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Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

So that was a quote from Carl Jung, from his last book, which was mostly on alchemy, Mysterium Coniunctionis.

And I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast. How’s it goin. Howy’re yis all doing out there? Hope yes are all doing well.

This is Episode 4 of my series of episodes on creativity, based around my book Create. Last time I talked about Walls, and today I want to talk about family, friends, and what I call villains.

So, family. Well, if I’m going to talk about family I need to talk about my own experience a bit so I can arrive at what I want to say, as I often do, through anecdote.

I grew up in rural Ireland, in a place not far from Dublin, but sufficiently far to be too far, for a young fella seeking creative community. It’s called Meath, and it’s a beautiful place, full of history, The Battle of the Boyne, and the Boyne valley itself with all it’s mad megalithic tombs. One of them, Newgrange, not far from where I grew up, was built about 5,000 years ago around 3,000 B.C. which makes it older than the Great Pyramids of Giza and Stonehenge over in England.

So, the place was rich and beautiful, but creative community was hard to find. There was no music in our house, hardly any books, save the ones inherited by a great-aunt from England.

All my Dad’s family were from a farming background. My Dad was an agricultural advisor. So, when I was a kid the other kids talked about tractors and livestock. Don’t get me wrong, I love my farming background, but I didn’t love the creative isolation, or the common understanding that creation was for crazy artists and writers up in Dublin, or in some far flung foreign city like New York or London.

My mother’s family, the same thing, they all worked for other people, even if they were doctors and lawyers. I was actually supposed to become a lawyer, or a doctor like my maternal grandfather. And he’s the one I want to talk about today. On his deathbed, he asked me a question. I was in my teens. He could barely breathe.

“What … are you … going to do … after university?”
“I’m going to be a writer, Granddad.”
His breathing got worse. “Oh no … not that,” he wheezed.

Not the most encouraging conversation I ever had. But that was the general consensus. You want to be a what? Writer? Are you mad? How will you eat? Where will you get money? Away with the fairies, as they say in Ireland.

So, getting back to that Jung quote.

Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their environment and especially on their children than the unlived life of the parent.

A classic example here in the states would be an immigrant family, say they have a store of some kind, but they want their kid to go to college even though their kid wants to keep working in the store, because he sees making furniture as really creative, or making bread as really creative. He or she loves it. So it becomes this war between doing what she loves and doing what makes her family love her.

Of course this is not just here in the states. Like I said, I was under pressure to become a doctor or a lawyer. Projection and expectation’s normal in every culture but it’s wrong-headed because creation is about doing what you love, being happy is doing what you love, not what your family loves. And just because one person settled into a way of living in the world doesn’t mean they have to subject their kids to the same pressure.

This pressure can be seen all the time. For example, I had it easy compared to the Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho. His parents went full throttle with their agenda for what young Paulo needed. In his teens, his parents sent him to a mental institution, not once, but three times. Why? Because he wanted to become a writer. Coelho was locked up for months and given tranquilizers and electroshock therapy.

As I just said, the examples exist everywhere, in every career. Charles Darwin gave up a medical career. His father didn’t think much of his decision. He said he was a very ordinary boy, below the common standard in intellect, and that he would disgrace himself and his family. I mentioned Rodin and his process in the last episode. Well, his father was even more blunt than Darwin’s. He said he had an idiot for a son.

It can be found in so much of what we watch too. Marilyn Brando’s character in “On the Waterfront” tells his brother what it did to him to take a fall in a fight, when he could have won. He said,

I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender. I coulda been somebody. Instead of a bum. Which is what I am. Let’s face it.

Two brothers, one a villain, the other with a dream and passion to express himself through boxing.

And why do we identify with this character? Because it’s great dialogue? Because it’s a great script? Great actors? Direction? Yes, but no. Because ultimately it’s because the scene makes us think, “I’ve experienced that. That’s my inner world, my inner struggle. I’ve had to deal with family like Brando’s brother. People who try to stop me from doing what I love.”

We’re all like Brando’s character. We all have “villains” in our life, even if they think they’re protecting us like my well-meaning Grandad. We just have to be able to recognize the villains.

It could be a spouse, a sibling, a child, a neighbor telling you:

“No, you’re biting off more than you can chew with that,” or some other cliché. Because that’s what they’ve been told, and they believed it, they believed their villain, and they’re simply regurgiating it.

Of course, as always, this doesn’t mean there are not supportive people out there encouraging people to create. My wife Kerry has been supporting my novel writing for over twenty years now. I would never have gotten those books done without her support. So many of the artists I’ve known, many of them close friends, would never have gotten their art out there if it weren’t for their spouses. So that’s a really important thing to mention.

However, what I’m talking about is how important it is to understand the distinction between the two. There are people who will support your creativity, open the Doors towards creativity even further for you, and there are those who will play the role of villain, putting up Walls and discouraging you away from creativity, whether they know it or not.

Who is your villain? And who’s your ally? Who or what has a negative effect on you when you’re trying to create, and who has a positive effect, gives you the opportunity to go further into your creativity? Are they the crazy-maker who calls you up when you’re trying to write a scene, when you’re about to build a chair, design a deck, to tell you about all their stuff, what’s wrong with their life? Or are they the person who minds the kids while you write? Or are they the person who assumes you’re not doing anything important, that you’re available because if you’re not making money, you’re not really “working”, and if you’re not working you’re available? Or do they leave you with the door closed, as Stephen King puts it, to create, and when you come out they smile and ask, how did it go? And when you had a crap day they encourage you, say it’ll pass, that tomorrow will be better, that getting 6 figures for your first book is not why you’re doing it, but because it gives you joy to create.

