Showing all posts tagged creativity

In Culture, Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Politics, Relationships, Writing

Farewell 2025

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

In December, I like to take some time to look back over the year and reflect. Normally, this feels peaceful and inspiring. This year, not so much. It feels like searching through shit, hoping to find a bit of elusive gold to make the process worthwhile.

I wish the news weren’t so bleak. I find myself longing for a pre-fascist world, one where common sense, intelligence, kindness, and decency are valued again. Where generative AI is a pipe dream, not the digital asbestos we have now that infects everything and costs a fortune and makes cheating easy and weakens our human connection to art and creativity.

But there are good things, too. My kids coming home from university to spend a couple weeks under the same roof as Jason and I again, after spending this entire fall grieving for the end of the beautiful stage that was raising our family. William has a new girlfriend, so we’ve been getting to know her, and experiencing that unique phenomenon where your heart can stretch to include someone who wasn’t there before.

For 2025, I decided to not publish anything. I made it a year to focus on a new writing project, my murder mystery novel A Body at the Fair, which I hoped to finish by December. I haven’t finished, but it’s okay. One of the best things about being an independent publisher is that I can be flexible with my scheduling. I don’t have an agent asking when I’ll be turning in my book, or an imprint setting a date and holding me to that deadline.

When I watched the limited series Task this fall and did a rewatch of Mare of Easttown, by the same creator, I remembered that good work takes time. Our culture has become obsessed with speed and commerce—the endless rush to market so someone can make money. But I’d prefer to invest in work that will outlive me, that has a chance to stand the test of time, and offer hope or inspiration or meaning to others for generations to come. That type of vision takes time and intention, so I’m offering those gifts to myself.

My overall word for 2025 was space. I think I worked hard at this, trying to make space for myself in my relationships, and in the wider world. I offered myself space to simply be human, instead of rushing around trying to check items off my to-do list. I also worked at giving space to others, especially my young-adult kids. My counsellor helped me see that if days go by and I don’t hear from them, it’s not punitive like it was in my family of origin. It’s just a bit of healthy space. If and when we miss one another or need one another, we’ll reach out. This bit of important insight has literally changed my life.

My 3 words for 2025 were deeper, simpler, quieter. I wanted to slow down and catch my breath. Looking back, I can see I did exactly that. I wrote the first half of my murder mystery novel, writing using intuition like with Post Civ instead of outlining and planning, and I’m thrilled with how that book is developing. I got derailed from finishing, when America tilted precariously into white Christian nationalist authoritarian rule and I decided to process my feelings on this by writing a journal as a historical record, but I will return to it in 2026 and eventually finish the book.

I loved having my monthly Ruby Finch Books Substack newsletter and podcast to reflect on each of the words I had chosen. At different points of the year, it’s helpful to have a unique focus to live into. I plan to continue my commitment to living a uniquely human life that prioritizes depth, simplicity, and quiet. These are valuable qualities.

The farther I move away from social media, and the aggressive disinformation campaigns forced on us through open AI, designed to fracture society and spread intentional propaganda, the more human I can become. And I fucking love being human in this misguided and inevitably doomed age of artificial intelligence. What an act of resistance it is to simply lean into my messy flesh and blood existence.

I’m sad that I didn’t finish my screenplay for Jamesy Harper’s Big Break this year, nor did I set up Ruby Finch Pictures as a production company. But there’s time. I’m giving myself space, and an extra measure of compassion, and moving these goals into the next year or even 2027. There’s no shortage of interesting work to do, and I keep reminding myself that a dream I’ve had since I was sixteen can wait another year or more. Living now, through these moments, matters too.

Farewell, 2025. You’ve been a hard one. Maybe 2026 will offer a little more light and hope for my fellow human beings, as we continue to share this one and only precious planet of ours. May love, nurture, and reason become fashionable again next year. Let’s work together to make it so.

In Identity, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Relationships, Speaking, Writing

A Dormant Season

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

In my workshops at teachers’ conferences, libraries and for writers, I often speak about building in a dormant season for creativity and rest. A period of time where we are intentional about doing nothing, so we can replenish our spent energies and allow our creative impulses to regenerate.

This sounds wonderful in theory, but I realised recently how difficult I find a dormant season in practice. When I’m writing a new manuscript, I try to maintain a steady rhythm, where I work for a little bit each day so I don’t get too far away from the characters and the story. But sometimes dormancy is forced upon us, due to vacations or the needs of others or health concerns or simply life being life, and interrupting us from our best-laid plans.

