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Today on Fable and the Verbivore, we get a bit more personal and talk about creating when life gets hard.

Like most of you, we’ve both experienced personal crises and challenges that have significantly changed our lives - including how our creative lives have looked and the ways that art nourishes us, so we thought we’d dig into these experiences and unpack some of what we’ve learned.

Specifically, we mosly reference our experiences with personal or family health crises and hardships, but we also touch on care-giving, grief, and the daily work of managing our mental health.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Recognizing the value of creating small things and using new creative rhythms as a way to replenish energy, express emotions, or to take a mental break from stress, anxiety, or pain

• Taking the pressure off of creativity and refocusing on the process of creativity and what it does  for us internally, rather than just the value of the product created 

• Showing ourselves grace when we can’t do what we typically could and being willing to adjust how we approach creativity to meet our different needs or capacity in a given season

• Giving ourselves the invitation to try different forms of creativity when we find we’re unable to turn to the ones we typically engage with (ex. writing) - things like painting, mind problems, crafting, and engaging in different kinds of movement can help express our creativity and emotions in new ways

• Reminding ourselves that interacting with art (of all kinds) that we connect with can help to replenish and nourish us during difficult times when we feel we’re scraping the bottom of our energy well and that investing some of our time in those things can have a lot of value for our mental health and emotional well-being

• Crisis can shrink our world down, make us feel suffocated or overwhelmed, or make us feel like we’re caught in a cycle of sameness. Art, beauty, and stories can help open back up our world, remind us of life outside our current experience, and bring us sparks of pleasure and joy.  

We hope you enjoy this episode and that it’s an encouragement wherever you’re at in your creative lives today.

Keep reading, writing, and putting your voice out there!

Into the woods,

Fable & The Verbivore

Notes:

In this episode, we touch on the following previous podcast episode:

• Episode 172: Non-linear Stories (looking at Ali Hazelwood's novellas)

The Verbivore references a personal instagram post (@hitchipo82) about her hospitalisation at the beginning of this year. Here is that post: https://www.instagram.com/p/CnpbLeFLwNM/

The Verbivore mentions a calendar with a piece of art and quote from Morgan Harper Nichols. The picture of that piece is available to see here. Here is that quote:

• “I do not know where tomorrow will lead, but I know I am free to give my all with audacious hope for what could be.” - MHN

Books and Movies Mentioned:

• Book Lovers by Emily Henry

• You've Got Mail - Screenplay by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron; Directed by Nora Ephron

• The Bodyguard by Katherine Center

Music from: https://filmmusic.io
‘Friendly day’ by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com)
Licence: CC BY (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)