Minding the Muse: A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers, and Other Creators

Minding the Muse is a practical handbook for the artist or writer—highly experienced, aspiring, or somewhere in between. Long draws from her extensive background as a poet, writer, and master teacher, but also gathers the insights and practices of a wide range of high-achieving artists, including mystery writer Raymond Chandler, choreographer Twyla Tharp, poet and performance artist Patti Smith, and the painter Joan Miró. Beginning with the first sparks of artistic creation—“Gathering, Hoarding, Conceptualizing”—Long moves through the various stages to “Completing Works” and “Poet as Peddler, Painter as Pusher: Marketing.” Every creative worker will find something here to take to heart and into the studio or workroom.

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Minding the Muse: A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers, and Other Creators

Minding the Muse is a practical handbook for the artist or writer—highly experienced, aspiring, or somewhere in between. Long draws from her extensive background as a poet, writer, and master teacher, but also gathers the insights and practices of a wide range of high-achieving artists, including mystery writer Raymond Chandler, choreographer Twyla Tharp, poet and performance artist Patti Smith, and the painter Joan Miró. Beginning with the first sparks of artistic creation—“Gathering, Hoarding, Conceptualizing”—Long moves through the various stages to “Completing Works” and “Poet as Peddler, Painter as Pusher: Marketing.” Every creative worker will find something here to take to heart and into the studio or workroom.

13.95 In Stock
Minding the Muse: A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers, and Other Creators

Minding the Muse: A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers, and Other Creators

by Priscilla Long
Minding the Muse: A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers, and Other Creators

Minding the Muse: A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers, and Other Creators

by Priscilla Long

Paperback

$13.95 
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Overview

Minding the Muse is a practical handbook for the artist or writer—highly experienced, aspiring, or somewhere in between. Long draws from her extensive background as a poet, writer, and master teacher, but also gathers the insights and practices of a wide range of high-achieving artists, including mystery writer Raymond Chandler, choreographer Twyla Tharp, poet and performance artist Patti Smith, and the painter Joan Miró. Beginning with the first sparks of artistic creation—“Gathering, Hoarding, Conceptualizing”—Long moves through the various stages to “Completing Works” and “Poet as Peddler, Painter as Pusher: Marketing.” Every creative worker will find something here to take to heart and into the studio or workroom.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781603813631
Publisher: Coffeetown Press
Publication date: 09/01/2016
Pages: 128
Product dimensions: 5.10(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Priscilla Long is a Seattle-based author and teacher of writing. Her work includes poetry, creative nonfictions, fictions, history, and science. Her other most recent book is Fire and Stone: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? Her book of poems is Crossing Over: Poems. She is also author of The Writer's Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life and the scholarly history book Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America's Bloody Coal Industry. For more information please visit PriscillaLong.com and PriscillaLong.org.

Read an Excerpt

Invitations proliferate; time evaporates. But if you start declining invitations, invitations start declining. You will rightly feel that you are hurting your chances for your work to gain a wider audience.

If you want to keep working though, you must set limits. It's as if an invitation were a chocolate gelato--good in small bites, bad as a stand-in for leafy greens. Determine the number of talks you will give per year, the amount of money you will charge for a talk, the number of pro-bono presentations you will give per year. If money starts coming in, even in moderate sums, consider employing a part-time assistant to help you plan or to just plain help.

I'm not famous. Still, on some days I get interrupted so incessantly you'd think I'd won the Nobel Prize in Literature. My best help with this problem of distraction and interruption is my intention to get four uninterrupted hours of work per day. The goal of time on the job--the job being the creative work itself, not teaching, answering email, sending work out, applying for grants, or other related tasks--is what keeps me on course. And make no mistake. I am looking with deep envy at the routine of three morning hours and three afternoon hours set up by Chuck Close (and also by the ultra-prolific Joyce Carol Oates). For now, given my other responsibilities, I am usually getting four hours. My timer is my taskmaster.

As your work begins to gain more attention, it's useful to pay attention to how you want to present it, and to how you want to present yourself in public. As an artist who is visible, what is it that you want to convey? What values do you want others to take away? What do you want to say and what do you want to model about art and about making art? When you serve as a public figure, whether on the radio or in the classroom or in a live performance or at a gallery opening, you stand for art--for the particular form of art you make, as well as for all art. That's a responsibility.

It may be helpful to take a class in acting or in the Alexander Technique, a body alignment practice developed originally for performers. I've done both and both helped me overcome my original stage fright. There are improvisation classes, classes in performing, classes in public speaking.

Look for model creators, past and present, who are visible in the culture, artists you admire. What can you learn from them by way of comporting yourself as a public figure? One I stand in awe of is Twyla Tharp as interviewed (on YouTube) by Norma Kamali. Check it out (youtu.be/atGJkkzVe54). I'm looking at Tharp's posture, her thoughtful and erudite responses, her dress, her lack of stuttering and stammering, her sincere and extremely professional presentation and the quintessential brilliance of the content she presents.



Table of Contents

Introduction 1
I. Productivity: Learning to Work 3
II. Gathering, Hoarding, Conceptualizing 13
III. Opening the Problem, Closing the Door 21
IV. Finding and Inventing Forms 27
V. Feelings Are Unimportant 35
VI. Acquiring Skills, Mastering Domains 39
VII. Creativity Heuristics for Artists 47
VIII. Taking Time, Making Space 55
IX. Completing Works 63
X. A Life in Art: Peer Artists 69
XI. Accounting for Works 77
XII. Poet as Peddler, Painter as Pusher: Marketing 83
XIII. Becoming a Public Figure 93
XIV. Developing High Self‑Regard 99
Epilogue 105
Acknowledgments 107
Index 109
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