In this first episode of the first season of The Go Creative! Podcast, novelist and poet Orna Ross introduces herself as a creative and creativist, and explains what to expect from her new solo podcast, for authors, artists and everyone.
Read the Transcript to Go Creative! Podcast #1: Introduction
Orna Ross: Hello and welcome. I'm Orna Ross, a novelist and poet who wants the whole world to go creative. And you're listening to the Go Creative! podcast. Come on in.
Hello and welcome, welcome, welcome to my new podcast, my solo podcast, something very different to anything I've ever done before, the Go Creative! Podcast.
It's Easter Monday here in England, and anywhere where Easter is celebrated. I celebrate Easter, but I also celebrate what came before Easter and what came after it in my world, but I love this time of year. Love that festival, love the idea of resurrection, rebirth, all of that is so tied in with creativity, and it's my birthday today also, so Easter Monday falling on my birthday.
And because all that goes with Easter, and spring, and birthdays, is so relevant for Go Creative, the whole idea of resurrection, rebirth, growth, expansion, all of that is going to be central to this podcast, so I held off till today to actually do the launch.
So, here we are, and today I'm just going to tell you a little bit about myself, a little bit about this podcast, which is aimed at creativists, as well as, I'm saying it's a podcast for authors, artists, and everyone. I'll explain a little bit more what I mean about that in a in a little while.
Some of you will already be familiar with the concept of creativism, but for some of you it may be new.
But I thought I'd just begin with a little bit of an introduction. Some of you may know me as the Director of the Alliance of Independent Authors. Some of you may know me because you've read one of my novels. Some of you may know me as poet. All of that, I'm bringing to this podcast, but most of all, I'm just bringing me as a human being.
So, I thought I'd tell you a couple of things about me, that you may or may not know about my childhood to start with.
I began back in Wexford in Ireland, the southeast of Ireland. I now live in the southeast of England, but Wexford is the county down in the very south-eastern corner of Ireland, about 100 miles away from Dublin. I grew up in a very rural village, and I had a number of things in my life, a number of challenges in my young life, as so many of us do. My dad, as so many Irish men, suffered the Irish disease of alcohol addiction. My mom was co-dependent on him, and my sister Una was profoundly disabled.
For me, books and reading were my lifeline away from these things, and also, because my sister was disabled, I was in a family of five, I had three brothers, so I was a girl with a lot of masculine energy in the house and a lot of masculine energy around us in a very patriarchal and church clergy ridden society.
So, churches are fine, and clergy can be fine, but when clergy is running the country and you live in a theocracy, that's rarely fine, and it wasn't fine in the Ireland of my youth.
So, I learned other ways of being from books, I learned moral code; different from the one that I was being given by my church.
I could see as a young person, because when we're young, we're very clear, and I could see that our country was hypocritical and turned in on itself and insular, and as I said, patriarchal.
So, the values that I was finding in other books about other societies were really important to me as a young person.
Hit my teens, acted out, discovered smoking, drinking, boys, all of that, was expelled from school. I grew up. I grew up some more.
I discovered feminism, which to me was important in terms of encouraging self-respect for me, self-esteem. I found Buddhism, a Western variety of Buddhism, and that gave me what the patriarchal Catholic church had failed to give me, and I found socialism, which also gave me an abiding belief in the dignity of financial independence, is how I would summarize it for all.
Independence became a really important value for me. In Ireland, it was drummed into us. It was one of the great things about it, because of course, I've mentioned all the bad things, and that's what we do when we talk about our childhoods, often. The dad with the alcohol addiction was a beautiful, sweet man. The mum, who was co-dependent, was one of the strongest people I know. Super, super mother in terms of every aspect of our physical care, and loved us so well, and my disabled sister also taught me about love, and our whole family brought us together in ways that have affected us at every level, each of us, and also our bond with each other.
So as ever, there are a thousand things going on all the time, but I'm just trying to give an insight to help you to know me a bit better, because one of the core things about going creative is about being yourself and touching in with who you actually really are. So, that's why I'm beginning with me, so you can begin with you.
So, having discovered feminism, Buddhism, socialism, as a young student and grown up and gotten over myself, I then dropped all isms for a long time and I just became non-political, started writing fiction, started writing poetry, and eventually, I'm not sure exactly when, I came around to this whole concept of creativism, which is going to be the topic of this podcast.
So, what am I talking about when I'm talking about creativism?
When I began blogging back in 2008, I needed a word that distinguished the application of the creative process in everyday life from its application in writing, and creativism seemed to me to be the perfect word to express that.
I started to use the word and I've been tickled to see it turn up in other places.
Essentially what it is, creativism, the conscious application of creative principles to everything in life.
I'm a creativist and that's how I define myself, if I have to put an identity on myself. A creativist is a person who applies creative principles to the art of living. So home, relationships, money, work, everything gets drawn in there, and the creativist understanding of life is very linked to the other isms that I had touched in; each of them feeds into that understanding.
So, for me, creativity and going creative, as this podcast will understand it, is nothing to do with how we normally think about being creative. It's not about being a hipster, or living in a commune, or a warehouse, or getting high, or getting laid, or sleeping around, or sleeping in a squat, or any of those kinds of things. It's not about broken debauchery or high drama.
It's just about directing your creative energy towards something you truly desire, understanding how the creative process works, how it takes you there, stretching yourself, taking risks, putting yourself out there, being yourself. All of those things.
So, it's not restricted to any particular task. Often with writers, you hear them feeling that writing is very creative, but book marketing is not. A creativist sees both of those things as creative.
