[MUSIC] Hey, you're listening to Creative PEP Talk, a weekly podcast companion for your creative journey. I'm your host, Andy J. Pizza. I'm a New York Times best-selling author and illustrator, and this show is just everything I'm learning about building and maintaining a thriving creative practice. Let's get into it. [MUSIC] I'm a believer in the idea of dressing for the job you want, not the job you have. And I have applied this to my creative practice, too, which means if you want professional results, you need to present online like a pro. And that means going beyond social media and having a professional website that reflects your style and looks legit. I rebuilt my site this year with Squarespace's fluid engine and was so happy with how easily I could build my vision without coding that when they approached me to support the show, I jumped at the chance because I love and use this product. So go check it out, squarespace.com/peptalk to test it out for yourself. And when you're ready to launch your site, use promo code PEPTALK, all one word, all caps for 10% off your first purchase. Thanks goes out to Squarespace for supporting the show and supporting creators all over the world. [MUSIC] Hey, in case you don't know, we have a monthly live virtual meetup every last Monday of the month with supporters of the show from Patreon and Substack. We have so much fun on these calls and they are the warmest, most encouraging creatives that I have ever met. And we also talk real creative practice stuff. We have authors, illustrators, lettering artists, picture bookmakers, fine artists, musicians, and folks that work in video and film as well. And we have people that are just starting out, people super established in their creative careers and everything in between. For the rest of this year, we're going to chat through our new Journey of the True fan series, exploring questions and ways to apply these ideas to your own creative practice so that you can leave 2024 stronger than you came in with more visibility, connection with your audience and sales. Coming up to whichever suits you best at either patreon.com/creativepeptalk or antijpizza.substack.com. And I hope to see you at this month's meetup. We have a real treat for you in this episode. It is a conversation with author Catherine May. I have been so excited to share this with you and I was so looking forward to having this conversation. It was such an enjoyable chat and I was really inspired and moved as I am by Catherine's work. I've introduced to Catherine's books by my wife, Sophie, who has an aesthetic kinship to the kind of stuff that Catherine explores with going on walks and understanding and feeling the joy of small things and being in your body and all things that honestly I really struggle with as an ADHD person. And for that reason, Catherine's writing is almost medicinal to me. It has this really profound effect and it can just really hit me and it's very meaningful to me. You might know Catherine from her books, enchantment or wintering or the electricity of every living thing. My way in was that book, electricity, I got into it because it is a memoir about her midlife autism diagnosis and I was reading it to prepare for making our series right side out about ADHD that we did earlier this year in 2024. And it highly recommend the book, I'm in enchantment now and it's just bringing me so much life. And so we started the year with this focus on neurodivergence and owning who you are. And we went into the summer with this slow and steady burnout recovery period. And that's really what enchantment is all about, which is her latest book. And it's just given me so much. So I feel like this is the perfect guest for this year of the show. And it was just an absolute delight. Stick around for the end and I will come back with a CTA that I'm calling post it no ritual. And I'll be back to talk about how you can not add new things to your life or constantly shifting, trying the brand new thing to see if you can feel good again, but how you can bake something, just one thing into your every day that might help you recover from burnout and stay more creatively regulated. And so I'll be back for that. In this chat, we talk about all kinds of things. We talk about the kind of balance between mystical creativity and systematic creativity. We kind of chop it up around the hero's journey and go at that from two very different perspectives. And we also explore tapping into the creative things that your brain automatically does and how to recognize those things so that you can put the best of that into your work in a way that comes with ease and flow. So look out for all that stuff and I'll be back at the end to give you a creative call to adventure on how to put some of these ideas into practice. I was introduced really to your work by my wife who is British and also I'm ADHD. So I find the world deeply under stimulating and so she helps some other energy that helps me kind of stay present and it's probably a little closer to your way of being. And so she introduced me to your work when I was working on, we were co-writing this series about ADHD and neurodivergence and kind of positive self psychology stuff. And so later I'd like to get into a little bit of that but your writing and your work has been really, really powerful for me. So first of all, just thanks for that. It's really nice that it lands somewhere, you know, you send out into the world you're never sure. I know. I know. And it's interesting because when I first got into your work, I'm about halfway through your latest book enchantment, which has been super timely for me. It's what I didn't know that I needed. But I got into your work from the electricity of every living thing. And it was kind of research because I was doing all this work on neurodivergence. And I just, it's so interesting how, you know, my creative practice, there's like, there's the part of it that's like an outpouring of who I am. And then there's also part of it that's like self regulating almost like medication. It's not even kind of soothing kind of, yeah. Yeah. But it goes outside of what comes natural. What comes natural for me is, you know, just burning white, hot ADHD action all the time. And so I'm really interested in that space between what comes natural and then what you need to do that maybe it doesn't come natural because you need that to your system. And your work is really like that for me. And so I think some people that are like me may not realize how much of a balm your ability to be present is. And halfway through this enchantment book, I really had to pause because I just had tears dreaming down my face because I have such a hard time accessing this. And I was just so moved. So thank you so much. That makes me really happy. And I, you know, I had to really learn it, you know, like my tendency as loads of autistic people is to sort of retreat into my head because the outside world feels so unsafe so often. And I mean, like, I don't know if this is a proper phrase, but I think that loads of neurodivergent people have got a kind of sensory trauma, almost, where we have been forced through things that feel uncomfortable or painful so many times or that that we know feels wrong in our bodies, but we've been told that it's right, you know, like anything from sort of sitting still to being an incredibly noisy room, you know, and you're told that no, this is just normal and you should be able to cope with this. And yeah, my, my default has always been to like retreat into my head, which is why I'm a writer, because that's where, you know, that's where I find stories. And I've, over the last, well, nearly 20 years now, you know, I took up meditation and I really, I was like, everyone else says to me now, oh, I wouldn't be able to meditate. I can't sit still. I can't concentrate. Like, yeah, hi, me too, but I, I knew I needed it. I knew I needed to figure it out. And I found so much solace there and it's, it has, it's changed the quality of my attention, but it's only since I wrote electricity