Create in the Twilight Zone – a Guest Blog on Lateral Action

One of my favorite creativity blogs is Mark McGuinness’s Lateral Action. Based in London, Mark is a poet who consults with entrepreneurs, creatives, and businesses. Sound familiar? He’s on the board of a literary magazine – one I published in a dozen years ago. He was a reluctant entrepreneur. He is a kindred spirit.

So, I’m thrilled he’s posted my guest blog, “Create in the Twilight Zone.”

Here’s the beginning (and zap over to Lateral Action and leave your comments there – and then subscribe to Mark’s blog and his slew of other fantastic offerings):

Each morning before dawn, novelist Nicholson Baker would slip out of bed without waking his wife, creep downstairs without stirring his kids, make a pot of coffee, light a fire in his wood-burning stove, flip on his laptop – the only other light besides the flames – and write.

In that dark twilight space between wake and dream, Baker created a quirky novella that celebrates the extraordinary of the ordinary: A Box of Matches. His naïve narrator, a medical textbook editor who lives in Maine with wife, kids, and duck Greta, riffs on everything from the pleasure of how a dishwasher’s top rack rolls out to the exhilaration of scrubbing first thing in the morning a dish left out overnight (“smiling with the clenched-teeth smile of the joyful scrubber”).

What Baker and his narrator embody are what novelist Jonathan Rosen says every great writer possesses: wonder. Read the rest.

See you in the woods,
Jeffrey

P.S. More prompts from the Virtual Tracking Wonder Retreat to come this week!

From Reactivity to Creativity in Times of Fertile Confusion
Kripalu Centre, Massachusetts, May 2011

The Yoga As Muse TRIBE Facilitator Training
May-September (mostly long-distance except for 9-day residency in the verdant Hudson Valley in August)