Healing the Intellectual v. Creative rift: My Interview on the Stepping Off Now Podcast with Kendra Patterson

Annie and Kendra in 2012!!!

I had the great honor of being interviewed by long-time friend (and lifeline) Kendra Patterson. The episode posted this morning. In the conversation, we discussed my creative practice, the ways that I prepare to enter a flow state, my teaching philosophy, whether my practices are “creative” or “spiritual,” how I (don’t) identify with labels like writer or creative, and the current state of our institutions and concepts.

Listening back to the episode, I realized how the conversation itself had been a part of my own healing process. Since my early twenties, when I entered graduate school, I have had a tenuous relationship with intellectualism. While I was drawn to the depth that I thought the academy would offer, I found that most of my companions on the route were approaching but not really diving into the human experience. They were striving to produce something “in genre,” that is, largely following templates that dictated what knowledge would look like. I often found their questions uninteresting, the answers they offered obvious or convenient and guided by a pretentious concern for methodology with too little concern for substance.

Meanwhile, among the poets, David Whyte was calling me to ask beautiful questions:

“John [O’Donohue] used to talk about how you shaped a more beautiful mind and that it’s an actual discipline, no matter what circumstances you’re in. The way I interpreted it was the discipline of asking beautiful questions and that a beautiful question shapes a beautiful mind. The ability to ask beautiful questions, often, in very unbeautiful moments, is one of the great disciplines of a human life. And a beautiful question starts to shape your identity as much by asking it as it does by having it answered. You don’t have to do anything about it. You just have to keep asking, and before you know it, you will find yourself actually shaping a different life, meeting different people, finding conversations that are leading you in those directions that you wouldn’t even have seen before.”

[The real “beautiful question” is if Ann Wainscott can write a blog post without citing David Whyte…]

The way I reacted to this tension was to build two different lives, one academic, the other poetic, romantic, sustaining. The conflict is reflected in my Twitter bio: “mystic masquerading as political scientist; not fooling anyone.” The point is that I started to bifurcate - divide my life into two spheres. It was a survival mechanism. I bracketed my respect for the mystery of life, relegated it to my writing or flower-arranging practice, re-fashioned my interest in how religion shapes meaning-making systems into a historical institutionalist analysis of Moroccan counter-terror policies [come on, you’ve got to admit that was impressive LOL], soothed my spirit with On Being podcasts and skinny-dipping in the poetry of the mystics, and did fieldwork in breathtaking places like Morocco or Senegal, interviewing bureaucrats and intellectuals with one eye on the respondent and the other on the brilliant bougainvillea growing over the wall of the nearby garden.

It wasn’t sustainable. But it worked for a season.

Lately, working my way through Julie Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, it became harder and harder to maintain this separation. Her damning critique of what she calls “The Ivory Power,” broke me and buoyed me, for naming the undeniably catastrophic impact many “creativity” programs have had on young artists. I wonder how many young writers’ motivation I have destroyed, by being too critical in my response, too strict with unnecessary conventions, too caught up in my own questions to recognize the beauty in theirs.

I will confess that these spheres are still so separate that I was even surprised when Kendra began to ask me about my teaching, as if that is irrelevant to my own creative practice. Something about the way she wove the two together "moved me back and forth into the change,” as Rilke says - in my life poem. It was fun, even, reflecting on what I am doing in the classroom, how I have tried to redeem my own disappointing educational experiences, what it looks like when a class “works,” who is doing the creating in a classroom, etc. The conversation helped me to recognize how for many years the classroom was my creative outlet.

There was a relevant angle of my experience that wasn’t fully captured by this conversation though, that readers of this blog will immediately recognize. Because the topic of the conversation was creativity, it was not clear how many of my practices play a dual purpose - processing grief and facilitating flow. Kendra is right to point out that I have a lot of practices. I’ve been in an experimental state for a long-time, about three years now, and most of the practices that we discuss were actually embraced not to facilitate a writing practice, but to help me get out of bed in the morning. And if I had to chose, I’d say that the majority of my practices are primarily grief-related, not for the purposes of creativity. But I don’t have to chose; they can serve both purposes.

My point is that intense periods of mourning or transition require more grounding practices than stable periods. Personally, I am coming to a place of greater stability now. I know many of my current practices are probably no longer necessary, but I am going to let the new normal arise organically, in its own time, rather than force some sort of transition prematurely. The connections between grief and creativity are myriad, already well-documented and explored by others, but I do suspect that the healing potential of participation in “the flow” is over-looked, and under-valued by most of us. Here’s to hoping that Kendra and I record a second conversation some day, digging into the beautiful questions at the frontier of grief and creativity.