that I've really, really realized the need to come back into my body and to live there again. And I'm, I'm still in process with that. It's hard. It's hard to be there sometimes, but it's, it is rewarding for sure when it, when I imagine. Yeah. It really fascinates me and this is like an over simplification, obviously everybody's experience with neurodivergence, ADHD, autism is very different and nuanced, but I have over the years had a lot of autistic friends that I'm kind of gravitate towards. And the thing that in this is what, and this is also true about your books where I live, my tendency is to live in my head. My tendency is to disassociate in that kind of way, but for the opposite reason, and it's because I find the presence so understimulating that I will be fit. Yeah. I spent most of my childhood like in fantasy, literally just, just like I'm in class and I'm just imagining things are way more interesting than what's happening. And so your descriptions and encounters with everyday things, the thing that touched me was I'd gone, I'd figured out last week how to get present and taking my youngest kid to the grocery store and it was, that's a real challenge for me. Not just to do, it's hard for me to do, it's hard for me to enjoy it, but somehow I enjoyed it that day, I figured out how to, and you had a line in your book about handwriting, your grandmother's handwriting, and the grocery lists, which are really the most important things. And I was just like, oh my gosh, I had touched that today, but it's so fascinating because it feels like it's coming from the opposite place, but finding the right level of stimulation by getting into your body. Although I think it is similar, I mean, yeah, it's definitely like, I'm often escaping because I'm overstimulated and I cannot be in here, everything's clanking and people are getting near to me and there's like all this kind of conflicting information and yeah, that's definitely like when I curl up in my little snail shell. But I also, I find that the world runs very slowly compared to the inside of my head, you know, and I find a lot of things just incredibly boring, like boredom is one of my defining experiences, I think. Me too. And when I, like when I, one of my first realizations when I realized that I was autistic, was this like sort of consistent feeling I'd had when I was in a room full of people, that everyone else was numb, and like, of course that doesn't make any sense because other people being numb is not in the field of my experience. But what I really meant was how unreactive they were to the world from what I could see. So whereas I wanted to kind of flinch and run away or like respond to the sensory overload, they were not responding and I couldn't, you know, I couldn't fully make sense of that as a response. And I, and I think on top of that, like we autistic people are really well known for like going straight to the point like we don't, we don't care about small talk. We find it really tedious and really pointless in such a waste of time. And that added to this sense of numbness coming at me from the people because why do they want to talk about really boring things when we could like ask each other about whether we believe in God or how to solve the massive questions of existence, like that's the conversation I care about. Yes. Yeah. That's amazing. So I get your, I get your boredom. Yeah. And you know, like I said, I know that there's, it's an oversimplification because there's all this nuance like you're bringing into that. But I also, my friend, my close friends that I've had over the years that are autistic and also feels almost like passing notes to the other part of the brain that I don't always have access to it almost feel that there's so there's such a similar quality to that. Yeah. I think there's this similarity of just not feeling normal, not feeling like, you know, typical. Yeah. But then there's also. Yeah. Yeah. But then there's also just this fact and that's one of the things that's not boring about those people is that it's like, oh, I have just no idea where you're going to go with this because I can't even foresee it. Yeah. And I love Anna's equipment. So I, you know, I love all of that stuff. But I wanted to talk about your latest book enchantment because, you know, I, we just did a series on the show over the summer, which was the slow and steady series. I was publicly trying to come out of burnout and just some difficult spaces in my work. And you know, my, the obvious answer for that I think is slow, slow down, get, you know, get more steady, all that. And I think those things are true. But I, you know, I started reading your book, not thinking of it being connected to that, not thinking the idea that enchantment was really connected that because it didn't seem like an obvious solve. And yet that's kind of what exactly what it's about. And I can see how much that magic is a huge part of what's making me retreat or shut down. So I wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about, because a little bit about what brought you into that space. And also why the word enchantment. I'd love how authors can kind of imbue new meaning into words. And when you say enchantment, you're, you're meaning something that wasn't immediately obvious to me, but it also is like a word that I think we need. It's something that's like, this is something we need to be able to talk about, you know? It's a slightly tricky word to use in a way, because it's become freighted with like all this kind of really tacky sort of Disney-fied stuff, like, oh, it's like butterflies and sparkles and magic and unicorns. And I, you know, like when we're first publishing the book, I kept joking to know once amusement that I'd love a unicorn on the front of the book, please, and perfectly some like a nice oily kind of, you know, holographic background. I wasn't entirely unserious and I didn't get my wish, but I like actually, I tried to afford using it for that reason, but it just kept coming up in my language. Like it just, it was this repeated word that I couldn't help but notice. And I, I loved the sense that enchantment has got this link to the word "song", you know, that it's, it's a song, a song kind of spell. And this sense that it's active and passive, the enchantment can be something that lands on you, or it can be something that you do to the world. It's a sort of exchange. I also like the kind of witchy spelliness about it too. And I, and as I was writing the book, and it's never made it in, but I read a Welsh myth called the Mabinogian, and one of the cycles about it is medieval, is that a fog falls over the kingdom, and it's like this literal kind of enchantment rolls in. And I sort of connected that to the pandemic, this sense that a fog can roll in to the whole of the world, and then you have to find your way back home again, which is what the characters kind of do. Logically, I should have actually written that, but sometimes it's nice to just keep things for yourself. Yeah, and podcasts, yeah, and put them on podcasts. Yeah, that's right. I'm going to give you something to talk about afterwards a little bit, but that that fog is really meaningful to me because of that sense of burnout, and that sense that I was in that my cognition had slowed down to the point where I felt like I was barely able to access my own thoughts, and it meant that time was skipping in weird ways, and I was feeling kind of physically exhausted, but also just not human, you know, dazed. And that, yeah, that was the beginning of the book really, like what can you do when you feel this burnout, like how do you recover your sense of self, because that's what it obliterates. And I realized quite soon on that the answer wasn't just what had happened in the immediate past, but I needed to think about my long standing habits of thought that were keeping me from feeling refreshed on a, you know, like being able to renew and refresh myself. Yeah. So not many unicorns tragically. You know, what's really grabbed me about that is thinking