Three things teaching English has taught me about creativity

I resisted the idea of teaching English when I first moved to Turkey. Part of it was that I didn't want to give up other pursuits to teach, but the other part was not feeling in my own skin as a second-language learner of Turkish. My brain felt crowded with new words and a new culture. If I couldn't speak Turkish, how could I get others to be enthused about learning English? Six years later, I've gotten my footing as a teacher, I can speak Turkish, and lo and behold, teaching English has taught me something about creativity.

Here are three things that make me think creativity and teaching English have a lot in common:

1. Comprehension evolves

I don't worry when my students don't understand what I'm saying. I worry when they don't listen and think for themselves. The words will come, the sentences will piece together like patchwork, but they need to trust that they will absorb the language over time by using it. True for both learning a second language and creativity? Listening. Paying attention. Being open. Giving the dictionary or rule book a break every now and then.

2. Innovation happens under pressure

Tara Agacayak talks about obstacles being way-finders in her blog post Now on Turquoise Poppy.

"We should give thanks when we are stopped in our tracks for being forced to innovate an alternative."

When teaching English, I have to think on my feet and come up with things on the fly. I stockpile ideas for quick pinch situations, like having ten minutes left of class and 20 grumbly second-graders. Paper. Pencil. Draw. Artists and writers crave innovation and alternatives because at the heart of creativity is being a problem solver.

3. Start with a ritual, end with something unconventional

In the classroom, I start the lesson with the same greeting and intro. The lesson relies on that daily ritual, but then branches out and turns into something organic. When I sit down to write or draw, I prepare mentally and ready my supplies with ritual, too. I open Scrivener or pull out a watercolor notebook. I keep my pens handy, and brushes clean. Doing the same ritual whenever I sit down to work triggers my memory and gets me ready to go.

Have you ever drawn a parallel between two things you didn't think were compatible?

Offerings and Transitions

New Year's eve, and I'm wrapped up in a blanket feeling the stark combination of caffeine withdrawal and sore throat. I want nothing more than to tuck in a little longer and read The Bird Sisters while drinking the hot sahlep drink at my side sprinkled with cinnamon. I'm ready to say goodbye to 2010's roller coaster cold and flu cycle, but I had such an amazing year in other ways that I'm not quite ready to let go. Two big reasons include these:

Voice Lessons from a Hybrid Ambassador - a blog ring that took a stance on a polarizing book promotion on She Writes.
Dialogue2010 at expat+HAREM - the 10-person roundtable discussion that sparked a year of conversation, comaradarie, and creativity.

60 Secs of Holiday Cheer
With just a few hours to spare on this side of the world for the New Year, squeeze in sixty seconds to watch this little video interview I did for She's Next on Family and Traditions from Anywhere.

Compared to last year, when I did a big holiday dinner and had lots of guests, we had a very quiet Christmas. In some ways, it was kind of a relief not to try so hard this year and to enjoy new little traditions of our own.

Creative Life picks for December 2010

• The clue to Justine Lee Monk’s The Secret Ingredient to a Strong Writer’s Platform? Big Meaning.
• Are you a writer? This pick has 10 Steps and 417 Comments.
• A hybrid design/multimedia/creativity thinker gives us Another Look at Self-Actualization.
• Who are you? Nilofer Merchant ponders the question in Rogues, Misfits, or Heroines?
• Karen Woland invites you to Declare your Indescribable Beauty.
• The post that started it all one year ago this month: Mapping the Imagination. This piece for expat+HAREM sparked a year of conversation, creativity, and camaraderie, and the 10-person roundtable discussion, Dialogue2010.

Moving On
In January, I'll be moving my blog from Blogger to my own site (yeah! cheers!). I've been moving my portfolio site to the same website, too, so it's been a learning curve in terms of bringing all these things together. I'll make the announcement soon, but www.rosedeniz.com will be the hub from January onward.

Wishing you and yours a healthy, creatively abundant new year!

Love,
Rose

Hello, Creative Block!

It started off innocently enough. A day or two of procrastination. Then stuff came up. And then more stuff. And then someone asked me about my book, and all of a sudden, I felt like a writer-impersonator.