Graduation advice: be willing to fail

In the last 24 hours, I have had three reminders that we are in graduation season. The first was an email from an old friend of mine, who has just finished a masters degree. We knew each other years ago. She found my blog through Facebook and found herself wandering around my website, reading my CV and seeing where life had taken me. She wrote to me about how she felt like she had gotten a bit disconnected from her own interests, and her passions, and how seeing what I have done with my life reminded her of them and inspired her to get back to the basics.

It was a kind gesture of her to share these thoughts with me. I struggle with knowing whether or not to publicize my rather bizarre but certainly busy life. I know I have a number of privileges. I've made some good decisions, but I've also benefited from certain structural opportunities and in some cases been just down right blessed. I sometimes worry that sharing my experiences with other people could be alienating or frustrating to some who don't have the opportunities that I have. Her email suggested the opposite, that being more open with others about my own life can assist rather than discourage. This was an encouragement to me.

The second reminder was an op-ed in the NYT this morning, the graduation speech that a former professor would give if given the chance. He had four pieces of advice: 1. "Earn Everything" 2. "Don't be a 'city doll" or in other words, don't be jealous of those who can ignore step one and land a sweet gig right after graduation, 3. Actively attempt to help the poor, and 4. "Think for yourself."

Many people feel they are situated to give advice to college graduates, but few offer something new. Although these points aren't all that radical, they struck me as unusual and well-timed graduation advice. Who is not jealous of the friend who lands a sweet job right out of school, and begins earning huge sums of money to do relatively meaningless work? It is appealing at some level to have work that stays in the office, and lots of money to play with after hours, and real weekends and evenings where you are not always working. Nevertheless, now that I have, in a sense, "arrived" at the job I have been headed towards for a decade, I can say with honesty that I'm glad I had no money in my twenties, that I traveled and consumed huge amounts of information and that I did not find myself in my first real job until the age of twenty-nine. Now I have a job that sends me to Morocco for my summers, and allows me to counsel students in a critical moment of decision making, and pursue my intellectual interests. In sum, I'm starting to be far enough from graduate school poverty to feel like it was a good decision.

This position seems confirmed by a third article from VOX "How Wall Street recruits so many insecure Ivy League grads." The article looks at a variation of the city doll, the investment banker who has come out of an Ivy League school. The article is an interview between Ezra Klein and Kevin Roose, the author of a new book about investment bankers. Roose suggests that people who take jobs as investment bankers are people who fear taking risks and want economic stability above all else. Becoming investment bankers for a few years allows them to postpone making the difficult decisions about what to do next.

(The article also talks about people for whom investment banking is a good thing: those who have a reason to be there, or those who just love the industry. I'm interested more in the people who go for reasons to avoid risk. The article argues that the industry can really destroy these people by eliminating their ability to think creatively).

Back to the idea that some people become bankers to postpone difficult decisions, though. This argument interested me a lot because I am frequently concerned that undergraduates go to graduate school (or law school) for exactly this same reason: they want to delay making a decision about what next. They want someone to hand them a checklist that says what the next step is (study for the GRE, take the LSAT). They are afraid to fail. What the NYT op-ed was saying though, was exactly that. Go and fail! Try a few different things. You will be a much better human being, and long term you may even be more likely to be successful because of what you learn through failure.

Putting these three things together, I'd say that it can really feel like you are headed in the wrong direction when you are in the midst of failure. I considered leaving graduate school on multiple occasions. Many of you know the many other life paths that I have considered. So I guess I'd say, in conclusion, if you are very concerned that you have taken a risk that didn't pay off, you may be in a better position than you thought you were. And if you have taken the easy way out, avoiding making adult decisions while seeking the privileges of adulthood, you may find that you are very unhappy. Both are difficult roads, but the light seems brighter at the end of the first tunnel. I'm glad that I took the path of risk.

Study Skills: Focus

Today, the Diane Rehm Show featured the work of Daniel Goleman. His latest book is titled "Focus." On the show, Goleman discussed the parts of the brain that allow for focus, and how they can be trained to function better.

Undergraduate students are faced with much higher workloads than ever before, at the same time that they have access to a myriad of distractions. Goleman's work offers strategies for using your time wisely, for getting "into the zone" faster. These strategies include a daily meditation practice (even as little as 15 minutes a day!) and the development of a "creative cocoon." By setting aside a part of your day as sacred and dedicated to your most important projects, where you will not check email nor answer the phone, one can achieve higher levels of focus and production over the course of a year.