about enchantment in two different ways there where, you know, there's the enchantment that pulls you out of the fog, and then the idea that the fog is an enchantment. And I reminds me kind of one of my ongoing creative threads, because I make picture books and most of the stuff I do has to do a storytelling is how the, the conflict and the obstacle is always the means in which the character gets what they need. Maybe it blocks what they want, but it's the, it's how they end up getting what they actually need. And it's just interesting to think of, oh, and then the burnout phases are really your body giving you what you need saying, okay, well, you can't keep doing this. I need to stop and I'm going to stop you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Instead of seeing it as, oh, just an obstacle in the way. Yeah. Absolutely. There's, if we're going to talk about in narrative terms, I always love the John York definition of a story, which is, I mean, this is going to be a wild misquote, but it's about somewhat, it's about going into the woods and bringing something back for your home. And I love that little code of for your home at the end of the sentence, you know, it's not bringing treasure back. It's like bringing something back that you need, as you say. And I mean, that's what my book, Wintering, was about, you know, it was about the, not these moments, which is often what people assume it's about, like these moments when you think, oh, I'm going to have a nice little rest for one. And then going to cut back having had a spa day, it's like the points when you are taken down by life, and often because you've been resisting stopping and thinking for such a long time, you've been pushing on through like all the signals that your body sent you and all the signals that your mind sent you and you've just bloody mindedly kept going on through. I think that's, I think that's my territory because I know it so well because I've done it to myself so many times and it's like, it fills up my purpose in life to tell people to stop doing it. And I love this idea because this is what I assume people go seek out a book like Wintering because they're like, all right, yeah, tell me how to avoid the winter. Like what, you know, like, you know, in some kind of weird way, I think that that's what I would be thinking. And that is kind of what I was thinking, entering enchantment of, I'm not thinking about like, oh, yeah, let's enter the fog, like, let's, let's really go into it. Or as I'm like, let's get in the fog, come on, the fog is really good. And there is, I mean, it's the only, it's the only way. And I think, okay, so could you maybe talk a little bit about what your, what enchantment is for you, what, because I think it's, you know, this is mainly for creative people. And I think that burnout is an ongoing thing, but also is this like loss of inspiration, loss of passion. I think a lot of that comes through part of just the job and, you know, every day. But also, as you get older, you just lose your sense of magic, especially in our modern day, we don't have that as much of a ritual and connection to the stuff. So yeah, I don't know if you could talk a little bit about why you needed that and then what, what you came out with and how maybe that relates to also your creativity. Yeah. I mean, like, you all know this better than most people, but children have got this innate sense of magic and it's not about the big things. It's about the tiny things, you know, like kids will, you'll walk down the street with them. And before you know it, they've got like a tiny nondescript pebble in their hand and they're like, their whole life is in the palm of their hand. And like, you can't, you can't even access that. And I like, yes, we all lose it, but I think we work quite hard to lose it. And I think we're trained very carefully to lose that sense of wonder, you know, from the parents saying, come on, hurry up, you're taking ages, which God knows I've done enough times as my own child to this kind of teenage sense that it's cool to be cynical. And you know, for me, like I'm the generation that thought Richard Dawkins was a really great idea and like all of that stuff, I thought was me being a really good rational adult and learning to grow up, and it took me a long time to feel this real sense of loss over that. And this, you know, this really, this restriction, actually, this kind of forbidden space that I wasn't allowed to think in and I wasn't allowed to engage in magical thinking, you know, and in China was a really hard book for me to write because I felt embarrassed to say, oh, no, wait, I need it, I actually really need this, I need to reengage with this sense of absolute or a stupid pebble, like a completely stupid pebble, I need that, I need that feeling. And I'm not willing to wait for it, you know, to go on a holiday of a lifetime and see that life refalls or something equally expensive, like I need it in my everyday, I deserve it, and I actually, I don't think I can carry on functioning without it, and I need permission to think in a completely different way, like a much more symbolic way, a much more ruminative way, rather than carrying on being grown up and practical. And so, sorry, that's not answering your question, you asked what enchantment is for me, I think enchantments, like the sort of ongoing practice of wonder, of deliberate wonder, of intentional wonder, but you know, that's there to just take great care of you. And I'm glad you went into the practice of it, because I want to, I want to circle back real quick to the in a second to that, but you know, this has been on my mind a lot lately, when I first started the podcast, so I was doing commercial illustration at the time, it was before I really had got much into picture books, I was doing a lot of client work and that kind of thing. And I kind of started it with a, I don't necessarily disagree with this now, but I started it with a feeling that all of the conversation around creativity within creative circles had become so overly spiritualized. And like, for me, as a person, yeah, pure mystery and, you know, mysticism and that kind of thing. And for me personally, that's, that was fine for the most part, because I am prone to that way of being like that, that is my natural gear in life is to be that way. I think at the time, I was really frustrated by when it's, when, you know, the pendulum swings back and forth, and there's like good things that happen as that kind of goes through history and the overly mystical view on creativity, I just felt like there were. I know exactly. We're about the same age. I'm, I'm, I think so. Yeah. I'm 38 and I, I'm 10 years old to me, but I do, but I do, yeah, I mean, we're probably right in the same zone with this. And there, and I think that I was just fed up with in the same thing with like a Richard Dawkins of unchecked spirituality or religion can be, it's so vague and abstract and it's so in the world of feelings that there's so much manipulation that can happen and there's, there are a lot of dangers, you know, which I don't have to tell you that you absolutely know that. Yeah. And like democratization as well, isn't it? I think that was, that was often my problem with it. It's like, Oh, you know, these people have got this mysterious gift and, and they're not, they're not one of you. Yeah. And like, I was like a working class kid growing up in a council house and like we, I knew that wasn't in my house. And actually like quite often what was seen as this mystical gift was like a privileged upbringing that made space and gave you money to do that. And I felt so long, resistance. So true. Yeah. Yeah. So true. And that's a great example of exactly what I mean of there's so many different or just, you know, that, and also things like the more that the people that are established, play it up and create the, it creates boundaries of the, yeah. Like I don't know how it works. It just comes to me and you're sat there like with a pencil, just trying to force something to happen. And