Kern Carter's Blog, page 134

You Cannot Do It All Alone

It’s Monday morning and I don’t know how to move out of bed… once again. The chore of walking to wash, get to my laptop, or just “try” seems impossible. My yoga mat calls me. I respond by sitting and moving through the poses with relative ease. YouTube Yogi Arianna Elizabeth’s soft spoken voice whisks me through the shavasana.

Photo by Lesly Juarez on Unsplash

Laying with one hand on my stomach and the other on my heart, I unexpectedly think… “You Can’t Do It All Alone.” Yoga makes me highly reflective. With my participation, I always attempt to show up to the mat with the intention of letting go of present worries. In these moments where I am laying like a corpse I can get stuck in my head, but also when I’m writing or creating something the same applies. Isolation cannot last always.

Isolate (verb): cause to be alone or apart from others; identify (something) and examine or deal with it separately.

The following verb carries a weight and I never took it to mean loneliness, though some folks may. Isolation of oneself and one’s ideas proposes that creatives require reflection time. I like to use my isolation periods to get acquainted with my desires and needs. In allowing my desires and needs to see light, I uncover truths in moments of being alone.

One truth I found was that, in the last few years, I’ve been craving more emotional depth from most if not all of my relationships, yet within the writing I need more imagination. It’s been an interesting dynamic to say the least. But, I do feel that they are related in that my yearning for less alone time has left me with better visions of what I want and need from my work and the people in my life. I now know where to draw the line. I know when I’ve spent enough time in all four corners of my room and my head.

Setting oneself and environment up for healthy ways to isolate is necessary too. This pandemic may have helped some assemble healthy boundaries, but I don’t know how much it has helped me. I sat beside my record player many times and listened to Ntozake Shange’s For Colored Girls. For too long, I didn’t hear the singing…

I found God in myself
I found God in myself
& I loved her fiercely
I loved her fierceeeeeeely
I found God in myself.

Photo by Alvin Balemesa on Unsplash

Finally hearing that and comprehending what it continues to mean, signaled me to a clearer vision of my womxnhood. I have to love myself alone and with those who are dedicated to loving me, my chosen community.

Isolation is imperative in certain periods of life, but it isn’t meant to be a constant state of being.

There’s a particular cycling through isolation that occurs when I decide to write. The global pandemic has disrupted that cycle for me. I have never been so creatively stifled in my life.

I’ll be transparent…I’m one of those introverts that actually thrives on human interaction: face to face, good talks, all that. So, while I can purport about the importance and beauty of being in isolation, I also know that the sort of isolation I’ve experienced since this March has caused me hell. AND I am bored as hell. AND I am sick of the internet. I would give anything to experience an open mic night at a local club. I cannot do this all alone.

I fondly recall sharing air with fellow word benders and musicians. They didn’t know it, but those two to three hour excursions I’d spend listening or performing, inspired at least a half of all the writing I’d produce. For me, creative energy is not bound to isolation, but rather is assembled with the intention of being in service to others: sharing what one has with the world to inspire others and free others. It is an energy exchange.

Photo by Federico Beccari on Unsplash

Don’t get me wrong, the virtual community is nice and energy exchanges can happen in the virtual world. I like knowing that, though miles away, there are folks who support me and want to see me continue to create. My craving for non-virtual interaction comes down to needing the sensual aspects of relationships and community building. To alleviate this, I’ve begun creating healthier habits around writing and creating. Now I know that I must search for inspiration and remain honest about my emotional states during this season or “the age of Coronavirus.” I cannot do this all alone, nor can I expect for things to magically “come together” all the time.

“I cannot do this all alone,” even in mandated quarantine mode, reminds me why many types of communities exist for people to lean on. Whether, it’s chosen quarantine buddies or those far away advocates…call on folks when you need em!

Mushim Patricia Ikeda is a Buddhist teacher, writer, mentor and community activist that I enjoy listening to. She discusses community (sangha) in a way that makes it hard for me to imagine what life would like without folks who share similar envisioning as me. Check out a video of hers below.

https://medium.com/media/b6754a99b0924cfcade57ee2c6f409c4/href

Community, as much as isolation, is needed for a creative to see their work come alive.

