by Jamie Chavez | Feb 4, 2016 | Creativity
The ability to listen is a skill we are honing. … Art is not about thinking something up. It is about the opposite—getting something down. The directions are important here. If we are trying to think something up, we are straining to reach for something that’s just...
by Jamie Chavez | Jan 2, 2016 | Books You Might Like
This has happened to you, I’m sure: you’re reading along and an exquisite sentence stops you in your tracks. Sometimes it’s in a novel full of perfection; sometimes it’s in a novel where it shines like a diamond in a pile of coal. This list came across Facebook this...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 19, 2015 | Creativity
The conversation focused on the unavoidable uncertainty, vulnerability, and discomfort of the creative process. … Absolutely no amount of experience or success gives you a free pass from the daunting level of doubt that is an unyielding part of the process. … [I call...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 12, 2015 | Authors & Other Writers, Creativity
Every work of art is one half of a secret handshake, a challenge that seeks the password, a heliograph flashed from a tower window, an act of hopeless optimism in the service of bottomless longing. Every great record or novel or comic book convenes the first meeting...
by Jamie Chavez | Nov 5, 2015 | Books You Might Like, Creativity
So many people are denied the deep gratification of poetry. Their educations have trained them to read for information. When I told my uncle that a book of my poems had been published, he said, “Poety is Greek to me.” He did not open the pristine white covers of my...