it's like, well, it can't be that. So there's all these, you know, I was just aware of, so the first, even though like myth and journey were big parts of the show all the way from the start, I did, I was always really careful of, I don't want to take that slant I want to take, I want to talk about research about creativity and all that stuff, but I think over time, both in my personal life and my creative life, I've realized that we could be talking about the same things. We can be talking about reality, but we are not going to be able to access the inspiration if we don't do it through the lens of metaphor and symbolism. And I don't want to use those words as if they're, that means we're talking about stuff that's not true. It's just a more powerful way of talking about it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, I have this, yeah, it's really interesting to use that because I have this like still gut reaction against the hero's journey, like don't ever talk to about it. It makes me angry. I've never read it. Like it just, it's just that all the people that have ever really loved it have pissed me off. That's hilarious. Like, it's probably great, but when I read the interesting, I was very happy about it. Yeah. No, no, no. I was just going to say, just for your context, the listeners know that I am a huge hero's journey person. However, I'm also a big hero and journey person and I've, I've kind of, that was also about a decade ago. I still love it. I still love it. And I get, I totally understand, I don't know why I'm so cross with it, but it's that like, I understand, I understand, I'm just giving you the context of it, but I, I get it. But I, but, you know, like when I sat down to write electricity and I realized I was writing about a literal journey and a journey of discovery and they were loads of the elements of the hero's journey in it, I had this real, like, I will not do this. I will, I am not going to do this, I'm absolutely, you know, and I, and so actually I don't complete the journey and I was delighted with myself over that like a deliberately disrupted the journey because it's like I am not doing the heroic thing. Yeah. And I, yeah. And I had a similar thing with the artist's way, which everybody loves except me. Yeah. And I read it and found it like, I think, I think exactly what you're talking about, like woolly and overly optimistic. And I wanted an account of my creativity that was about showing up and working and doing all those kind of hard bits and, and like knowing that I didn't have the privilege to just let my creativity float out there, I had to make it work, I had to earn money from it. I had, you know, all of that sort of thing. And now I think I probably really need to revisit that book because I think I've probably been unkind for it, but at that time in my life, it just, it would never have served me to think in that way. I couldn't leave stuff to enough chance to get involved in this like beautiful pink cloud of creativity, I had to find the system and the labor in it and the grump work. Like that was the only way I knew how to do it. Exactly. And I feel, I feel exactly the same. And in my response to, you know, the, the artist's way or even things, people like Rick Rubin, I don't have a, I just have a, I don't disagree with much I've heard either of those people say. Yeah. It's just more that, that way of thinking about it. I just had, um, initial, you know, kind of negative reaction for, for all sorts of reasons. And a big part of it is just that a lot of those ideas, uh, if they're unchecked, they can be, they can really take off the responsibility, uh, on the artist, um, to have habits and show up and do the work and, and feel the, the difficulty of it, because that's a huge part of it for me. Um, and then, you know, I, I also, in, in my time, you know, hero's journey was a big thing for me when I was in my twenties. It kind of was, I didn't even think of it as a creative thing or a writer's thing, even though later it informed a lot of story things, but it, um, it, it was really important to me at that point, almost more as a spiritual thing or a, um, psychological thing, but the further I've gotten into story now, you know, now I've dove into 15 books or something about it and all these different perspectives. Um, I definitely understand people's impulse to push back on. There's some, there's some really, there's some really pervasive kind of like dogmatism that comes with hero's journey, fanboys, Joseph Campbell, fanboys, and I think it's the fanboys rather than the book to tell you the truth, you know, it's this like, we know everything. We know how stories are made. We've got a system and every story follows this system and I'm like, I can break it. And it's not true. And it's all. Watch me break it. Yeah. I mean, the whole idea of soon as there's a right way in creativity, it's the wrong way. Like, you know, that's the whole, the whole notion. Um, but yeah, I totally feel like what's really interesting to add in at this point. When people do ask me things like, where do your stories come from? I have to say, I have no idea, like they do, I do often feel like I'm channeling something that I've got no access to, like, no kind of conscious access to. And I, I don't, I don't feel like the inventor of a lot of my work. I feel like I feel like I create the circumstances in which it can happen. And I love that kind of Picasso quote, I think when inspiration comes, I wanted to find me working. Yeah. Something along those lines. Yeah. Um, that's my part is that I, I show up, um, but I, I would have to admit that I, I cannot explain a lot of what, what happened, what comes out. Like it doesn't, it doesn't, it's, I don't make it in any sort of. And I think that is the, I think that is the aim. I feel like all the stuff that I make within that. And so I, I feel like what's really interesting about this is we're talking a both and kind of way where we're, there were both, we're talking about what as a creative person, maybe gross us out about systems and logic. Yeah. Yeah. And then also what can feel that way when it gets overly mystical. And that there's this way in between where you don't have to know how it works, because even as you're saying, you know, I don't know if you feel like this, but having put out a bunch of books and a bunch of podcasts and stuff, you can never put enough nuance into the actual experience of it. And you know, when you say that it can feel like channeling, I completely agree with that. And I also feel like, um, and I don't know what it is, but I like, actually like the idea that I could see it from both angles. I could see it from what's the same thing that happens when you have a dream is that it's not in your control. It's coming from, it's instantly coming from somewhere else. And we don't, we don't fully understand that either. Yeah. I mean, first of all, I compelled to say I edit like hell as well. So I do tell, I do then there's so much of me in that bit. Yeah. Oh, the holidays are here. You got to find a unique gift for Uncle Derek and your sister, Catherine, and her kids, Jackson and Jeddah and Jirfree and Jaggab, and another two Jay kids, so much thinking, so much searching. Plus there's the ethical thing, you got to shop small, it just, it's a lot, but it doesn't have to be uncommon goods makes all of this simple and straightforward for real. The site is chock full of unique and interesting gifts that also support small businesses. My fam loves advent calendars. I think Sophie would like to stitch a day advent calendar and 12 days of hot sauce is definitely shouting my name. Sorry, that wasn't me. That was the 12 days of hot sauce calendar shouting seriously, we had tons of fun browsing the site for ourselves and kids and family to get 15% off your next gift. Go to uncommon goods.com/peptalk that's uncommon goods.com/peptalk for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited time offer, uncommon goods. We're all out of the ordinary. I don't know if you've got this in an enchantment