Empathy and our homeless project

I never warmed to Alain de Botton. For a number of reasons: 1) his Essays on Love were, I felt, dressed up as more than they actually were, and I felt I could have done better; and 2) but then he actually did it—wrote the thing—and I had not; 3) everything else that followed was [...]

Do negative emotions make for better creative decisions?

Do negative emotions during the creative practice make for better decisions as a writer?
That’s one suggestion that comes from the recent article by Jonah Lehrer on the ‘upside’ of sadness. Lehrer examines research, published in Psychological Review by Andy Thompson and Paul Andrews, psychiatrist and evolutionary psychologist, which offers the idea that sadness and depression [...]

In writing, don’t chase your themes

I’m off to see Peter Brook’s 11 and 12 in April at Northern Stage. On Radio 4 a few weeks ago, a fellow guest on Start the Week challenged Peter (and Lucy Prebble, the playwright behind the story of Enron) on how a writer could not be aware of the themes of her/his writing. Surely, [...]

Tense affects between creative & critical

I’ve just put in my abstract for the PhD conference here in Newcastle in April: ‘Creative Friction – How do the different modes of creative practice intersect with the world of traditional academia?’
The theme looks at how the two parts of a creative practice PhD – the critical and creative – interact, and what are [...]

David Bohm on creative curiosity

I came across the work of David Bohm last week, and took his collection of essays On Creativity away camping for the weekend.
Bohm was a physicist and theorist, and the book is a weaving of both science and philosophy. While working with the prevailing views of Quantum mechanics, Bohm also took a lateral [...]