Kimberly O'Connor

Hello! I wanted to acknowledge that my “weekly” emails about The Artist’s Way have become bi-weekly (at best). Life! I hope their slowness is an example of how we can give attention to the things we want to create even if it’s not quite up to par with our original intention? (Wink–and thanks for your patience, readers.)

Anyway, here we are at week 9, “Recovering a Sense of Compassion.” What I want to focus on this week is fear.

Last week, I began teaching a beginning poetry class with Denver Public Library. During the first session, I asked the students what they most wanted to learn or explore during the class. I thought I might hear things like “sonnets” or “rhyme scheme.” Some students did mention specific elements of poetry they wanted to learn about, but a very common theme that students wanted to dive into was the fear of writing poetry.

During the second session yesterday, I invited the class to freewrite about what was so scary about writing poetry. Here are some of the things we identified:

• Fear of not being good at writing poetry
• Fear of being misunderstood
• Fear of the subject matter that we want to write about
• Fear of being judged
• Fear of accessing the feelings we want to explore
• Fear that people won’t like what we create
• Fear that you, the writer, won’t like what you wrote

Creating can be terrifying. I think poetry is a bit unique because we’re often taught in school that poets are tricky creatures and only the smartest readers can “figure out” a poem, but these fears apply to all art.

As we chatted about these fears, I felt a little overwhelmed, and kind of wished I hadn’t brought it up at all. As “the teacher,” I felt like I should be able to wave my magic wand and explain why we shouldn’t fear any of these things. I could not. Instead, saved by a moment of divine teaching inspiration that told me my only move was to buy time, I invited students to sit with their creative fears all week and see what they noticed.

The truth is, these things are scary. And the truth is, as artists, we’re going to encounter all of the things on the list and more. Writing is going to involve engaging with uncomfortable emotions. Some people are not going to understand or like what we write. Sometimes, we aren’t going to like what we write.

Here’s what Julia Cameron says about fear in chapter 9:

Fear is what blocks an artist. The fear of not being good enough. The fear of not finishing. The fear of failure and of success. The fear of beginning at all. There is only one cure for fear. That fear is love.

Use love for your artist to cure its fear.

Stop yelling at it. Be nice. Call fear by its right name.

In this chapter, Cameron compares the artist-self to a “scared child” and a “skittish horse.” We don’t deal with a scared child or skittish horse by yelling at it (at least not effectively). We have to be gentle, kind, and patient. Cameron invites us to use be compassionate with our artist-selves. She says,

Our artist child can be best compelled to work by treating work as play. Paint is great gooey stuff. Sixty sharpened pencils are fun… In order to work well, many artists find that their work spaces are best dealt with as play spaces…

Remember that art is a process. That process is supposed to be fun.

Some of my darkest times as a writer, and also as a human, are when I’ve forgotten that writing is supposed to be fun. Periodically, I get weighed down with the outcome of my writing. Who is ever going to read this? I ask myself. Or after 6 months of only rejections from literary magazines, What’s the point of writing if no one is ever going to publish this?

The point is, I need to write because writing feeds my life force. Not sharing what I write, not publishing what I write, not winning awards for what I write, but the actual writing, the unique, entirely private buzz that comes from the act of creation itself.

So, we embrace the fear of creation because moving through the fear is far less uncomfortable than the dull, depressing swamp of avoiding the act of creation.

This week, see how you can play with your “artist child.” Finger-paint! Collage. Buy some stickers. Make something, and have fun.

Here’s perhaps the most cliche poem ever to end with, but also, this poem is truly one of my all time favorites: go read Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day.”

I’ll see you in a week (or two.)

Photo by Boris Smokrovic on Unsplash