Ever been crossed by someone you thought could be trusted? Randomly crossed paths with an old lover while backpacking through Patagonia? Crossed a threshold, arriving at the other side with new insights? Crossed a metaphoric line that you never knew you had? Crossed over bodies of water or masses of land in unconventional manners? Decided to cross the road and see for yourself what the proverbial chicken experienced? Found your hands tracing the air in the Sign of the Cross after surviving a potential catastrophe? Cross an item off of a long wish list? So many ways to engage in crossing and we want to hear all about it. Please send us your stories, poems, lyrics, lists and dreams of up to 2,000 words by June 30, 2012.

petalsandbones@gmail.com

Issue #4 Collected Interviews from the Blog!

Our latest issue features interviews on creativity, persistence, your paleolithic brilliant birthright, and the importance of french presses, with artist and writers  like Tomas Moniz, Ariel Gore, Inga Musico, Mike Sacks, Vanessa Davis, and more. If you’ve ever needed the inspiration to embrace your own “mortal fucking genius” (in the words of our lit idol Inga) then this is the zine for you!

On sale for $5 in the zine shop.

Here’s the details from the Word Up website:

Free & Fun Word Up! Fair!

Sunday, October 30, 2011,
11 AM to 6 PM
Sonoma-Marin Fairgrounds in Petaluma, CA

5 Learning Lounges featuring new things to learn from 30 local organizations including…

Eat Grass Roots, Southern Sonoma County Resource Conservation, Bite Club Eats, Boys and Girls Club, Petals and Bones, Paleotechnics, Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, Talk is Sheep, Aqus Community, Livability Project/Share Exchange, Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition and Mentor Me Petaluma.

Presented by Literacyworks, The Word Up! Fair will be a day full of authors, entertainers, local learning resources and “how to” opportunities. It is a chance for all who participate to learn and experience something new for and about themselves, their families and the community.

And here are the specifics about our contribution.

1. Can you give some background on your life as a musician? How did you come to choose this career? What kinds of projects have you completed? Did you have a formal education in something music related?

I grew up in Ft. Bragg/Mendocino, California. I started playing basic piano when I was 5 years old. I took lessons from pre-school through first grade and then quit because I had a decent ear and wasn’t interested in reading music or following lesson books. I picked up piano again when I was 14 with an art therapy teacher who let me improvise and learn any piece I wanted. I then moved on to an improvisational jazz teacher. Around the same time my father, who is also a guitar player, introduced me to a few open chords with which I was able to learn a few covers.

During my college years at UC Santa Cruz I began playing in a few punk/rock bands. I played electric guitar and keyboard. I then picked up the acoustic guitar after a serious heartbreak and began writing my own songs at the age of 20. I started with an all girl group called The Diamond Star Halos and then went on to pursue my own solo music after our lives went in different directions. I essentially made it a goal in 2005/2006 to record my first record. I released it in 2007 and had some success here and in Europe which has continued to build. I’ve released three records. My first two were released in Europe and in the US. The third one was released in Europe last year and I’m hoping to release it in the US sometime soon.

In regard to formal musical training, I took many piano lessons and a music theory class in college but I never pursued any kind of formal training on a serious level.

2. How do you stay motivated to be creative? Where do your ideas come from?

I’ve been touring so much these past three years that I’ve currently taken a break from writing with the intention of making a record. I needed to take the pressure off myself for awhile. However, I sing and write all the time. I often sit with my guitar and record whatever comes out, or sit at the piano and improvise. I have about 50 sketches of songs on my computer right now. Music is a life practice for me. I write because I have to. It’s a form of catharsis. I never intended for music to be my main career but am grateful it has become this way for now. Because I essentially manage my whole musical project, I sometimes get caught up in the mundane maintenance of that and it distracts me from my creative process. I’ve recently been designing and enforcing a structure for myself to write at least one thing a day, whether it be a poem or a song.

My ideas come from strong autobiographical sentiments within, or reactions and empathic responses to things I have heard about or witnessed. My songwriting is a way for me to channel political criticism, negative sentiment, anger, and primarily sadness and melancholy, into something transformative and hopeful. My most recent record is autobiographical but my first two records have a few songs written in response to the legacy of other artists by whom I’ve been strongly influenced, literature, or political issues.

3. What advice do you have to someone who wants to be more creative or bring more creativity into their work?

Well, I’m no expert on the creative process. But, one thing that has been helpful and was recommended to me by a dear artist friend of mine is to pick up a copy of “Letters to a Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke and really ask yourself the question of what do you want to create and why? What is it that you want and have to say? By what are you informed? Who do you want to inform? There are a lot of inexplicable elements to the creative process making it hard to talk about. Some of these elements are deeply personal and hard to translate to others.

Another way is to simply free write. I was taught how to free write in middle school and it has been of great use to me. I simply write whatever I’m feeling or thinking for 20 minutes without stopping or censoring myself. It helps to remove creative blocks.