It happens that fast, I marveled.

While the writer world tapped to the NaNoWriMo beat this past November, I wrote a scene here, a mock-interview with my protagonist there, my words moving at a trickle. I put everything I had into my first draft in August, but still thought I'd keep myself buoyed up by NaNo adrenaline. I know others, like MadMemoirist, could relate to feeling out of sync with the month-long no-holds-barred writing feast. We sent each other tweets of support - you go girl! aim for low word count! hang out on the couch and enjoy your TV over the roar of the NaNo crowd!

I have a parenting rule of thumb, though: when I want to retreat, get closer. Get down on the ground on my knees, pull child to chest, get closer. It almost never fails to soothe and stop a problem from getting bigger. Sometimes I don't know what I'm supposed to do - but I stop and ask myself about my reaction, rather than theirs: if I want to leave the room, I make myself stay. Creative types, especially if you are HSP like me, will understand why you'd want to shut out the stimulation, but it works.

Here are two posts this week that helped me get closer to why I was having creative block (hint: the ubiquitous internal editor), and helped me get back to the book:

-Judith van Praag's NaNoWriMo Editor/Devil - Git Friendly or Git!
-Chris Brogan's You Are So Stupid

How do you know when to get closer or walk away from a creative project?

Learning curve

Several times a year I take on projects that are more than I can handle. I make sure that they are outside of my area of expertise, and keep me up late at night problem solving. Like writing a book in August and revising it while redoing my website and this blog at the same time.

My dreams as of late have been preceded by images of navigation bars, widgets, and CSS code, or snatches of dialogue from a story that I feel is emerging slowly compared to the gusto with which it was born over the summer.

In order to make myself feel better and ensure more procrastination, I downloaded these fantastic essential (free!) story outlining worksheets and checklists from Karen S. Wiesner's From First Draft to Finished Novel and am printing all 50 pages. The sound of the printer is soothing, and it offsets my guilt about paper and trees and all the ink I'm wasting. Not to mention the printer I have uses cartridges only available in the US, so it requires serious finagling to refill them.

A new job teaching (screaming!) English to grade school and middle school kids has me way out of my comfort zone, too.

Are there projects you take on that you know are worth the steep learning curve? 

Good guilt

"I'm doing research," I say, and huddle in the corner cloaked in my Uzbek suzani to watch Pretty Little Liars.

Bukhara Suzani, 1983

In September it was Glee. I had just finished a first draft of a young adult novel, and I celebrated with three days of impassioned singing and crying (every time I'd sing along, the kids would cry at me to stop).

Now it's October and Pretty Little Liars. I'm humming the theme song, "Got a secret, can you keep it..." while I revise the novel.

Pop culture bingeing? Guilty.

This is good guilt. This makes all the "shoulds" run in terror: "I should be working. I should be cleaning. I should finish x-y-z project I lost interest in." It makes me a goal artist instead of a goal athlete.

Tara Sophia Mohr says, "Detours will lead to fruitful places. Important things will gestate in so-called fallow periods."

Detour taken, binge over, and everything shifts back into place. Revising sounds good, projects look interesting again. 

What guilt-laden detours have helped you get back on track?

Monsters, irascible inner critics, and Merilee

"Hybrids are used to strengthen the homogeneous. Grafting different orchids together makes flowers nobody has ever seen before. Cross-pollinating makes hardier fruits and vegetables. Hybrid cars are more energy efficient. Not one, or the other. Both. Conjoined. The hybrid/monster can be sensed even from the shadows. Poison Ivy left behind her traces of vanilla scent. The snakes in Medusa’s hair hissed." 

 - Sezin Koehler, from a hybrid/MONSTER manifesto

When I read The Fluent Self, I find myself enmeshed in Havi's language, the way she talks to monsters like inner critics, doubts, and fears. I've been hanging out with my inner writing critic since I started writing stories on yellow legal paper in this maroon recliner in our farmhouse over two decades ago. I discarded the stories over and over because I didn't like how I had written the words. I didn't like how the words looked. I was obsessed with perfect transcription and had no idea that a first draft could be messy and alive.

