Using Creativity to Navigate Big-life Change forced me write a new narrative for myself other than the one I had been living. That journey has helped me face what I had spent a life time not wanting to see, feel our touch. 

As a a creative human and as a lifelong champion of women in the arts, I became so curious about how artists approach and navigate this kind of big-change and the transitions that follow.  

About a year after my husband died, I took to the stage three times to tell stories of the most confusing and messy experiences of my own process of healing and transformation. I grew up in the theater and have spent my professional career in the arts. There was a point in my journey where the stage was one of the spaces where I could express the most honest and raw parts of the experiences that I couldn’t share in words even with my best friends or my therapist. That got me curious.

​

Questions I asked

How do artists brave creativity in response to big-change in their lives? Do artists, who use disruption as material for their creativity, who have a facility with moments of uncertainty that are embedded in the process of creativity itself, how do they navigate the uncertainty that remains when everything in life changes?

I wondered:

• Are artists more courageous with personal change than most?

• What strategies do artists use to process big-life change?

• Can we learn something from each other about how to move through change and transition in life by hearing the stories of artists who have made brave choices in the face of big-change?

 

How the book is structured
In Braving Creativity, I talk to artists who are just like you. They are in mid-career and later and create work in visual art, performance art, dance, film, music, performance, playwriting and screenwriting. They are also mothers and daughters, partners and friends. They all have a perspective on change that has been sewn from a lifetime of grappling with the hardest most honest truths of our journey here on earth.  

Each section begins with a story from me and teachings around the the topic that encapsulates the themes of the stories that follow.  

• Grief

• Disruption

• Choice

• Opportunity

• Deserving

• Synergy

 

 

The Artist Stories in the Book

Although each story has aspects of all the others, the overarching goal is to illustrate the kind of devotion it takes to navigate the uncertainty inherent in any transformational process. Whether we experience a crisis or we make a radical choice to change, the women who share their stories are expert at braving creativity in order to continue to grow. They shared their stories with me so that other people might be inspired to brave their creativity too. 

Like actress and writer Maddie Corman, who published and performed her first solo-play “Accidentally Brave” to share the private story of her personal experience of recovery in the aftermath of her husband’s public arrest and how it led her to explore her love of writing for the first time since college; Dancer and scholar Cynthia Oliver’s story demonstrates how an invitation and a collaboration can create the alchemy that makes it possible to brave the painful examination of the beliefs that she challenges in her multi-media dance theater piece Boom! about her cancer diagnosis and recovery journey; painter Antoinette Wysocki, takes us through the how the dismantling of her armor led to the kind of vulnerability that made it possible for her to approach a canvas again with her injured painting hand, which was shattered when a truck hit her car head on.