4. How important is discipline to your creative output? How important is idle time/relaxation?

These are great questions!  Creating art takes work and discipline. There is no doubt about that. It depends on what you’re doing with your idle time and relaxation. A lot of my work was initially written in solitude. I have played with extraordinarily talented musicians, so during rehearsal the songs took on a new life once I played them for my band mates and allowed for collaborative accompaniment. I have to stay firmly disciplined in protecting my solitude and alone time if I want to stay in touch with my creative process.

Since I’ve been on break, I’ve allowed myself time for distraction, leading me to take a good look my artistic life and the structure it needs.

5. What does a typical day look like for you?

I spent so much time these past 3 years recording records and touring that my day to day when I return home is not very routine. I spend a lot of time walking and exercising. While I do this I often listen to a lot of interviews with artists that I really admire. I have suffered a few repetitive motion injuries over the years so I do a lot of physical exercise to deal with those. I read articles and listen to NPR and music I’ve never heard before. I also spend a lot of time dealing with e-mail, contracts, those kinds of things. Having spent so much time away, I do make friends and family a priority.

A sample of Emily’s talent: Emily Jane White live: A Shot Rang Out

1. Can you give some background on your life as a writer? How did you come to choose this career?

Although I write for a living – freelancing without a job – I don’t think I can say writing is a career. Journalists aren’t professional writers; they/we are assemblers and disseminators of information, story-shapers, certainly, truth-seekers, perhaps, full-time fighters for justice, sometimes; in any case, writing is just part of the job. We don’t think of a storeowner’s career as being in the shop, though often that is the most primary part of his or her job – that’s what I mean.

As for professional fiction writers, to give another example, who support themselves entirely on the income of their books, I dare say that a hefty percentage of these people are essentially customizable stampers – they create a basic template or formula and reproduce it with varying details. I think this kind of career is called commerce. I like to think of the process of writing (put as simply as possible) as the development of self. Career fiction writing – commerce – is not mine.

In that regard, I never chose to be a writer. I decided to write because it seemed to me that writing was the most difficult pursuit in that it forces one to constantly develop the self and therefore to remain honest. I chose to continue to grow and perceived writing to be the best tool to that end. Also, I chose to write because it seemed (and still seems) to me that the verbal expression of human experience is the most valuable activity in which one can engage. We are able to find ourselves through the process and to document our evolution as a species (and, one would like to argue, from one species to another); such records allow us to learn from the past and from others so that we can proceed and, hopefully, do so together. This can be applied to individual development too, of course.

It’s not what we do, but how, that’s important. For better or worse, language is the backbone of human nature. I want to support the growing animal.

What kinds of projects have you completed? Did you have a degree in creative writing or journalism?

I created – with the help of many people – San Francisco’s first monthly submission-based reading series, Quiet Lightning, which is now a 501c3 nonprofit organization. Quiet Lightning, as far as I can tell, is responsible for several revolutions: 1) The submission process is blind because it is the quality of work that is most important. 2) We do not introduce the accepted authors and do not allow them to introduce themselves (or to banter in any way) because each pattern of language is a self-contained spell; when they interpenetrate one another in rapid succession, the audience is forced to continually reinterpret the context of each spell. This is dizzying in all the best ways. (Is it the name that grounds us, stamped from the start as something specific?) 3) We publish each show and have the books for sale at the shows. Another way to look at this is that we accept submissions to a monthly book or magazine — comprised exclusively of creative writing (poetry, fiction, non-fiction, etc.) — and perform each issue only once, as though the reading series were really a monthly book release. I think we’re the first people to do this.

I also created Litseen, which serves the Bay Area literary community by documenting readings of all kinds and discussing them, publishing book reviews and author interviews, and providing an extensive video archive of performances. There are now two other staff members and a handful of additional contributors to Litseen and, to date, we have filmed over 2500 author readings… in the past 18 months.

Also, I am the official blogger for Litquake, the largest literary festival this side of the Mississip’. I mention this because, as you can see if you look at my coverage the first year [through page 16] and last, it definitely qualifies as a major ‘project!’

I do not have any degrees. I dropped out of school twice. I am proud of this, and like to think of “my piece of paper” as my lack of a need for one. Degrees, in so many ways, are just crutches, and you don’t need those to get a library card.

2. How do you stay motivated to be creative? Where do your ideas come from?

The desire to be creative is the procreant urge! When I said it’s not what you do but how that’s important I meant that our character is defined by the details of our lives: do we cut corners or do we express ourselves to the degree that others can plainly see we express the wholly inexpressible, that, though we have added every flourish imaginable, we in fact have done so by an exudation of limitless energy, and are, in effect, shaping ourselves through the process. If we don’t express this every time we express something, we lose access to the bottomless well – to the self. (This is called aging.) If we can’t find anything else to do, we should dance until we are needed.

Ideas come from activity. If you keep doing, and you keep an open mind, you will wish that you had fewer ideas and more time.