The villain doesn’t have to be malicious. Just effective enough to unhinge you, to take your time, to discourage you. They don’t simply exist in plays and novels. They’re on the streets, or sitting beside you in a taxi, or on the couch saying it’s not worth it.

When I was a kid, most of the time my villains didn’t have to say anything. A look, the expression of disbelief, was enough. Their silence, their faces were enough. Those faces said:

“You want to be a what?”
“This fellas off his head.”

After Granddad, when people asked me what I wanted to be I answered, “I don’t know. Maybe a pilot.” Each time I’d tell them whatever came into my head. For the laugh. Because I thought I might as well have fun with it than let it depress me. My answers became more and more obscure. Lawyer. Botanist. Neuroscientist. Feng shui consultant. Fragrance chemist.
However, now, when people ask I say, “I’m a writer”.

So remember, be aware of who your villains are, as much as who your allies are, and of course villains will always tell you what you are not, so don’t let them tell you who you are. Create, regardless.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst but as I’ve done the last episodes, I’m going to end each podcast with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

There’s no hearth or fireplace like your own hearth.

Or there’s no place like home – if they let you do what you want or more importantly, what you love to do that is.

Níl aon tinteán mar do thinteán féin.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get a wage for doing it, because that’s how I see this podcast as a job, one I love doing, 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 leave a review on itunes or wherever ya listen to it. 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 be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals . . . We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it’s too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us — create who we are. It is we who created the system.

So, that was part of the Japanese novelist, Haruki Murakami’s acceptance speech, for the Jerusalem Prize back in 2009. And I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin. Howy’re yis all doing out there? Hope you’re all doing well. So, this is Episode 3 of my series of episodes on creativity, based around my book Create.

First off, thank you for all the positive feedback to the first two shows. I really appreciate it and to all of you who’ve starting supporting the podcast on Patreon, thanks so much. I’m very grateful.

However, some of you, many of you creators I really trust told me: 1. The intro should have been half the length, and that the second episode should have been two episodes, one on creativity, and then the next on what is a creator. Then 2. You said I need to spell people’s names out as this form is the spoken word and not everyone is going to go to my website to look at the links and correct spelling of the individual I’m talking about. And I will. Fair point. And I’d never even thought of it.

So, sorry about all that. I was actually going to take down the episodes and do them again. I researched for hours how to do it technically until my wife Kerry told me to just leave them there, saying they’re an example of creativity, that it’s messy, that you have to learn from your mistakes and grow as you go. Also, people only ever look at the last thing you did, the last ten episodes, the last book, movie, so the first 2 will get buried she said by my tenacity to keep putting out episodes. So, this episode, and every one after it is going to be under 30 mins, accept for interviews later on.

Last time I said I’d get into family, friends and villains, but that’ll bring me over the 30 min mark, so today I want to talk generally about Walls, as the next 10 episodes at least are going to be about Walls away from creativity, before I move onto Doors towards creativity.

And I want to start with an anecdote, about when I left Europe for the first time, to come to the States. My first apartment in America was out in Brooklyn, after sleeping on the floors of other Irish immigrants in Sunnyside, Queens. They had warned me, whatever you do, don’t live in Brooklyn. A month later, I was living in a railroad apartment beside a scrapyard, with a drug dealer and his immense bulldog on the bottom floor, and a huge Puerto Rican family upstairs who practiced Santeria, a lot, judging by the amount of dancing and singing going on up there. The one conversation I had with the father of the family consisted of references to “orishas”, possession by spirits, and Catholic saints.

One day I came home from work to find my Irish friends waiting for me on the stoop. They’d cycled from Sunnyside to “surprise” me. They looked worried. I invited them upstairs. The bulldog hurled himself against the backyard door when we entered the building. They’d already met the owner outside. He’d asked them if they needed “some”, cocaine that is.

When I unlocked the door to my apartment we could see the bulldog barking at us in the backyard. Why? There was no wall in my kitchen. I found out later the family upstairs had “forgotten” to switch off the water in their bath and it had seeped into my wall, necessitating the removal of all the sheetrock by the tattooed “employees” of the slumlord while I was at work.

All my friends’ worst fears had become manifest. They looked around the apartment in horror. Besides my bicycle and some clothes, my only furniture was a mattress on the floor in the “bedroom”. One of them never talked to me again.

Every one of these things should have been a wall to me moving out of Sunnyside. Like my friends, a lot of Irish immigrants move all the way from Ireland to America and hardly ever leave the four walls of Irish communities like Sunnyside. The guy who never talked to me again had worked for the MTA for ten years, but had never been to Manhattan. There I was enacting the parable of the lost black sheep again, leaving my people behind, taking the leap out of the enclosure.

I landed in the right place, a now defunct cafe in the then vibrant, edgy and still affordable East Village. In that coffee shop, I met my real “people”, creators living on the cheap, well, by New York standards. Again, as with Camden Town in London, they were doing whatever they had to to keep creating. My willingness to step outside the walls of Sunnyside and embrace America, honor the culture I was in, led to me meeting so many of the New York creators I still love. I would never have met any of these poets, screenwriters, musicians, artists, eccentrics, students, film editors, designers and photographers if I’d not left behind the protective, safe walls of my own culture.

