Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
There is a drawing I made in a therapist's waiting room when I was twenty-six, on the back of a magazine subscription card, in ballpoint pen while I was waiting. It was of a door. I didn't think about...
Read article →Drama therapy asks you to step into a role, and in stepping into a role, it offers you something that everyday therapy rarely can: plausible deniability. The character said that, not you. The characte...
Read article →I came to art therapy sideways, the way most adults do — not through intention but through desperation. A therapist suggested it. I resisted for weeks. I am not an artist, I said, as if that were rele...
Read article →Love poetry is very old, and that oldness is worth sitting with. Before the novel, before memoir, before the essay — long before almost any form we'd recognize — there were poems about wanting someone...
Read article →Something happens when you make music. Not listen — make. The two activities are related but neurologically distinct, and the distinction matters if you're interested in what creative practice does fo...
Read article →The body knows things. This is not mysticism — it is physiology. Before a thought becomes conscious, before language catches up with experience, the body has already been registering it: in posture, i...
Read article →Prose poetry sits in a strange and productive no-man's-land. It doesn't break into lines. It doesn't worry about the volta or the tercet. And yet it refuses to be ordinary prose, to be content with ju...
Read article →Flash Fiction as Art Form: What Extreme Brevity Demands from a Writer A complete story in under a thousand words. In five hundred. In two hundred. In six. The last example is the one credited to Hemin...
Read article →Haiku as Mindfulness Practice: Slowing Down to See the Moment The haiku is the most minimal serious art form in the world. Seventeen syllables, arranged in three lines, typically presenting a concrete...
Read article →The word elegy carries weight before it is even read. You know, opening an elegy, that it is about loss. You have been warned. And yet that warning does not prepare you — not fully — because grief is...
Read article →There is a letter I wrote when I was twenty-four to someone who had hurt me in a way I couldn't articulate out loud. I wrote three pages, front and back, in a handwriting I didn't recognize as my own...
Read article →Memoir Writing as Therapy: Making Meaning from Difficult Experience Writing about your own life is one of the more courageous things a person can attempt, and one of the more demanding. Unlike journal...
Read article →The Incubation Period in Creativity: Why Stepping Away Solves Problems Every creative person knows the experience: you push on a problem for hours, making no progress, growing increasingly frustrated,...
Read article →The Personal Essay and the Art of Vulnerability on the Page The personal essay is among the most intimate things a person can write, and among the most technically demanding. It invites the writer ont...
Read article →Poetry Therapy: How Writing and Reading Poems Supports Adult Mental Health Poetry has been used for healing in one form or another for as long as written language has existed. The ancient Greeks under...
Read article →Spoken Word Poetry: How Performance Builds Healing Community There is something that happens in a room where spoken word poetry is being performed that is different from almost any other cultural gath...
Read article →Sleep and Creative Problem Solving: How Your Brain Works Overnight The sleeping brain is not dormant. It is running a complex maintenance and processing operation that, among many other functions, wor...
Read article →Why Daydreaming Is Actually Creative Work Daydreaming has a reputation problem. In school it was the thing you got in trouble for, the sign of an inattentive mind, the opposite of productive engagemen...
Read article →Walking and Creativity: The Research on Why Movement Sparks Ideas There is a long tradition among writers, philosophers, and composers of thinking on foot. Wordsworth composed poems while walking the...
Read article →Why You Get Your Best Ideas in the Shower: The Science of Insight You have almost certainly had the experience. You are not trying to solve anything. You are performing a routine bodily task, your min...
Read article →Environmental Design for Creativity: How Your Space Shapes What You Make The relationship between physical environment and creative output is something most people sense intuitively but rarely investi...
Read article →The Creativity of Boredom: Why Doing Nothing Might Be the Best Creative Strategy Nobody wants to be bored. The entire architecture of modern digital life is designed to prevent it — the phone fills ev...
Read article →Building a Creative Routine That Actually Works for You Ask ten creative people what their daily routine looks like and you will get ten completely different answers. One novelist swears by writing at...
Read article →Constraints and Creativity: Why Limitations Often Make Better Art It seems counterintuitive. More resources, more time, more options — these should produce better work. And yet creative history is lit...
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