3. What advice do you have to someone who wants to be more creative or bring more creativity into their work?

Surround yourself with inspiration. What makes you think: HOLY FUCK? Plaster that shit on your walls! Don’t take it for granted. Why would you take something that makes you think HOLY FUCK for granted?

Also: treat yourself like a little punk. Talk trash to yourself. But don’t just take it! Show yourself who’s boss. Do things despite yourself. If you’re getting tired and want to sleep, for instance, perhaps you should try another voice. Is that obtuse? To become tired, I mean, is to acquiesce to one perspective. Role-play yourself. Stop thinking about what you’re doing. Remember (I cannot stress this enough): it’s how you do things that’s important, not what things you do. Let justice be the thing you do.

4. How important is discipline to your creative output? How important is idle time/relaxation?

Discipline is crucial. But so is flexibility. You must not rest until your work is finished (and perhaps not then, either). But how and when you work is another thing. Trust your instincts. You’ll talk to yourself (you’re doing it now, though probably I’m providing the bulk of the words)… make sure you listen.

Idle time is preposterous. In the words of Henry Miller, stand still like the hummingbird. Relaxation – a deep breath of fresh air – is possible through work (believe it or not). Have you tried painting?

A common misconception is that art is something that requires strangulation. If it isn’t fun, don’t do it. Have to do it? Make it fun.

5. What does a typical day look like for you?

These are parts of my everyday: I brush my teeth, eat, sleep, and send out and receive a lot of emails. The rest just depends. And once a week I don’t touch my computer.

Inga Muscio‘s words found permanent residency in the hearts and minds of feminists everywhere with her debut book, Cunt. Cunt did more for the feminist movement than shout out a call to reclaim the word itself. Muscio offered an invitation for women to engage in radical self-love and self-knowing. Through her fearless and unapologetic ability to speak candidly, humorously and thoughtfully about the issues women face, Muscio lays it all out on the table. From there, she proceeded to write Autobiography of A Blue-Eyed Devil: My Life and Times in A Racist, Imperialist Society. Her latest book, Rose: Love in Violent Times, both breaks and mends the readers heart by addressing every day acts of violence while offering insights on how to love despite it all. Inga Muscio is fierce and sincere, accessible and passionate and a must read for anyone seeking cunt-loving words of wisdom. She lives, loves and inspires in the Pacific Northwest. -D.B.

1.Can you give some background on your life as a writer? How did you come to choose this career? What kinds of projects have you completed? Did you have a degree in creative writing or journalism?

I started writing stories and poems when I was a kid and just pretty much went with it from there. During the angsty punk rock teenage years it came in damn handy and so by the time I was in my 20s, it was a lifelong habit. I went to Evergreen, in Olympia, WA to get a degree in creative writing. During my first year there, my younger brother was in a horrible car accident, and we lost him. Writing moved me through the worst of the grief. I got my BA, moved back to Seattle and started working for a weekly newspaper here. The articles I wrote eventually coalesced into being Cunt: A Declaration of Independence. Then I wrote Autobiography of A Blue-Eyed Devil: My Life and Times in A Racist, Imperialist Society and my latest book is called Rose: Love in Violent Times.

2. How do you stay motivated to be creative? Where do your ideas come from?

I think the act of being alive is pure creativity. People who don’t consider themselves creative don’t give themselves any credit for the endless fount of creativity they call upon from the moment they wake up, until the moment they fall asleep.

When you’re a kid, so many things are new. It’s perfectly normal to spend entire days lost in totally creative endeavors—sand fortresses, elaborate barbie mansions, mud wars which evolve into vendettas that can last for years.

We still do all of these things when we grow up, but we do them in other, more “responsible” ways—making money, raising children, getting an education. That same creativity becomes a hustle of some kind or another, and hustles are always creative. Ask any grifter, poker player or pool hall ace.

Instead of being a teacher, lawyer, forest ranger, soldier, nurse, or truck driver, I am a writer. The end result of my work is something people can hold in their hands and experience in an intimate way. And moreover, they can experience my work on their terms. They have full control. The end result of most other people’s work is not as tangible or controllable. That’s the only distinction between creatives and non-creatives.

So, short story long, every day that I’m motivated to be alive, I am motivated to be creative. This isn’t to say that I’m always motivated to be alive, however.

My ideas come from a lifelong narrative that has swirled in my mind ever since I was put on this planet. Questions I had as a child that have still never been adequately answered, such as:

Where is heaven and hell? Why do people keep talking about god and the devil? Why do white people think they’re better than everyone else? What were the Missions of California (where we went on 4^th grade field trips) for, exactly? What is slavery again? People really did that? They still do it? What the fuck is going on here? I am a girl? I will be a woman? Will I have to be treated like I am a dumbass unworthy of respect? I will? Fuck! How does one deal with that? What is rape? Why do people rape other people? Children get raped? Are you serious? Okay, how do animals die for our meat again? Animals don’t have feelings? Really? You really think that? Oh, wait, a lot of people think that? Do they also think the earth and everything that lives on it doesn’t have feelings? Shit, they do? How does one deal with that?

