From a 1956 profile of Edward Hopper in Time magazine, here’s an arresting illustration of single-minded dedication to one’s art by deliberately embracing silence and limiting one’s self-expression in other forms to avoid careless leaks of creative vision and energy: Offered a gold medal by the National Institute of Arts and Letters last year, Hopper…
Category: Writing & Creativity
When Artificial Intelligence Hacks the Muse
Stephen Marche in The New Yorker: Sudowrite uses, as its base, GPT-3, the latest version of a deep-learning neural network that can auto-generate text. The organization that created GPT-3, OpenAI, was founded as a nonprofit with a mission “to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,…
For Writers: Make a Place in Your Plan for the Irrational and Mysterious
Novelist Maria Mutch, writing for Literary Hub: Efficiency, rationalism, progress, all perfectly decent ideas that also call to mind the American highway-building madness of the 1950s, for instance, or the current financial paradigm of ceaseless and predictable growth, and which, left to overtake the novel-writing process, can obscure or squeeze out altogether what is mysterious…
Steven Pressfield: God Designed the World with Monsters. Your Daimon Is One of Them.
Steve Pressfield, in his book The Artist’s Journey: The human race lost something, I believe, when it passed from the ancient world to the modern. The ancients understood the monstrous. They were not appalled by it, as we are. The legends of the ancient world are packed with monsters — Medusa, Cerberus, the Minotaur. Even…
Is Deepened Spirituality Incompatible with Writing?
In her sublime A Book of Silence, Sara Maitland describes an inner dilemma that she experienced during her experiments with silence and solitude. It’s a dilemma that has become highly personal for me as well: Then I noticed something shocking. I had come to Weardale for four conscious reasons: to study and think about silence,…
Tori Amos on serving the muses: “You have to get yourself out of the way”
With my long-running investigations into the experience of inspired creativity in the mode of the muse, the daimon/daemon, and the genius, I was interested to see this theme getting a big shout-out in the mainstream press in connection with the publication of Tori Amos’s new memoir, Resistance: A Songwriter’s Story of Hope, Change, and Courage….
Writing is meditation. Its value is just doing it.
The current dawning of the Coronacene reframes and underscores an always-salient truth: Real success in writing is just doing it. Just inhabiting the act itself. Just seeing new words appear on the page. “The search for meaning distilled in an act . . . an act of meditation, an act of prayer . . ….
Teeming Links – August 9, 2019
Before the links, a brief screed that arose spontaneously from some well in my psyche: If you’re a writer or another type of creator, never compare your gift to that of others. Your particular gift of vision, subject matter, passion, skill level, style, approach, and the life circumstances in which these all exist and unfold…
My spiritual autobiography: A video interview
In 2017 I published an enthusiastic review of Jerry L. Martin’s God: An Autobiography here at The Teeming Brain, and also at Amazon. The book presents Martin’s account of being an atheist who was hit with an unexpected experience of what presented itself as divine communication. Over the course of about a year, he found…
‘To Rouse Leviathan’ is actually happening
Leviathan is finally being roused. My third horror fiction collection, To Rouse Leviathan, will soon be available from Hippocampus Press.