So by embracing a new culture, a new group of people, other creators, I felt more at home. Actually one of those creators, an American screenwriter, one I met all those years ago in that coffee shop in the East Village, once asked me this question while on retreat:

“Why have you built a wall about doing this non-fiction book, John?”
“Well, because I write novels.”
“I write screenplays,” she said. “And I paint. And I knit. And I tango. Should I stop painting, knitting and dancing because I’m a screenwriter?”

She had me, pardon the pun, up against a wall.

About a week later she said to me, “You know, there are about as many walls to creation, as there are leaves in that forest.”

Artists, writers, actors, inventors, academics, are no different from every one else. We’re all different, but we all have one thing in common: Walls. All creators suffer. At times they can’t create. They make mistakes. They have off days. Walls. What do they do? They accept they’re having an off day, what someone once called an inspiring dry patch, and keep working anyway. They know the off day is a wall, and that it will eventually disappear. And the wall of walls? Fear. We all have it. It’s insidious. I have it. I’ve known many very successful creators. They have it too. Their fears are the same as mine, as yours.

It goes something like this:

“I’ve nothing new to say,” or:
“It’s all been done, written, directed, created before,” or:
“Even when I get it done, it’s going to be sht. People will pretend it’s good, when they really think it’s sht. Even I will think it’s sh*t, because I’ll never be able to create it the way I envisioned it.”

It all leads to the same thing, you hit a wall, and the wall has this written on it:

Don’t do it! Give up!

Anything that says, in the end, don’t do it, is the ego, the mind, and the mind/ego creates fear. It creeps in, everywhere, every time as you’re about to create something.

Maria Callas would sink her nails into the arms of whomever was there before she went on stage to sing. She was terrified. She was the greatest opera singer in the world, and she still thought she’d get found out, that she wasn’t good enough, that her voice would fail, that she wouldn’t be able to give it her best, that people would laugh at her. Even Callas had imposter syndrome.

The answer? You do what you love, you sing anyway. You live passionately. You create anyway, knowing fear is simply part of the process.

Rodin would do thousands of sketches before starting a sculpture. You could say he was blocked, that he was creating a wall, or, you could see it like he saw it, as waiting, preparing for the right moment, the right movement to sculpt. Like Rodin you have to wait for the solution to come, naturally. And the only way to receive a solution is to be there. Keep on taking notes, sketching, planting seeds. Walls are a natural part of the process. You have to accept them, and begin again. They fall away with confidence. You allow your mind/ego to tire itself out, by having the faith to accept that every wall falls, with time.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from a Japanese but as I did last time, I’m going to end this episode with an Irish proverb. This one literally means:

Walls need spalls as well as large stones.

Fóireann spallaí do bhallaí chomh maith le clocha móra.

A spall’s a small bit or chip of a stone, that you get when you split a larger stone. A good mason can create any chip size they like with the right hit of a hammer, to fit into a hole, or hold up a bigger rock. The word comes from the Old German word spell, which means to split. Course this would’ve been important in Ireland centuries ago because they didn’t have cement to keep things together. So it takes all kinds to make a wall, and a balanced wall, if we look at walls from a holistic perspective, as are the ones that allow for the big things as well as the small things in life. One balances the other. Sometimes the little things, the spalls, are what keep us balanced.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get a wage for doing it, because that’s how I see this podcast as a job, one I love doing, 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 leave a review on itunes 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 be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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 To create is to resist; to resist is to create.

I’m John Fanning and this is the “Create with John Fanning” podcast. How’s it goin. Howy’re yis all doing out there? So, this is Episode 2 of my series of episodes on creativity, based around my book “Create”.

Last time I gave you an intro or overview of who I am and why I’m doing this podcast, and how artists and writers basically don’t own creativity and how I’m going to use my own experience and the experience of many of the creators I’ve met to talk about our shared understanding of what it is to create and how to get there. Even when my own experience and the experience of so many creators I’ve known is one of dealing with the difficulty of being a creator, what I call Walls, in a world where value equals capital, not art for art’s sake or the opportunity to share with others. To be a so called real artist you have to be “successful” which means receiving capital, where art is a product, as opposed to art as art and then as a product, not the joy of creation, what I call a Door to creativity, something you en- joy and the joy of sharing it, your creation, even if it’s only with one person.

So, last time I said I’d get into family, friends and villains, but in the interim I thought about it and felt I should get into what creativity is, what a creator actually is and why it’s important to live a creative life.

What is Creativity?

So,  “To create is to resist; to resist is to create.” Why did I start with that quote? Well, that’s the last line from “Time For Outrage!”, or in the original French, Indignez-vous! a small but powerful book, more a pamphlet I suppose, by the French diplomat Stéphane Hessel. But then a lot of books don’t have the power this little book has. It was published at the end of 2010 when Hessel was 93 years old.

To create is to resist. To resist is to create. When we create we resist the modus operandi of society, we resist what we are told we are, what we are supposed to be, what we ought to be, and become who we are. By resisting we are becoming creative beings, one of the most powerful things  we can be.

Hessel was a diplomat, but no ordinary diplomat, because he was a French Resistant who fought in World War II, surviving a concentration camp, and resisting the Nazis to create a new world for future generations, by resisting the powers in charge. He created a different idea of how the world should be, one against authoritarianism, one of freedom,  creative one. After the war he was involved with  the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 with Eleanor Roosevelt. His activism refocused on the social vision that was created after World War II, one of solidarity and compassion for other human beings. Indeed, he and his book were often referred to as inspiration for the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados, the American Occupy Wall Street movement as well as many other political movements.

