Imprint: Triarchy Press
Published: 22nd April 2022 Format: Paperback Extent: 168pp. ~ Size: 23.4 x 15.6 cm List Price: £15/€17.50 Print ISBN: 978-1-913743-54-3 Tags: walking, creativity, creative writing, autoethnography, autoetnographic cartography, ecotherapy, ecopsychology, personal development, nature retreat, somatics, nature connection Buy the Paperback @ £20
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Walking for Creative RecoveryA handbook for creatives, with insights and ideas for supporting your creative life
Christina Reading & Jess Moriarty Sooner or later, most of us get stuck. Feel stuck. Our creativity in crisis… lost, blocked, overwhelmed by work, family, illness. How to find or recover that creative edge? How to get unstuck?
For the authors, it began with cancer and stretched into the pandemic. One primarily a writer and the other a painter, they decide to walk together, to talk, write, feed back, reflect and repeat, again and again. They explore trust, openness, motherhood, their willingness to take risks and be exposed, and the particular insights they bring as women. Along the way, they walk and map their way back to creative life. This is their story, but more than that – it’s a map and a handbook for anyone who is feeling stuck. Whether or not you have had a creative practice before (writing/ painting/ making/ crafting), this book will help you find your way into creative expression. The authors offer creative tasks and suggestions in each chapter, and ideas and structures to get you going. But most important, they offer warmth, friendship and inspiration from their own shared vulnerability, struggle, setbacks and muddy walking. From the Introduction:
Our Method Our new practice is a form of cartography, a map of our own making. The glorious Sussex landscape is our terrain, but walking, talking, reflection and writing are our co-ordinates and so this is a new path. It moves us away from who we were, helps us to recover and gives us time to regroup. We are navigators, explorers, orienteers. The first part of this process was to enter a mutual contract triggered by a desire by both parties to alter or enliven our creative practice and use this to help our recovery from personal change or crisis. This contract included:
Our work combined a cyclical process of:
The method can and will lead to:
This book develops the authors' method of walking-talking-making to aid creative recovery. It offers readers strategies that will help to move through and past "stuck places" and suggests tasks that readers can undertake to shift and transform their creative process.
Each chapter is organised around a particular structure: first a walk, then a piece of writing, and finally a task to encourage readers' own creative shift. Related titles:Nature Connection ~ The Pattern ~ Nine Ways of Seeing a Body ~ All Triarchy books on Walking ~ All Triarchy books on Movement and Somatics
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