yet, and I think it's later in the book, so maybe not. Okay. I write about Julian James's book, The Origins of Consciousness in the Something of the Bicameral Mind is such an exciting way to write down the Bicameral Mind. Okay, you're going to like this, because it's like this weird, completely, you know, unsupported book about neurology, I guess, where, from like the 60s, where James, and the thing with it is it's beautifully written and it's so compelling, but also almost certainly wrong. Yeah. But he puts forward this incredibly well argued theory that in our early evolution, our brains were in two halves, the two halves weren't joined together yet, and therefore we received information from different sides of our brain to the other side of the brain as if they were the voice of God. And so we evolved, feeling that we were in direct conversation with God all the time inside our head when it was actually that we just didn't have access to one half of our brain. And loads of neuroscience- And I have got to this part, I have got to this part, but keep going, because I did absolutely like this, yeah, I mean, I loved it when I first read it, you know, always aware that it wasn't, it's not the gospel that brain was, and loads of neuroscientists do for the same thing. And like what David Eagleman says about it is, we don't actually have a better theory. We don't think this one is right, but we don't have anything better. It's outlandish, but it's one of many outlandish theories we have about how the brain honestly operates and how it evolved. But I like it on a metaphorical level. I love the way it lets me think about creativity in all honesty, because if I had to pin down a theory of how creativity operates for me, I would say the bicarbon mind, sure, why not? Why not? Because where else is it? Like, where else is this stuff coming from? I don't know. Yes. And just so I, because I want to make sure that I get it and that listeners get it too. He's saying, and by the way, as an aside, one of the things I think a lot about is what could be a great relationship between creative thinking and scientific thinking, a lot of times I think what a problem that happens is when creatives are trying to say, this is literally how it is when it's an intuitive idea, or when scientists won't be creative in their ideas. I think most scientists that I have met actually acknowledge the power of intuitive thinking and how much it's led the way through scientific thought, because you need the hypothesis. And you need like, even if it's wrong, it's a way of like opening up preconception. So you need that kind of dialogue between these kind of philosophical ideas that are not true, maybe literally, or could be. But I think that to me, as I was going through that chapter, and I absolutely loved it, this is my kind of juicy as soon as you're getting into it, I was like, oh, man. But that we need, to me, it sounds almost like, oh, that's the great, it's not only just an interesting theory. What a great premise for a book. What a great premise for a world in which things work that way. Exactly. Like, it's this great leap of imagination, and it's an attempt, like, I love attempts. You know what I mean? Like, he's tried to think it through. And also, like, he draws on loads of literary, like, early literature to try and prove his point and gets a load of that wrong too, you know, because as soon as you examine it closely, what he says happens doesn't happen. You know, he says that I think it's the Iliad that, but just, you know, shows that this is happening in the characters in there. And I don't care, like, I love, I feel like it's a fantasy, you know, like, it's no bearing on my real life. It's a great, it's a great metaphor for thinking about how it is to be and how to be a creative person. And just in case, I want to make sure I get it right, how I'm thinking about what you're saying is, essentially, in the book, you talk about how we take for granted that we have this kind of emergent one voice that is us in our brand. A sense of self, like a really clear, yeah, access to all the elements about thought, yeah. And that these are, and that they're one perspective, even though, you know, you take the IFS look or you take a little bit further peek behind it, you realize that there's many perspectives that are very argumentative, usually, at least to my head. And he's proposing that there was a time where there was, we were all hearing voices. We were hearing these different perspectives in our brains and some of them were attributed to God, we're thinking, oh, God's just speaking to us, essentially, is that kind of what he was saying? There's no evidence of this, but that people believe that they were in constant and personal dialogue with God, that was a voice directly inside their head. And I just, do you know what, I just love the way Julian James's mind works. That book is, I mean, honestly, it's inches fat. It's a labor of love to get through it, but his prose is beautiful. And what you're doing when you read that book is wandering around the mind of undoubtedly a genius. But geniuses don't always get stuff right. And I am deeply okay with that because he didn't get stuff right in a, not only a harmless way, but in like a really enriching, gorgeous, immersive way. It's hard to have that conversation, isn't it, in our current era, it's like things got to be either right or wrong, things got to be science or art, like, actually, no, we can just immerse ourselves in the gorgeousness of some ways of thinking and some ideas. And it's safer us to do that. Nothing bad happens. Yeah. And I'm very interested in that because of being a creative and also then having a podcast that's attempting to be more nonfiction, because it's a, it's a delicate space. I think there's something of taking the work seriously and not yourself that quote at all, not taking yourself so seriously, so like creating a world where you like, I think your books are great at this of like, these are a personal perspective that where I'm kind of poetically working through things and it doesn't feel positioned as a journey. Yeah. Yeah. I hate gigantic books. Yeah. I've got no interest in being told. Like I'm just a horrible rebellious teenager, so you could never tell me anything and you still can't. I'm sorry. Like I want to, I want the experience of learning. Yeah. I've just got no interest in having it ready me. I tell you, I don't know if you know, Kristen Hirsch, the songwriter and musician. I don't know if I do. Well, she's just, she's, I mean, she was my teen hero and my adult hero too, but I, you know, you have this intense relationship with people. Sure. I've just interviewed her for my, for my sub-stack, so excited about that. Cool. And she's written a book called, I'm going to get it right by picking it up at the future of songwriting. Yeah. And it's, it's really a book about creativity and one of the, the points that she makes in there is that songwriters, and therefore I think writers and artists and every, and creative people are medicine. They are offering medicine, but they are, they are not, that's, that you have to remove the ego for that, like we're just a conduit for that medicine to come to our audience. And therefore there's, there's necessary humility in that, like you have to realize how small you are as the deliverer of that medicine, because you're not fully in control of what that medicine is. And that made sense of so many things for me, really, just this, this feeling of like, what, what am I doing? Like, what is this, what is this thing that I'm doing? Um, because I don't think I've got the answers, but I know people, I have to acknowledge that people find answers in my book. Definitely. She has captured that relationship better than anything I've ever read, honestly, I just, I think she really has thought about her role there and what she, what she offers and what we offer. And it's really gorgeous. I love that. I love the idea of the, the conduit and the, and the, you're the messenger, but you're, you know, you're