The Creativity Guild Manifesto
Experiments, interviews, showcases... and medical questionnaires?
The Creativity Guild is a community of mid-life creative explorers looking to reignite our creative sparks. This is the place to reconnect with your creativity and start the projects you’ve always wanted to work on. No one lives forever, so let’s roll up our sleeves and make stuff!
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“Creativity is play, but for shadow artists, learning to allow themselves to play is hard work.”
- Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way
Hello Friends.
We have some exciting surprises for you, but first… we feel like we owe you an explanation.
If you’ve already signed up to be a part of The Creativity Guild, we thank you for your blind faith. We love that you have enough trust to join us on this journey, but even so, it would be pretty reasonable if you were left still scratching your head a little and asking yourself, “What the heck is a Creativity Guild anyway?”
Before we started this project, we were in a bit of a funk. We’d just lived through a global pandemic (maybe you did as well?), we were both undergoing some pretty big questioning about our jobs, and perhaps most importantly we were both feeling stagnant. That’s when we began talking to each other about creativity. How neither of us felt we were using our creativity much anymore, and that we missed the fun, the passion, and the collaboration (for some backstory you can read about the conversation that crushed Steve’s creative confidence, or about how a lack of faith in himself caused Geoff to turn his back on his love of puppets).
We also had a realization that the best way to experience it again was to focus on creativity for creativity’s sake. Call it a midlife crisis or just an incredibly slowly arriving moment of clarity, but it was from the sparks of those discussions that The Creativity Guild was born.
So, again, what exactly have you signed up for? Here is how we are thinking about proceeding…
Experiments and Challenges
We are both huge fans of experiential journalism, where the writer acts as a human guinea pig. Our favourite person in this space is A.J. Jacobs, author of the new book The Puzzler, and of several other iconic human guinea pig books like The Year of Living Biblically. We think this would be a great model to follow for exploring creativity.
This could be everything from waking up every day at 5am and doing two hours of creative work before the sun rises to taking naps and immediately doing creative work upon waking. It could be doing an extended isolation period in nature to setting up an entirely analog creative area in our houses. It could be following Jeff Tweedy’s book advice about How To Write One Song or it could be following Julia Cameron’s book advice about doing handwritten Morning Pages every day.
So… we’re going to experiment and see what works, what we learn about creativity, and what we learn about ourselves. And for those that are interested, we’d love for you to join us and participate in the challenges/experiments as much or as little as you’d like.
Interviews and Conversations
We want to talk to smart and inspiring creatives. Writers, musicians, painters, cartoonists, filmmakers, improvisors, and people that we admire for their creative thinking, generous sharing, and output. People who have thought deeply about what they do, and are willing to share what they’ve learned.
Showcases and Exhibits
As Seth Godin puts it so well, if you’re going to make stuff, you have to “ship it.” That means we have to put something out in the world. Part of “shipping it” is this entire project. That’s why we decided to do this publicly instead of just for ourselves. However, there is also part of “shipping” that will be even more uncomfortable - sharing the output of our creativity. We don’t know exactly the right forum to do this yet, but we would like to ensure there is a place to showcase the work that we do as part of The Creativity Guild, and also a place for any work that you do and would like to share with this growing community.
And finally, we thought we should set some ground rules for ourselves and for you, should you decide to actively join us in this journey…
The Creativity Guild Manifesto!
We realize that “Manifesto” is a pretty stodgy word, and probably too stodgy to really be linked to the spirit of discovery that is essential in any kind of creative endeavour. Also calling anything a “Manifesto” is pretty pretentious. But that’s also what we love about it. The exercise of creating a manifesto for this work. It feels like we’re planting our flag in the battle against creative stagnation. It’s our call to arms.
This is something we are committing ourselves to, and if any of this rings true to you, you can either follow along to see where this journey takes us, or you can strap on your swimming goggles and jump into the deep end with us to see where it goes. There may not be a lifeguard on duty to make sure we’re safe, but the water is pretty warm, and there’s room for us all. Have we milked the swimming metaphor enough? We think we have, so let’s move on.
Without further adieu…. The Manifesto!
Oh right.
There is no Manifesto here. Oops.
We wanted to do something more visual and uh… creative than plain text for our manifesto, so we’ve turned our manifesto into an image gallery and put it all on Instagram. Check it out and let us know what you think!
And like the iconic Steve Jobs Keynotes of yore… there’s ONE MORE THING. Actually, there are two more things.
In order the get the SECOND thing, please fill out this important Creativity Guild Medical Questionnaire. (for your safety and our management of liability)
And now, the REAL “one more thing” - you are cordially invited to download, print and laminate your very own Creativity Guild Membership Card. We hope you carry it with pride! (We will obviously be working on a variety of discounts for card-carrying members…)
Have we missed anything? Please let us know.
Next edition, we are kicking off the project in earnest with an exciting guest. We can’t wait to share it with you!
Welcome to the Creativity Guild! We’re thrilled to start the journey with you!
Geoff & Steve
(P.S. As you might be able to tell with the Instagram gallery, the medical survey, and the Membership Card, the Creativity Guild is NOT just a Substack. We are going to post material wherever it makes the most sense. The Substack is going to be our home base, but there will be tentacles! Tentacles into other exciting types of content!)
What a fun read! Thank you for bringing this into the world, @StevePratt and @GeoffSiskind. I love it on so many levels, I could write a novella here... but that's for another time. Thank you again, such a pleasure to discover your work.