This happened to me in August. And I struggled against it. I find it frustrating that even when I’m teaching about certain skills and strategies, like taking a dormant season, I can still be ridiculously slow to recognise it in my own existence. We had a couple of trips planned, and then an unplanned trip to the island late in the month to help our kids move into their first basement suite off campus for the upcoming university year, and by early September I recognised how far away I felt from the novel I was writing.

I wish I could say that I was calm about this. But I wasn’t. I got pissed off, at myself for not progressing on my book when I had planned to write all summer, and then irritated by my family members who kept me from writing. I didn’t enjoy how this resentment made me feel, but I stewed in it for more than a week before suddenly remembering what I tell others: for a dormant season to be effective, we have to surrender to it. To enjoy our lives without feeling guilty that we aren’t working on a creative project.

I had completely missed this part of the process. So I reached for my journal, and reflected on this season of dormancy I’d been in, and why I felt myself longing to get back into the writing of my murder mystery novel. I remembered my Ruby Finch Books tagline: Intuitive Courage. Somewhere along the line, I had once again lost myself and my sense of identity and purpose. I’d been at the mercy of circumstances and other people and life itself without recognising or claiming my own agency.

It felt so good to realise that I can always choose my response. I could be angry about not writing, or I could acknowledge that I had been in a period of creative dormancy, which meant that a new burst of creative energy could bloom in me if I allowed it to. In the four seasons of nature, winter is the dormant season. It’s followed by spring, the explosion of growth and vitality, but we only get the beauty of spring because the trees have been dormant in the winter.

I truly believe that the same seasons are necessary in our own lives. And sure enough, once I stopped having a temper tantrum about my writing rhythms and progress being disrupted for a month, I began to feel the slow, gathering momentum of fresh insight for my book. I would lay in bed at night, ready to drop off to sleep, and my intuition would connect one storyline with another in a way I hadn’t considered before. I would realise something in one of my character’s backstories that informed their current choices and motivations.

Writers live for those moments of insight. I suppose I’ll never know if I would’ve had them anyway, if I’d been writing during August and into early September, but they came to me so insistently and yet gently when I wasn’t writing, so I have to hope the brief dormant season made a difference. Now I’m back into the story, writing nearly every day, and the work has a fresh energy behind it.

I’m working with a new counsellor this month, and one of our goals is to help me identify these patterns in my life faster. I don’t like to feel lost and annoyed for weeks on end when I could simply choose a better response. Believing that a dormant season will help my creativity flourish is a healthier choice to make than stewing in frustration about being unproductive.

What are some ways you’ve seen a dormant season lead to fresh insights and replenished energy in your life?

In Books, Culture, Identity, Nurture, Personal Growth, Speaking, Uncategorized, University, Writing

Fallow

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on

I’ve just completed my final semester of undergrad. After four years of classes, I’ll graduate in early June with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing from Kwantlen Polytechnic University. Due to our never-ending super fun pandemic, instead of walking across the stage in a cap and gown as I’d planned, I’ll be mailed a box containing my degree.

I’m 48, and at times I’ve felt ancient next to my twenty-year-old classmates, but overall it’s been an excellent experience to complete the higher education I began thirty years earlier. So enjoyable, in fact, that I’ve decided I might like to teach creative writing at the university level in the future, so for that I’ll need an MFA. I applied to UBC for grad school and I’ve been accepted, attending in-person this fall for their two-year program.

Completing any big goal is satisfying, but I also feel strange. For so long I dreamed about having additional time on my hands. To have five months off with no school seemed impossible to imagine, and now it’s here. I want to rest, to daydream, to read novels for pure pleasure and not feel like I’m supposed to be doing something else. To write, for myself and not for a grade.

I just finished a round of counselling, and in my last session I talked about the need for a creative break to let the soil of my mind rest. “I think that’s called letting the land lie fallow,” she said. The more I turned this word over in my mind, the more I fell in love with it. For me, this season between April and September is designed for intentional inactivity, a state that doesn’t feel naturally comfortable. But it is necessary.

Other than a few writing projects and some conference speaking, I’m going to prioritize a fallow state for my creativity. I’ll need to go into grad school as a full-time student with a sense of renewed purpose and energy. For those things, I require rest and rejuvenation.

Our culture likes to whisper in our ear, “You’re only valuable if you produce something, earn money, and work hard all the time.” But I’ve been fighting against this messaging for quite a long time, offering myself permission to slow down, simplify my existence and clarify my priorities. My 3 words for 2021 are peace, priorities and potential. They all fit well into this season of my life, where one big goal has been completed and another one has yet to begin. I’m in the liminal space, where I’m not quite sure of anything, except that rest is required so I don’t burn out.

We’ve all had a hellish twelve months. This time last year the whole world was turned upside down by Covid, and a year later we’re still fighting to stay healthy and carve out a tiny bit of novelty and fun wherever we can. It’s a long haul on a boring treadmill of sameness. For me, right now, the answer is the word fallow, which means “land plowed and left unseeded for a season or more.”

