Know Your Enemy

• The voices in your head that you don’t want there (implanted by your day job, a presumed future audience, a hypothetical critic, people you’re writing about, your own anxieties and fears)

• Could be an institutional voice (traditional academic / journalistic values), could be someone who hurt your feelings once, could be the voice of your own fears  or perfectionism – all voices that might have other valuable roles to play in your life but do not get to have a say in your creative practice

• They are big into “shoulds” rather than “coulds”

• Voices that push you away from things rather than pull you toward them.

By banishing the voices that interfere with your creative self, you strengthen your ability to hear your own true voice! Give your enemy a description, a body, a voice, and a name so you can recognize them.

Banishing spell: “Go with honor, go with love. Be gone, be gone, be gone, I banish you!”

Tap Your Subconcious

Here’s Cormac McCarthy on the subconcious as a precursor to language.

Name Your Desires

Manifesto: a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer. Futurist leader F. T. Marinetti recommended artists make their manifestos specific, imbued with “violence and precision” to energize a group against a common threat and lay out a plan for future action. Some examples:

• Futurism

• Fluxus

• Immaculate Heart College Art Department

• Stuckists

• Grayson Perry

Questions for crafting your own:

• You have already named your threat – your enemy. What would energize you against it?

• What do you want to drive your future action?

• What has inspired you and shifted for you these last six weeks – can that become part of your manifesto?

• Are there quotes you’ve always loved or ways of working that art particularly aligned with your desires for yourself?

Available until Oct. 31

Keep in Touch

You can connect with each other using this spreadsheet or on the Signal chat.

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Feedback

If you haven’t filled out the form already, we’d love to know about your experience in this class!

Soundtrack

Week 6: Your Freest Self playlist. (For mostly-instrumental writing-background music, check out this playlist instead.)