You Cannot Do It All Alone was originally published in C.R.Y on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

STRANDED ON THE ISLAND OF CREATIVE ENDEAVOR

Isolation is necessary for many creative undertakings — but it isn’t sufficient

By Joan Van Tassel

Isolation for creative work is a two-edged sword. Many artistic endeavors require intense concentration and fierce focus. As a writer, once in a hundred times I sit down and toss off brilliant prose without a hitch — but it’s the other ninety-nine times (as is occurring now as I write) that I want to consider.

For me, writing involves four distinct phases: Germination, observation, drafting, and polishing. The first two processes call for an outward orientation — scanning the world to bring in information. The second two, drafting and polishing, require pushing my prose out into the world. (Just for the record, I enjoy observation the most, followed closely by polishing.)

None of the phases require relating to the people around me. Often enough, I experience even friends and family members as interruptions. I know it can be hard to hide and hard on them. As for me, I sometimes feel selfish and guilty. I try to bring others into my process, with mixed results. I listen to their concerns, then I tell them what I’m working on. Sometimes they are interested for a while, a few even hang in throughout the whole process. But I am obsessed, often for years at a time. It wears out the people I love and who love me, so I limit the time I bend the ears of loved ones about my work.

However, isolation from the people is not the same thing as total isolation. I don’t work all the time. I shop, I cook, I work out, I watch entertainment; occasionally, I even hang out. And I’m not isolated from the world, either. Much of the work demands my active participation in the real world, even when I’m writing fiction.

Here’s how my process works

Germination is finding and shaping an idea. Getting to clarity demands rapid cycles of inner thinking/feeling, enriched and supplemented by outward observation. The accumulation of bits and pieces — a verb here, a color there, a hook in the murk — until I can get to “Yes, this is an idea worth working on.”

So observation plays a role in my process almost from the very start. Once I settle on an idea, though, my observations become more structured. As a writer, I examine perspective (who is relating this story?), settings, sensory details, issues, and ramifications (the ‘so what’ factor). I love this part where I mine my world for observational gold. It’s what I’m best at and I’d love to leave the whole project here — but I can’t.

I need readers to complete my work: I’m thinking about them as I work. Why I need readers I cannot say, but as a child I craved attention, so I suppose it is partly that. Readers also provide the purpose behind my efforts, it’s reason for being. Sometimes I write for myself to understand how I think or feel about a personal decision or experience: Journaling serves those purposes. But writing for myself doesn’t require as much attention to meaning and detail — after all, I know what I mean.

Writing for readers is something else. I hold them in my mind because I want others to see what I saw, to feel what I felt or, conversely, to feel their own feelings under the circumstances I’m conveying. I know that I want them to feel something about an experience I consider worth sharing. All that requires repeated, careful observations of the world, as well as the anticipated reader responses.

Given all that, it isn’t surprising that I spend so much time on research!

Once I’ve formulated a clear idea for a project and carried out enough research, I start writing the first draft. I liken first drafts to laying bricks: word (slather space) word (slather space) word (slather space), and then rearranging the words before the slathers dry. This is mind-breaking, concentrated work that, except for the word count, is more labor than reward. And it does require isolation for several hours at a time. I’m also pretty stressed, so not much of a companion.

But, oooooh, the polishing. Successive revisions to the draft get it closer and closer to a final version, each one clearer and smoother than the previous iteration. I love this last phase the most: gliding, stylin,’ sailing, and soaring in the skies of previously imprecise sentences. Here, I can isolate for a period if the piece is short. For longer projects — more than fifty pages — I make sure to break up the time I spend because it requires flexibility and a certain playfulness.

In general, polishing puts me in a good mood. If deadlines permit, I’m sociable and relaxed, outgoing compared to the keyboard-chained wretch in the drafting phase. I re-connect with the people I care most about, brag about my newly-created child, show snippets of brilliant sentences and phrases, and splash the final name around.

I accept a certain isolation, comforted by the presence of the real world around me at first. Later, the reader provides some company too. To the extent my peeps enter my fictional world as I struggle to bring the characters, cultures, skies, trees, interiors, events, actions, tragedies, and victories of the world I am creating.

Writing isn’t just my job. It’s my calling. Not writing would require that I cut off and impoverish some part of my soul, that I abandon my life purpose. Some people call that isolation. I call it commitment.

If I were in solitary confinement in prison, I would study cement.

STRANDED ON THE ISLAND OF CREATIVE ENDEAVOR was originally published in C.R.Y on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Isolation Gestates the Gifts of the Artist

Solitude is apart of the process

Continue reading on C.R.Y »

Another round of rejection — The author life

Sometimes it’s just too much.

