Jen Knox's Blog, page 21
July 25, 2023
1 of 4: The Alchemy of Creative Living
Hi friends,
For the next four (4) weeks, I’m sharing The Alchemy of Creative Living, a course that I’ve been working on with Insight Timer. Week 1 will be open to everyone. I hope you enjoy it as a stand-alone practice, or as a creative catalyst.
Week 1 (7/25): Releasing comparison & competition (open to all subscribers)Time: 15 minutes
No supplies needed
Reflection question: How does this practice change your perspective on your own work or that of others?
Week 2 (8/1): Learning how to ground & focus despite distractionsTime: 12 minutes
Bring a notebook & your attention
Week 3 (8/8): Methods for keeping creative momentumTime: 13 minutes
Get ready to write!
Week 4 (8/15): Your unique creative voiceTime: 10 minutes
Hey, get that notebook again!
I hope you enjoy and appreciate this offering. I hope it offers you a little new perspective as you embark on whatever creative journey you’re on. Comment below if you have questions or feedback.
xo Jen
Music credit: Adrift Among Infinite Stars by Scott Buckley
Music promoted by: https://www.chosic.com/free-music/all/
Creative Commons CC BY 4.0
July 22, 2023
On softening into the unknown
I’ve recently adopted a new creative practice that came to me organically. It’s an offshoot of a to-do list, and I believe it supports my ability to write consistently despite an impossible schedule (at least lately).
I’m sharing it here in hopes that you, too, will find it useful. But I also share it selfishly, so that I don’t forget.
When I wake up, often around o’dark thirty in the morning (as my mother would say), I walk my dogs, heat tea, and engage in some kind of light exercise, then I make a list. But not a to-do list. Instead, it is a list of possibilities. Once I make said list, I plug my nose and dive into the sea of tasks that await me.
There are many reasons to make lists. According to this article in Psychology Today, lists “organize and contain a sense of inner chaos,” and “separate the minutia from what matters.”
I personally find them helpful for keeping me on track, yes, but I also find it delightful at times to ignore them completely.
Making a list of what we need to do for the day is one thing. Listing possibilities, on the other hand, is another. I’ve started listing the possibilities of the day with less prescription than a standard to-do list (check email, walk the dog, finish edits). Now my lists look more like this:
By the end of the day, I will:
feel accomplished and happy
reconcile open conversations and questions
feel good about the way I connected with my students
get a little clearer on the direction of my novel
You get the idea. I don’t necessarily outline numbers of words or metrics per se, but I focus on how I want to feel. This is the antithesis of a SMART (specific, measurable, accountable, realistic and time-bound) goal. Somehow it changes the weight and the meaning of what I’m doing. Everything feels a bit less transactional and a little more honest.
Prompt: Write a list of the various things you want to feel at the end of the day, creatively and practically, rather than the metrics you want to hit. See if it changes anything in the way you approach your work.
If you try it out, let me know how it goes.
Wishing you well.
xo
Jen
PS - For those of you who enjoy my meditations, I recently released my first course in partnership with AURA and Insight Timer. Check it out here: From Worry to Love.
July 13, 2023
On transitions (with audio)
Our lives are always in transition. It’s just a matter of pacing.
Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of friends and family going through transitions at what seems an accelerated pace (sudden loss, sudden gain, big moves, realizations, etc…).
In my own life, new and amazing (and even intimidating) opportunities are arriving and older patterns are falling away. Some relationships are beginning to fade, while others are joyously deepening.
There is a richness but also an unsettling feeling to major transitions, and I have always believed that times like this offer particularly unique opportunities to kindle the honest artistic voice.
I’m the first to admit, however, that major life shifts are not comfortable. They can feel lonely or enthralling, depending on the way we converse with the world.
According to David Whyte, these are the times we begin the conversation with ourselves. The full poem extracted here is one to savor because it speaks to feelings of connection in a truly unique manner.
Start with
the ground
you know,
the pale ground
beneath your feet,
your own
way of starting
the conversation.
—David Whyte, “Start Close In”
Transitions are a time of heightened emotion and awareness. So, what better time to go return to the personal conversation?
I find the idea of coming back to the discourse we have with ourselves as artists and people a beautiful way of better distinguishing what thoughts and truths are our own, and what we’ve adopted from the noise around us.
To me, competition and qualification are never personal truths. Especially artistic competition and quantification.
I know a woman who told me she felt defeated over the lack of reach of her creative words. But is this defeat truly her own, or is it merely a false idea she can control how many units she is able to sell?
This is where I have no advice but I do have thoughts.
Instead of trying to fit the mold of expectations we think are quantifiable, we are often served by reminding ourselves of the actual questions that live within our art, our work, and our actions in the world ask.
Are we doing the work we feel called to do or replicating efforts on a quest for approval?