Hessel’s amazing life was actually one of the inspirations for me writing my novel “Ezekiel”, how one individual could envision a better world and have the will to create that reality along with a few others, even against such a huge killing machine such as the Nazis. What an act of the imagination, of creativity, to imagine a better world.

Of course this gives us the opposite of what creativity is too, destruction. If you’re inspired by destruction then you burn books instead of writing them, like Hitler. You kill life instead of creating it, like Hitler. There’s a great irony here too, Hitler was a failed artist. He abandoned creativity, and because he was a psychopath, instead of embracing it in others, by being empathetic, he destroyed creativity, in his manipulative, criminal way, making an art of destruction.

So Hessel and others kept the door to creativity open during and after World War 2 by imagining a better, more creative world. He and people like him eventually helped walls fall, literal ones like the one in Berlin, and so many other figurative ones too. And this is one of the things I want to talk about today, walls, walls and doors.

You see, I see walls and doors as paths. Walls are a path away from creativity and doors are a path towards creativity. This is really important. Away, and towards. Doors to creativity would be notebooks, process, space-time and many others I’ll talk about in later episodes, but walls, they would be school, perfection, capitalism, what I call lexical prisons, trolls and many others. We have to be aware of what a wall is, and what a door is, so that we don’t confuse one for the other. They’re simple metaphors, but then can’t simple things be very complex too.

Walls are what I’ll talk about in the next episode, and after going through many of the types of walls that stop our creativity, that move us away from creativity, I’ll get into talking about all the doors towards creativity, how we transform walls into doors, how we make doors through these walls.

But before getting into that I want to talk about the idea of creativity as an idea, because creativity can be a pretty amorphous word. Like Love, with a capital L. It can mean so many different things to different people, all of which are neither wrong or right, it just depends on the persons perspective. To me, on a simplistic level, I see creativity as walls and doors, and in the end windows out into the world. But before I get to the walls and doors, and the windows out into the world, I want to talk about this amorphous apex of the triangle of creativity, before getting into what I think a creator is.

The funny and inspirational Brazilian artist Vik Muniz, in a Ted Talk, Art with Wire, Sugar, Chocolate and String,  I’ll leave the link for, on the transcript on my website, talks about creativity, and in a cool way about how getting shot helped him get to the US.

He has a lovely clarity on the distinction between creation and creativity and I won’t paraphrase it all here as you can look at the video for that, but generally he draws, pardon the pun, a distinction between creativity being how we cope with creation, while creation sometimes seems a bit ungraspable or even pointless. To him creativity is always meaningful. He sees what we “see”, in inverted commas, as artistically as creativity and what nature, the world gives us, objects etc. as creation. Which explains inspiration (something I’ll get into later as a door into creativity) in that it’s something that we “see” spontaneously, differently, when others don’t “see” it all.

Then there’s the art critic and novelist John Berger. He used to talk a lot about ways of seeing too, and even wrote a  book of the same name. He says the process of seeing is less spontaneous and natural than we tend to believe. The book he wrote was based on a BBC 2 television series where Berger compared what he called “the stillness and silence of a painting” as divorced from the “religiosity” or what “people teach us about art.” So, we are conditioned to an extent in how we see creativity and creation and this link between creativity and inspiration is to make the distinction for yourself between creativity and creation. So it would seem that creation is where inspiration lies, not creativity.

Connection, or “flow” as the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it in his book also called Flow, is the experience every creator talks about in some way, the wonderful experience that happens when you’re in the zone. You lose yourself. You lose awareness, because you’re in the moment, fully present. You get away from time and space. Your brain chills out, gets relaxed, reflective, because you are focused on the pleasure of something you are passionate about. So creation helps your health. First there’s the mind. It connects you to the world. And when your mind makes connections, when unrelated things come together, when we imagine new ways of communicating, then we’re being healthy, in flow. It stimulates your mind, and later, your emotions and feelings, something I’ll get into later.

In society the idea of being creative and getting inspired is oftentimes frowned upon, so running a “business” that focuses on exactly that can’t be lucrative. Right? “You’ll never make enough money to support your family with that,” was the kind of stuff we always heard from people when we started our retreat in France. We didn’t blame people for their skepticism. They just didn’t understand. Fortunately these potentially discouraging comments came to us when it was too late for us to be discouraged. We were already locked in. And so, we just did it, kept creating our retreat and life in France. You see, we weren’t doing it to support a family. We were doing it because we believed in it.

And of course this is exactly the language I heard when I was a young fella growing up in Meath.

“Why bother?”

This is exactly what an Irish relation, who shall remain nameless as he’s still alive, said to me when I got third prize in an essay competition. And you know what, he wasn’t even being mean, just clueless. To him it was a useless thing to do, create an essay. Who cared.

My response?

“Maybe you’re right.”

I was thirteen. What I really wanted to say, if I’d had the words and knowledge, the language, was:

“Nothing, yes, nothing, has ever been achieved without creation, without essays, ideas, without a creative leap because the future will come from creative leaps. If we are to survive in the face of population explosion, global warming, nuclear weapons, our survival will come from our passion and intuition  to create, creations we have not yet even imagined.”

And then I would have said, “Creation is existential!”

But I was thirteen. So I told him he was probably right. I knew he was wrong at the time, even if I didn’t know how to respond to him.

Everything, from maths to space travel, from writing novels to falling in love, cooking a meal to planning a vacation, takes creation, imagination, a leap. A leap into the unknown, out of the mundane. All our myths and symbols came from creation, our philosophies, sciences. It’s what makes us different from all the other species on this planet.

