Sunday (It is Sunday somewhere, right?) Book Review

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Book Reviews!.

I picked The 12 Secrets of Highly Creative Women up on a whim for 50% off what are already delightfully low book prices at Goodwill. This is not the sort of book I usually buy.  Maybe 10% of books I read are non-fiction and those are usually not so screamingly self-help. I don’t mean to disparage the genre. I’ve read some life-changing books of this sort, but aside from a binge I went on between the ages of 16 and 18 and my final year of college when I read five books on anxiety hoping to put and end to increasingly crippling panic attacks, I don’t tend to like them very much and they almost always go on longer than they should.

Though this book did go on longer than I wanted it to, I remained engaged and inspired through the first seven secrets. McMeekin manages to write good advice based on her own experience and the experience of women she interviewed and successfully spin that advice in a cultural context of who we are as women and to what extent we can reclaim our individual spirit in a culture perfectly happy to let us submerge our own creative urges for any perceived collective good. Each chapter covers one of the twelve secrets and moves through describing and analyzing to an exercise for the reader to use to reflect and set goals. The margins throughout the book are filled with quotes on all of the twelve topics. I found myself circling the ones I liked best or drawing a little heart next to the quote.

I skimmed the last five secrets as McMeekin at this point got a bit too prescriptive for me in her calling for logs and charts and  hair-splittling list of feelings. Ironically, I think that sort of thing just zaps my creative energy and takes my creative time.

But I LOVED the parts that just mused and the book is worth a read at least for that.

From the margin of page 97: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deep fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.” –Marianne Williamson, Writer

12 secrets of highly creative women

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

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.

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