What does the word fallow look like in your life right now?

In Culture, Nurture, Parenting, Personal Growth, Speaking, Writing

Renewal

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on
Renewal

My word for the summer of 2019 is renewal. I want to rest, first and foremost, but with the intention that the rest is leading me somewhere new.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about fresh ideas. In our current social media-frenzied world, where trite memes are shared by the millions every hour, thoughts that carry some weight and meaning are more valuable than ever.

I had coffee with a new friend recently, and when I told her about the speaking and writing I’m doing, she offered me her marketing services. “We’ve got to let more people find you,” she said. My answer was, “I don’t want everyone to find me. Only those who are really invested in the kind of work I’m doing.”

I’ve been ruminating on this conversation, because when she said that short videos could help me reach a wider audience, I could see that this was probably true, but I said, “I don’t want to do what everyone else is doing.” To me, the interesting part of the work is innovating a new way to communicate and operate. I want to focus on my own path, not trod the same one others are already walking.

Which leads me back to renewal. Ideas are valuable and we must nurture ourselves in order to be in the right frame of mind to implement them. Having a crazy busy schedule doesn’t allow space for innovation to bloom. Rest, white space and peace are required ingredients for the work of renewal.

Lately, I’m understanding just how critical rhythm is to creativity. We need a dormant phase for the ideas to develop and grow in the dark, before they are ready to inch forward into the light. It’s lovely to feel the stirrings of something new and refuse to give in to the temptation to rush the process. This summer, I’m determined to allow renewal to happen by making the space for it.

This past week, we celebrated William’s graduation from grade 7 and Ava passing her written test for her learner’s driving license. High school for William and driving for Ava: two new steps to fit into this summer theme of renewal. I’m so ready to leave elementary school behind with its daily agenda messages, endless parent emails and field trip driving. On to the next stage.

Happy start of the summer to all of you, my wonderful and treasured readers and friends. May we all experience renewal in our spirits, bodies, minds and hearts.

In Identity, Personal Growth, Spiritual Life, University, Writing

Circles

Author Julianne HarveyPosted on
Circles

I adore my two writing classes this semester. One is online, my first time to try a class in this format, and the other is in person with a favourite professor who taught me counselling classes almost twenty years ago. He was a big reason for me choosing this particular university and this is my first class with him since I returned to school. It’s like three hours of the best therapy every Thursday afternoon.

Yesterday we spent 45 minutes silently colouring on large pieces of art paper. We used crayons, broken and bent from years of other people using them to access some long forgotten piece of their creative selves. The only rule was that we couldn’t write words. The goal was to draw aimlessly, without thinking about it too much, and try to enter into the flow of listening to what our subconscious was saying.

I highly recommend this practice. Even just drawing nonsense squiggles caused me to feel weepy, as I knew I was communicating from a deeper level than usual by allowing my right hand to move aimlessly across a sheet of paper without planning or designing what was going to happen.

We all have so much happening underneath of our usual words, smiles, tears, and silences. Some days we churn, others we are still like a standing puddle. The key to fully living out this human experience is to stay in touch with these deeper parts of our being. To know who we really are, without our bullshit disguises and imposed societal obligations.

Many of us drew some form of a circle. For me, my circles felt like a dream I’m inching toward; some form of wholeness and inevitability. I’m weary of straight lines and conformity. I long for the clarity and purpose of a circle, fully contained but also willing to expand and grow outward as necessary. My subconscious seemed to be expressing this wish in my class yesterday. Today, when I reflect on this drawing and sharing experience, I feel a sense of peace and wonder.

I’m also thinking about something my professor said when we were discussing the boundless possibilities humans experience. He said, “We have the capacity to create a fair and just world. And yet we don’t. Why is this?” As a question, it generated a lot of interesting ideas, but my heart feels heavy a day later mulling this over in my mind and soul. How can humans innovate so many marvellous inventions and yet we continually fail to create a fair and just world?

Peace and wonder have to be the markers of a creative life being lived. Otherwise, what is it all for? This pursuit of art is supposed to be leading us somewhere. Together. Towards fairness and justice. We are all on different paths but hopefully our guideposts involve peace and wonder, lighting our way towards a fair and just world. Or at least a better one than what we were born into.

I long for that, with every ounce of my being, and hope that somehow those circles last night are part of this unyielding dream toward a better existence for all of us. For today, I’ll follow my sense of peace and wonder. Whatever leads me closer to those things are to be prioritized over what leads away from them. Perhaps it really is as simple as that while we make our way towards creating a fair and just world.