Physicists and mathematicians don’t rely on logic alone to arrive at new science. They will tell you that imagination is also key to making new leaps. Quantum physicists, and string theorists after them, were inspired by their imaginations to create new visions of reality and science. Einstein would never have come up with his special and general theories of Relativity if he weren’t being creative, trying to see things differently.

This is important. If we don’t have creation, we’re done. If we can’t imagine new ways of doing things or imagine new ways of living, we’re lost.

Creation is one of the most significant forces on this planet. I’ll say it again: “We are all creative beings. We are all creators.” If we bring this into our lives we make this planet a better place. I completely trust this. When you start to live a creative life it has an effect on you and all those around you. It brings joy, the joy of living, of being alive, of being in appreciation of what surrounds us, inspires us.

Why do I create? Why am I writing, creating this podcast? Why did I leave Ireland for Manhattan? How did I end up living in rural southern France married to an American, welcoming creators from all over the world?

Because I trusted my drive to create.

Trust is not belief. Beliefs are created by other people, mostly people we’ve never met. As Blake once wrote:

I must create my own system, else be enslaved by another man’s.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

I trust creation, not dogmas created by others. It’s like Jung once said, “I don’t believe, I know.” That’s knowledge, that’s trust.

Another story comes to me now, from 90s London, as a way of trying to get at what I mean.

What the hell’s 90s London got to do with anything you’re asking? Well, before I founded La Muse and even before I worked in magazines in New York, I managed a very cool bar in Camden Town, called The Good Mixer, all this during the Brit-pop 90s in London. The bar is still there too, but I haven’t been back since it went under new ownership.

Anyway, the bar had fruit and veg sellers and barrow boys from the market out front, old age pensioners from the spike down the road, like in Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. Mods and all types of sellers from the Market Stalls up the road, people from all over London, as well as one man who had created a record label, “Blur” being one of his bands. It was a mad place and a lot of fun. The place was an amazing mix of eclectic creative people: musicians, artists, producers, sound engineers, journalists and the museos and groupies that followed them from all over the world. Mostly New Zealanders and Australians served behind the bar with me. You’d get ten Japanese teenagers sitting around one Coke for two hours, watching the sellers play pool and waiting for a glimpse of the guitarist from Blur. That was one of the many bizarre regular occurrences in there.

However, the thing I found in talking to any of the successful creative people in that pub was that they were simply doing what they loved. They were playing music, writing about it, producing it, mixing it, because they loved music. Some bands got lucky and got real famous. Some were well known for a few years. Others were dropped after their first album, especially ones taken on as tax write offs by the big companies – “boiler bands” as they used to call them. You had bands that made it big in England were unheard of in the States and bands that nobody knew of in England became famous in the States. It’s the way all creative industries go, nobody really knows what will be “successful” where and when, even though they say they do. Most of the musicians and other creators I met didn’t care. They just wanted to make music, have fun, and get drunk with other people on the same wavelength. It was a mad bar, a mad time. After two degrees I found myself serving alcohol and having fun with all these people, a worthless resume building exercise, but it was better than sitting in an office cubicle. Better than any MFA. Why? Because it taught me this lesson: you can have fun doing what you love, creating what you love. The success comes with the doing, the fun of creating, not with getting a load of money.

I’ve another story kind of in the same vein, or going at the same thing about creativity.

About ten years ago I met a woman in Maine who’d just dropped her last kid off at college the week before. She’d always wanted to write short stories. Of course I was there telling her she should take advantage of her new found freedom and go to a writers’ retreat. I’d met so many women like her.

“I wouldn’t know how,” she said “I’m not a real writer. I’m really not that creative any more.”

We were standing in front of her old colonial house, with its wrap-around porch and this amazing flower garden. Not only that, out the back was this mad organic kitchen garden she’d created.

“Well, if you’re not creative,” I said, “then either am I.”

“What do you mean? You write novels,” she said.

“You just created three kids, a wonderful home, gardens, and are a great cook. Each one of those things is highly creative.”

She looked at me, confused at first, then smiled. “You know, I’d never thought about it like that.”

Again, like I said at the outset, creation is not owned by artists and writers. Everyone has “it” in them. When you were a child all you ever did was create. It was called play, something I’ll talk about more in a later episode.

Creation is a way of embracing new, personal worlds, whether it’s making music like those guys in Camden Town, building, designing, mending, painting, sewing, engineering, or gardening like that woman in Maine. The list is endless. If you think you’re not creative it’s because you just haven’t found out what it is you love creating, yet.

Every retreat, over and over again, for nearly twenty years, I met people from all over the world who “needed” to create. They left everything behind and went to a little village in the mountains of the south of France, in the middle of nowhere, to create. And they’re still going there, irrespective of whether I’m there or not because we created a space, a safe space for people to create.

Some of these creators have never written a word. Some have never painted. Some are well established. Some are famous. Some old, others just out of college. Some the head of colleges. And what do they all have in common? The need to create. The need to be a creator.

Here’s the thing: As soon as we’re born we’re told who we are. A lot of the time by people who don’t know who they are. And so, the problem grows, consolidates its case, something like this: “I’m definitely not creative. No, other people are. The people making movies, acting in them. The people writing them. Even the people creating the billboards.”

Well, here’s my response: It’s not true, it’s a damn lie.

Society constantly kills creation by making us think we are only one thing, not many. The world is large, and so is each human being. We are many things, the most important: we are creative beings.

We’re all creators. Everyone needs to create, to make, to bring something into being. Creation is how we bring what is inside us into being. The idea that “creativity” is only for so called “professionals”, or those who make money from what they create is not only wrong-headed, but insulting.

