TP: In your new book, The Creative Life, you give us a detailed picture of your life in New York. You take us into restaurants, classrooms and into your home. I found myself curious, having read most of the body of your work that you have moved back to New Mexico.
JC: I’m in Sante Fe. I never lived here before. I lived up in Taos for 10 years. Sante Fe is more urbane. Perhaps a little bit gentler. I found that after 12 years in New York I was craving nature. I lived a block from Central Park but going to Central Park didn’t seem to scratch the itch. I had one part of Central Park I went to, which was a grove of pine trees. And when I came to New Mexico, I took a little house up in the pine trees. I take my dog for a walk every day in the pines. She loves it.
TP: Do you see nature as a big feed for your creative well?
TP: In your new book, The Creative Life, you give us a detailed picture of your life in New York. You take us into restaurants, classrooms and into your home. I found myself curious, having read most of the body of your work that you have moved back to New Mexico.
JC: I’m in Sante Fe. I never lived here before. I lived up in Taos for 10 years. Sante Fe is more urbane. Perhaps a little bit gentler. I found that after 12 years in New York I was craving nature. I lived a block from Central Park but going to Central Park didn’t seem to scratch the itch. I had one part of Central Park I went to, which was a grove of pine trees. And when I came to New Mexico, I took a little house up in the pine trees. I take my dog for a walk every day in the pines. She loves it.
TP: Do you see nature as a big feed for your creative well?
JC: Yes, absolutely so. When I wrote The Creative Life, I would have one little sentence identify what was going on in the atmosphere. ‘Today it’s gray and socked in. Today I have two blue jays.’ I think that for me nature is a great catalyst for work.
TP: How is being back in New Mexico, different from New York?
JC: I find myself wanting to write more, which is enjoyable. I have bought bird feeders, and I have flocks of birds coming right near my writing room window. It’s very nice.
TP: Are you near Natalie Goldberg then?
JC: I’m about three miles from her house. Five minutes from Nat.
TP: Have you had time to catch up?
JC: Yes, I’ve been over to her house, which is wonderful. She has a little orchard at her house and I found myself being very jealous and thinking, "Gee I want an orchard." So who knows where the next house will be.
TP: Do you have a planned creative collaboration with her?
JC: We’re talking about doing another tape on writing. We did a tape about 10 years ago, and we both have grown up and changed, and we thought it would be good to do another tape. So we may do that.
TP: I wanted to ask how you use the writing tools you have developed, the Artist Date, the Morning Pages and now, over the last several years, your walks. I am curious, and you touch on it a little bit in The Creative Life. But with your own Morning Pages, how would you describe your use of them?
JC: I’ve been writing Morning Pages for about 25 years. I write them daily. I get up, and I drink cold coffee. You’re hearing the voice of a fanatic here. I make my coffee the night before. And then in the morning, I grab a cup of cold coffee, and I sit down in my writing chair, and I begin writing. And I am awake, and I am tired. And I sort of take my emotional temperature and look at the day that lies ahead of me. And I also use the Morning Pages to pray. So for about a half a page, I pray on the page. Dear God, guard and guide my beloveds.
TP: Is there an amount of time you average with them?
JC: They take between 20 and 40 minutes.
TP: Has there been a change in how you apply them?
JC: I think I just understand them better. Morning Pages are a catalyst for all the other forms of creativity that I practice. There’s no wrong way to do them but my critic, whom I call Nigel, Nigel will rear his head and say, ‘Oh, you’re being so petty.’ And I say, ‘Nigel, thank you for sharing.’ And I keep going. And that becomes a
portable skill, so that when Nigel rears his head, when I’m trying to write music, I say, ‘Nigel, thank you for sharing’. And the process of the Morning Pages really has trained Nigel that he has to step aside when I tell him to, and that is invaluable.
TP: If you could take only one of the thirty some books you have written, to a deserted island, which would it be and why?
JC: I think it would be The Artist’s Way because it has the most concrete use of spiritual tools. If I were on a deserted island I would definitely want to feel that God was playing close attention to me.