As you can imagine, I never run out of ideas. My culture on this planet is bountiful in this way.

3. What advice do you have to someone who wants to be more creative or bring more creativity into their work?

Step away from the negative voice inside your head and give yourself huge credit for every creative endeavor you embark upon each day. Build on that. Every time you catch yourself putting you down, STOP, kiss your hand and scream “I am a mortal fucking genius!” Every time you catch yourself comparing you to others, or being jealous of other people, STOP, kiss whoever you are comparing yourself to and scream, “You are a mortal fucking genius!” You don’t have to do any of this out loud, or in real life (although it’s great if you do), but in your head, at least. You can train yourself to shut that negative voice up. Things come a lot easier once you do that.

Also, if you want to actually make something that others can experience intimately, you have to be willing to face your shit. All your nightmares and things you have hidden will come out. If you are afraid of these things, you will not be able to create whatever it is you want to create.

4. How important is discipline to your creative output? How important is idle time/relaxation?

I think this question has been nixed by my answers in 2 and 3. I think it’s all of a piece. Discipline is not nearly as important as being conscious, which I suppose is considered a discipline. If you have something inside of you, it will come out in it’s own time. You can’t force shit. You can train yourself and hone your craft til you’re technically the greatest at what you do, but you hafta be gentle with yourself to make art. Spending the day at the river with my friends is a vital part of many chapters in my last book. There is no separation in my mind. Idle time is work time, every bit as much as sitting at my computer making new pages appear.

5. What does a typical day look like for you?

I get up in the morning and go for a run. I usually run to the house I used to live in and hang out with the goats for a while. Then I run home. Make tea or coffee, write, email, interviews, breakfast. Then I go work at the refugee office for a few hours. When I get home, I see about dinner and the garden, spend time with loved ones, watch a movie maybe. Go to bed. I love the sameness of my days when I am not traveling.



1. Can you give some background on your life as a writer? How did you come to choose this career? What kinds of projects have you completed? Did you get a degree creative writing?

I wrote my first book when I was nine. It was bound in red felt, the title HYSTERICAL POEMS spelled out in yellow yarn glued to the cover. I still have it. At age thirteen I discovered a box of dirty magazines in the woods, and not long after I wrote “Summer of the Albino,” an illustrated piece of erotica that I hid under my mattress. Set during Prohibition, it was the story of a love affair between a flapper and a dwarf albino bootlegger. In my twenties I wrote poems and gave them to boys I liked, or read them aloud at poetry readings held in cafes and bars in San Francisco, where in order to be a poet you had to be a junkie or a stripper or homeless and for sure had to have a banged-up heart. I started writing for money in my late twenties– personal essays, travel pieces, newspaper articles. Back then you could make some decent money doing this. Not so easy these days.

I was always restless, always on the search for that dopamine rush of the new, whether in the form of lovers, jobs, foreign countries and various reckless pursuits. I’d throw myself in and sink to the gills, but inevitably I’d lose interest and swim away. It took me many years to understand that a large part of my unsettledness was due to my brain chemistry.

Through my thirties I continued to write, but had yet to fully realize that my writing could be a way to focus my restless energy without laying waste in the process. After completing BA degrees in english and anthropology, in my late thirties I decided to write in earnest. I earned an MFA in creative writing and soon was teaching writing classes at New College in San Francisco and Santa Rosa. I had a literary  agent and was close to completing a short story collection, lived with my children on a mountaintop in Sonoma County. I wrote every day. Writing had become my temple, my lover, my foreign country. For a couple of years things were swimming along. Then I fell ill with what was later diagnosed as a mitochondrial disorder. I would be teaching a class when all of a sudden I had to run out into the hall, my heart beating wildly and my limbs shaking. Soon I became so sick I couldn’t read, write, drive, even wash a dish. For a year I spent most of my waking hours doing absolutely nothing. It was an enforced spiritual retreat, a kind of prison sentence.  Eventually I began to recover somewhat. I felt like Persephone returning from the underworld, cloaked in the black veil of darkness.  In the past my writing had always been threaded with a subtle melancholy, but when I returned to writing that thread had a heft to it, and smelled like death. Death’s lurking odor is not a bad thing, really. In contrast, life takes on a sweeter fragrance.

Living with an illness sometimes feels like wearing a chastity belt. I can’t be too reckless or I’ll pay. Writing saves me. I can indulge my current obsessions, spending weeks hanging out in a strip club, at a demolition derby, a Buddhist monastery, a psych ward, the history stacks at UC Berkeley– and use my writing to, as Victor Jones says, “trap Heaven and Earth in the cage of form.” Writing encourages the overlap of self and other, that mysterious third entity. Writing is the one dominion over which I have ultimate power, and yet to access that power I have to submit myself. The story knows what it wants. I am just its vehicle.