not creating the message and there's a good kind of, um, both hand way of holding something where you're, you're doing something important, but it's also not you that's doing it fully or, you know, something in that vein. Uh, the other thing that makes me think, yeah, and, and I think the other thing that makes me think is, um, I keep thinking about this. I've mentioned a few times in the show, I heard, um, Mike Brabiglia on his podcast talking about how essential it is to have stand up friends for him, because the best stuff that he does is so natural to him that it feels like nothing and it gets back to this kind of channeling, uh, and that, and, and when I read your books, your, there's some things about the, your way of being that are so different to me that I, and it's funny because nobody thinks of me as a meditative person at all on the opposite of whatever that is, right? And, um, and, uh, and so, and, you know, so in, in my, when I was, you know, in my 20s, I would have not sought out books like yours and yet there's something so medicinal about it. Like it's like, it hits me on such a, such a hard level and it feels like you say there's definitely a lot of levels to it that feel, um, just you being you and, and, and this thing of being able to notice how, how have you, what helped you be able to capture those things? Cause I think about this, I've also heard Jerry Seinfeld say back in the day that he's like a joke chuck. So there's like woodchucks, you just have to figure out like, what does your, what does your brain do, you know, and then be able to notice what it, what does it just naturally produce? And that also gets to this channeling thing, you know, how did you, how did you, how did you get acquainted because it seems even more as you've gone along. You're more aware of like this is what I do. Yeah. I mean, I, I think writing electricity, everything changed that because I'd set out to write a really straightforward memoir about walking and it was really supposed to be about motherhood and how you come to terms with being a parent and like how you process that huge life event. And along the way, I realized that I was autistic and realized it was a book about autistic experience, but also about that I was, that I was actually literally, I'd put myself in the situation to learn how to cope with being autistic, which I didn't know how to do. And, and so I sort of consciously started to add in the bits that I'd probably otherwise edited out. You know, like my instinct when I write a book is to learn everything about the field. And then to just write the core of it. And of course for writing that book, that included like, well, who else has lived along this path? Like what are the, what are the stories here? What are the mythologies? You know, I love, I don't know if you have these in your country, but we, whenever you get any tourist destination, if you go into like a petrol station, there will be a little rack of kind of thin books of local ghost stories. Someone has really called it the market in this. What? I don't know if we do. First I was thinking they're like pamphlets, you know, like, yeah, we got pamphlets, but I don't think I haven't seen this now. They're thicker than pamphlets, but they're probably like 50 or 70 pages long. Okay. And they're always, you know, they've gathered up and I, I love it. I love these things. Yeah. I'm all over them. I've got so many of them. They're terribly written. They're not. I mean, they're probably made up. I don't care. I love them. Yeah. But you know, like, so all of that I would do around the root and I, and I started to think, wait, that is actually, if that, if I've got an autistic brain, then wanting to suck in the knowledge around this place is part of part of that, that's, that's what that leads me to. Yeah. And so I started to try and include it. And I realized as I was doing it, that that was part of my sense making around the world. I was, I didn't want to just think about the basic facts. I wanted to know it deeply. And that's how I approach everything. And so electricity was still like a pretty straightforward memoir, but it included all these other little stories along the way, like about Jean Reese and about Samuel Palmer and all these quite sort of weird, outsider-ish visionary people that had a track, had been attracted to this path that I was walking. And I, you know, I felt lineage with them. I came to feel lineage with them. They were attracted to the edge of the world. And so then when I started to write wintering, I really invited that in fully. I didn't want to tell a story about myself or not solely. I wanted to create the kind of patchwork and I was trying to represent the way I think. And that in turn helped me to start to notice that detail, you know, like that's, that's the call and response of knowledge, you know, it's, you, you learn some stuff and it takes you deeper and then it raises more questions and you go deeper again and it's this beautiful cycle. It's, it's a recursive loop. It's, you know, and it's definitely how I, how I absolutely work now and I, and it's changed the quality of my attention. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I also, I love that kind of process element. It reminds me of, um, Ira Glass talking about how for him storytelling is this thing of I'm going to tell you a bit about the story and then I'm going to tell you how I met, how it made me feel. And then I'm going to tell you a bit about it and that is, that's a huge part of storytelling. Um, and it just has this, yeah, I think it's an interesting way to engage in a text or a body of work or research or whatever your substance is that is kind of the, the meat of your, um, project, um, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, um, it, yeah, there's also this awareness of like, okay, you're engaging with something and then you have another layer where you're able to, to notice, okay, how did that make me feel? What did, what was I doing as I was engaging in that? And then that's part of the work and then it kind of, yeah, I mean, I like in lots of ways, all creative work is a distillation of somebody's quality of attention. So, you know, when I see your work, I understand something about how you perceive the world and like, not just visually, but meaningfully, like, how do you make meaning around what you see? You know, we will see the same thing and you will construct one set of meanings around it and I will construct another and I don't think I'll ever get over the thrill of that, you know, of like really encountering someone else's consciousness. I think it's the best, the best we have and that's a challenge, too, because I remember and I don't know if this was just my own trauma or something as a kid, like not like learning not to trust my own experience or whatever, or if it's just a thing that every artist needs to learn because, you know, there's this thing of like, I imagine young musicians seeing Lady Gaga wear meat dress and think that's what you got to do and take the wrong lesson rather than be like, no, what she did was follow her thing, that was her attention and being able to trust and notice where your attention goes. That's such a such a difficult muscle to learn how to work, but then once you start getting it, I think that's the thing for me is, you know, I'm kind of aware of like, oh, I kind of I do think I know what my brain does from doing the podcast for 10 years, a lot of these are were monologues, you just kind of know, like, oh, that's one of those things that turns into something, but it takes a while to get a feel, don't you know, I've got that feeling, I got that feeling and you begin to know you're like, you're the sort of beats of your creative, because I'm like, I don't know, I'd say, I'd say I'm exactly two thirds through writing a book and I know that because I because the day before yesterday I had the watershed moment and I knew it had to come at some point and until then I was slogging and slogging and slogging towards it and feeling like, that