on the story of a mad French priest from a hundred years ago who amassed a huge fortune and had countless stories spun about his life because nobody knew where he got all the money or why he had such big connections with the Vatican. Anyway, my boys were making a short stop motion movie about his life for a film festival and I asked them how it was going. They started laughing. And I wondered what for? They went on to explain to me that the “bad guys” were going to break into the priests house dressed as ninjas but with Star Wars swords and fight the priest to the death for his treasure. I was like, what the hell are they on about? This is for a serious adult film festival that they got a dispensation to be allowed to enter the competition because they were only twelve at the time. What? I said. You can’t have bloody light sabers. And what the hell do you mean they have to try to kill the priest. And the priest has a huge machete type sword? I went on. And of course, they didn’t listen to me. And in my head I thought, Well, that’s that idea rubbished. They’re not going to get anywhere with that movie. Fast forward 6 months later and we’re at the film festival and I’m watching these two 12 year olds climb up onto the stage to applause after winning the festival ahead of all the adults and professionals from film schools and production companies. And why? Why did they win? Play. Their riff on the priest’s life was fun, actually hilarious, and above all, playful. Playfulness was in every scene. I had a French film critic who told me afterwards that every scene was so inspired, so fun, and that he hadn’t seen such a playful short in years. Playful. Exactly. There I was being serious, too serious. Not encouraging my wonderfully creative boys, who were full of play and humor, but actually trying to stymie them with my jaded, serious adult attitude. Those light sabers and ninjas were the very scenes that got the biggest laughs, from me – and everyone else.

So play and humor are wonderful doors to creativity, to the imagination. But why? Because it reminds us not to take everything so seriously. Otherwise we might as well jump out the window. If we’re too serious we can drop into mental health problems or rigid stereotypes. For example, nothing makes me happier than seeing my little girl smiling as she reads the novels of Rick Riordan or JK Rowling. And those worlds she enters into, they were created by creators being playful, having fun doing what they do, and crafting that playfulness and inspiration into a creation. And anyway, if life is, as the Buddha puts it, that it’s suffering, then isn’t laughter and play, other than meditation et al., one of the great ways of dealing with it, to laugh at the absurdity of what we are living in?

Play. From another angle, it’s importance. Think about Google. They didn’t call their online app store the App Store. They called it Google Play. This isn’t happenstance. They know how important the word is, how it infers so much positive meaning for people. From a capitalistic perspective Google have capitalized on the word. They sell apps to us by making us think it’s a playful thing to do. And as I said back in the last episode in the Walls section of this podcast, when I talked about Capitalism, Success and Encouragement, what we have here again is the commodification of creativity. And of course, Google are not alone. There’s also PlayStation, WiiPlay, Xperia Play, not to mention all the various sports and games uses. This idea also transfers wonderfully into luxury products where the ads are all so serious. Because seriousness sells to seriousness. The serious businessman or woman who is a capitalistic success has to be sold Mercedes and ridiculously priced watches and craft alcohols, and craft lifestyles in a serious way. That’s why the ads are all so serious, so sophisticated, so bloody laughably boring, to me anyway, because they are selling seriousness to serious people. And this is a different form of play, acting. Playacting. Not playing. They’re acting the part of a successful person. They’re acting the part instead of playing. They play a part instead of playing. And the part they’re playing , the serious adult, means you have to have the right costume, the right props, the right capitalistic monologues on success while sipping the same craft alcohols, all purchased for serious amounts of money.