Our artistic existence is often defined by times of transition. We can use these times of loss and gain to question and reroot. To strengthen the resonance of our voice.
The personal voice. The honest voice.
Because this is the voice that steers the most fulfilling course and allows things like competition to fall away. Our conversation with ourselves, as Whyte puts it, enables us to realize that no matter who surrounds us and what we are inspired by, everything is an opportunity to sing our song.
Once we can do that, there is no counting or competition. There is a chorus. To sing our songs together is to allow our individual voices to shine in whatever way they are supposed to.
The richness of transitions reminds us of who we are. I hope that if you happen to be one of the many people I know going through one, painful or blissful or terrifying, you can tap its richness by journeying into this personal conversation. Remembering to ask ourselves what expectations we’ve been carrying that are not our own allows us to ground back down into a more honest conversation with ourselves and the world.
Wishing you all good things.
xo Jen
July 11, 2023
Addressing anxious thoughts
Originally published on Insight Timer. I’ll be doing a live talk on my journey on the 21st at 8 a.m. ET.
Ian Stauffer
July 10, 2023
On anxiety & fear
"Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary."
— Fred Rogers
At one time in my life, I suffered debilitating anxiety and panic attacks, and writing got me through. I remember someone recommending that I push through. Feel the fear and do it anyway. Face my fear with courage. And I bought into this idea for many years but couldn’t fully understand why that wasn’t as easy for me as it seemed to be for others.
It took a lot longer to realize that my anxious thoughts and worry were not merely fear. In fact, I was less fearful than I should have been in many cases. When I was younger, I thought being courageous meant taking risks, and I was good at that, but I later realized that what I was actually seeking was adrenaline to combat a more constant and steadier stream of anxiety. I sometimes wonder if this is the case for extreme athletes and all manners of thrill-seeking or extreme ambition.
I have my thoughts.
Anyway, I bring this up to say that facing static fears, to me, is not the same as coping with worry and anxiety. Courage in the face of anxiety and worry, on the other hand, is always about looking within and beyond surface-level advice or thrill-seeking. It’s about allowing a slow and honest process to begin.
And this takes a holistic approach for many of us. At least for me, it was aided, and maybe even guided, by writing. Exploring emotions on the page was a way of connecting to thoughts that felt too extreme to share anywhere else. And they showed up in metaphor, simile, and staccato sentences that overtly stated what I felt.
Worry and anxious thoughts started to fade in my life when I looked at them honestly. Without trying to romanticize or sensationalize them, I was able to find a different way to experience my life.
Photo by Yusuf Evli The Stoic philosophers had a practice of negative visualization in which a person doesn’t force themself to think positively or ignore the sensation. Rather, they indulge the worst-case scenario—allowing it to fully surface. They imagine what it might be like for everything to fall apart, and in so doing, allow a constant soundtrack in their minds to be confronted. Rather than trying to ignore anxiety or shove it down with extreme experience, this practice allows steady confrontation. Honesty. Radical honesty.
And with radical honesty comes a new way to see.
To me, writing demands the same. At least good writing. And I do qualify writing as good or not by the honesty that I feel is the undercurrent of the words. Writing through and to and about emotions is not separate from the art of writing.
Give me something honest, brutally so, and I will give you applause. And I hope you do that for yourself, too.
xo Jen
July 7, 2023
Quick Pick-me-up
Intellectual and creative people especially are notoriously hard on themselves. Let’s take a moment to remember our strength and release any unnecessary rumination.
July 3, 2023
On problems and solutions
There’s a writing problem that I’ve had for some time (I’ll get into this later), and it made me think about how valuable some relational leadership concepts are to creativity.
Stay with me here . . .
In my course at OSU, I dedicate a lot of time to the topic of social responsibility as it pertains to individual interactions and community impact. I assign a team project that undergraduates take on as a way of exercising their leadership skills by addressing an issue that means something to them.
When I ask them to create a list of social and community problems they’d like to solve, they begin with things like “eliminate homelessness” or “save our planet/environment,” and get overwhelmed. How can they make a difference in one semester? In a group of five? With no money?
To answer, I ask them to create a problem statement/question that correlates with their chosen issue, such as “How can I get people to stop littering on campus?” or “How can I decrease homelessness in Central Ohio?”
Then I ask them to research the issue itself and find reasons these problems persist. What is the cycle that feeds these problems? Take a magnifying glass and find a little pinhole from which you can disrupt the problem loop.
For instance, if they are concerned with the environment and decide to tackle littering on campus, a team might research the issue and find out that litter always collects in a particular place, which would allow them to refine a problem with a more systematic question . . . “Why is there so much trash near the lake?”