thing's working, what is this, what does that, it's made, what is the other, and then like, literally, that is my behaviour every evening when I walk through it. And then yesterday I had a conversation that I thought was entirely unpromising and I came home and it was like, I, you know, I was crying and I was like, my body felt different and I was like, here it is, this is it, I knew, like I know my process well enough to know that was going to happen and I trusted it, but the first few times that happened, I thought I was, I'd got completely insane. Well, I know the last third of the book will happen really quickly now that that was because the whole emotional centre of it has landed for me. I'm so, I love, I love getting to talk to you in that moment because, you know, the thing I think about a lot, when I'm encouraging people to trust themselves, trust that interest or whatever, I'm trying to get across to somebody who's maybe never had that experience that you just described, or maybe had it once and didn't realise like, I talk about it like a boomerang where, or not a boomerang, what's it called, slingshot, a slingshot where at a slingshot which doesn't come back to you, hopefully, unless you do it wrong, you can load it wrong and that can happen, but for me, like the first time you have that happen, you can think, oh, the moment where everything changes when I let go and totally ignore the fact that, oh, there's all this tension building that was also essential to, you know, that kind of thing. You said this because that, that was, that took me so, it took me, I didn't, I wasted some of my college years in my early part of my practice because I just didn't have the confidence that this would come together, especially when it felt wrong, when you're sometimes in the early process, because it's not working, it feels wrong. It feels grim. I mean, it feels like the opposite of what creativity is supposed to feel like and, yeah, and I think probably the truth is that most people who feel like they fail don't push to that point, you know, they get deterred like quite rationally honestly, but I, and actually there is a direct parallel with the walk there because I, like I know when I was walking the southwest coast of us path and I was finding it so hard and I was doing it through winter and I was alone and I'm not sporty, but there would, there would be this kind of direct process of the first hour or so it would be all about my discomfort and my doubts and I'd, you know, stop to relays my shoes and adjust the straps and my backpack and wonder, like, think I can't do this, I'm too tired, my legs don't feel right. And then I'd hit this kind of flow and sense of like slight euphoria actually, and I'd call it popcorn brain and I'd be having all these ideas and I'd feel really excited. But then if I pushed on through past that, which I think probably most people don't walk for long enough in their life to get there, I'd hit this place of like emptiness, beautiful serene emptiness that I wouldn't even remember that part of the walk, but in the days afterwards I'd realized I'd process something massive in that place. But again, I'm back to my bike, I have a real mind. Yeah, yeah. But yeah. I love the way that you-- And creativity is so analogous to that. Describe that and I've, and I can think, and I, as I'm reading, I can think back to the walks I've had where you do, like you say, just become a body towards the end and it is this, it's real and creativity is so like that, yeah. I wondered, I want to be sensitive to your time and I wanted to ask just one more question which was, having gone through the enchantment world, I won't call it a journey, we won't say it was a journey, but the enchantment process. I might just have to live with that. No, it's fine. I love, I love, I genuinely love a pushback. I love it. I need that, like, I love the-- I love both sides. You know, it's the first to do that, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And also, there's always new stuff in that. Yes. There's always new when someone's like, well, yeah, but here's the problem with that. I've learned to love it. Okay, so the last thing I was going to say was, in the enchantment process, I wondered if you had any ritual or practice that has been, you know, at least somewhat consistently fruitful for you because I think, for me, going through burnout, that's the thing that I've been really thinking about, like, I need, you know, when I go on my phone, there are thousands, millions of new ideas, like new prompts, new ways to do it, all that stuff. And I realize, like, oh, my dopamine deprived ADHD brain, freaking loves that, loves a new thing. It's like drinking. Let's go. Yeah. But then I realize, like, but my humanity cannot deal. I don't actually need any new thing. I am longing for what some of the old things where people had the ritual and that worked, you know, even if it just works 20% of the time, even less, whatever, but we used to trust the ritual. Yeah. And now we doubt it before we even get there. And I think that's, you know, like, what I'm trying to learn to do. And my new book is a lot about this as well, is to just get into certain habits of undertaking the ritual and to stop questioning it, you know, to stop asking, do I belong here? Will I like it? Will I like the people here? Like none of that actually matters because the thing that you will ultimately value is that you showed up and that you did it over and over again, even and that you sat through it when it was boring, you know, because because we've lost community, you know, we've lost the ability to withstand any tension in our lives and we've walked away for it for really good reasons, but the loss has now become greater than the reasons that made it useful to us. Yeah. And that means that I am not meaningfully contributing to a community, to any community, because I'm not present in it, because I've allowed myself to not be present in it. And I am looking for that, that thing that I will just damn well show up to. But if you want like a, it's not even a ritual, but it's something that I write about at the beginning of enchantment, when I was really stuck, when I was really burnt out, I kept a post-it note stuck to my screen that said, go for a walk. And when I found myself like gazing into the middle distance or constantly picking up my phone, you know, that cycle of like, oh, I've opened Instagram, I didn't mean to, I'll close it. Oh, I've opened Instagram. Like, do you do that? Yes, I do. Round of it. Like, that post-it note was like, right, go for a walk, even if it's five minutes, even if it's just, I mean, I've got like loads of little alleyways around my house. Sometimes I just do a loop around those. It's fine. Yeah. It will change. It will change something up. You'll notice something, you'll bump into someone, you'll pet a cat that you've passed, and you've plump will have grown in that familiar place that you walk past every day. The air will smell different. The weather will be doing something, because it always is, because I'm in England, it's always weather to notice. Something will happen, and a lot of the times, you'll end up walking for longer than you meant to. But even if you get back home, you'll come back with like fresh air on your clothes and you will feel differently, like it's, it's just do that. Just walk. Yeah. And it speaks to that, go into the woods and find something to bring home kind of thing, and it reminds me of, you know, the thing you were speaking to about finding community and habit and ritual, even if it's boring, even if there's problems with it. I think that I'm taking that as a greater theme, because I think our age, we have had the spirit of deconstruction and individualism and correcting and critiquing, and that has been the wilderness, and it's been a really necessary thing, I think, for there's no doubt about it. Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. But I think I feel like everybody's hurting for that ritual and that connection and that thing you're speaking to. No, I love that. You know what? Like when I was a kid, I asked my mom if I could take the hoo for a part, and she said, you can take it apart, but you've got to put it back together again. And I think, like, yeah, I'm always that in the new book, no, I maybe it will be now though. Oh, I'm telling you, I love it. I love it. It's a great image on the spring of the of the hatch and thinking, I can't put this back together so I can reverse out of this. That symbol is like feels like society right now. It's like, okay, we're we broke it apart. Okay, but definitely there's a deal here, take it apart, but you've got a responsibility to reintegrate it. And I like, yeah, we've got to we've got to acknowledge that responsibility because we have disintegrated and it's we're not okay because of it. I love that. Thank you so much. Thank you for your writing. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Yeah. Absolutely. Hope to talk to you again. It was it was delightful to meet you. And yeah, I think I just, you know, it's a nice way to finish my week. Awesome. Massive thanks to Catherine May for taking the time. I hope that I get to talk to her again because it is just truly enriching and I'm so grateful for her work. It's really, really powerful stuff. And if you are burnout or you've lost your zest, maybe go check out enchantment there or if you're going through kind of working out what's unique about you or even maybe some level of neuro divergence diagnosis, then maybe check out electricity of every living thing. I also recommend following her on sub stack, Catherine may.substack.com. It's called the clearing by Catherine May. And she's really active over there and has a really great community. Yeah. Really appreciate you. Thank you for taking the time. And I said, I'd be back with the creative call to adventure here it is post it. No ritual. I love this thing that Catherine talked about where she has this post to know that says go for a walk. But I wondered, you know, you could do that. That could be yours or you could use that as a prompt and say, you know, what needs to be on your post it now? What needs to be a regular everyday thing? What's something that tends to consistently help you regulate or get into your creative brain or get you out of a stuck place or a low place or just a overly stressed place? I started thinking about this for myself. And one thing that came to mind was take care of your dog. Now, yes, taking care of my dog is something I like to do in many ways, but I mean something different which comes from a different author, Martha Beck, who is just a real wild individual. I heard her recently say that, you know, you can treat yourself, your body like a pet that you love, you know, instead of waking up and saying like, all right, what does this creature need to get done today thinking just starting with looking in the mirror and just saying, you know, what, what do you need? You know, when your dog is acting a certain way, you're thinking or misbehaving or even just acting weird or disruptive, your first guess is not, you know, why aren't you being productive? First of all, but second of all, you're thinking, you know, what do they need? And if you're waking up feeling bad and feeling out of whack, which I do very frequently, I've tried to, I can't always do it, but even just the self love of looking in the mirror and being like, Hey, what do you need today, man? You're tired? Like you need to take a nap today. You need to go to sleep earlier tonight. You need some enchantment, you need some, you need to listen to some new music, you need whatever it is, whatever it is. I just found it really powerful, like take care of your dog as a reminder to take care of yourself with the love and care that you do your pets and providing their needs. There's so many ways in which I can find myself ignoring my own needs. And so even throughout the day, I will think that recently, like, Oh, I'm starting to be really unproductive or I'm starting to feel really bad or my brain is starting to spiral out like a dog doing, you know, chaotic zoomies. And, and I instead of just thinking, Oh, you better get your crap together. I think, Okay, man, what do you need? What do you need? Dude, what's going on? And that's kind of become a little ritual for me. So that's my, that's my call to adventure for you to just think about what do you need to put on that post it note? What is something that you need as a regular reminder for your practice and well-being? All right. Thanks, Catherine May for being here. Hope we get to do it again sometime. Thanks. Each episode of creative pep talk is designed to help you maintain a consistent creative practice. If you're trying to transform your creativity from an infrequent hobby into a real discipline, sign up to our newsletter at Andy J Pizza dot sub stack.com so that you never miss an episode. Creative pep talk is part of the pod glomerate network. You can learn more at pod glomerate.com massive thanks to my team so familiar for content editing and co-writing to Connor Jones of Pending Beautiful for editing and sound design. And thanks to all of you for listening. Until next time, stay papped up. Hey, y'all, one more quick thing. Earlier this year, I rebuilt my website using Squarespace's new fluid engine, and I was so pumped about how it turned out that I have been really thrilled to find as many ways to partner with them and tell you about what they can do and bring you discounts as possible. With social media going haywire, I think having a site that feels as unique as your creative work is essential to building trust with your target audience or your clients. I have had several clients point out how cohesive and fresh my site looks lately. And if you want to check that out, and what I was able to do without any code, check out AndyJPizza.com. If you want to test it out, go to squarespace.com/peptalk to test it out yourself. And when you're ready to launch, use promo code PEPTALK for 10% off your first purchase. Make Squarespace for supporting the show and for supporting creative people. I did consider Barney a friend, and he's still a friend to this day. The idea of Barney is something that I want to live up to. I love you, you love me. I call it the purple mantra. Barney taught me how to be a man. Generation Barney, a podcast about the media we loved as kids and how it shapes us. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music)
Sometimes the most simple act of presence can lead us from exhaustion, to recovery and back onto the path towards inspiration. Katherine May, author of The Electricity of Every Living Thing and Wintering joins us to talk about the inspiration behind her newest book Enchantment.
In this episode we discuss the fog, the magic, the journey, and how we can nudge ourselves and others forward by:
Reconnecting to a child-like sense of awe and wonder
Trusting what comes natural
Leaving a post-it note
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SHOW NOTES:
Web https://katherine-may.co.uk/
'The Clearing' https://substack.com/@katherinemay
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/katherinemay_/
MENTIONS:
John Yorke: 'All tales, then, are at some level a journey into the woods to find the missing part of us, to retrieve it and make ourselves whole.'
Richard Dawkins
'The Artist's Way' Book
Picasso: 'Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working'
Julian James- Origin of Consciousnessin the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Kristin Hersh- The Future of Songwriting
Mike Birbiglia podcast
Co-Writing/ Editing: Sophie Miller http://sophiemiller.co
Audio Editing/ Sound Design: Conner Jones http://pendingbeautiful.co
Soundtrack/ Theme Song: Yoni Wolf/ WHY? http://whywithaquestionmark.com
SPONSORS:
Uncommon Goods
Check out Uncommon Goods and use my code PEPTALK for a great deal:
http://uncommongoods.com
Miro
Miro is a collaborative virtual workspace that syncs in real time for you and your team so that you can innovate an idea into an outcome seamlessly
http://miro.com