2. How do you stay motivated to be creative? Where do your ideas come from?

Ideas wash over me all day. They might be related to whatever writing project I’m working on, or they might be other story ideas, or ideas related to something I want to make, sew, cook, see, know. I write them down in a red notebook or on scraps of paper that are scattered around the house, and now and then I gather them up and organize them. For some of us, creativity can be both a gift and a curse. Benign quotidian rituals are important just to anchor ourselves, to temper the fire, to allow the explosive rush of ideas to develop form and depth.

3. What advice do you have to someone who wants to be more creative or bring more creativity into their work?

Go to where you feel lit up, cracked open, unhinged. Find the poetic thread and follow it: you may end up with a story. Keep an ongoing list of the things you love, that turn you on (and not just sexually). Develop your own manifesto, your ars poetica. This will feed you when you are depleted.

As far as staying the course with a writing practice, beyond the usual advice to write every day and read constantly (both essential, in my opinion), I’d suggest  training your brain to crave writing.  A large part of creativity has to do with brain chemistry, and there are ways to to seduce the muse, to cultivate what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow,” that state of total absorption when your sense of time disappears and you feel as though you are a conduit for a divine fire. This is the alpha brain wave state. One way to access this is with the repetition of cues. It sounds esoteric, but it’s really quite scientific. Find things that have meaning for you and repeat them every time you write, and eventually your mind will associate them with that rush you feel when your writing is hot. It could be as simple as placing a copy of your favorite novel next to the computer, or writing in the same place or at the same time every day, or wearing a certain article of clothing, or listening to a particular album (perhaps give each of your stories its own soundtrack) or drinking from certain coffee cup.

If you’ve been working on something for a long time and are having trouble seeing it with fresh eyes, you might try reformatting it in giant geriatric 30-point type or in the New Yorker-style three column format, and print it out on the back of old manuscript pages. Or read your work aloud to yourself or have someone read it to you. If you always type, write longhand. You’d be surprised what you’ll notice when you change things up.

Writing can be hard, lonely work, and it helps to have other writers to commune with. Join or start a writer’s group, or go to writer’s conferences if that rings your bell. Above all, trust yourself. What’s around the corner for you is a mystery, a vast realm of possibility, but if you are committed, your work will find its place in the world.

4. How important is discipline to your creative output? How important is idle time/relaxation?

Discipline is vital to me. Bondage is good. I don’t do well with blank pages, too many choices or easy exits. Idle time? Due to my illness, my activity level is much lower than it used to be, but inactivity feels alien. My mind needs something to focus on or it won’t shut up. Relaxation for me is doing something stimulating and engaging but that doesn’t require anything of me. Like watching a baseball game, or looking at art in a museum, or listening to music or a friend tell a story over a beer on the back porch or in a parked car. I love stories, about anything: the outrages and tragedies and twists of fate, the enigmas of love and hatred, the inherent suffering and exquisite luck in being human. I can never just sit there and gaze at the sunset, my mind emptied of thought.

5. What does a typical day look like for you?

Lately I’ve been taking a break from a half-completed novel and am working on a memoir. I started it after interest from an editor based on a blog I’ve been keeping sporadically (www.javasugar.wordpress.com) about the years I spent living in West Java, Indonesia. Originally I hadn’t planned a book-length work, but the idea took hold and for now it’s keeping me busy. Writing a novel is flippin’ hard for a brain like mine. There’s too much room, and I gallop all over the place. The memoir genre is easier, barbed as it is by the boundary of truth. Short stories are also easier for me, so tight and contained, each with its own set of rules, its own aesthetic language. I could write short stories for the rest of my life and be happy. Would anybody read them? Hmm.
I write in the afternoon or early evening, when my mind is the most obedient. But during other times I think about my writing, like when I am taking a walk, sitting in my car, or just before falling asleep. In this way I feed the dream, keeping it alive until the next time I sit down to write. Thinking about my work uses up a lot of potentially troublesome energy. This is not to say that my old reckless ways have died. I’m just keeping an eye on them.

1. Can you give some background on your life as a photographer? How did you come to choose this career? What kinds of projects have you completed? Did you get a degree from an art school or an MFA?

I went to Bennington College, in Vermont, for most of my college education… but because it is a fancy private school, and I was paying for almost everything myself (with a bit of parental help and a lot of scholarships and grants), I had to do several semesters here in California, at the Santa Rosa Junior College. Basically, back then if you had decent grades, the school paid you to attend, and it’s one of the best Junior/ Community Colleges in the country.

So during one of these “scholastic leave of absences” (which was how I sold it to Bennington, who ultimately did let me graduate on time – suckers!!) my sophomore year, I was living on my friends, Josh and Sara’s couch for $100 a month, going to SRJC, and trying to figure out what I was doing. I took a photography class on a whim, borrowed Sara’s camera, used her home darkroom, and got hooked.

