Honing Your Voice with a New Art Form

Holiday Mathis on Learning Stand-Up Comedy

“The art form of stand up is being a version of yourself—sometimes more the real me than I am able to be in real life.” —Holiday Mathis

Preview: Episode 119 with Holiday Mathis

“No matter what you do to hone your voice, you’re honing your voice,” says Holiday Mathis. “It’s going to speak through whatever art form you choose.” In this lively, laughter-filled episode recorded in person with Holiday near her home in Nashville, we speak with our most-featured guest about her newest creative endeavor, stand-up comedy. We cover how one art form informs another, why saying yes to adventure can be good for your creative life, how meeting our fears can help us grow, the importance of diligence in “doing the work” and how camaraderie and diversity and community fuel not only our creative work but our lives.

Holiday Mathis writes the daily horoscope for The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and hundreds of newspapers around the world. In her decades-long syndication she's published almost nine million words on luck, the stars and the human condition. She's also a multi-platinum selling songwriter with songs recorded by Miley Cyrus, Emma Roberts and more. Holiday is the author of several books including How to Fail Epically in Hollywood.  

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What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• "Let my love be heard." Ohhhhh. My favorite acapella group, Voces8, sings this prayer poem by Alfred Noyes, and the waves of sound and the insistence on love are just so deeply heart-opening. It’s so good for the soul when sorrow is fully met with great beauty,

• In episode 64, we spoke with poet, essayist and librettist Alison Luterman about how she was reclaiming joy in her creative practice by learning to sing after she’d been told as a girl by a choir director to not sing and to just mouth the words. In this fun and playful poem, Vibrato Ghazal, (based on an Arabic form), we get a glimpse of how the joy continues!

• Though the film Nine Days came out three years ago, I just heard now saw this clip of Winston Duke reciting Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” It’s beyond beyond beyond. I have never really loved that poem. Now I feel like it’s remade me. What a wild and uninhibited rendering! Ecstatic! I can’t praise it enough!

Christie:

• These stories from survivors of the atomic bombs the U.S. dropped on Japan are both compelling and important. We don’t talk enough about the ramifications of the decisions to use that horrid technology.

• My friend Cameron sent me Nell Freudenberger’s new novel, The Limits, and early on I realized that oh, here I am reading yet another pandemic book. (I also recently finished Rachel Cusk’s Second Place.) But that’s no criticism! I really enjoyed the book, which features a marine biologist studying coral reefs in Tahiti, her ex-husband who’s a cardiologist working in New York City during the early days of covid, his new, younger wife, and several young women whose lives will intersect. The novel explores family dynamics, race and class and what it’s like to live at a time when it feels like the world is ending every day. I didn’t love it as much as Lost and Wanted, another Freudenberger novel, but enjoyed it a lot.

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The Opening

for Holiday, in the James Turrell Skyspace at Cheekwood Gardens

Each moment of the day
a song is looking for its singer—
song before the eyelids rise,
song of hunger, song of dream,
song of waiting for the phone to ring,
song of groping in the dark,
song of walking through the garden,
song of trying on silver hats,
song of seeing the city’s edge.
And still so often we miss the song,
but today when Holiday
opened her mouth and began
to sing of cumulonimbus,
her clear tune spiraled through the small
white room with such astonishing
rightness I brimmed with gold
and cloud and kin,
her bright-winged notes soaring
in my body like a murmuration,
and I opened like dawn, like sky,
as if when one person dares
to be found by the song of the moment
and sing it true, they teach
the rest of us how to do it, too,
how to sing, sing wild, sing
ourselves alive, as if
it’s what we’re here to do.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
 

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A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Starting this month, only our paid subscribers will receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support.

This week, Holiday does a few minutes of a stand-up routine and then we ask her questions about her process creating and performing it. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can go now to our website, EmergingForm.substack.com, or by clicking the button below. Thank you!

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Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. Do you have a creative motto? Share it!

2. What new creative endeavor are you trying and what are you learning from it?

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