So again, it’s the idea of play as fun, and laughter, as an expression of emotional play that I find most inspiring. Why? Because we can harness free play, or what Carl Jung called the “free child” to have fun, to be playful, free to be imaginative and creative. Jung said people can over-identify with their own persona, becoming a stereotype. Ambition, expectations of society, and being sold artificial seriousness can turn us into stereotypes, rob us of our freedom. His “free child” is the opposite to the “Would you ever go and grow up!” rubbish we all have to hear at some stage or at many times of our lives. Being playful is frowned upon. Because we’re supposed to be serious all the time, to be a real adult. Which gets me back to the idea of the child again. The free child is the exact opposite of the serious adult, the imprisoned adult you could almost say. The irony here is that you can have very serious adults in suits who are actual emotional toddlers – we’ve nearly all met some version of this type of individual in the work place – because they take everything so seriously. And of course they will never be the ones to imagine new ideas because of that very seriousness. If they can’t joke and have a laugh, have some fun with what they are doing then how the hell are they supposed to create anything meaningful that changes and inspires people to buy their invention, their creation, not their serious object or product. So again, we have this idea of Capitalism versus Imagination, versus creativity, when we have the serious adult versus the playful free child, the destructive child versus the free child. This is why we have corporate tantrums. These specific “adults”, and I’m not saying all individuals working a serious job are like this, but these specific “adults” can’t stand even listening to someone let their free child roam. They can’s stand someone being playful or funny. It makes them jealous, because they’re lost in seriousness, because they’ve lost complete touch with their free child. So, they’ll try to belittle or demean the creative free child. Because we all had a free child when we were young. But when we go into the work force and universities we’re told to give up childish things, when ironically, it is these very childish things that inspire and create anything. And this is why so many creators are so playful, because they never let go of their free child. They could be 75 and they’re still having fun and being playful. Again, as with the serious suit, we all know the playful old man or woman who still sees the world playfully. They play, they create, and they have fun doing it, so they repeat it, and their inspiration to be around, a joy to communicate with.

My boys and girl are forever creating, “playing”. Drawing. Cutting up paper. Singing. Dancing. Creating houses, space craft, making films, igloos, now that we’re here in Maine, little rock villages by the stream at the bottom of our valley when we were in the mountains back in France. Actually, creating little villages out of little rocks was also what helped Carl Jung make breakthroughs in his work.

There’s a lovely story about Jung. He used to create when he hit emotional and professional road blocks in his life. When visitors from all over the world would be sitting down talking over a meal, Jung would disappear. They would search for him and find him down by the water creating little streams from the land into the lake with the children of the visitors with a twig. Why? He preferred playing to talking. He preferred his free child to than the serious adult.

Play was essential to Jung’s life work. He didn’t consider his books as his only creative outlet. Indeed, the very thing that inspired his books were his moments creating other worlds playing — in sculpting, mandalas, woodcarving, building towers and little streams with children. For Albert Einstein, play’s defining characteristic was what he called in Ideas and Opinions, “combinatory play” usually arrived at with the playing of his violin in between trying to solve mathematical conundrums. In part of a 1945 letter responding to a survey of the processes of famous scientists, Einstein had this to say:

The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined.
There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.

When I was a kid you always found kids outside playing in the street, in the fields. You spontaneously played a soccer game. You didn’t have to have a set place to do it, with adult supervision. And it was a blessing. We didn’t have adults telling us how to behave. We had to learn how to socialize, to create our own rules and how to make up when we fought or bickered. Today we’re afraid to have our kids walk down the street to get a newspaper without a parent in tow, what many call helicopter parenting. How can a child be playful if the serious adult is always around? It makes no sense.

Play has gone inside, to video games and other devices that tell us all about the latest child abduction or school shooting. What does this mean? We don’t take risks. We don’t know how to organize ourselves autonomously. We forget or don’t even know how to play. Why are so many young people anxious, depressed, suffering from self-harm, getting autoimmune diseases? Fear. They’re even afraid of getting dirty, which has only gotten worse with this pandemic.

Myself and my brother used to come home covered in dirt, flithy at the end of a day. Germs? We never heard a word about them. When we failed to score a goal we didn’t have Mammy or Daddy in the background to shout us on and say we’re wonderful. You failed. So what? You learned to try harder. You challenged yourself. You learned not to let it get you down. Eventually you scored a goal, on your own steam, after learning to deal with being let down. We learned how to deal with other kids when there was a fight, a conflict. You learned to negotiate, instead of telling an adult. How are we supposed to interact with others, ourselves, if we’re not free to play and learn from play?

You don’t have to go anywhere. There’s no road. You get to discover it. This is the fun of creation. It’s playful. The creators having the most fun, the ones immersed in their work, in flow, create the most work and the greatest work. Joy, inspiration, comes when you forget the rules. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t know the rules of your field. No. It simply means you have to play with them, after you’ve learned them. Children love creation, accept it naturally, understand it intuitively. We are conditioned to forget this wonderful understanding as we grow into adults. So forget seriousness and embrace your free child. Laugh at the seriousness so as to have fun with creating. Create from freedom not the prison of seriousness.

So thanks for listening. I started with what I think is a quote from an Irish writer, but as always I’m going to end the episode with an Irish proverb. Literally, this one means:

Youth doesn’t care where it sets its foot.

Is cum leis an óige cá leagann sí a cos.

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.