Continue reading on C.R.Y »

Trauma Is a Room Inside Your Mind — An emotional week on CRY

Trauma Is a Room Inside Your Mind — An emotional week on CRY

Sometimes the stories on CRY really hit deep. Last week, we asked our writers to share stories of trauma and creativity and they delivered in a big way.

Maria Chance’s piece titled Trauma is a Room Inside Your Mind is writing at its finest. Maria assembles words brilliantly and sets them against a concept that had me applauding before I was even finished reading.

Trauma Is a Room Inside Your Mind

And just when I thought there was nothing that would even come close to Maria’s piece, D.L Shultz delivers a canon of a work titled On Living Through and Writing About Trauma.

It’s a longer read that’s filled with pain, with some tragedy, but is ultimately grounded in a kind of elusive hope. My favourite quotes (among many favourite quotes) from Shultz was this:

“I find that writing about trauma is like pulling pieces of broken glass out of my stomach. Some of these pieces have been in there for so long that my body has grown around them and yet every time I move I still feel their jagged edges lacerating my insides. When we dig into ourselves to find and remove these pieces we will undoubtedly reactivate wounds and bleed profusely. But once the pieces are removed, then our organism will be able to truly heal instead of accommodating and trying to grow around these violent intrusions.”

Wow. And then there’s this one:

“I have broken up with him many times but never for more than a day because whenever I pull away he is devastated at the prospect of losing me. Perhaps I am testing him — seeing if he really does love me by examining how he responds to me leaving. Perhaps I am being abusive by testing him and enjoying knowing that he is sad when I am gone.”

On Living Through and Writing About Trauma

It’s really not possible to get any better than that. Just incredible pieces of writing that deserve some extra thought and attention.

Take a moment to read these stories and others on CRY.

Trauma Is a Room Inside Your Mind — An emotional week on CRY was originally published in C.R.Y on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On Living Through and Writing About Trauma

Strategies for identifying the impact of and expressing trauma.

Continue reading on C.R.Y »

Call for submissions — Isolation as part of the creative process

Call for submissions — Isolation as part of the creative process

I find it interesting that there’s this historical narrative about writers and creatives being particularly recluse and choosing isolation as part of their creative process. Some of this is by the nature of the art form. When you’re writing, you do it alone. It’s necessary.

But there’s also an aspect of isolation that we choose. We choose to shut ourselves out from the world in an effort to contain our thoughts and focus on the task. We hide our work, our process, our ideation like it’s a secret we don’t want anyone to know. Any thought of sharing or collaborating feels like an intrusion.

I know I used to be that kind of writer. There was no way I wanted anyone to be part of my process until absolutely necessary. But that changed with my second book, and I’m wondering what role isolation plays in your creative process? And has the pandemic shifted your concept of isolation and creativity in any way?

You can take some liberties with this submission request. Talk about whether or not you need isolation and what that looks like. Is isolation even possible in your life? How important is it for you to have your own space? You can also tell stories of something you’ve created in intentional isolation and how it turned out. Or you can talk about isolation being a myth that you’ve never resigned to.

Same rules as always:If you’re already a writer for CRY, go ahead and submit.If you’re not a writer for CRY but would like to submit to this request, let us know and we’ll add you ASAP.Be as creative as you want in your submissions. As long as you stick to the topic, we’ll consider it.Just because you submit doesn’t mean we’ll post. If you haven’t heard back from us in three days, consider that a pass.Deadline to submit is this Friday, October 23.

Please reach out if you have any questions at all. If you are new to Medium, here’s how you submit a draft to a publication.

Call for submissions — Isolation as part of the creative process was originally published in C.R.Y on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Underexplored places: cities and brains

“I would give everything I know, for half of what I don’t know. The little I have learned is worthless compared to what I don’t know. And learning doesn’t despair me.”

This classic quote by Descartes reminds me: learning is valuable, and leads to writing. Such as about the cities we visit, and our brain. We visit few of the unmissable towns, though we see many in books, films, newspapers, at school… We never even heard about many of them. And our brains also keep great secrets. I’m just back from a trip to both topics.

