Tag: creativity

honouring our passions

In this blog series, I am getting curious about attention. Why can it be so hard to pay attention to the things we want to? Why do we give so much attention to things we’d rather not? And how can we harness our attention? I approach these questions from a personal perspective, in the hope that this may in some small way contribute to ongoing conversations about how we can practice attending to what really matters.

This is post two out of five. You can read part one here.

One sunny August evening at the Stockholm Water Festival in 1996, my life changed. On my family’s annual visit to Sweden, I, together with my one local friend, went to see the rock/pop band Garbage. I already had their debut album, which I had listened to a fair bit, but that night things changed. Seeing the band’s singer, Shirley Manson, perform live, I was hypnotised. By the time Shirley signed my ticket stub after the show, I was a capital F Fan.

My love of Garbage/Shirley felt like the defining aspect of my identity in my late teenage years. I listened to their music every day. I collected magazine clippings and all the singles. Whenever I could get online, I searched for information about them. Once I had my own email account, I joined a fan listserv, where hundreds of us gathered to discuss all aspects of the band and the music. I learned HTML so that I could create my own fan-site. I got knee-high boots and wore them with a corduroy miniskirt, like Shirley.

I finally had the opportunity to see the band live again after they released their second album. By that time, I was at university in London, and they had reached the dizzy heights of a sold-out Wembley Arena gig. A couple of days later, desperate to stave off the despair that descended after such a monumental and highly anticipated event, I got a train to Manchester to see them again, hanging around with other fans outside the venue in the early afternoon to catch a glimpse of the tour bus as it arrived.

I have had many other intense, passionate interests in my life, both before and after my Garbage era. None have been as intense (although my Jodie Foster phase in my early teens may be a close second!), but usually there is something or someone occupying a lot of my thinking and feeling space. In my younger years, it was animals, then pop stars, actors and musicians. In my adult life, people have continued to feature, but also broader subjects, such as feminism and, in more recent years, writing and creativity.

It was reading about what autistic “special interests” can look like for those of us socialised as girls/women that sparked some of my initial recognition of myself as autistic. One of the reasons why our neurodivergence is more likely to go under the radar is because our interests may sit within normative cultural expectations (it is not unusual for young people assigned female to be fans of pop bands or to love animals, for example). There is also a stereotype that autistic people’s interests don’t change over time, which is not true for many of us. The divergence lies mainly in the intensity of our interests.

But this blog post is not only about autistic special interests. More generally, what I’m exploring here is interested attention: when our attention is immersed in a topic that is deeply interesting to us. I want to make a case for the importance of honouring this form of deep attention and everything that it can bring to our lives.

the wisdom of our interested attention

Over the last few years, I have had periods of time (ranging from a couple of weeks to a couple of months) when I’ve intensely immersed myself in learning about, reading and writing poetry. Notably, they have coincided with times when I’ve been feeling particularly overwhelmed.

I find this so interesting to notice: when I am overloaded, I turn to poetry – as a creative outlet of personal expression, but also as a form of art that I want to submerge myself in and learn about. Perhaps it’s because poetry doesn’t demand as much linear “sense-making” and explanation as prose writing. In times of overwhelm, writing narrative, coherent prose can feel like too much. But, as I still find reading and writing meaningful, my attention switches to poetry. It seems almost subconscious. Poetry is an invitation to slow down and pay attention to the beauty and wonder of words – an invitation my subconscious accepts.

This kind of detailed, sensory and slow attention can also direct me towards beauty in my physical surroundings. When I am walking along the streets in my neighbourhood, my eyes and hands gravitate to small details: the pattern created by paint peeling off a doorway, the texture of moss on a wall, the contrast of colours on a rusty fence. While intense sensory attention has its downsides, it gives me an appreciation of the beauty of small things. A well-crafted sentence. The quality of light in a room. It is a kind of creative attention.

With both poetry and my physical surroundings, it is like my body knows that this is what I need before the conscious part of my being does – it directs me towards things that absorb my attention in a creative, vibrant way. Overwhelm for me often manifests in the form of withdrawal and shutdown – a state that can be hard to think my way out of. Instead, I am learning to let this different kind of embodied wisdom lead me towards the things that interest me and call my creative attention, leading me to regulate my nervous system and feel more connected.

letting go of shame

For a long time, I carried a lot of shame around my intense interests. I have often downplayed or hid them, seeing them as embarrassing obsessions – evidence that there was something wrong with me. Even now, over twenty years later, I feel some embarrassment writing so candidly about my Garbage fandom era and I had to fight the urge to mock my younger self.

