When the Creative Beaver Dam Bursts
Unsurprisingly, these days I’ve been pondering the word “release”. Prisoners are released from jail, butterflies are released from cocoons, classified documents are released to the public, singers release their latest albums, and when we weep or rage we release emotions. My favorite definition of release is “to allow something to move, act, or flow freely”; I imagine a beaver dam breaking, the stream once again trickling merrily along.
Now that The Release: Creativity & Freedom After the Writing is Done is circulating, I’m curious: What exactly is flowing freely? To find the answer I have to first ask what was blocked. The book was eight years in the making—countless hours of research and conversations, reading and drafting, testing ideas on students and friends, railing against my editor and then returning to the drawing board. From the outside, the project might as well have been a chrysalis, seemingly unchanged, static. Dead even.
But on the inside, an organic matrix of incoherent intuitive impulses dissolved and reformed into language (on the page) and confidence (within me). The creative process is far from static, although changes roil and surge so slowly and with so little external evidence, I’m often in doubt. Writing is a hidden art. No matter how many beta-readers see the manuscript-in-progress, most of what “moves, acts, and flows freely” when we write is invisible to others. That’s why strangers ask writers, “Have you published?” They want evidence.
With The Release now between mint-green covers, I now have evidence. So on the surface level, what’s been hidden from the public is now in view. It’s been released. Simultaneously, though, the gifts of insight and coherence that moved through those years now circulate beyond me. They inform my decisions; they infuse my actions. More eloquent on paper than in person, for years I could barely talk about this project; now I teach what I’ve learned. What’s released is the book, sure, but more importantly the abundant gifts moving through and flowing from my creative engagement.
The word “release” has its roots in the Latin relaxare, “to loosen again.” Now that it’s done, I sense the hidden muscles of this project relaxing into their real work. What an amazing process!
— Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew is an author, spiritual director, and writing coach, who specializes in helping others find their stories through teaching spiritual memoir.
