Losing--and Finding--The Artist's Way

There are so many things I think about posting but there is too much to do and think these days--even though I might have enough time to write if I didn't waste it here and there, I also am trying desperately to focus on my upcoming CD project (and write several freelance articles to keep the lights on). One way I waste time is by reading. Not good reading. Compulsive reading of nonessential information (magazines, Internet, newspapers). One person who has identified reading as a potential problem for artists is Julia Cameron, in her magnificent book, The Artist's Way.

In 2000, when I had my first son, I read through the book on my producer/songwriting teacher's recommendation. I dutifully performed the exercises. And much of my subsequent success creatively (through action, education, courage and vision) is due to that book. If you don't know what you want, if you are afraid of what people think, if critics have wounded you, if you're hobbled by jealousy, if you don't know how to improve, if you think you're too old to live your dream, if you hide your light under a bushel, if you waste your creative energies by processing all the words and data the world throws at you--you need to read The Artist's Way. It is sad that people believe "those who can, do; those who can't, teach," when in fact, teaching is an art. Perhaps we don't appreciate teachers because so few virtuosos exist. Nonetheless, Cameron's lovely, clear prose and well designed structure are considered by many to be her masterpiece, even though she, too, would prefer to focus on the "true" art she writes in the form of screenplays, poems, novels and songs. Perhaps too many multi-step self-help tomes are out there, inviting comparison. Trust me, this is a great book. I have thanked Wayne many times for telling his students to read it.

Interestingly, Cameron's own life has continued to churn with drama, even post-Way. According to Los Angeles Times coverage of her recently published memoir, mania and depression have plagued her:

Until now, this tentativeness has been kept secret from her followers, the struggling professional actors and writers of L.A., New York and Chicago and the dreamers everywhere else. In the book, Cameron characterizes that decision as one of survival. She had work to do and seminars to teach. And remarkably, it got done despite the breakdowns.

The first big one came in the mid-1990s just as she became known as a recovery guru, after the end of her second marriage to Mark Bryan, her inspiration for writing "The Artist's Way."

"Cast as a 'spiritual teacher' and desperate for answers myself in the wake of the loss of Mark, I embarked on a series of ill-considered fasts," she writes of that time. " I went as long as a week or ten days without solid food. I went for very long walks praying with every footfall. Although I didn't see it at the time, mine was a punishing" regimen.

This search eventually led her to London, where she began writing her first musical, this one about Merlin. Things soon started unraveling.

Cameron stopped wearing her glasses and contacts, because "with nothing and no one to care for, who needed to see clearly?" She did yoga obsessively. She succumbed to delusions so intense that during one of her aimless walks in Regent's Park, she wrote, she became the victim of a "very gentle rape." Later that day after Bryan reported the incident, the London police arrived at her door, took one look at her "giant bird's nest" of an apartment and led her off to a mental hospital. She was diagnosed as manic depressive, which American doctors later said was wrong. Cameron still hasn't gotten a new diagnosis.

Provided she isn't making it all up (as today's memoirists are wont to do), it appears that Cameron's life path holds more artistic promise than her inventions. Not that that's a bad thing. Think of David Sedaris and his parents and siblings, who (according to him) live screwy lives that he chisels into absorbing vignettes. Few can get away with this device, granted. But no one achieves artistic success without discipline--the Way.