Ely

Early this year, a project at the Oliver Zangwill Centre took me to a 5-week stay at this town near Cambridge. The project and the city are unforgettable. Ely is small (some 20,000 inhabitants), but has a remarkable political and religious history. It was still an islet when an abbey was created there in 673. Two centuries later, Danish invaders destroyed it, but the abbey was back in 970.

It was in the village around the abbey that Hereward, a rebel noble, led the last Saxon resistance to William the Conqueror, who by then had control over the rest of England. William was crowned king in 1066, but only 5 years later defeated Hereward and finally brought Ely to the British world: it was England’s last Saxon corner!

Later, in 1109, Ely became home to England’s first cathedral, with high ceiling and a remarkable architecture. It hosts quality musical events, exhibitions, plus the outside stroll on the walkway on its ridge, around the octagon. Every year, Ely attracts 250 thousand visitors. It has good restaurants and stores. In sport, runners enjoy long, flat dirt trails across farms surrounding it, and in other nearby rural towns. I became a distant member of the Ely Runners Club — just another good reminder of those weeks.

The Oliver Zangwill Centre

The project that took me to Ely was also unforgettable. Correctly, this is how OZC presents itself: “We are the world leader in holistic neuropsychological rehabilitation; our mission is to enhance quality of life for people with acquired brain injury, through holistic interdisciplinary assessment and rehabilitation.”

Usually, holism describes an approach to neuropsychology. But it also exists in two areas closer to me: humanities and languages. OZC taught me about its neuropsychological side. [1]

A brief note: “whole” comes from Greek holos (all). Holism is more recent. It was created by the South African J. Smuts in his 1926 book Holism and Evolution. A quote from the book: “Holism (from holos = whole) is the term here coined for this fundamental factor operative towards the creation of wholes in the universe.”

A thought: when you are writing, do it as if you are creating wholes.

An inspiring approach: “The Oliver Zangwill Centre has provided innovative neuropsychological rehabilitation since we were founded in 1966 by Professor Barbara Wilson. Our approach places the client with brain injury and their family at the heart of rehabilitation, to empower clients to overcome their difficulties and support families”.

I learned a lot from the OZC team and their range of connected areas. And I also had meetings with Barbara herself. What took me there?

My writing history and plans

7 years ago, in sportive cycling, I had a serious accident in Romeiros, a road in São Paulo’s northern outskirts widely used for cycle training. I had a high-speed skid, with no impact beyond the brain. I passed out, and friends who were cycling with me called for an ambulance from the Albert Einstein Hospital. I was in a coma for a few days. Doctors told my family about the risk of death. After 10 weeks, I was back to a life that might be called normal. But there remained nearly imperceptible effects of the traumatic brain injury (TBI). Einstein’s medical team knew of uncommon “quick and full” physical recoveries from a TBI, such as mine. But the good post-accident days made the TBI hard to notice. After all, what had happened to my memory, my relationships, career review plans, etc?

But a sabbatical was under way! A few months before the accident, I had quit a good job as an economist at Itaú, a leading Brazilian Bank, aiming to head to a new career stage. But the new direction was not yet clear to me, and the accident postponed that reflection. Especially because I came out so physically well.

I always meant to keep writing, but maybe not about the economic and political scene, as I had done for years. The accident halted my sabbatical, but those recent weeks at OZC helped me complete it. After the accident, I still wrote for a while as an economist. First at Guide Investimentos — a financial brokerage house where I have good friends; and then as an advisor to Joaquim Levy, when he was Financial Minister. Neither of these two jobs as an economist attracted me for long. I soon quit both. More recently, back to the transition route, I published my first book. On topics that belong to Economics, but rarely or never appear in economic books. Finally en route to maintain a writing career, slightly different from pre-sabbatical days.

As a first non-economics writing project, I may visit these last 7 years. OZC lessons can help. One of their psychologists told me: “Those who spend time with us feel some mixture of being a patient, a student, or in a sabbatical. In your case, I suppose it will feel part of a sabbatical”. So it did.

Summing up that 5-week cycle:

* 1st week — Basics about the brain: how it works? What impact different accidents have? What is its anatomy? How do people recover from an accident, and what are the possible consequences?

* 2nd week — Memory and attention: what types of cognitive talent, attention, and memory do we all have? What strategies can we use to advance them?

* 3rd week — Executive functions: our ability to lead independent and successful lives. Choosing goals, identifying ways to achieve goals, designing actions, and thinking about when and how to adapt to change.

