an argument for creative community

and why a writer’s workshop — even if you aren’t a writer — might help you make mort art.

for those of you who don’t already know, i’ve been teaching and leading an artist’s workshop for a little over four years now.

it started when i was 21, nearly 22, and working at a diner in leucadia, just north of the city of san diego; like all diners, it was greasy and cramped and cozy and the people eating there had been eating there for years. amongst these lifers i had a regular who i chatted with once a week when he came in on wednesdays. one day i told him, in those roundabout conversational ways that we reveal parts of ourselves to our customers, that i was a writer. “really?” he asked me. “because i’m looking for a writing teacher.”

it turned out he was opening a coffee shop near csu san marcos, twenty minutes from the diner i was working in, and he was looking for people to help build up a calendar of events & meet-ups & classes so that the shop could be a spot for community instead of just a cup of coffee. and who but i, waitress-writer-extraordinaire, was free to teach?

that’s how it was born. since then the coffee shop’s gone under, just like all the other coffee shops in that neighborhood always go under, and i packed up my apartment and left southern california, but throughout the years, cities, breakups, breakdowns, and one global pandemic, i’ve kept on teaching and worskhopping.

you may be thinking, what exactly does one do in this workshop? to which i would say, not only is that a really great question, but i also have an answer to it.

over the years i’ve noticed a decidedly negative trend with the artists i work with. everyone — and i mean everyone — has very strict and rigid rules about what they are and aren’t capable of within their artistic lives. and more than that, they are typically pursuing their artistic lives at the expense of their “regular” lives — both sacrificing their relationships and mental health and money to make it as an artist (whatever that means) and also upholding a harmful and not necessarily true dichotomy about where “art” ends and “real life” begins. and because i’m nosy, and also because i was their teacher and all that, i decided i was no longer content just teaching poetry, and instead i wanted to help teach people how to be creative in a way that doesn’t burn their love life and their mental health and bank accounts. namely, i wanted to help other people spend less time sabotaging their creative pursuits and projects, and spend more time actually making the things and lives they dreamed of making.

artists are masterminds at self-sabotage, but we don’t have to be. we’ve all heard of the suffering artist, and that we won’t make any money doing what we’re doing, and the list of alcoholic deaths and overdoses and suicides in every creative field is enough to turn a man to stone. but that’s just the last few hundred years doing its damage. these ideas we have about art and the people who make it — that you have to struggle, and suffer, and fight against god or the devil himself — that it will make you insane, or that you’re already insane, or that you can never relinquish your insanity and your darkness else you lose the ability to make your art — that you have to do it alone, that you have to sacrifice everything else, that you are engaged in the battle of your lifetime every time you sit down on your stool with a paintbrush — that a bad painting, a bad poem, a bad day or a bad review or just a bad year mean you are also bad, so that every page, every canvas, every word has to be exactingly perfect, else you will be revealed as a failure — all of these (extremely harmful) ideas are not innate to making art. they were all constructed to support certain ideals, classes of people, and economic systems. they do not actually reflect the real truth of the human (or creative) condition.

but that means you can do something about them.

i, too, also struggle with the exact things that my students struggle with; i say struggle instead of struggled because there is no completely getting off the train of self-imposed suffering. we’re all going to have unhelpful thoughts; the only difference is, compared to my students, i’ve devoted a considerable amount of time and energy and research into figuring out how to make good work, consistently & without destroying myself in the process, regardless of the thoughts in my head. they also do this same work, every day and every time they sit down to make things. i do not have a monopoly on these things. i just simply, through time & fortune & circumstance, landed on the path that meant i had to think about them all the time. (and thank god i did, because i would probably not be making art or be at all sane if i haven’t.) i’m not cured of the condition — god knows probably nobody is — but i also no longer think of being an artist as being a death sentence.

if we’re lucky, we’ll all spend the rest of our lives trying to unlearn that which we’ve decided is most important for us to unlearn, and picking up the skills we’ve decided are most important for us to learn in their wake. but — and it’s a big but — it’s not a finite destination that one can reach. there aren’t a certain number of hours we just have to dutifully log before we can cross that all-encompassing magic threshold; there is no lightbulb moment we can induce (pharmacologically or otherwise) to bring ourselves out of the woods and into the meadow of self-love. it’s a practice, not a postal code. and having a practice around your creativity and your mental health, not to mention the practice of making whatever art you make, means committing, again and again, to do the things that you want to do. you may have a lightbulb moment; you may not. but when the lightbulb fades and you wake up the next day and the credits haven’t rolled — then what? it turns out you have to keep living even after you’ve had your triumphant win. one moment, one night, one embrace in the cold hard rain outside the train station — these are the kind of things that end movies: the plot resolved, the characters evolved, the audience dutifully lulled into a sort of easy sleep by the fact the principal characters have made up, and Realized Things, and as such the audience can now forget about them because they’ve done what they needed to do for the audience to go home & take a nap imagining the sort of scenario in which things just End Well and End Neatly.

there is no such ending in real life.