What is a Creator?

Of course there’s a distinction to be made here, between what a creative and a creator are, which reminds me of another very cool woman I met, at La Muse. I had just told her she wasn’t a creative, and she wasn’t happy about it.

“Aye right, what do you mean I’m not a creative?”

We were in the truck, about seven years ago, going down to Carcassonne to get groceries. The woman talking was a Scottish ad executive from London. She was on retreat to “draw the line”, as she put it. By this she meant she was going to draw without taking her pencil off the paper. She’s a great artist, but she writes ad copy for a living. Again, another example of how people can be many things, create many different things.

Ya see she had been calling me a creative, herself a creative, the other people on retreat creative, and I didn’t want to correct her because I didn’t want to come off as a mansplainer, as I’d just met her, but now we’d had a few laughs, so I got into it.

“You’re a creator and co-creator, not a creative, unless you’re at work.” I said.

“It’s the same thing?” she said.

“No, it’s not,” I said.

“Explain.” She’s a very clear, funny woman and she loved definitions, so I said something like this:

“Well, creatives can be people who live life creating walls to not create or they could be people who work as ‘creatives’ for other people. You need ‘co-creators’ when you finish your art. They create internally their appreciation of one of your line drawing. And you’re a co-creator when you appreciate and respond to someone else’s art.”

“Then what’s a creator?”

“They make things. They create. They crochet. They paint. They sing. They repair cars, write imaginative business plans. Draw the line, like you.”

“Oh, so you’re saying society has co-opted ‘creative’ by making us think it’s the same as creator and/or co-creator?”

“Exactly. ‘Creative’ has become capitalized upon by the corporate world. (I’ll get into this idea of capitalism more later on. Anyway I’m digressing.) What I said to her was something like: “You’re a creative, the graphic designers you work with, they’re creatives. You don’t necessarily get positive co-creation, or creation for that matter, from your work. Some people do though. They’re creators when they’re at work. But companies want us the audience, the consumer to have a passive relationship with ‘creativity’ so we buy their products, not make our own. A ‘creative’ is a way of blurring the distinction between creator and co-creator.”

She smiled at me and said, “Ya know, that’s a well tidy idea.”

She called a lot of things “tidy”. I think it’s Scottish for good. At least I hope it is.

The word “creative”, just like the word “creativity” has been “robbed” by academic programs, theories, science, commerce. I’m sure if I met that Scottish artist today she’d talk about the advertising of “creativity” on the sidelines of major football matches, or how banks are using it in their ads.

My old drama lecturer would explain it differently. He’d talk about the Greek word “drama”, how it literally means to do, to act. He’d say if you’re a co-creator, you’re in the audience.

Actors act. Audiences watch, absorb. It’s a different level of creation. You create empathy with the characters on the stage, but you are not creating the character as an actor or playwright. You’re a co-creator when you enjoy and appreciate the play on the stage. And it can inspire you to be a creator, to write your own play, to act in one.You’re a creative negator when you’re criticizing the play, almost for the sake of criticizing it.

A co-creator can have wonderful ideas but does not bring them out into the  world for the rest of us to see, experience, like a creator does. A creator acts on their ideas. They create software, paintings, books, companies. They’re co-creators who have become creators, become actors in their fields. They get up on the stage of the world and create. They climb out of the audience and start telling the audience about their play, business plan, design, project.

Now, wouldn’t it be great to be an actor too, to become the part, to live it, to write it, so others can enjoy what you create? Wouldn’t it be great to be a creator? But how does one become a creator?

Insight. You have an in-sight. You look inside yourself. You look inside and bring things into the world that nobody has ever seen or heard before, because it’s yours to share. But again, the question comes up: Why bother?

Creation is an act, a sacred act, a personal act, religious in the true sense of the word: “re” meaning again or connect and “lego” meaning to choose or revere and bond, ultimately meaning to choose again a reverential personal bond. Creation is religious because we choose to go over something again and again. We become devoted to creating. We reinvent. We re-create ourselves by creating over and over again. Creation is never still, it’s always changing. I’ll get into this idea of sacredness a little more in a later episode.

We created a writers and artists retreat nearly two decades ago to help other people create. We created a publishing house to get people’s creations out into the world. Now, I’m creating this podcast for the same reason, to empower others to create too.

I’m doing this podcast because no matter what you want to create, no matter what you’re into, there are so many things we all have in common — the walls, the doors to walk through those walls, and the windows out onto the world that creativity gives us. And of course the most important thing, to persevere in order to create, because it’s perspiration not inspiration that counts, and why, for your own good, and the good of others.

So, again, why am I creating this podcast? To help others create. So people don’t feel alone like I used to. So they don’t repeat the same mistakes I and so many other creators have made. So we can create something to reflect our needs, and the unconscious needs of all of us. And also because when we create, the world thrives, becomes a better, more beautiful place, not the destructive kind of world a Hitler imagines. Isn’t that what most of us want, a better world?

Also, epiphany: You don’t need permission to create. You don’t need a diploma in building to build a house. Plenty of people build their own houses, the whole thing, from electricity to masonry to plumbing to the furniture inside it. I renovated most of the house we left, myself. I learned as I went along.

So don’t ask for permission. Do it. Dance, sing, write, build. Now. Don’t think about what you want the work to be. Simply do the work you need to do. Write. Paint. Play. Design. Change it. Refine it. And some day it’ll be ready to be put up on a stage, or into an album.

