The Creative Life: True Tales of Inspiration Book

A passionate and inspiring guide to creating a life built around the creative process.

This groundbreaking new work from the bestselling author of The Artist's Way, guides readers in creating a vision for their lives in which art and life are inextricably linked. According to Julia Cameron, when we allow our creative spirit to serve as our compass, we discover that the art we have always longed to create is suddenly within our grasp.

In The Creative Life, Cameron shows readers how to use their creative hearts and minds to cultivate lives that nourish and sustain their art. Through beautifully drawn scenes from her own life, as well as the lives of the many artists around her, Cameron reveals that creativity flourishes during the quiet pauses in our lives-and that it is only when we allow ourselves to slow down and savor life that we discover ways to depict it sensitively and poetically in our art. By opening the curtain on her own life and the lives of the artists who surround her, Cameron reveals a world rich with creative possibility.

Publishers Weekly

In her life, Cameron has learned to seize whatever moments of creative time she can get. "Small tidbits add up to a larger whole," she says, one of the compact yet insightful truisms that make up this volume of enlightening analogies, confessions, and vignettes of Cameron's life on New York's Upper West Side. From dinners and musicals to teaching engagements and writing sessions, Cameron's latest contribution to her already extensive list of titles is something of a diary, exposing her personal life with unexpected honesty and humility. A spat with her inner censor, a made up "gay British designer" she's named Nigel, gives the book a light-hearted and relatable tone. Colorful characters, including actors turned writers, musicians turned songwriters, poets turned playwrights, and songwriter-bakers, make up an encouraging community of creators. Practical, productive, and passionate, Cameron and her Believing Mirrors ("people who see our power and potential and reflect it back at us") show the artistic way in an organic light that makes it seem approachable and attainable, revealing how living creatively can be as calibrated as a work of fiction.
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