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 

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pdf ISBN: 978-1-913743-56-7​
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The book is extensively illustrated with colour and black & white drawings and paintings, mainly by Christina Reading, undertaken alongside the creative writing aspects of the process.

Readership

This handbook is written for anyone who is feeling stuck with their creativity or creative practice. Whether or not readers have had a creative practice before (writing/ painting/ making/ crafting) the exercises here will help them to find ways to 'get unstuck'. 
​The handbook is also ideally suited to creative writing courses.

Walking for Creative Recovery

A 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:
  • A timetable that both committed to, with definite start and finish points
  • Trust – a willingness to lead and be led on each other’s creative journey
  • Mutual respect – listening, constructive feedback and equal time 
  • Openness to change – personal and creative
  • Willingness to take risks and resist comfort zones

Our work combined a cyclical process of:
  • Getting away from conventional workspaces, moving – we chose walking
  • Dialogue – purposeful conversation about work, creative process, health
  • Writing – about our experience of the walk and any stories/memories triggered
  • Feedback – we read each other’s work and gave constructive critique 
  • Reflection – how had the process made us feel and what had it made us think/write about? What had changed and what had stayed the same?

The method can and will lead to:
  • Writing (or other creative practice)
  • Reflection on the method, including amendments and developments
  • Identifying changes to creative practice(s)
  • Personal shift and transformation – feeling differently about an event
  • The personal and professional relationship being deepened and strengthened
  • A clear pathway forward for creative and professional practice
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