I think about the 9-year-old me who threw crumpled pieces of paper on the floor because she thought writers were always surrounded by their maimed, discarded thoughts. The opposite of cultivating a creative life.

Once proud of moving overseas with only a few suitcases, I now have stuff spilling over. And not just physical stuff, but also taking time to work on things that I love, building in quiet time into my otherwise bell-clanging-kid-filled day. Words fill up space. Ideas fill up space. Sometimes our own thoughts seem insurgent to the ones before them and that thinking takes up space. How do we live with conflicting ideas? Mediate. 

I'm in the middle of making 1,600 words a day for thirty days come to life. These run-at-full-tilt-projects are what keep me energized and fueled up.

It's a lot easier to take a break from my irascible inner critic thanks to the 15-year-old girl in my head telling me what to do. Not my adolescent self. Merilee. The girl in my NaNoWriMo novel who's father writes eulogies for a living and who's in love with a celebrity. Totally not my thing to write about celebrities - it's all Merilee's doing.

And then there's this other way of looking at monsters: Sezin Koehler's collaborative hybrid/Monster project is a glimpse into how letting the shadowy side of our selves be visible can create rich, creative, multifarious ideas of beauty.

What are your monsters, and do they ever help you discover something wonderful? 

Five years in Turkey and Five Insights

Vanity, Rose Deniz 2010

This post was originally going to be tips for traveling light - a global citizen mama carries a lot of stuff across the world, but there are other ways to travel light - starting with disrobing definition and adopting changes in perspective.

Here are five insights that stem directly from uprooting myself and moving to Turkey.

1. I like to be slightly off the beaten path. I don't live in Istanbul, and I'm none the worse for it. Sometimes I get too hermit-y, but I need less stimulation in my daily life, not more, to do my creative work. Are you the kind of creative person that needs to live off the beaten track, too?

2. Saying the right thing is overrated. Observation, sharing, smiles, kind looks, accepting and offering food and drink, all help me to be expressive in Turkish. The persona I thought I adopted as a survival instinct to manage living abroad was not a veneer - it was an unused muscle, an un-actualized part of myself that had been dormant.

3. Raising kids abroad anchors me to Turkey in unexpected ways. I have to be present. My kids say and do things that put me at ease because they don't think about being half Turkish, half American. I'm learning to ignore parenting disparities and find commonalities.

4. Creativity doesn't need a rigid set of tools. I trade canvas for textile, fabric for pen and ink, then drawing tools for words depending on the space I am in. I've learned to slip in creative moments where I would have thought there was no time. Parenting brings out my creativity rather than prohibits it.

5. Words like foreigner and expat don't fit. I prefer global citizen, and being hybrid resonates with me in terms of being one of many places, with many impulses.

What have you learned about yourself from the place you are in? 

Half life

I live a double life. Half of me is resident crumb-sweeper and bedtime storyteller of our family of four, while the other half is mentally miles away dreaming up projects, threading the needle of a story, and compulsively suggesting to Amazon that Penguin make The Poisoner's Handbook available on the Kindle until it is. I'm a junk food addict who has convinced herself to eat healthily. I'm a recovering over-achiever who can be extremely lazy. I'm what Figen Çakır calls people like us, a 'double agent': half of the time defending Turkey when I'm in the US, half the time longing for all things Americana when I'm here.

My last post is about being a hybrid of two-or-more things.  I wonder while burning sage to clear out negative energy in my house if I've left some parts of my life deliberately hidden to savor and protect them. Kept the dualities and unlikely opposites tucked away. Can all this business about duality and different aspects of one self start to be a drain on the senses? Enter the half-life. According to the Oxford American Dictionary, a half-life is the time taken for the radioactivity of a specific isotope to fall to half its original value. I'm interested in how science, creativity, and domesticity intersect in this respect. If I were to equate it to being a work-at-home mom while living abroad, have I been quietly urging myself along to be half-living in several realms at the same time?

