When someone asks you, “What do you do?” what is your answer? If you’re like most of us, context matters. You might say one thing at a professional networking reception and quite another at a neighborhood block party. But how often do you answer, “I create art?” Part of living an art-committed life is fully […]
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Archive by Author
3 Steps Off the Path of an Art-Committed Life
May 16, 2013 
66 Comments
It is one of my greatest fears. I have abandoned my creativity before; this blog is my chronicle of returning to an art-committed life and working to stay there. That is also a central theme of the travel memoir I am in the process of polishing to final. But it is so easy to drift away […]
Read moreGuest Post: Fine Arts, Creativity & the Aging Brain Positively Linked
May 8, 2013 27 Comments
Here at The Artist’s Road we promote creative thinking and doing at any age. Dr. Francine Toder has written a book based both on scientific research and individual case studies that not only supports the notion that a “vintage” brain can take up a new artistic passion, but that there are many benefits to doing […]
Read moreA Pearl of Wisdom for Fiction Writers
May 2, 2013 6 Comments
Allow me to share with you a nugget for my readers who are fiction writers. This is from an essay on the great Victorian novelist George Eliot by Joseph Epstein, from his recently published essay collection Essays in Biography: One of the modern fiction workshop laws is that a writer should always show and never […]
Read moreFive Keys to Living an Art-Committed Life
April 30, 2013 35 Comments
His story is simultaneously inspiring and horrifying. After ten years in the rat-race of London, James Rhodes returned to his true passion, the piano. He dedicated himself to achieving the mastery he had dreamed of as a youth. And now, after years of dedication and hard work, James is a concert pianist. In his essay […]
Read moreGuest Post: Creating the Workshop of Your Dreams
April 26, 2013 34 Comments
Three weeks ago I wrote about how award-winning writer and stellar writing instructor Robin Hemley no longer has patience for writing groups; instead, he has a trusted fellow writer with whom he mutually shares his work. Both in comments and email, I encountered some pushback to Robin’s choice, with many defending writing groups and others […]
Read moreOwn Your Identity as an Artist
April 23, 2013 80 Comments
I savor the comments readers leave on this blog. But often they are apologetic in tone, along the lines of “I’m not really a writer,” or “I aspire to be a writer.” In the technical sense of the word “writer,” at least as I see it, these statements are a lie. They “wrote” a comment, […]
Read moreWhat I Learned from Being Freshly Pressed
April 15, 2013 47 Comments
When I tweeted one of my loyal readers yesterday–a memoir guru and creativity instructor–that my post on avoiding “truthiness” when writing about yourself had been featured on WordPress’ Freshly Pressed, she tweeted back that she already knew. She was subscribed to comments on that post, and her inbox was filling up with a tsunami (her […]
Read moreWhen Did You First Embrace Your Creativity?
April 9, 2013 27 Comments
There were many commonalities I found among the creatives I interviewed during my 2010 cross-country U.S. trip. One was that my interview subjects all discovered their own creative side at a very early age. Fortunately for them–and for us–they held on to that creativity, and didn’t let the “I can’t” and “I don’t” forces of […]
Read moreA Model for Feedback on Your Creative Work
April 4, 2013 28 Comments
“Writing is a solitary pursuit,” said award-winning author Robin Hemley, explaining why he has “no patience” for belonging to a writer’s group. You might argue that Robin has reached a level in his career where he doesn’t need feedback from other writers. He is an accomplished writer of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. He directs the […]
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