Playing Well with Others

Who couldn’t use a nudge toward the positive? Who wouldn’t benefit from the feeling “someone out there cares about my creative process”?

If you aren’t someone who could benefit, I suppose this post isn’t for you—right now. (Save it for later, you might change your mind at some point.)

The creative path is, largely, solitary. It doesn’t HAVE to be; we can find ways to create and strengthen community as a creative. The fact does remain, however, that creating from our own internal visions and desires is usually an individual process.

Last post I encouraged you to play—this post I encourage you to play with others. Before you begin to reach out to others, get a good foundation of esteem and movement ready within your mind and body to help create the reality that would serve you best.

Foundation Reminders:

• The work I am doing in this moment is building my future.

• Creative success is reached slowly with small wins.

• Being a creative is one of the most important callings.

• I am wonderous and deserve to take up space.

• I am being generous when I take up space; I become magnetic.

• Making bad art is the only way to make good art.

• The creative process is difficult and uncomfortable sometimes; that’s normal.

• I will show up and create; that is my path.

The fungi Orange Hobnail Canker on a tree’s bark.

Ideas for Playing with Others:

There are a lot of ways to begin seeking out creative support—these are NOT definitive ways, just some ideas that might spark inspiration for you.

• Seek out an organization that supports what you do and/or what you want to do in the future (guild, group, society) and attend a meeting and/or join as a member.

• Do you meet with others who are pursuing your similar passion? Seek someone out you could connect with. If you already meet, could you meet more than you already do or for a bit longer than you do currently—in favor of incorporating more play into your time?

• Work on a collaborative project—a poem, a story, a painting, a drawing, a weaving; what can you and others bring to the venture?

• Invite others for a “crafternoon”: a chance to play. Weave with paper, work with new art materials, learn something new together (jam-making, cordage harvesting, identifying plants/wildflowers, sculpting, embroidery, crochet…)

• Start a creative process book club.

• Host a “music evening” where everyone brings an instrument to play and/or their favorite music to share.

• Take a photography tour around your city/home and share favorite pictures afterward.

• Choose a new recipe to try and share the process of making it, then eating it.

• In addition to, or instead of, a book club—what about a “read aloud” club? Taking turns reading chapter by chapter or book by book.

• Take another person/other people to a live theatre event and meet afterwards to discuss.

• Work with creatives outside of your creative niche—talk with a painter if you are a fiction writer, a poet if you are a sculptor, etc. How does their creative technique/process help inform your own?

• Photocopy a page from a book & have everyone make a black-out poem and share.

Whatever you end up doing, let me know how it serves you and your creative community.

Take good care.

—Shameless Self-Promotion Part at the End—

· Check out my website if you are interested in purchasing one of my books.

· August 1^st, at the Virginia Writer’s Club 2026 Symposium, I will be teaching a workshop, “Putting Your Best Poems Forward: How to Successfully Compile Published Poems into a Cohesive Manuscript“.

· The poet Ann Chinnis and I will be having a co-book launch for Neolithic Imaginings: Mythic Explorations of the Unknown (Loralee Clark) and Love Song: Port and Starboard (Ann Chinnis) at The Muse in Norfolk, VA on Saturday, August 15th at 4 p.m.; we’d love to have you come!