Yanking myself from one realm to the other has become second nature, but I'm starting to slow down, to make the transitions smoother. My daughter is nearly two, and she has taken reign over my computer, navigating keys effortlessly to fast-forward through two hours of Sesame Street in four minutes. While she pages away, I work on a cross-stitch of frolicking bunnies. Some days this all seems more surreal than is healthy. She now eats at the counter with me, scooping up cream cheese with crackers from the tub while I think 'this is not a good long-term habit' and munch along with her. This simple act of eating makes me think of my mother. She supposedly liked bread with butter and cream cheese, and lately I've sorely been wishing I knew more about her than that and she read Ingrid Bergman: My Story and canned all sorts of fruits and vegetables. But invention and imagination are wonderful devices in filling in the gaps, and creating a legacy of eating crackers and cream cheese with my daughter at the counter might be one microscopic way to stay present in all these contrasting realms.

On resurfacing

Or: on having a sensitivity-challenged sensory system while traveling abroad with two children and one unabashedly devoted husband and father to said-children, now back home to the tune of jet lag and the search for foods easy-to-obtain in the US but missing from most grocery-store shelves in Turkey: bagels, Philadelphia cream cheese, unsweetened peanut butter, breakfast bars, avocados, fruit snacks, organic yogurt, fiber-enriched Froot Loops, muenster cheese.

The most I can muster this week is the following three very important thoughts:

1. Creativity these days, when it happens, feels like grin-and-bear it, oh god, get it over with, like I'd rather be alone with my epilator for hours.
2. A cup of coffee while working does not count as a real cup of coffee unless it accompanies the reading of a book or some other enjoyable activity not requiring mental activity.
3. Installing updates is a pleasant way to procrastinate.

This is what I did do while on a beach for 10 days: I napped, wrote something twice, had really good mojitos, read about 30 pages of a book I carried across the ocean, used SPF like a good girl but still came back with a tan, and felt my bones, my body, everything relax for the first time in months months months.

Can a break from creativity, the mother-of-all pursuits that makes my life run, be necessary to refuel?

Poised to pause

Like the Haley's Comet of all Naps, holidays at Love, Rose seem 75 years apart. But it's happening: I have a date with the beach, energetic recuperation, The Lives of Girls and Women waiting to be read, and sleep to catch up on. Things have felt edgy lately, brilliant and bright, full of promise, but without the readiness to take it all in, I've experienced delayed absorption. Disorientation, lack of focus. Here's to coming back refreshed to dialogue, create, write, and nest. Visual postcards forthcoming!

Verbal footprints

Home prints / photo by Rose Deniz

Sezin described us as 'intimate strangers,' Anastasia a 'carillon,' each person's comments creating a verbal percussion. The nine women who gathered on Sunday to participate in Dialogue2010 astounded me with their clarity of vision, their engagement with creativity, their willingness to bend and flex through identity and language challenges, and their alignment with their core. A year or two ago, I created my vision statement, or what Gwen Bell would describe as a 'personal manifesto,' and these three words have shaped the work I've done since: manifest creative potential. In starting Art is Dialogue and moderating this discussion, I felt that come to life. I felt synchronicty with people I've yet to meet in real life, bonded through a willingness to live a meaningful life at the crossroads. 

How do you manifest your creative potential?

The blog responses to the dialogue have left me speechless. I invite you to dip into the syncopated words of the women who made it happen. As more posts and feedback become available, I'll post updates.

Being grounded is overrated -- Furthering the Worldwide Cultural Conversation

What determines your present orbit, and how does it change your self-view?

Conversational Crossroads -- Love, Rose

Mapping my hybrid life on a personal, passion level involves drawings, notations, and novel writing.

What is a Turquoise Poppy? -- Tara Lutman Agacayak

Turquoise Poppy is about allowing your circumstances to guide your path while staying true to your inner compass.
Fear of Flying -- Sezin.org

My fear of flying signals my time to stay put, my time to understand how it feels to have wings while remaining grounded.
Path finder -- Love, Rose
What language do you use to describe your trajectory?
Ring my bell -- Furthering the Worldwide Cultural Conversation
What comes first, the hybrid self or the hybrid life? Are our most resonant peers made or born?
Talking Point -- Skaian Gates
I found myself asking through the day were we sharing our hybrid lives because of our creativity or because of our experience of being expats.
A Thousand Ways -- Tales from Turkey
I've connected with 9 women with crazy, joyful, challenging hybrid lives so like my own. Lives that seem to hinge on one particular characteristic we all share - creativity.
Intimate Strangers -- Sezin.org
Dialogue 2010 was a meeting of kindreds, as women, as hybrids, as artists, as dreamers, believers.
Mapping My Worldview -- Skaian Gates
Two snapshots placed side-by-side to show how my worldview has changed.
What an Expat Leaves Behind - Judith van Praag
The expat hybrid lifestyle forms an audible cloud