You have to discover your own need, your own love, your own way, away from the psychology of the many, away from what Nietzsche called the “herd-instinct in the individual”, one publicists like Edward Bernays have been manipulating us with for the last hundred years. He would have us believe we can buy happiness. But you can’t buy happiness, because it’s a byproduct of creation, and creation isn’t a product, it’s a process. You’ll be happy if you buy this car is very different from You’ll be happy if you create a car.

“Oh, I’m not a mechanic because I haven’t built any cars.”

If I’d stopped writing because I wasn’t published I wouldn’t have any books finished, but more importantly, I wouldn’t be who I am today. By being a creator, by writing, by creating, I found out a lot of things about myself. If I’m not creating then I’m missing a huge opportunity to grow.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from that wonderful Frenchman Hessel  but as I said last time, I’m going to end each episode with an Irish proverb.

This one literally means: Whoever doesn’t plant in the spring doesn’t reap in the fall.

An té nach gcuireann san earrach ní bhaineann sé san fhómhar.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get a wage for doing it, because that’s how I see this podcast as a job, one I love doing, 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 leave a review on itunes 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 be benevolent when you can!

Slán libh agus go n-éirí an bóthar libh.

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So, my New Year’s resolution was to put out the first episode of my podcast, “Create with John Fanning.” Click the play button above.

Below is a transcript of the introductory episode, with links to some of the references I make in the episode. Enjoy!

…go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

So that was Kurt Vonnegut from his book A Man Without a Country. And I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin. Howy’re yis all doing out there? So this is my first episode, of my first ever podcast, or more a short introductory episode to let you know who I am, and why I’m doing this podcast.

So, I’m an author, mostly novels, literary – which is a daft word in itself but seemingly describes what I write. And as you can probably guess from my accent I’m Irish, although that’d probably be debated back in Ireland, what with my being married to an American and after living so long in France.

Anyway, I just got to the states about three months ago, from France where we, myself and my American wife Kerry, founded and ran La Muse, for nearly 20 years. La Muse is a writers and artists retreat in the south of France. We left the south of France and came to Maine, to the Portland area, to be closer to family, but also so our kids could get a better second level education. Like most countries, the second level education from 12 on is not what you might call helpful to the growth of a kids’ creative potential, but I’ll get into school and education in a later episode.

So, primarily this podcast is – which at the beginning will go out every second Thursday of the month and then later, weekly, the more support it gets – so, as I was saying, this podcast is gonna start with “Create”, which is what I’ve tentatively called the book I’ve just finished a first draft of. And as a lot of you probably know, first drafts can be pretty shitty, so sayeth Anne Lamott anyway – by th way, she’s written a book that’s not shitty. It’s called Bird by Bird, a book on writing or on the craft of writing and one of the chapters is actually called The Shitty First Draft if I’m recalling it correctly.

So, I hope that this “Create” book will be an inspiration for this podcast but also that it will work the other way too, that this podcast will be  an inspiration for the book, a way of ironing out the kinks of what I envision as a short, sharp, shock of a book, to inspire people to be creative, to create.

So, why? Why is always the best question, isn’t it? Why did I write this book, and why am I doing this podcast? Well, quite simply to help, to be of service in some way to others. Why? Because creation is not owned by artists and writers.

Yes, not everyone is an artist, but everyone is a creator.  We need surgeons, mechanics, bankers, accountants, spiritual leaders, teachers, just as much as we need artists, but this does not mean those people are not being creative, when they practice what it is they love doing but the fact that they’re doing what they love, means they are creators. A surgeon uses his hands just as deftly as an artist does on her painting and palette.

So basically what I’m trying to say is creation’s for everyone. We all create in different ways and it’s about changing our mindset about how that is viewed. A mother creates a child, an engineer creates a bridge, a philosopher creates an idea. That’s you. That’s me. And I don’t care what a person’s background is, they are a creator. Knowing you are creative is empowering, if you embrace it.

So, to be a creator you don’t have to write a book. You don’t have to paint, you don’t have to sculpt. You don’t have to be a Michelangelo or a Rodin. But simply create, out of what you love. Life gives us this wonderful opportunity to be creative in nearly everything that we do, but the systems or system put us down, grind us into believing this unspoken tenet that creation is owned by writers and artists when it’s not.

Even the most simplistic of things – the ceremony of tea in the morning, the repair of an engine in the afternoon. These are creative acts, and they’re important to the people who create in those moments and in those spaces. It makes them feel good. And so if you change your habits you’ll see everything as a creative opportunity from creating a cup of tea, repairing an engine to repairing somebody’s heart. It’s the same creative potential, the same creative fingers as an artist. These creative acts are just as important as creating a watercolor or an aria, whether you’re singing it or writing it.

Creative acts are being enacted every day, everywhere, so we have to break away from this systemic idea that creation is owned by artists and writers. There, I’ve bludgeoned that idea to death, or hopefully got across some kind of thesis of the what of the why I’m doing this podcast, and I’m sure it’ll resurface in different ways through concepts and ideas over the course of these Thursday episodes.

So, this podcast is simply my understanding from over twenty years of interacting with other creators and learning from my own experience as well.

As well, be aware that my own experience is somewhat colored by the fact that I’m white, Irish, and have a couple of degrees. So I’m coming at this with my own prejudices, like anyone would. Hopefully I don’t fall into the trap of talking too much about white European males (laugh) which would take away from my love for people like Emily Dickinson, Sojourner Truth, or Mary Wollstonecraft, or Malala Yousafzai and many other wonderful women I’ve met in my life.

