What kind of encouragement does your heart need this year to blossom creatively? (poem by Rosemerry, embroidery by Joanie Schwarz)
Preview: Episode 78 The Creative Year in Review and Ahead
What creative projects last year really worked for you? What surprised you about your creative practice? What had you hoped for yourself? What creative practice or project do you most want to pursue in 2023? Any creative epiphanies from last year? In this annual year end/year beginning episode, Rosemerry and Christie converse about their own creative practices and epiphanies. Rosemerry hands out magic wands for any listeners who want to jump start their own creative projects and reveals this year’s creative mantra.
What We’re Reading and Listening to:
Rosemerry:
I have a mad crush on St. Paul and the Broken Bones, an eight-piece soul band from Birmingham. The music, I love—somehow all at once exuberant and tender. But the performance—oh! If you don’t know them yet, I started with this Tiny Desk concert from NPR and couldn’t get enough.
Due to a certain poem I wrote about the language (actually, the lack of it) for female pleasure, I was sent this very interesting link to an article about the genitalia of female snakes. The article in The Guardian is interesting both for the science (the death adder has a clitoris shaped like a heart) and for what it says about what has not been studied previously (um, and it makes one wonder why not) …
Looking for a good conversationalist? I love this poem by Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska about talking with plants. Especially fine for this season that invites a relationship with silence.
Christie:
How to Fail Epically in Hollywood by Holiday Mathis is hilarious romp that made me laugh out loud. I may be biased (Holiday is two-time guest on Emerging Form who I got to know as the result of a LWON post), but her novel about an aspiring musician trying to make it in L.A. is both funny and heart-felt. The storyline involves sleazy Hollywood types, iconic rock stars and a stolen guitar. Along the way, readers are treated to some pleasing and earnest advice about navigating the sharky world of show business. I listened to the audio version, read by Holiday herself, and she really makes the story come alive. I wrote about some of my other favorite books read this year at Last Word On Nothing.
I recently watched the film, Down With the King, and can't recommend it enough. It stars real-life rapper Freddie Gibbs as a rap star Money Merc, who is having an existential creative crisis. Merc rents a house in a rural area somewhere (the Berkshires?) where his manager hopes he’ll complete his next album. The film follows Merc as he tries to create, while reckoning with the downside of fame and the expectations of others. He makes friends with a farmer several decades older than him, and starts to wonder what he wants his life to be. I loved the film’s gentle pace and its realness.
For Auld Lang Syne
We’ll drink a cup of kindness yet,
says the song, and I would give you
the cup, friend, would fill it
with whiskey or water or whatever
would best meet your thirst.
I fill it with the terrifying beauty
of tonight’s bonfire—giant licks
of red and swirls of blue that consume
what is dead and melt the ice
and give warmth to what is here.
I fill it with moonrise and snow crystal
and the silver river song beneath the ice.
With the boom of fireworks and with laughter
that persists through tears. With
Lilac Wine and Over the Rainbow and Fever.
I toast you with all the poems we’ve yet to write
and all the tears we’ve yet to weep,
I hold the cup to your lips,
this chalice of kindness, we’ll drink it yet,
though the days are cold, the nights so long.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer
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, Rosemerry & Christie share creative epiphanies from our facebook readers and ways that our listeners plan for their own creative projects. 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!
Two Questions:
(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)
What was the biggest creative epiphany you had in 2022?
How do you set goals or intentions for your creative projects?
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Emerging Form is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.