Creativity and War

Seeking creative joy in moments of sorrow

Geoff and Steve started The Creativity Guild to create a community of creative explorers looking to reignite their creative sparks. The goal is to build a place for us all to reconnect with our creativity, start the projects we’ve always wanted to work on and be the people we’ve always wanted to be.

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I’m an incredibly slow writer. You might not be able to tell by reading this newsletter, but it usually takes me weeks to finish writing a post. It’s a super heady process for me that involves a ton of writing, followed by a ton of deleting, and then a ton of writing again. My collaborator Steve on the other hand is much quicker, and I thoroughly resent him each and every time he presents me with a brand new, fully fleshed out, sparkling draft that he seems to have whipped up in a couple of hours. If I’m honest about it, I kind of hate him for it. 

I’ve been working on a post for about a month now. The post is a magical and whimsical bit of writing about one of my grandest creative dreams. The plan was to give it one more pass this morning and then to hit publish on it today…but then the October 7th events in Israel happened this past weekend and working on it now feels wrong. I’m not feeling particularly magical or whimsical. I feel gutted. 

Just to be clear, I am under no illusion that anyone opens The Creativity Guild to hear thoughts or opinions about Israel, and fear not, I have no intention of presenting any. But what I will tell you is how these events are making me feel in my body. As a Jew and as a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I feel nauseous. In another reality I could have been one of the people that were killed or captured. Or my wife and children. Or even more likely my cousins who currently live on a kibbutz not far from Gaza. It’s something that’s always in the back of my mind, no matter what else I’m doing. It affects my sleep as well as my waking brain. I feel like I’m surrounded by a haze that only gets worse with every news headline I see.

I am also really struggling to see where joy and creativity fit into this moment. Is it frivolous to be creative in a time of war? 

I’ve thought a lot about why I am driven to create. There is a release that I get from going up to my home office on the third floor late at night and writing, drawing, or even playing my ukulele. It is a quiet kind of joy that tickles and excites me. It is creation for creations sake, and the feeling that I get from it is totally addictive.

A friend of mine shared a reading with me last week about joy from Alan Lew. It resonated with me and has made me rethink my relationship to the feelings I get through creating: 

“Joy is a deep release of the soul, and it includes death and pain. Joy is any feeling fully felt, any experience we give our whole being to. We are conditioned to choose pleasure and to reject pain, but the truth is, any moment of our life fully inhabited, any feeling fully felt, and any immersion in the full depth of life, can be the source of deep joy.”

Throughout history people have created beauty in the face of atrocity. There are loads of examples, from Picasso’s Guernica, to all the music that came out of the Terezín concentration camp. All are heartbreaking and all feel important. I’ve had the honour of giving eulogies at funerals for people I love, and the process of writing those eulogies have been some of the most profound moments of my creative life. A “joy” emerging from sadness and loss.

Picasso’s Guernica, a painting created in reaction to the bombing of Guernica, Spain in 1937.

By expanding my definition of joy maybe I can allow creativity to help me feel more in touch with this moment too. Maybe there is a reason that I’m driven to listen to sad songs when I’m feeling blue. Is there joy in staying in my emotions, no matter how distressing? 

What I want to do is curl up under a blanket and shut the world out. Or watch TV with the hope that it will distract me from the despair I feel. At this moment what I chose to do instead was to sit down and write this post. It’s a process that has helped me get in touch with some of the emotions that have been bubbling up inside. 

This post only took an hour or so to write, beating my usual writing speed record by approximately one month. There was a desperation to the process that I don’t usually feel, as though there was something that needed to be released. It’s helped organize my emotions and provided an outlet for the thoughts that are keeping me up at night. 

The hard part for me is “What does this all mean?” Does a practice like this bring me closer to the joy that Alan Lew writes about? If I soften resistance and truly embrace creative expression, is there an opportunity for me to feel more alive? 

Stephen Marche on Margaret Atwood on Stephen Marche

Friend of The Creativity Guild, Stephen Marche, wrote an amazing book called “On Writing and Failure”  (we spoke with him about it a few months back.) In the book he tells the story of Margaret Atwood talking to someone at a party, who upon telling her that he had just gotten published in the New York Times, Atwood defensively snapped back “I’ve written for the Times too!” It’s the kind of story that Stephen wrote probably never thinking Atwood would ever see. Well she did. And then she wrote her own review of that incident and of Marche’s book. It’s a pretty amazing read. 

Sarah Lazarovic’s Minimum Viable Planet

Sarah Lazarovic’s art is exactly the kind of thing that gets us excited. It’s whimsical, comical, beautiful and entirely created in a voice that is undeniable hers. She writes a Substack called “Minimum Viable Planet” that is (in her words) an “undepressing climate newsletter”. It’s a fantastic blend of art and writing that actually leaves us feeling somewhat hopeful(ish) about the state of our planet. You can find it here.