we can, however, make our journey through and with this practice easier. i don’t claim to have a monopoly on how to do so; all i know is that i’ve found things that work for my own faulty, cavity-hole ridden artist-brain and that, by extension, if the hundred or so people i’ve had roll in and out of workshop over the last four years are any indication, my own artist-brain is bone-numbingly similar to all the other artist-brains living within the same geography, generation, and general sense of malaise.

so i teach, because i’ve figured out stuff that works for me, and other people seem to also be helped by it, and also it’s just a whole shopping cart of fun. it’s genuinely one of the greatest honors & joys of my life to be in conversation with other makers and doers and to have the extreme privilege to help people in their most vulnerable, creative blind spots and dark nights of the soul. i love it, more than almost anything else i’ve ever done, which is why i keep doing it.

by having a good and solid creative community on which to connect with, and intentionally practicing with different exercises and thought experiments to expand your definition of the self and art, and doing your all-around best to undo some of the nastier, most glaringly faulty wiring that your parents and society and capitalism writ large laid deep into your brain from when you first ended up here on the planet, you can figure out how to make things without making yourself miserable. and that’s basically what i am interested in doing, for myself and others, not least because i get helped immensely by the process. (i have my faults, but fully embracing what makes me feel good is not one of them.)

the workshop does these things, so that everyone involved benefits from the things that you can’t access working in isolation. you get community, first of all, a thing that is as necessary to healthy creativity as having a working heartbeat. and you get someone moderating the discussion (me) and challenging any of the unhelpful or straight-up toxic thoughts that bubble up in groups and random conversations and debates. and you also get assignments and exercises and experiences that, like the hobbits taking off to mordor, you are responsible for going off & doing. you also get accountability for all these things, so that whether you do or don’t do it you’ll have someone who knows you were supposed to.

making art and living a creative life — one where you live in line with your truest selves, one where you make peace with the fear and anxiety and jealousy that live alongside you in your head — one where you make your own choices from a place of embodiment and power, instead of fear or shame — these things are not easy undertakings. they are not for the weak of heart. but i promise you it’s possible, and what’s more is i promise you it’s worth it.

maybe you’re reading this and you’re thinking but joelle, i don’t have a creative bone in my body! to which i would respond: of course you do. (i would also venture to maybe ask you, as kindly and gently as i could who told you that?). we are all innately creative, and the idea that we’re not is just the leftover toxic sludge of earlier strains of colonialism & patriarchy & the age of empire, all of which combine with the present strains of colonialism & patriarchy & the age of empire to make life as miserable as possible for the most number of people. but just because we’ve inherited this version of the world doesn’t mean we can do nothing to upend it.

you are creative, and i am creative, and every single one of us is creative, because it’s literally in our DNA.

we are the making ape, this species that is always tinkering and designing and playing and imagining and painting, and if you think we aren’t, then i encourage you to take your head out of this century’s asshole and look back. back, to your grandmother embroidering with saved thread and salvaged fabric; back, to your great-grandfather hammering together a table to serve the family dinner on; back, to your great-great-great-great-greats who put seeds into the soil and tacked their favorite watercolors onto the wall and built houses and churches and bonfires and mended their own clothes and learned to cook chicken and danced for the harvest and learned to braid hair and used nothing more than a thimble and thread to build a life. they fed their children whatever they could come up with to feed them, and their children’s children, and because they used love and creativity and mindfulness to make these things now you eat the same thing every time you go home for the holidays. we are all the inheritors of this creativity. it is our home and birthright and our blessing. and all of these people, who made things and dreamed things and stood waist high in the shit storm of life, made them with no shortage of money problems, time problems, space problems, life problems. they made things despite these limitations, and in spite of them, and you will also make things despite and in spite of your limitations, and that is how the world has always been made, one patchwork quilt or window mosaic at a time.

you are a creative person. please believe that. but whether or not you are living a creative life is another story.

that’s where workshop comes in :-)

anywho!

if you want to learn more about workshop you can hit me up or mozy on over to the workshop page to poke around and sign up. a month’s worth of exercises & assignments is only $10, and for $15 you can get all the above plus a personalized weekly assignment designed to help you with the things you yourself need most help with. (for context, when i teach in-person, my single weekly workshop costs $15 per session.)

i’ll keep on badgering everyone to sign up in future newsletters (a girl’s gotta eat, after all; and have tea, and smokes, and a roof to keep the rain off..); and hopefully if your interest is at all piqued by this or you want to build a healthier creative practice you’ll join us.

aside from all that: i’m alive. i’m well. i’m in amsterdam. can’t recommend trying all three of these things at once enough if you’re able to.

and as always — love you! mean it! sign up for workshop!

the manic pixie dream girl’s guide to existential angst is a free newsletter (and the occasional poem) from joelle schumacher. if you enjoy their work or would like to support it, you can become a paid subscriber, subscribe to or write in to their advice column, or buy them a coffee. they also offer an online creative recovery workshop, for poets & artists of all stripes.

you can find more info here.