Post-diagnosis, I’ve been trying to reframe this personal trait more positively. Part of my unmasking process has involved unpicking that shame and learning to honour my passionate interests – noticing what this passion brings and enables and allowing myself to embrace what is pulling me in, without “shoulds” or shame.

This can be easier said than done. Even as I was writing this post, I noticed a familiar “should” coming in. This part of me wants all my interests to in some way be useful – to go beyond pleasure and enjoyment for their own sake. Devon Price writes about this in Unmasking Autism:

If an adult fills their evenings after work learning to code or creating jewelry that they sell on Etsy, they’re seen as enterprising. But if someone instead devotes their free time to something that gives them pleasure but doesn’t financially benefit anyone, it’s seen as frivolous or embarrassing, even selfish. (p. 152)

I definitely notice this pull towards economic productivity in myself, but also, perhaps even more strongly, I notice a sense that I should be putting my time and energy towards something more “worthy” – that I should be spending the time I devote to my personal passions to doing things that directly contribute towards social justice struggles.

But I am pushing back on this. It is not an either/or. Embracing our passionate interests without shame not only gives us joy (which is enough of a reason in and of itself), but also helps us build our personal skills, strengths and creativity. When I think back to my Garbage era, what I remember most fondly was the connection with other fans. I dared show what felt truest about me to other people, which gave me practice in forming and being part of a community. Embracing the interests that regulate and nourish us builds our capacity to be in the world.

our passion is our creative fuel

This push/pull between what’s capturing our attention vs. what we think we should be doing to be “productive” or “useful” relates to our creative work, too.

When I’m in a poem-writing phase, I notice how quickly a judgemental voice enters, concerned about quality and progress. My poems are no good. Why am I spending time writing bad poems instead of writing blog posts or essays to submit for publication? When will my poetry be good enough to publish? I have to guard so fiercely against this voice – to protect the pleasure I get from playing with poetry without it immediately tipping into an external-oriented desire for recognition.

This is not to say it’s bad to be interested in improving my craft. But it is to say that we need safe space to play creatively with whatever feels most exciting (whether that’s making poems, collage or cakes). That space matters for its own sake. It reminds me of Sarah Teresa Cook’s powerful insistence that our personal creative practices matter: that “it is the act of making that enriches your life – not the reception of your output”.

Even if I never share any of my poems with another person, it still matters that I write them. It gives me pleasure and deepens my understanding of myself, my feelings and my relationship with the people and world around me. Not to mention that poetry is a whole other way of engaging with language and emotions – one that deepens my creative work across the board. Just as writing fan fiction or writing in a private journal helps hone our skills and attention as writers more generally.

Relatedly, I love how Marta Rose reframes the shame that often accompanies “serial hobbies” and “abandoned projects”. “Dabbling is so undervalued, but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with loving novelty”, she writes, noting also that “[w]hen we disrupt shame and have patience, you will be amazed at how many of your abandoned projects turn out to be practice rounds for new pleasures and new projects sometime in the future”.

Following what calls our interested attention – even when it seems tangential or does not lead to any type “output” – matters to us as human beings just as it matters to our creative practice, building our attention muscles and capacity over time.

our interests help us regulate, create and connect

Our passionate interests are not shameful indulgences or evidence that there is something wrong with us. Interested attention helps us regulate, create and connect – with ourselves, first and foremost, but often also with others (human or more-than-human).

You may be protesting at this point that it isn’t all so rosy: that our attention can also get intensely hooked into things that do not feel regulating or nourishing at all, but rather the opposite. I’ll be exploring this in the next post, on distracted attention.

But, ultimately, it comes back to this: we can learn to listen to what our attention is telling us. When we notice our attention being pulled, we can practise discerning when something feels good in our bodies and when something is dysregulating (and some interests may well bring up a range of different responses at different times). In this way, we practise listening to our bodies. And when an interest genuinely does feel nourishing and regulating, and it’s not harming anyone else, we can practise giving ourselves permission to enjoy it and everything that it brings to our lives, without shame.

03/19/2026
writing towards connection in a disconnected world

welcome to my blog. take 2.

A few years ago, I started this blog and a newsletter with a view to writing about creativity, craft and connection. I proceeded to publish three posts in eight months before the project ground to a halt.

This was not entirely unpredictable.

Firstly, as I wrote in the third post, in February 2024, I found it hard to write anything “meaningful enough” in the face of current world events, most acutely Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, abetted by western governments.

