This blog/newsletter is for artists. For storytellers. For lateral thinkers. For multi-hyphenates. For chaos goblins. For the square pegs. For those who refuse to follow a trodden path. Those who feel everything so, so deeply. For those who are still working things out.
Expect weekly-ish journeys down various rabbit holes straight into your inbox, with selected essays published here.
Last week I found myself deep down the rabbit hole of academic literature on the topics of play and work. It started when I came across the term “plork" which was coined by Sister Corita Kent, who was an artist, a teacher and an activist, working at the Immaculate Heart College in California (I...
Seth Godin in (I think) The Practice, writes that true learning (as opposed to schooling) is a voluntary experience that requires tension and discomfort. He calls this discomfort “the persistent feeling of incompetence” as we get better at a skill. Ira Glass calls this discomfort The...
In internet culture, shitposting refers to creating any content whose humour derives from its surreal nature, lack of clear context, and an unexpected treatment of an existing form. Originating on underground internet forums like 4chan, shitposting evolved into its own form of content...
The first rule of improv comedy is that you never say no. “No” is a buzzkill. It robs you and your partner of an opportunity for forward motion. It’s a block, a dead-end of creative pursuit. A betrayal of trust. You can’t do anything with a “no”. “No” stops the creative process. There are no...
Want to know my secret formula for getting out of creative rut? Just kidding. There is no recipe to creativity. Even "bibles" of creativity like The Artist's Way don't suit everyone (I never got past the morning pages!) But here’s what tends to work for me. I’m calling them “steps” but they are...
In rock climbing, beta refers to the intended way of ascending a route, and specific climbing techniques required to overcome the key challenges. It’s intended to give you a roadmap to a climb - making your life a little easier in outdoor climbing, or challenging you in just the right...
They told us that curiosity killed the cat but it's a freaking lie. In the original 16th century telling - and until the late 1800s - it was care (with the meaning of worry) that lead to the cat’s demise. And somewhere along the way, care was replaced by curiosity. Why? No one really knows, apart...
What does your creative practice look like? Mine looks a bit like this: Nature walks and swimming in the sea, Photography and collage, Embroidery and working with found objects, Staring at the wall and driving in silence, Conversations with friends, Gardening by trial and error (mostly error) and...
When Diana Gabaldon sat down to write her first novel, she did it for practice. She’d not written fiction before and figured that the best way to learn - and see if she’s any good at it - is to just write one. She settled on historical fiction because, by her own admission, if it turned out that...
My two current crushes - an intellectual one (anthropologist David Graeber) and entertainment one (comedian Brennan Lee Mulligan) recently collided when the latter casually quoted the former in a podcast interview on Adventuring Academy. Sidenote: Adventuring Academy is a Dropout TV show...