I loved shooting low light portraits of my friends and trying to keep things from being unusably blurry hand holding the camera with long shutter speeds at concerts and raves (yes, it was the 90s). I used many rolls of film trying to take a decent self portrait (to boost my perpetually low self esteem) and became fascinated with the subtleties of mood, expression, contrast, light, shadow, etc., in the photographs. I soon took a color class as well (back then, digital cameras weren’t really around, so we were still doing everything by hand, in camera and the darkroom, and color printing meant printing and developing in the pitch black) and loved that even more. I went on to work at a few photo labs, graduated from Bennington in June 2000 with focuses in directing and photography, and tried to figure out what I wanted to do next.

I had always thought I would do something in the performing or fine arts, coming from a bunch of wacky artists in my mom’s family, but didn’t want the same struggles to make a living and just to put myself out into the “art” world again and again. It sounded like a romantically bohemian, yet crummy, existence, and one that would always involve a “day job”.

Luckily, after graduating college and working at photo labs and a photo supply store, as well as even less art-related jobs, I got a job as the office/ studio manager for a big advertising photographer. Although working for her presented its own set of nightmares, I was exposed to the commercial creative world – and learned a bit about advertising and editorial photography. I realized that gallery art wasn’t for me – I wanted something that was more collaborative and rewarding, and tangible. I liked the idea of being hired for a certain project, working with a team or subject to follow through, and then seeing the end result reflected in publications.

The commercial art world, however, is also super intimidating and cutthroat… so while I do occasionally shoot for magazines, companies, and my photo stock agency, I now mostly do weddings and portraits, which I sort of fell into by shooting some images I liked at friends’ weddings, then charging a bit for couples who wanted a non-traditional perspective for their wedding photography.

I love working with a team of professionals and clients, shooting happy people and gorgeous details, and being appreciated for my unique eye and sensibility. Sometimes I still feel panic at the thought of being a “wedding photographer” for the rest of my life, so I try to take on other projects to keep myself on my toes. Recent ones include a Gluten Free cookbook; a few profiles for Wine Spectator magazine; and about a trillion photos of my baby girl throughout her first year.

2. How do you stay motivated to be creative? Where do your ideas come from?

Unfortunately most of my motivation is still coming from FEAR – fear of starving, fear of letting my clients down, fear of failure, fear of people not liking me. I try to ignore these and get past them, but it’s really tough. I do feel motivated to get creative with ideas when I have more downtime, but, again, the fear gets in the way and I start worrying about not having enough jobs booked… then when I have lots booked, I get scared about doing all of the work. Ha!

Luckily, once I have something in my calendar, deposits are paid and I am obligated, and I’ve been shooting long enough now (started full time in 2004) that I know I will get into my groove once I’m there.

When I have time for creative ideas, they mostly come from people who inspire me (example: shooting artist Meredith Hamilton as she made her encaustic pieces earlier this year), delicious food, beautiful locations, things growing in my yard, and so on.

3. What advice do you have to offer someone who wants to be more creative or bring more creativity into their work?

I don’t know, because I still am trying to figure out how I can follow through on all of the self-assigned projects I want to do. I guess I would recommend trying to bring creativity into every day assignments. For example, during my busy wedding season, I rarely have time to do self-assigned shoots, so I try to bring unique ideas, poses, perspectives, and techniques into my wedding shoots. I’m lucky in that my clients are great about letting me try things, and not sticking to a scripted approach. But, again, my work is so collaborative, that I am always kind of watching my subjects and going with the flow. I guess it’s a tricky balance of pushing but not too hard… give and take.

I’d love to get organized with an idea journal (I have one but it has been neglected lately), self produced scheduled shoots, an image a day, or something similarly assigned. But I really do seem to need another person to be accountable to – when it’s just me, the ideas seem too big and too intangible. I like shooting people partly because it gives me focus!

4. How important is discipline to your creative output? How important is idle time/relaxation?

As for idle time/ relaxation, it’s very important. I need a lot of down time to process and think and chill. I need a lot of sleep (which I don’t get, thanks a lot, baby!) and just quiet time. It’s frustrating at times, because I wish that I was more energetic and outgoing, but I am those things when I’m working – and it’s just who I am to require a lot of recharge time. I think it’s partly because I am pretty sensitive to other peoples’ energy, which helps for making nice portraits of them, but it also means I need time to myself, and alone with my family. I love to read, watch silly TV shows, and hang out in the garden hammock with the baby.

5. What does a typical day look like for you?

These days are very different from even a year ago! The baby has been waking up earlier and earlier which I am NOT INTO, particularly as she is not sleeping anywhere near through the night yet. But I do get now that her babyhood is almost over (she’s 13 months) and so I’m hanging in there and just trying to enjoy this super intensive needy time (she is a nursing fiend!).