Secondly, I have a history of abandoning writing projects soon after starting them. Since leaving academia in 2019 (and thereby the requirement to write academic publications), I have played around with different genres, making various attempts at short stories, personal essays, poetry and even novels. But aside from journaling, which I do fairly consistently, I have chronically struggled with getting beyond the starting point of many writing projects or otherwise getting stuck (and bored) halfway. Even blog posts take me a long time from idea to publication – I like to go deep, research, connect different themes. So even aside from the cycles of getting stuck and/or bored, the time this takes has not been easy to accommodate alongside client work (and parenting a young child).

Thirdly, and not unrelated to the first two points, I felt conflicted about the purpose of the blog. In fact, I drafted a couple of posts in the last year that I decided not to publish, as they felt too personal and/or political. In other words, I worried about my writing being “unprofessional” and not the kind of “content” you should share on your business website. As most guides about how to run your own freelance business will tell you, your website is your “shop front” and part of your “brand”. Blog posts should take the form of “content marketing”, always written with the needs of your potential clients in mind.

But I never figured out how to write like that, nor am I particularly interested in separating what is important to me personally and politically from my professional work.

So, the blog fell by the wayside.

That’s one part of the story, anyway.

Another is that in the last couple of years, I’ve been coming to understand myself as neurodivergent – a process that included being diagnosed as autistic.

Last autumn, I celebrated (yes, celebrated) the first-year anniversary of my diagnosis, but it still feels like I’m only scratching the surface of this new personal reality, in terms of understanding and trusting my own experience, and untangling the effects of four decades of masking.

In other words, I always come back to writing.

During these last couple of years, I have done a lot of writing – journaling, mostly, alongside messy, fragmentary poems. But I also drafted (with many stops and starts along the way) my first complete piece of creative non-fiction – a personal essay weaving together some of my thoughts about the relationship between writing, “truth-telling” and autistic self-discovery. I’m currently preparing to submit this essay to a literary journal, but whether it ends up published or not, the fact that I finished this piece, when nobody was asking me to write it, nor waiting to see it, has been important for my belief in my own capabilities as a creative writer.

In other words, I always come back to writing. It is how I process, think, untangle and work out what I feel. Even when I can’t stick to writing projects or write coherent blog posts, I turn to the pages of my notebooks.

We spiral and swirl and circle back as our energy ebbs and flows and our attention and interests flow in different directions – often returning to “abandoned” projects, meaning they were never abandoned in the first place.

My new understanding of myself as neurodivergent has also led to a new hope: that writing those more coherent pieces may become a little easier. For one, this self-knowledge has given me some previously absent self-compassion about why I sometimes struggle so much with writing, despite my strong desire to do it. It has given me important insight into the roots of those struggles, including burnout, overwhelm and struggles with “task initiation”, but also masking (and related people-pleasing), which can show up in particularly insidious ways and immobilise me when I try to write for publication. I’ve found Marta Rose’s concept of “spiral time” particularly powerful in undermining shame about not finishing pieces of writing in an “efficient” manner. As I learned last year from Marta on the Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice course, neurodivergent creative practice rarely unfolds in a linear manner.^[i] We spiral and swirl and circle back as our energy ebbs and flows and our attention and interests flow in different directions – often returning to “abandoned” projects, meaning they were never abandoned in the first place.

returning to creativity, craft and connection

I recently moved my website from Wix, to participate in the boycott in solidarity with Palestinians. While researching alternative web hosts and plans, I revisited the question of whether I want to write a blog and/or newsletter.

And what I keep coming back to is this: I still want to write about creativity, craft and connection. And: I don’t want to compartmentalise my personal and political writing from my professional identity – I have spent too much energy for too long presenting different versions of myself to different people (i.e. masking). Neither do I want to participate in a façade of “business as usual”, where genocide, coloniality, rising fascism and climate crisis are not acknowledged or circumvented to avoid appearing “political”.

I want to continue thinking and writing about creativity from a critical, anti-capitalist and social justice-oriented perspective (something I started in this blog post): an expansive, community- and world-building creativity. From a more personal perspective, as a “recovering” academic and late-diagnosed autistic person, reconnecting with creative practice has felt like a complicated but necessary, life-giving process, undeniably connected with my sense of identity and self. It is something I want to continue exploring, not just privately, but also in conversation with others.

Creative practice, toddler-style.

As someone who spends many of my waking hours thinking about and immersed in written words – for work, for fun, and most of all as a necessary personal practice of meaning-making – it is possible I also have some useful insights to share on the topic of writing craft. I want to clarify and discuss what I have learned about crafting engaging and powerful prose – as an editor and writer, but perhaps most importantly as a reader – with a particular focus on how we can write to make a difference: how we can communicate our ideas, experiences and research in ways that are compelling and authentic.

