The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women. Gail McMeekin
back to us our overreactions to day-to-day inconveniences or irritations. Her mission now is to “abolish global whining.” She works with the faculty of the esteemed Mind-Body Clinic at Deaconess/Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, speaks to packed audiences, has award-winning videos on PBS, and just published a new book.
I have to thank my husband for discovering her. A PBS devotee who usually watches science programs that are too technical for me, he came upon Loretta while channel-surfing and insisted that I watch her show, The Joy of Stress, since I've also spent years training people in stress management. I found Loretta captivating and refreshing and knew she was destined to be a blockbuster. My husband and I have listened to her routines repeatedly, and each time we discover a new nuance. Daring to take risk led Loretta to the creation of a new methodology for reducing stress.
Sometimes new enticements take us by surprise. Dancer Leslie Neal happened to hear about another choreographer who was working with women in prisons in Seattle. Shortly after hearing the story, Leslie woke up one morning with a jolt and a commitment to try it herself: “It's been like a calling. Whenever I begin to struggle, more opportunities come. I've found what I believe I am truly supposed to be doing, and I'm very grateful.” Within six months of this revelation, Leslie initiated “Inside Out—Expressive Arts Workshops for Incarcerated Women” at the Broward Correctional Institution in Florida, which is now the longest ongoing prison arts program in the state and has received national attention for its success. Since 1994, it has been implemented in two other facilities in Florida, and Leslie has taught workshops at women's prisons in Michigan and California.
The purpose of “Inside Out” is to utilize art-making and creative expression as tools to enhance women's self-esteem and confidence, to expand communication skills and self-expression, and to encourage personal change.
As for me, prizes mean nothing. My prize is my work.
—KATHARINE HEPBURN, ACTRESS
With research support, Leslie is now working to develop a curriculum guide for other prison arts programs. As she writes about her work in her article, “Miles from Nowhere, Teaching Dance in Prison” in High Performance, Leslie says, “Why do I go to prison once a week? I go because I feel safer there, with them, than I do outside. I go because now they expect me to come. I go because I believe in the change that we have all experienced with each other. I go because I miss them. I go because they heal me. I go because I am a woman, and in them I see parts of me.”
I met Leslie at a Common Boundary conference on creativity. Recently she took another risk and moved her home away from her warehouse dance studio and into a cedar cabin on an acre and a half of land so she could honor her need to connect with the peacefulness of the country: “In my studio in Miami, I created everything I had ever dreamed of having. It's been hard to move from that physical place because it represents many aspects of my driven, emerging artist over the past ten years. But now, as I move into my forties, I want to live in a place where I can feel the ground underneath me, see the stars at night, watch the cycles of the moon, and just be present in that. My inner voice is telling me to seek out those things that nurture me and feed me both spiritually and creatively.” Leslie's courage to experiment, nudged by her strong intuitive sense of what's right for her, has made all the difference in her life.
Impulsive or planned risks can be either positive or negative. Negative risk taking can be reckless, dangerous, harmful to yourself and others, and even fatal.
Solitude, says the moon shell. Every person, especially every woman, should be alone sometime during the year, some part of each week, and each day.
—ANNE MORROW LINDBERGH WRITER
Investing your life savings into a business that doesn't feel intuitively right to you or skipping your pap smear for two years are examples of negative risks. Positive risks involve challenging yourself, following your creative hunches, and testing your strengths. Positive risks include going back to school to pursue a subject you love, going to Paris because you feel called there, or taking voice lessons. Positive risk takers support themselves with a plan of action, even if the plan is to just experiment with an idea or a strategy. Stepping out of the boundaries of security and stretching to induce growth are essential to positive risking. While we may be fortunate to have a strong support system, positive risk taking is a solo trip. It is an individual process of honoring your own belief system, pursuing a trail of clues, and dedicating yourself wholeheartedly to a path. The women in this chapter all took calculated risks based on the confidence that they were choosing the right course of action, even though there were no guarantees. They were curious, compelled, or challenged, but they also chose carefully to take a risk on behalf of their growth. In general, creative women don't worship the god of security; rather they respond to their inner urges to try out new inklings.
Challenge: YOUR RISK-TAKING HISTORY
What is your personal history as a risk taker? Do you take calculated risks—where you planned out the steps, or impulsive risks—with no forethought or preparation? Identify the key elements of your successes and failures with both kinds of risks. Then write down a risk profile for yourself with guidelines for future risk taking based on your past experience and natural abilities.
Intuiting New Pathways
The story of Rosette Gault, the inventor and developer of paper clay, illustrates how important following intuitive hunches is in cultivating creativity. After many years of running a successful ceramic design studio, and having become a specialist in the art of making eggshell-thin porcelain sculpture, Rosette acknowledged that she needed to invigorate her creative process.
Rosette applied for and received a grant from the Banff Center for the Arts in Canada and set out on a self-declared sabbatical. Twenty years earlier, while in graduate school, Rosette had questioned her teachers about the fragility of clay and why once the clay form cracks, you can't repair it. She was told, logically enough, that “clay shrinks,” but she still wondered what material might prevent these stress fractures. Experts told her that some high-tech material would have to be developed to stop the shrinking, and if it ever was invented, it would cost a fortune to use and wouldn't be practical for use in ceramics. But Rosette stayed loyal to her dream of finding an easy answer, explaining, “The puzzle had been bugging me in the back of my mind for all those years.”
While at Banff, she and another artist, a papermaker, fired clay and recycled paper together, and noted its lightness after firing. Intrigued, Rosette experimented further, trying different combinations. One day, she says, “I mixed up a batch of old brochures into pulp and put it into the clay and made a giant piece much larger than I normally would to test my limit. The form proceeded to crack while it dried. I came back to the dried-out work a couple of days later and looked at the crack and said, ‘Oh yuck.’ So I thought, it'll probably crack again but I'll just smear some of my paper clay emulsion mixture right into the crack, so I did.
Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.
—HELEN KELLER, ACTIVIST
“What did I have to lose since I had already lost the piece? I thought, well, if it behaves like normal, which I expected it to do, I figured it would crack again as it dried. Then I forgot all about it and a few days later I came back, but to my surprise, the crack was gone. The piece was dry and whole.”
Not quite believing what had happened, Rosette kept quietly testing her mixture, and was fortunate enough to extend her stay at Banff to continue her analysis. Her new blend kept on working. After checking professional journals and trying her combination in different climates, she began to realize that she had indeed invented a new form of clay. Her invention (which recently was awarded a United States patent) has transformed ceramics forever. Her early puzzlement about why clay cracks emerged again mid-career to nudge her to transform the laws of ceramic history.
Another innovator, Joline Godfrey, founded Independent Means, Inc., and the nonprofit group An Income of Her Own. Both organizations are doing breakthrough work in teaching girls the values and skills of financial independence as they grow up. Joline's hope is that this next generation