In high school I listened to a lot of Joni Mitchell. It’s safe to say that I was a bit of an outlier when it came to my eclectic music tastes. New England boarding school in the late 1980s, all boys scholar-athlete paradigm, etc. I tried to infect my friends with an appreciation for Joni’s poetry, her voice, what I saw as her pellucid courage, and her stripped down and un-overproduced sound. I’m not sure I won over any fans, but she’s endured in my musical carousel (while many others from that period are long forgotten.) So it feels fine indeed to lean on Joni this morning for a perspective she’s often shared about creative crop rotation. Given my affinity for gardening and garden metaphors, it feels as if I could have offered the same idea myself in the past, albeit absent the tidy clarity that Joni brings to her words.
“It’s a natural thing for me to rotate my creative crops when I’m dried up as a poet.”
— Joni Mitchell
Frankly I find it hard to believe that Joni Mitchell’s writing well ever dried up! But the possibility of re-priming the pump by changing things up makes sense to me.
Creative crop rotation between writing and construction, writing and gardening, writing and art is consistently beneficial for me. To wit, I recently took an encaustic crash course with a new friend and artist, Gloria Santoyo Ruenitz, as a way to shift/expand my current creative process and to get unstuck. I’m not referring to writer’s block. I’m referring to an overdue mind shift. Creative risk as catalyst!
Encaustic is totally new to me, but it’s part of a much longer journey. I’ve been exploring collage, multimedia mashup, mosaic, braiding, adaptive reuse, repurposing, and poetry as a way to better approximate my storytelling goals. Muddling my creative processes? Perhaps. But creative risk and the flux it engenders are reliably freeing for me. I’ve learned to trust the process — play, experiment, make, unmake, play some more, experiment some more, reimagine, create anew — to get me unstuck.
Here’s another take on the same topic.
“Anytime I make a record, it’s followed by a painting period. It’s a good crop rotation. I keep the creative juices going by switching from one to the other, so that when the music or the writing dries up, I paint.”
— Joni Mitchell (Source: kateandsarahklise.com)
Switching between dissimilar creative processes seems to refresh my generative output. And, even more important, exploring an idea in totally different ways actually seems to increase the likelihood of a breakthrough. Does that make sense? It’s as if briefly stepping away from a familiar process and exploring, experimenting, iterating with another discipline actually can alchemize new connections or a new perspective.
As I dive into these next six months, I’m leaning into creative crop rotation in order to revitalize and supercharge my quest. Sure hope it helps!
What do you think?