* 4th week — Communication: possible difficulties, strengths, challenges, and the design of strategies for contact and communication after an accident.

* 5th week — Humor: emotions and experiences. How an accident may have affected emotions, and how to start building strategies to regulate them.

The OZC also says: “We are committed to remain a leading provider of innovative rehabilitation, to empower clients to overcome their difficulties and support families.”

What valuable weeks: the town and the people/ideas I met at OZC, including my Scottish classmate.

Understanding the brain and discovering cities are both of wide interest. Beyond OZC and Ely, there are many ways to seek brain knowledge, and many cities to visit, each with its particularity and charm.

Excursions to the brain and to the role mine played in my sabbatical, seem now a welcome route to my writing.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

[1] Holism:

-> From Oxford Dictionary:

The theory or principle of a tendency in nature to form or produce organized wholes which are more than the mere sum of the component units; specially the application of this theory in medicine, involving the treatment of the whole person rather than the physical symptoms alone.

-> From the Houaiss Brazilian Dictionary:

* Approach, in the field of human and natural sciences, that prioritizes the integral understanding of phenomena, as opposed to the analytical procedure in which its components are taken in isolation [for example, the sociological approach that starts from global society and not from the individual.

* Medical doctrine and psychological school that considers biological and psychological phenomena as totalities irreducible to the simple sum of its parts.

* In the philosophy of language, a theory that considers the meaning of a term or sentence only understandable if it is considered in relation to a larger linguistic totality, through which it acquires meaning.

Underexplored places: cities and brains was originally published in C.R.Y on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Trauma is a Room Inside Your Mind

Through writing you create a place where the chaos cannot touch you. Through writing, we explain the unexplainable. We make it make sense.

Continue reading on C.R.Y »

Sales of print books continue to rise — let’s talk about why

Sales of print books continue to rise — let’s talk about why

Year over year print sales is up again. 6.4% compared to this time last year to be exact. There are several reasons for this upsurge, with culture impacting commerce the overarching theme.

Necessity is a strong influencer

With the pandemic continuing to keep much of society indoors and limiting the access to social and outdoor activities, we’ve been forced to do a couple of things. First, we need to fill our time at home. Reading is one way to fill this time and studies have shown that print book sales escalated in parallel to the start of the pandemic. (This is a generalization. It’s a bit more nuanced than my last sentence suggests. Read this article for more detail and clarity.)

But that necessity isn’t limited to our need to occupy time. We’ve also found ourselves in a position where we need to make sense of the world around us. That partially explains why the demand for racially-based non-fiction books and children's non-fiction books has risen. The awareness of how we exist in the world has been exacerbated by the racial justice movement and the pandemic. Books offer insights into how we can move forward.

People prefer physical books

If you knew what was happening with American printing houses, you’d be amazed that print books have continued to be this popular. Some have closed and others are in bankruptcy. Couple that with a supply chain problem that’s both struggling to comprehend and meet demands, it’s a wonder any books are being sold at all. Readers are being asked to wait up to a month to receive a book, depending on the distributor, and that’s caused publishers — big and small alike — high levels of distress and confusion when trying to manage print runs.

Despite this, third-quarter sales figures for print books have increased year-over-year. Young Adult and Juvenile Non-Fiction, in particular, have risen by 36.5% and 29.1% respectively. Even Young Adult Fiction has increased by over 18%. All figures are from NPD Bookscan.

What does this mean for authors?

Keep writing. I mentioned earlier that the situation is far more nuanced than I’m laying it out here. Many authors have found it difficult to operate in a virtual-only world where they aren’t able to connect with fans directly to promote their books. But in my opinion, connecting with readers has always been an author’s biggest problem. The pandemic may have amplified that, but even that isn’t as black and white as it may seem.

I’ve spoken to booksellers, agents and other authors who have thrived during this pandemic. And while my network is a minute scale, the overall sales numbers show a much more profound trend in the general popularity of books.

My suggestion for authors is to not approach this new environment as temporary. Find ways to permanently engage your audience online by using digital software and platforms that simultaneously allow for gathering an audience and selling your book. Your personal life aside, take this as an opportunity to connect with readers who are outside of your physical geography. Expand your conversations to audiences that may not even live in your country. If the pandemic has shown us anything it’s that we are far more connected than we think.

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Sales of print books continue to rise — let’s talk about why was originally published in C.R.Y on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.