It doesn't see creativity as a talent or a skill that some people like writers have, but other people say businesspeople don't have. It recognizes that writing can be cranked out in a very rote, un-creative and commercial kind of way. Whereas the tasks of running a business can offer you countless opportunities to be innovative and imaginative and expressive. So, an entrepreneur can display dazzling creativity, whereas a writer can be a hack, routinely just going through the motions.
Most of all, what unites creatives and creativists is intentionality, the power of creative intention, our energies directed towards what we truly want.
That means admitting to ourselves who we truly are, and setting an intention from that place, and I guess that's why I began by introducing myself in the way that I did, because that sort of recognition of self, and what is going on within ourselves, and how that connects to the outer world and the conditions within which we find ourselves, the interplay between the internal conditions and the external conditions, all of that is something that creativism can encompass.
We don't go around thinking about that in our heads, but as we develop and create more from a conscious place, and develop our skills at conscious creation, then we find these things automatically expand. We get to know ourselves in a whole different way, and we get to know the world in a whole different way.
There's a connection here a little bit between things that have become very popular in the creative community over the last 10 years and the concept of the law of attraction and manifestation.
Very often I hear creatives and creativists talking about these things and the universe in ways that are very close to superstition, and conscious creation isn't superstitious. It's the opposite. Faith is absolutely needed, belief guides what happens. All of that, absolutely, but there's also a whole extra layer.
So, the law of attraction and manifestation techniques really take up just the first three or four stages of what is a seven-stage process. Conscious creation is a seven-stage process, and that process operates whether we are creating a book or a breakfast. It's the same thing. We're not so conscious of it when we're creating breakfast because it's something we've created very often before, and it's pretty straightforward and easy, but if we turn that into a banquet for a hundred people, now we understand, that's a consciously creative thing and that we need to apply our skills to it, but it's the same process that will deliver that to us as delivers breakfast.
So, I will be talking about this in other episodes. For now, I just want to say that there is more here than just the law of attraction.
I also want to, finally, before I stop talking about creativism and creativists, just to say that very often people who are attracted to this way of thinking and this way of living are purpose driven, values driven, as indeed are so many creatives. We want to change the world in some way. The internal world, ourselves, the external world out there, both.
That is very much embraced by this podcast, and we will be talking about the challenges that brings along for us, and the ways in which we can ensure that we remain nurtured and care for ourselves so that we take our risks from a place of safety and so that we creatively connect with other people.
So, it's very much about what I call ‘both, and' thinking rather than ‘either, or' thinking. So, heart on heart rather than head-to-head, and knowing how to look within, knowing how to check in with ourselves. Because the thing that happens as you live this way is that you realise knowing yourself is a never-ending process.
There is always another layer to unpeel, there's always something else going on, and when you look back at how you viewed things when you were younger, you can see so clearly how your thinking changes, and develops, and grows, and expands.
Another sort of regular theme that we'll be looking at is that expansion can keep on going right up to the end of our days, and that is not encouraged in our society at the moment. There is a sense that once you reach a certain age, you stop growing, you stop consciously creating, you stop playing, you stop just meeting the world in that way.
We're all born into conventions, societal conventions, familial conventions, and in many ways, they're great. They keep us safe so that we can take our risks from a place of safety. All good, but when we get stuck in them, when we allow them to run the show and we stop questioning, and we stop feeling that expansion belongs to us, that we are as entitled to growth and expansion as anybody else. When we stop that, when we slide into conventional thinking, and our mind will have us doing that many times in every day, but with conscious creation, it's not about being that all the time, because nobody is every one thing all the time. We are all large, we all contain multitudes. It's very much about embracing all of the different aspects of us and embracing the interplay between them and the relationships between those different parts.
That's very core to conscious creation and to creativism, getting to a place where there is full acceptance and understanding and listening, internal listening, to the different parts within.
That of course, then gets translated into the same sort of meeting of the world on the outside.
So, creativism is, first of all, always an act of listening. It's always about allowing things to be, and observing, checking in, seeing what's going on, and then intentionally creating from there.
So, lots of theory there. I won't just be talking theory on the podcast. Each episode, I will take some aspect of creative theory. I'll talk a bit about what's coming up for me in that particular week, both as a creative and a creativist, but I'm really super interested in you as well. It's very much about what's going on for you. So, I will be setting some exercises around the topic, exploring from different perspectives, psychological, spiritual so many different ways to look at what's going on.
Most of all, the podcast is an invitation. It's an invitation to you to connect with your own creative spirit. To go creative, to be a creativist, to tap into your own creative power, to apply it everywhere at all times when you become conscious, to everything, to every aspect of your life. To understand how the creative spirit works through you, operates in you, and to learn more and more all the time about how to apply it in the most creative way.
So, there will be sometimes in the podcast an opportunity to just stop and breathe, and not think. To allow the space where that space of non-thinking where creativity can rise within us and that deeper and more powerful aspect of ourselves is given the space to actually move us towards what we most truly want.
So, that is it for episode one. I hope all of this sounds interesting to you. I hope you will tune in. You can find out more at ornaross.com/podcast. The podcast will be going out, you can get it wherever you get your podcasts, and everybody has a different way of tuning in.
It will go out every Monday morning at around 9am. UK time, and we'll be looking at a different topic every week, a different aspect of creativity, conscious creation, creativism.
Next episode, I'm going to be looking at the three cardinal creative virtues. They are, if you're not aware of them, courage, commitment, and celebration.
It's very much about celebration, always, and when the creativity goes out of life, the celebration goes out of life. So, this would be very much about putting it back in, no matter what's going on in your life.
Yes, I hope you'll tune in again next Monday. I hope you have a wonderful creative day today, and last day of our long weekend here. Have a wonderful week and don't forget to go creative.
Bye, bye for now.