All Things Burning: Tending your creative fire

This is not a class about how to draw a realistic hand, or write a well-crafted sentence, or sing on pitch. This is a class about the creative skills no one teaches: how to sit with your own mind, how to nurture your curiosity, and grow your most important resource – your attention. Because let’s face it. There’s the moment when you have a great idea, and then there’s five minutes later, when you are distracted, or discouraged, or stuck. That is the moment this class is about. 

Creativity requires trusting your own vision, and making a path where there was none. These are the same skills required to navigate the crisis-filled world around us. In this class, we approach creativity not just as an artist’s tool, but as a skill for resilient living. 

Over eight weeks, we will do a set of experiments in attention, listening, and making. We will study the work of artists who engage the world in unexpected ways. You will make work in the medium of your choice; you will also collage, journal, eavesdrop, write text message poems, document, echo, imitate, iterate and invent. At the end of this course, you will have a new group of creative comrades, and a new superpower that will serve you in making all your impossible ideas real.