Certain tenets ink my brain like lines from a resonant poem or song. They define who I am and keep me centered when I feel like I’m veering off-track. These tenets arise from lived heart expansion and heart explosion, from daft pursuits of burning yearnings and from the pain of feeling & making sense of…
To flourish in the publishing life as a thought leader or artisanal author, know the book biz and know your options. Easier said than done, right?
Take your novel, memoir, trade nonfiction book, your creative mess-in-the-works, your business brand identity, and distill it into 6 words. It’s not easy. As more than one person has observed, coming up with ideas is easy. Keeping them simple is hard work. But it’s necessary. Without the art of idea distillation, you get lost & frustrated and…
In college, I ogled over a smoky black-and-white photograph of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In their book-flooded study, Jean-Paul sits at his desk on one end of the room, and on the other side Simone sits at hers. The photo of the French philosophical duo—however pent-up their appearance and however strained their relationship—promised…
“I was cultivating stupidity.” That’s what Andre Dubus III said when he wrote his first memoir, Townie. The son of a prominent short story writer, Dubus had met success as a novelist, the least of his successes being that The House of Fog and Sand has membership in Oprah’s club. But when it came to…
One of our greatest needs as business artists is for our best self to be seen and for a vision of that best self’s quest to be held and mirrored back to us. Earlier this week, a beloved client and Tracking Wonder enthusiast sent me a note that linked to this blog post by the…
When working on multiple projects, at least one key difference exists between those creatives and business artists who flounder and those who flourish.
Their ability to learn to discern.
We turned toward art as kids because we could not not create. But we also turned to art for our own defenses. It quieted the yelling downstairs. It salved the confusion of being an outsider when we didn’t have the language of feeling like an outsider. Retreating to the imagination’s citadel felt safe and strangely…
The Idea The idea started to congeal this past summer: In the past few years, I had offered a creative work flow series, an author’s mentorship program that sold out, and a live author’s intensive that sold out – all of which were met with great fanfare. But last summer, I yearned to offer something…
Note to Readers: One joy of shifting from a DIY attitude to a DIT (Do It Together) mindset is that you get to work with talented people who lift you up. That’s my experience with Heidi Johnson. Heidi has trained and apprenticed with me, worked as an events assistant & facilitator, and now serves as…
Discover the inspiration behind Tracking Wonder. When life (literally) goes up in flames, learn to use the transformative power of wonder to find hope and even thrive in challenging times.
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