Media Room

What’s a lifeline of creativity for you?

What’s one healing form of creativity? 

Music!  That’s why I write songs, and I’m so excited to share two of the videos of premieres of my original songs, How Dare You (what I wish I could have said to my abuser at 17 years old) and Picture Frame (a love-note and farewell to childhood) at the New York Duplex Cabaret and Piano Bar.  Thanks to Playlight Theatre for organizing the amazing Songwriter’s Showcase!  

These two songs are part of two musicals I’m working on, Passageways, and Leftovers.  Watch the videos of the amazing And my song “Picture Frame,” sung by SHARAE MOULTRIE (A New Brain, Gallery Players) and “How Dare You” sung by MEGHANN REYNOLDS (Show Me A Hero, HBO)

Creative expression as a personal lifeline…

Whenever I could, I have used some inner resource to be healing myself, to be creative.  When it was first found out that I would have to get another colostomy, my parents were trying to break it to me in the calmest way.  I was hunched my double-boiler making chocolate and as soon as they told me, I started crying and screaming hysterically.

Creating chocolate was the best way I knew to express what I was really feeling: Rage, like I wanted to explode – in my chest and legs.  I just wanted to hit something, throw something on the floor a.  I was so furious at the situation and worse: helpless. By creating, I felt like my feelings were being expressed, and  I was able to know what I was feeling – which gave me a sense of empowerment in a powerless situation.

         Creativity in Uncertainty

So how did I survive over four years (besides IV nutrition, which was NOT the same as a huge bowl of ice cream!) without even a tiny ice cube to satiate myself?  I had to be resourceful.  This is what creativity means to me in my favorite quotes:

Art is magical, but it’s not magic. It’s a neurological product, and we can study this neurological product the same way we study other complex processes such as language. — Charles Limb, neuroscientist

Creativity is allowing oneself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.
— Scott Adams, The Dilbert Principle

The goal of life is rapture. Art is the way we experience it. Art is the transforming experience.
— Joseph Campbell

Beginning with audacity is a very great part of the art of painting.
— Winston Churchill

…Only art penetrates what pride, passion, intelligence and habit erect on all sides – the seeming realities of this world. There is another reality, the genuine one, which we lose sight of. This other reality is always sending us hints, which without art, we can’t receive. Proust calls these hints our “true impressions.” The true impressions, our persistent intuitions, will, without art, be hidden from us and we will be left with nothing but a ‘terminology for practical ends’ which we falsely call life.
— Saul Bellow, on science and art from his Nobel lecture in 1976

The artist has one function–to affirm and glorify life.
— W. Edward Brown

Art is not a mirror held up to reality, but a hammer with which to shape it.
— Berthold Brecht

The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been concealed by the answers.
— James Baldwin

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures.
— Henry Ward Beecher

That’s all I’ll share for now – but let me know – how is creativity YOUR lifeline?

Well, let’s hope April is filled with Spring flowers, and keep sharing your detours with me!

“April prepares her green traffic light and the world thinks Go.” – Christopher Morley

(Check out more art here)