So, typically she wakes me up for the day around 7, sometimes later and sometimes MUCH earlier. We have breakfast and I check my email and try to stay awake while she plays. Then she naps around 9, and I’ll either nap too (depending on how the night before has gone) or answer emails and have some tea. Then we run errands, go to the park, play in the living room, have lunch, and nap number 2 is at 2pm. This is when I do most of my work on the days I don’t have childcare. I do a lot of emailing, phone calls, photo editing, submission to wedding style blogs, album design, etc. The baby wakes up by 4, and we have mellow time inside or in the yard until her dad gets home around 5. Then I often have client calls or meetings, or sometimes shoots. On the weekends in the busy season, I have weddings, which are pretty intense and require my full attention and lots of gear and muscles.

I do portrait shoots in the evenings or weekends, and editing during the days when I have childcare.

I know that eventually I’ll be sending the baby to preschool or daycare or kindergarten, so I’m trying to just make do (and I’m very lucky that she has a special bond with her grandmother) for now… I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a bit freaked out about shooting a record number of weddings this year, but every time I get nervous, I remember how much wonderful support I have, what cool clients I get to work with, and that my job is so flexible most of the time that I can spend all of my days and nights with the baby, and I’m happy!

-Leilani

Can you give some background on your writing life? How did you come to be a writer? What kinds of projects have you completed? Did you get a degree in writing or English?

I started writing when I was quite small, but I didn’t settle down to it for a long time. In high school I spent most nights reading and writing stories, but as an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz in the late 70’s, I changed my major quite often. I began in poetry, then – dismayed by my first experiences with workshops – switched to Aesthetic Studies, then to Women’s Studies, finally ending up in studio art and art history: my B.A. is in painting. Very large, bright flattened-picture-plane oil on canvas: peacocks dancing in front of a full moon, undersea creatures in caves, an aardvark wandering through a saturated red-orange world of sharp black branches and bubbles full of somersaulting birds or poison arrow frogs. The paintings, like my writing now, live somewhere in between the realistic and the fabulous, have unnerving protagonists, and function as collages of unlikely mixes of subject matter.

I didn’t know that about them then: though I had looked and looked at art, I couldn’t have articulated what I did or why. My classmates were largely working in abstract expressionist styles or intimate, grayed Barbizon-style landscapes. A professor of mine (trying to at once protect me and distance himself) said, “Sarah is a naive painter. We have nothing to teach her.” This surprised me then – it seemed to me that he’d taught me a lot.

After a while I caught myself creating elaborate stories about the animals and places in the paintings. So I started a novel. That first attempt was set in the 16^th century, with an alchemist who couldn’t walk and was trying to discover the philosopher’s stone to cure himself, his grandfather’s ghost who lived in the attic, an orphan girl, a trip by sea to Italy. I didn’t understand the ways in which research could help me, and I knew nothing about either character or plot: eventually, I abandoned the book.

This week I’m teaching Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, a Biomythography. She writes: To whom do I owe the power behind my voice, what strength I have become, yeasting up like sudden blood from under the bruised skin’s blister? To whom do I owe the symbols of my survival? I’m thinking about those questions in writing about what came next.

My then-husband, a photographer, became a Foreign Service officer; living that life, I became even more interested in the ways people use their power over each other. I moved from Washington D.C. to Seoul to central Africa, involved in a complicated fretwork of relationships with different men and women, writing two more novels, all without having any clear sense of direction. Divorced and unable to make my novels work, I thought about going back to school. I was afraid of MFA programs (afraid we’d all write up writing in the same bland style, afraid that the kinds of learning we’d do wouldn’t apply to me), but Andrea Barrett, who’d been my workshop leader at the Mt. Holyoke Writers’ Conference and had been reading my work since, encouraged me to give it a try.

The MFA program at the University of Michigan really saved me. When I arrived, I didn’t even know the shape and size of what I needed to learn. Fortunately, we had wonderful teachers — Jonis Agee, Charles Baxter, Nicholas Delbanco, Lorrie Moore, Eileen Pollack. My smart and serious cohort gave me helpful, if sometimes painful, readings of the inventive but wildly inept work I was doing, though it was still some time before I became fully able to put what I’d learnt into practice. A few years later, I was able to finish my fourth novel, The True Sources of the Nile, and then – with my spouse Ron Nyren, who I’d met at Michigan – wrote Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. (More about these at http://www.redroom.com/author/sarah-stone)

How do you stay motivated to be creative? Where do your ideas come from?

Children from chaotic families (that would be most families) have a large hunger for discovering shape and meaning, for trying to name and understand reality. There’s a mix of pleasure and outrage in my need to delineate what people do. It doesn’t make sense to me that we’re so cruel, but, at the same time I also can’t believe how beautiful it all is, and I still don’t understand quite how these things go together. Like almost everyone, I love to make up stories. So I’d say that it’s not motivation artists need, but permission. I used to think it would come from the right kind of praise or publication, but for me it required understanding that every word we write exposes us, and that I could live with knowing this. I had to face my own flaws in order to stop writing stories in which the protagonist is terribly put upon by fate and all other people. It’s hard to write stories, real or imagined, in which we are not the heroes. Or the victims.