Podcast availability will be made public this spring. In the meantime, join the discussion on Twitter using #dialogue2010, visit this Squidoo lens for up to the minute information, and join the Dialogue2010 Facebook page for future event information.

Silk Road Stories

Friendships made in just a few short hours. Life stories shared, professional commonalities discovered, mothering suggestions offered, all while eating some of the best Turkish food I've had in Turkey. The women I met from the Bursa International Women's Association were French, Italian, German, Russian, American, and more. How were we able to relate to each other with different cultural viewpoints? Different occupations, different ages? I went to speak about creativity and left marveling at the ability for community to form abroad. Enlightened conversation. Multi-national viewpoints.

Bursa, known for being the last stop on the silk road, has a vibrant international women's community. I met a Turkish woman who runs her own coffee shop after first studying finance in Turkey, designing textiles in New York, and returning to start afresh with coffee and pastries she decorates herself. I met an American opening the first quilting shop in Turkey that will be selling fabric online (yea for me!). I met a German graphic designer who breezed through my drawing exercises. I met homemakers juggling multiple kids and learning new languages. I met a woman with her 2-month old baby who apologized for her English while elegantly articulating that the only thing she wants to do is be a mother right now.

Riding a bus to Bursa that left at 7:30 a.m., I sat next to a university student wearing hand-knit leg warmers and gloves who offered me her saltine crackers. 11 hours later, we coincidentally rode the same bus back to Izmit, laughing when we boarded the small service bus that took us home to nearby neighborhoods. She studied economics. Had taken her final exam that day. She was a photographer. We made a date for coffee.

I believe that the things most difficult to overcome, public speaking being way out of my comfort zone, are emboldened by passion. By the support of a community that honors unique, individual voices that examine larger cultural patterns. I am passionate about art and life being merged, even if it is messy. I am grateful for breaking out of routines. And the kismet relationships that can form just by hopping a bus.

The Art of Cultivating a Creative Life

20 women sit around long tables pushed together in a corner of a café in Istanbul on a Saturday morning. The clink of coffee cups, the murmur of orders being placed. I pace around a little bit, preparing myself physically and mentally to talk about creativity to this group of professional women that I have been a part of since 2007.

The painter Robert Motherwell reportedly always started his day with figure drawing, though in his finished work, literal figures are scarce. He did it because it got him up and moving, pushing kinetic energy around until the good stuff could come out. He knew the power of drawing.

I have planned a drawing exercise for this reason, and I move around the room, saying hello to all the women who have come: a mother with her 6 month old baby and her 4-year old daughter, a salon owner, lawyers, entrepreneurs, writers, bakers and teachers.

The title of my talk is The Art of Cultivating a Creative Life. I hand out sheets of paper and pencils, and we do one of Betty Edward’s exercises from Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. I do this to dispel the “I can’t draw” so “I’m not creative” myth. I also choose this exercise because it relates to perception. How we think we see a chair, a hand, a house, but what we really see is a symbol. By slowing down our brains, we trick it into overriding its impulse to see the symbol of a hand and not its network of lines, hangnails, smooth nail beds, and curve of the thumb. Some women grasp a shift in their awareness immediately, others later as I talk about the application of a seemingly simple exercise to the borderlands of work and home, to professionalism, to adapting to life as an expat in Turkey.

I talk about navigating new territory abroad. About being faced with making decisions in the gray areas of bi-cultural life. I talk about reinvention. The spark. Creativity as a way of being and not just the action of sitting down to make something or write something. I talk about the magic of dialogue, concluding by putting out the extraordinarily uncomplicated idea that all moments in life are art. And then I pose this question:

Can you identify where you feel moments of spark in your own life?

Now, where are yours?