Upon asking this more specific question, a group might notice that there isn’t a trash can or recycling bin anywhere near this common area to chill and study. Maybe they’ll notice a common area where a sign might remind students to take their trash with them. And so on …
Ultimately, the students are able to construct realistic ways to make an impact by identifying the pattern (the systematic issue) and how they can interrupt the problem loop by interrupting this pattern at some accessible point within this loop.
So here’s an example from my writing life.
I write a lot of exceedingly long sentences. Unnecessarily long sentences.
This has been a blind spot for me since graduate school, and it is one that was recently pointed out by a brilliant woman who plainly stated that my circuitous sentences were exhausting (and I agree — have you noticed this sentence is exceedingly long?).
“How can I stop writing long sentences?” I wondered, and I thought about my class.
I started investigating my writing and noticed that my long sentences show up far more often than I could’ve imagined. They’ve haunted me for a long time and likely stem from a desire to sound smart, I thought. But no! I investigated further and noticed that I tend to write long sentences when I’m “in the flow.” I write them at the openings and endings or during digressions. They are my default.
So I refined my question.
“What techniques can I adopt to improve the cadence of my writing?” So I built in a checkpoint for digressive writing in my revision process. I’ll let you be the judge as to whether it works moving forward. I doubt I’ll abandon my long darlings altogether, but perhaps I’ll address them here and there.
If there is a recurring problem you’re facing creatively, personally, or socially, see if you can find the loop and disrupt it. Because why not try? If you do, let me know how it goes.
*Speaking of problems, I opened up a new meditation on pain. Find & download by clicking the podcast. It’ll be open to free subscribers for a week and paid subscribers indefinitely.
July 2, 2023
June 26, 2023
On envy & jealousy
I’ve never been envious or jealous,* of course, but I can imagine it’s a remarkably uncomfortable feeling . . . something like a wave of self-consciousness and distrust collecting in the body and collapsing all strength and rationality, if momentarily, as the mantra repeats, “Why not me?” We evaluate another’s success or read another’s words and might as well cross our arms and stomp our feet.
This two-pronged emotion fascinates me, especially when it comes to creativity. Even the impetus of creativity. I grabbed the following paragraph from The Evolutionary Psychology of Envy and Jealousy.
Jealousy is a motive of immense potency. Although you are often consciously aware of being jealous or envious of someone, sometimes the actual reasons for the envy are buried in your unconscious and disguised by rationalizations. Ironically, what you really value in life is more often revealed by asking yourself who you are jealous of rather than asking yourself directly “what do I value.” The latter often taps into what society expects you to value; your “superego” takes over – and you are aware only of what you should want rather than what you really want. Envy and jealousy, on the other hand, kick in as a gut reaction in your emotional/evaluative system long before you become conscious of it.
My favorite takeaway from this passage, “sometimes the actual reasons for the envy are buried in your unconscious and disguised by rationalizations,” suggests an interesting frame for this uncomfortable emotion. It suggests that the emotion itself is not something we can think ourselves out of because it’s not even conscious.
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To me, this is partly disconcerting and partly cool. It suggests that we can use our work, as writers and artists, to explore this complex emotion.
While I don’t often covet other humans’ publication credits or fame/fortune, I catch myself wishing I had more time and energy. Maybe this is a type of jealousy that comes with age. And, if I’m being honest, sometimes I wish I found fashion more intuitive (I’m minimalist). Meanwhile, I used to be riddled with envy of the more petty variety. Anyone who had a better education or more monetary resources had me doing the internal foot stomp.
Feel free to diagnose this.
Perhaps I felt intellectually stunted compared to others and feared I didn’t have natural gifts, or maybe it boiled down to a simple sense of safety. I’ve since resolved (or at least reduced) this feeling by exploring the idea in fiction and nonfiction through characters and essays. Because writing, for me, is a personal development practice that taps, if briefly here and there, the subconscious.
It introduces me to whatever soundtrack plays in the background of my life’s plot. Such realizations are often reduced to writing as therapy, but I think of it more as writing to get to know one’s self.
If jealousy is more subconscious than conscious, can we tap into the reason behind it through artistic expression? I have yet to try this prompt myself, but if you’re game, let’s do it together.
Optional freewriting prompt: Freewrite about anyone or anything you’ve been jealous/envious of/about, then write about what’s beneath it.
Optional research prompt: Read some of your old writing and see if you notice any patterns or clues in older work. Does this emotion surface?
Let me know if you try it. In the meantime, I added a meditation on this topic. I wrote it a few years ago and still find it useful (see podcast link).
xo Jen
*Sarcasm alert - AI can’t do that (okay, maybe it can, but probably not well … foot stomp).June 25, 2023
Our Sky, the Ocean
I just found out that The Glass City, a collection of climate fiction I released in 2017 with Press Americana will be reprinted on Zero-Emissions day. This very short story (one I dissect in a previous post) is featured in a slightly different form.
Photo by Evan Bollag