So, basically what  I’m talking about or what I’m talking about, or trying to say is that all this is always coming from my heart, irrespective of my background, but obviously I won’t be covering large swathes of civilization as I can only relay what I’ve learned from my own experience.

So this podcast will journey through my own understanding of creation. And another thing, this is not a podcast of theories although I’m always interested to hear other viewpoints and angles. But that’s not my deal.

Added to that… this idea of theoretical “creativity” is for others to write or talk about. I’m more into practical applications like notebooks and other stuff I’ll talk about later on. Also, books on left and right side brain activity, what parts of the brain lights up, is not my “domain”, as they say back in France.

Most of what is in this podcast comes from, as I said before, my own experience or books, but from the painters, inventors, musicians, healers, academics, novelists, poets, venture capitalists, business people. All of these people came to our retreat to write a business plan or a novel. We didn’t discriminate, we welcomed anyone who wanted to create, or dance, or design jewelry or take photos. And from that rich diversity of conversations, whether it was in our three hour Book Breaks about books that inspired creators, or long conversations in the truck up and down the mountain or just sitting on the terrace watching the swallows swoop while drinking a glass of wine, or sitting in the library beside the fire, these conversations kept coming back to the same language, themes, concepts, which was beautiful to realize because it showed me, or shows that there are universal ideas on process, craft, distractions, creators, black sheep, freedom, walls, perfection, Shakespeare, myths and lies, rejection and failure, difference and comfort zones, capitalism and much more and how they all apply to creation.

Each one of these things I’ll talk about in future episodes, and at the end, after also talking about stuff like talent, genius, dark nights of the soul, emotional memory, bushjumping, limits, genre, encouragement, action, balance, daydreaming, enthusiasm, madness, passion, audience, patronage and perhaps ending on benevolence, I’ll release all the episodes as a succinct and digestible version of my rants and ramblings in my book “Create”.

So not just artists and writers, but creative business people, architects, teachers, and all the creators I mentioned inspired this podcast, as their broadness of perspective helped me realize all the creative things we all have in common.

Actually, now that I think of it, a lot of writers and artists are teachers. These people who teach our children are oftentimes going on retreat to write a book or paint abstracts and thankfully they are because they return to the states or England or Australia to inspire creativity or creation in children. So when they go away on retreat it should be applauded. People should be applauded when they try to get away to create. Not just the teachers. I’ll get into that later too in an episode on retreats, maybe with some tips about retreats.

So teachers and people who go away to create, or who create, can bring that positive energy back to how they educate and inspire children to become business people or novelists or academics or surgeons, or inspire their spouses and friends to create too. I can’t say I know everything about creation but it has been cool to listen to all these divergent voices on it and to see the thing are always the same, process, blocks and all these other things.

And of course, later on, that’s why I’ll be interviewing other people for information and ideas and inspiration. I’ll start interviewing creators I met and became friends with over the years at our retreat, as well as some of the inspiring people I’ve been meeting from around here, in Portland, Maine.

So, this podcast is about what I’ve learned… and what I am still learning, from other creators, and my own experiences as an author, in understanding what walls are which I’ll get into in another episode too – the walls we create to block creation our creation and the practice, habits and creative action in itself and how to get there.

Hopefully this podcast and the future edited book will be helpful and hopefully be especially helpful for that young man about 25 years ago who thought he knew everything in his twenties when he came out of university. That young man being me. I wish I’d had someone to talk to me about process and craft and all the wonderful tools and tips of creation. So this is my way of maybe talking to that young man and of giving back, and of being of service to other people in some way who want to create but think it too daunting.

Each episode will stand alone, independent of previous or following ones, while the podcast as a whole will have an arc of purpose and an arc of content addressing “internal” and “external” issues, but not in a distancing kind of academic way.

At the same time, I feel it important to provide some generalized perspective on these systemic issues albeit cultural, social, or economic. Because the context in which ‘creativity’ happens, especially from access to aesthetics, which is not usually addressed in a straight-forward way, access to the opportunity to create, or to even think of creation as something that is for everyone.

So, each episode will have a key concept or concepts and language – language is very important as I said before, and these lexical prisons, or at least what I call lexical prisons, we get placed in – and I’ll try to put in human being examples and experiences, my own and or other peoples’, other creators, and hopefully each one of them will encourage you guys to create.

So, in the next episode – as I think that’s more than enough of an introduction – I’ll start talking about family, friends and what I call villains. Then perhaps get into schooling and perhaps even talk about what a creator actually is, although that may be the following episode depending on how long the episode is going. Not sure how long the episodes are going to be. This one is looking like it’s coming in at about 25 minutes or so. Maybe the next one will be a bit longer or about the same length. The interviews will be much longer as I won’t be asking them about just one concept, but many concepts, as I want people to able to get into what inspires them to create, the books that got them inspired, their process and the other concepts I mentioned that I’m going to be elaborating on as I go along.

So thanks for listening. I started with a quote from an American novelist but I’m going to end, yeah, I’m going to end each podcast with an Irish proverb because one just came into me head. This one literally means: the weather or Time is a good storyteller. In modern terms it would mean something like, Time will tell:  

Is maith an scéalaí an aimsir.

This podcast is supported by you the listener via my Patreon page. If ya want to support the podcast and help me get a wage for doing it, because that’s how I see this podcast as a job, one I love doing, 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 leave a review on itunes or wherever ya listen to it. 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 be benevolent when you can!

Slán leat agus go n-éirí an bóthar leat.