And then there’s connection… the word feels both trite and profound, but it is one that continues to compel and propel me. When I started my editing business six years ago, I decided to call it write/connect, because those two words, in my mind, feel so linked and so central to what I am interested in. Writing, for me, is about connection: I write to connect – with myself, with others and with what is happening in the world.

…writing towards connection feels like one way to orient towards social justice.

Given the current world system is predicated on disconnection – on separating different groups of people from each other, dehumanising those considered “other” – writing towards connection feels like one way to orient towards social justice. It reminds me of a powerful passage from Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now, in which she challenges the American (and, I would say, more broadly Western capitalist) obsession with “freedom” – particularly the idea of artistic freedom as a right to create whatever you want without any need to consider your connection to or impact on others:

But what if our artistic practices were founded not on the presumption of artistic freedom – certainly, at least, not the individualistic, late capitalist brand of American freedom? … What if art was the space not for us to enjoy our freedom, but for us to encounter our bondages – and our bondedness? That in our art making and our art consumption, we paid attention not just to the things that made us feel free, expansive, containing multitudes, but to the things that remind us we are not just free but delimited – the things that make us feel our smallness, our ordinariness, our contingency, our vulnerability and reliance? The things that make us feel not neutral but named – actually known by the world, so that we might be truly in it, and of it? (pp. 72–73)

Since reading this book last year, my thoughts have returned again and again to Castillo’s notion of bondedness, particularly as I’ve been grappling with my own understanding of creativity, as well as my own feelings and struggles around “art making”. It strikes me that Castillo’s bondedness has something in common with my belief that writing is (or at least can be) about connection: it can move us towards being “known by the world, so that we might be truly in it, and of it”.

So, I am reviving the blog. I plan to use this space to share my reflections, learning and research in various forms – mini-essays, deep craft dives into compelling non-fiction books, more creative and experimental pieces, potentially some interviews down the line – as I continue being fascinated by writing and creative practice, and particularly the ways in which these can help us connect with each other and orient us towards a more socially just world.

If you want to follow along, writing, thinking and learning together, I would love it if you would sign up to my newsletter (below), where I will share new posts and other updates.

^[i] I highly recommend this course, co-facilitated by KR Moorhead, Meg Max and Marta Rose.

01/12/2026
is all writing creative?
If you had asked me five years ago if I thought of myself as a creative person I would have said no. At the time, I was a Sociology lecturer and I was working on the manuscript of my book, based on my PhD research. I struggled a lot with writing the book, much more than I had expected, given that I’d already written the PhD thesis a few years earlier. I wanted the book to be more accessible than the thesis, more engaging and ‘creative’, but I felt like I had no idea how to achieve this. The ‘publish or perish’ pressures of academia and a fear of getting things wrong had stifled my ability to think creatively and enjoy the process. Neither did the heavy workload leave me with energy to read for pleasure across genres or disciplines, which narrowed my imagination in relation to my own writing.

A year later, I left academia (another story!). Looking back at my writing journey since then, I can see how it has been about recovering a sense of and belief in my creativity. I have experimented with different types of writing, styles and topics (mostly privately, without worrying about publication). My thinking about creativity has shifted during this time – from seeing it as something that only certain people have towards seeing that we are all inherently creative.

But what is creativity, and, if we all have it, does that mean we all use it?

What is creativity?

To stay on the topic of writing, if everyone is inherently creative, does this mean that all writing is creative? In Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, the late, great bell hooks (whose work I will come back to in future blog posts) shares the following quote by Nancy Mairs:

I do not distinguish between creative and critical writing because all writing is creative… Whatever the product – poem, story, essay, letter to lover, technical report – the problem is the same: the page is empty and will have to be filled. Out of nothing, something. And all writing is critical, requiring the same sifting, selection, scrutiny, and judgment of the material at hand. The distinctions are not useful… (Mairs, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer: 66)

Mairs’ approach to creativity intrigues me, as someone who has primarily written (critical, academic) non-fiction so far, but who is interested in creative writing (usually associated with fiction and poetry) and wondering how the two relate. But is Mairs right – is all writing creative? More generally, is creativity simply any activity that results in something appearing out of nothing? And should all and every instance of creativity be celebrated?

In today’s late capitalist society, we are encouraged to be creative, but only in private or profit-oriented ways.