TP: You have continued to choose to teach. In The Creative Life you talk about two workshops. One a shorter one based on The Right to Write and then a 12-week course on The Artist Way.
JC: In all the years that I have taught, I’ve had a couple classes that were really difficult. And one of them was during the writing of The Creative Life. I was faced with skeptics. I had one girl raise her hand and say, ‘Julia, I’ve been having Artist Dates and doing Morning Pages for nine weeks now and absolutely nothing has changed.’ I said, ‘I think that’s impossible” and she said, ‘It’s true.’ Then I said, ‘I think you should drop the class.’ And she said, ‘But Julia, I’m getting so much out of it.’ Cameron recalled with a laugh.
TP: I guess she hadn’t gotten her Nigel in line yet.
JC: Right, she was kind of a little stinker.
TP: I know you believe that creativity is married to spirituality. Has that ever been challenged or proved an obstacle in your teaching?
JC: I teach in environments that are open. I taught for 17 years through the New York Open Center. And the Open Center tends to attract a clientele that is willing to dabble in spirituality. So when I tell them ,’I want you to write a prayer,’ I haven’t had anybody say, ‘I’m not going to write a prayer dammit.’ They seem to be open to experimenting. Right now I am teaching through Unity Church in Sante Fe. So again it’s sort of a pre-selected, pro-spiritual group.
TP: I wanted to ask you about your relationship with your editors. In your memoir Floor Sample, for instance, we learn a lot about Jeremy Tarcher. And now your editor is Sarah Carder?
JC: The way it works for me is I write a rough draft. I give that rough draft to a woman named Linda Kahn. Linda goes through it, as does my group of Believing Mirrors. I get all those notes, and then I sit down, and I do a second draft. And after I get finished with the second draft or maybe it’s even a third draft, then it goes into Sara Carder and Joel Fotinos; Joel is my publisher. So Joel and Sarah will read it, and if they have notes, they will give me notes.
TP: How would you describe you relationships with your editors and the publishing industry?
JC: First of all, I have been very lucky. I have had a lot of continuity in my career. A lot of people have grown up with me. And a lot of times, I have listened to stories about how horrible publishing is, and I think that’s not true because that has not been my experience. I think editors have less power politically than they used to have. And if you turn in a book, it has to please the editors but it also has to please the marketing people. So I think for editors life is a little bit more difficult. They can’t buy things with as much impunity. But I’ve had very good editors. I had a good editor last year when I wrote my novel Mozart’s Ghost. Marsha Markland was my editor, and she was very deft. And I should also say Susan Raihofer, who is my literary agent, is a tough, tough editor, so she’s very useful too.
TP: What are your creative goals right now?
JC: I’m writing another book for Putnam.
TP: Can you tell me what it’s about?
JC: I should probably keep it a secret because I find if I start talking about it, I lose my momentum.
TP: So that is a rule you use, in general?
JC: Yes, I think that the part of us who writes, wants applause. And if you get applause for telling about something, you don’t have the same impetus to write it. You’ve probably run into that in your writing workshops. Where people will give a great pitch on something and then mysteriously, not be able to write it very well.
TP: Is there anything else you wanted to share with our audience?
JC: Just that I didn’t realize that I was writing a farewell letter. Now when I look at The Creative Life, it looks like it’s a love letter to New York. It’s a love letter to that life.
Julia's upcoming schedule will be:
December 12th ~Creativity and Divinity: Dancing Partners at the New York Open Center, NY, NY..
March 11th-13th ~ A Workshop on The Artist's Way: Creative Myths and Monsters at Kripalu – Center for Yoga & Health, Stockbridge, MA.
For more information on Julia's work please visit www.theartistsway.com.
© 2010 Teresa Piccari
Teresa Piccari is a writer and teacher living in coastal Maine. She is the proprietor of The Village Scribe, a writing and editing business located at The Wellness Center, 71 Elm, in Camden. She runs The Ducktrap Writers Roundtable. She teaches writing workshops including Creative Writing, Mythic Structure, Writing & Healing and Memoir. Correspond with her at
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