Most artists combine some form of social bewilderment with a frequently unpleasant hyper-empathy or agonized sense of what the world could be like if it were just. It’s like living without skin: we keep trying to arrange life to be less agonizing. We often aren’t that great at living. Tolstoy rushed away from his dying brother’s bedside, apparently because he couldn’t stand it, and then wrote – magnificently – the story of a man who helps his brother through every misery and eases his final passage to the other world.

What advice do you have to someone who wants to be more creative or bring more creativity into their work?

Creativity/talent isn’t something anyone is born with; it’s something we learn over time. I teach in two very different, splendid MFA programs – The MFA in Writing and Consciousness at California Institute of Integral Studies and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers — and I believe in the sometimes searing beauty of the MFA process. In a good program, people discover their own lineages, what they need to write and why, the parameters of what they need to know. We find friends to keep going. It’s a great thing we have this democratic way of learning about our art and craft while finding our mentors and friends. Not everyone is ready for the commitment of an MFA program. But I believe in artists (at least most artists) finding some way to be part of a community, to get some instruction, to share ideas and exercises and processes and discoveries. You can learn about writing from reading and living. But without a community, and maybe some guidance from people who’ve been writing for a while, most writers don’t know what they know and don’t know and may have trouble developing the habits of creativity.

How important is discipline to your creative output? How important is idle time/relaxation?

As a product of our hyper-productive society, I’ve had to retrain myself to allow my mind to wander. Even though I’m naturally lazy or dreamy, I’ve had to develop a happy relationship with waste and failure, to be willing to spend ten years on a project that might be wonderful or might mean nothing to anyone but me and a few friends. When my life is going well, though, I do write every day. I don’t love the word discipline – I prefer the idea of learning to trust ourselves. When we get all the neurotic perfectionism and fear out of the way, then making up stories comes as naturally as eating when we’re hungry. I had a period of writer’s block where I noticed that when I sat down with a beloved niece on my lap –when I wasn’t thinking about any external factors, or trying to carry out a political agenda or to make my writing good – the stories just poured out, one after another. (Even though, like most of my nephews and nieces, she’s quite a tough audience and will immediately tell me if something is boring. I know it works when she says, right away, “Tell me another.”)

What does a typical day look like for you?

There are two kinds of typical days. More days than not, I do Dayan Qigong (great for the wrists and neck!), meditate, eat, go for a walk to get some lux into my often malfunctioning writer’s brain, then go straight to writing, before my brain fills up with other people’s work or needs. (I would like to not feel guilty about doing my own reading and writing; I’m working on that.) There’s another kind of day, though, in which, even though I haven’t done my writing, I plug my DSL cable in and begin running around email and the internet, lapping up the news, including my friends’ postings. Today was a day like that – I was avoiding the start of a new version of the last piece of my current novel. Eventually, though, I cut it out and got down to work.

The hard part of learning to write nearly every day was learning that my feelings about what I can or can’t do are meaningless. I sit at the computer and sometimes feel a nauseated refusal to look at my writing: an actual physical semi-blindness sets in, and I can’t see the screen or the page. But if I don’t leap up and go eat or tidy or get onto email, if I just sit there, the first few agonizing moments of refusal pass, and I can negotiate with the refusing self. “Let’s just edit a little. Let’s just look at this one passage I don’t hate and mess with the sentences.” Almost always, within a few minutes I’m back inside the world of the writing. And then, weirdly, it’s the greatest pleasure there is. The neurotic, considering, reluctant self disappears, and the writing mechanism takes over – a fierce animal brain that lives through the characters and language.

When even this process doesn’t work, because there’s some problem in the writing itself, I work in a writing journal. I try out different versions of events, speculate on what the characters want, feel through the connections.  Sometimes I write about what I don’t want to write and maybe why. Often I wind up writing without having realized that I was entering my book through this side door. Brian Kiteley wrote “not for the novel” on the draft pages of Still Life with Insects. Some days writing starts out as a voluptuous, easy pleasure, full of discoveries and delight. Other days, you have to trick yourself into it.

Let’s Write! Calling all beginning and experienced writers, dabblers, vagabonds of the mind, and everyone in between!

Saturday, June 18

10:30am-1:30pm

In Central Santa Rosa–exact location will be announced soon.

During this Saturday morning creative writing prompt session, we will leap together into the tremendous adventure of writing. Get ready for fun and thoughtful in-class writing exercises to spark your imagination and get you jumping for your pen. For those who have attended before, we have a whole new set of exciting exercises to explore! You will have the opportunity to your writing with the class without judgment or critique.  No doubt, you will leave with plenty of new ideas and inspiration to last a long while. Tea, coffee,  cupcakes and treats will be provided.

$25.00

This workshop is limited to 12  people so sign up via PayPal below, or email us at petalsandbones.com to get on the class list!

Half-Day Workshop