Creative Spaces

lizshine74by lizshine74

In A Room Of Your Own.

Cup of morning coffee

I’ve been thinking about how spaces support our creative work. Support us, really. I’ve been trying to expand the spaces where I can work. I’ve got a little office space in the middle of our upstairs that I keep neat and inspiring. I make tweaks whenever I need to turn up (or change) the vibe. My most recent addition was an African violet for the edge of my desk. It was long enough ago now that I’ve discovered that it has added checking the blooms and deadheading old flowers to make room for new growth to the micromovements that are part of getting started with my writing time. While the coffee brews, I flow between a few yoga poses. I head upstairs and turn on string lights and two lamps, then put on my noise-canceling headphones before getting down to work. I place a weighted blanket on my lap. I click on the votive candle, kept just at eye level behind my computer. I clear away any dead leaves on the plant. These are all tiny movements that take little time. I have a watercolor and an acrylic (painted by my sister) on the wall. I have some sassy magnets and lots of photos of friends and loved ones posted to corkboards. Many photos feature the strong, creative women who have carried me through so much, and still do.

Yet, this space exists in my home where there are other spaces to tend to. Sometimes, the pull of those other spaces is hard to resist, so I look for spaces to write out in the world. There’s a coffee shop a five-minute walk from home that I’ll go to if they are open. The light is just right and the music isn’t intrusive. The coffee is second-best, which is pretty good for a coffee town like Olympia. I discovered a few weeks ago that another good space for writing is on long drives on the freeway. Why I never considered this as a space to write is funny looking back. I didn’t trust not being connected to Wi-Fi. Didn’t realize I could connect to my hotspot and still not run out of data before the month ended, if needed. I learned to trust the liminal space between Word not connected to Wi-Fi and Word connected again. Freeway writing is perfect because I get anxious on the freeway and can’t drive on it myself due to panic attacks. Everyone is a little better off if I am lost in a piece of writing instead of imagining death around every corner. I can sometimes write at school, though this is hard because there is always work to be done there. When my students are writing I will sometimes write, because I do believe that the collective energy of creative work is a thing. So, I will write to contribute to that vibe. The café at Barnes and Noble has the best hours, but the acoustics are terrible. If I am writing there, I bring my noise-canceling headphones.

When the weather gets warm, there are picnic tables and park benches everywhere. In winter, spaces become more scarce.

Setting up a space for yourself that is peaceful and inspiring is truly an act of self-love. I write these posts as much for myself as for all of you. The idea here is to explore how it is that we make time, even though at times the world is in chaos all around us. That doesn’t even account for our own self-doubt and habits of mind that keep us small and scared. I sat down to write this post not really knowing what I was going to say, knowing only that I wanted to explore how we clear space to create. I knew that it was not as simple as claiming an empty den, or setting up a desk and then drawing a line around it with our care and love and attention, though those are very good starts.

I see now that it has as much to do with those micromovements as it does anything. Last night, I left my email browser open. When I sat down to write this morning, I knew the ritual was to close out that browser and get to work. My hand hovered there for a few beats, where I could have disrupted the sequence of movements that allow for flow and sabotaged my morning.

I think that the thing to do first is to identify these spaces. After that is to have a ritual to signal to the brain what you are in that space for, and to prompt flow. At home this is more elaborate, but I see a clear path to condensing this into a travel-sized plan. For me, it will look like this: order a beverage (if applicable), before sitting do a star pose to goddess. Or if I can’t stand, then do a quick stretch to the sky and maybe side to side and/or heart to the sky, then sit and check my weekly plan for what I said I’d work on that day (this goes back to post about having a plan), close out all windows that are not the thing you are to work on, don the noise-canceling headphones, then get to work. You can tweak this ritual to suit your needs, but this one will work for me for now. I can see myself in the future maybe adding listening to one song I love, or reading a poem. For now, I’ll start with this. I knew I wanted to write about how we make space for this work, but I did not know that I needed and would come up with a plan for how to take my show on the road, which I’ve needed. When I try writing out in the world, I encounter this awkwardness that I now realize comes from not knowing how to get started.

I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.