The critical thinker in me is not fully satisfied with this ‘everything goes’ version of creativity. In Against Creativity, Oli Mould outlines how European colonisation and capitalist expansionism transformed creativity from being ‘a socialized and collective behaviour’ to ‘an individual characteristic that could be traded’ (think the lone ‘creative genius’ and the privatisation of the arts). In today’s late capitalist society, we are encouraged to be creative, but only in private or profit-oriented ways, whether as workers or consumers (design apps! write content! decorate your house!). Self-help books and podcasts encourage us to reawaken our creative selves, but generally in ways that focus on our own personal healing, with little attention to the wider world.

In order to be creative, we need space to slow down, daydream and imagine the unknown.

Mould defines creativity as ‘the power to create something from nothing’, but suggests we need to pay more attention to the power and the something parts: who has the power to create and what is the something that’s being created? Mould argues that creativity has been co-opted in the service of economic growth, with any countercultural/protest movement, art or ideology ‘viewed as a potential market to exploit’. But while he presents a rather bleak picture, he urges us to seek out, support and practise radical forms of creativity, which involves ‘believing in impossible things’ and resisting capitalism’s co-option of our creative powers.

Some key ingredients of the creative writing process

From a more critically informed perspective on creative writing, then, the kind of creativity I want to nurture in both my own and others’ writing is less about using particular styles or writing in particular genres, and more about a process of:
- expanding your thinking and ways of expressing it, through a wide-ranging and inquisitive engagement with the topic at hand, underpinned by curiosity, passion and an open mind.
- experimenting and trying new things, knowing that not everything will work, and that we might get things wrong, but that we’ll learn something new along the way.
- developing confidence in your own thinking and ideas. This is not about arrogance or about working in isolation – our thinking is always developed in collaboration and through building on other people’s ideas. But, from my own experience, I have come to see the importance of developing confidence in your own ideas. Without this, it’s easy to fall into the trap of trying to write what you think someone else wants you to say rather than what you want to say. This foundation is also important when working collaboratively with others, so that we can contribute our best thinking rather than feeling we don’t have anything important to bring to the conversation.
- asking the deeper questions about the topic at hand and how you are expressing your thinking about it. Some of these might include: (How) does what I’m writing engage with dominant societal structures? What are the gaps or silences in what I am writing? Are there other people it is important to connect with in thinking about this topic? Such questions resonate with Mairs’ point about the need to break down the distinction between critical and creative work. Critical writing is creative and the best creative writing (in my view!) engages with critical questions.
- slowing down. In order to be creative, we need space to slow down, daydream and imagine the unknown. We need time to look out the window, listen to the birds and ‘do nothing’. This in itself goes against capitalist productivity culture. It also leads to questions of resources and access: sadly, time and space to do nothing is hard to come by and ill afforded by many. Questions about creativity can therefore not be disconnected from questions of inequality. One of the many ‘impossible things’ we need to imagine is how to create a society where everyone’s needs are met and everyone has the space to exercise their innate creativity in ways that are meaningful to them.
This list is not meant to be definitive. It is a work in progress, as I am not done thinking about this topic, but hopefully it provides some useful food for thought. Maybe you have other ingredients to add? I’d love to hear from you.

Image: I took this photo some years ago somewhere along the River Lee in Hackney Marshes, London. The graffiti reads ‘what is this life if full of care, / we have no time to stand and stare?’. The lines come from the poem ‘Leisure’ by W.H. Davies.
09/12/2023
creativity, craft and connection – or, why I’m starting a blog

At the end of 2022, my partner gave birth to our son. It may be a cliché, but it has been truly humbling to nurture and be alongside this new human as he discovers the world around him, witnessing him use his innate creativity and curiosity to notice new things and learn new skills (such as chewing his toes and rolling over on his tummy!).

Perhaps not coincidentally, despite being fairly exhausted, I have been feeling more creative myself this year. I’ve been writing more (often typing into my phone while holding a sleeping baby), generating ideas for stories and other pieces, playing with words and splurging rough drafts of poems in my journal. I’ve been wanting to write more publicly again and to stop procrastinating on my writing plans, which include both fiction as well as more non-fiction writing.

As a starting point, I have decided to set up a blog with the aim of encouraging writers, myself included, to embrace creativity in our practice, whatever kind of writing we’re doing. I’ll be exploring what creativity is, how we can play and experiment with our writing, antidotes to perfectionism and more. I’ll be drawing on a range of literature and other sources that, in different ways, touch on creativity, craft and connection, as well as on the politics of language and writing (because everything is political!).

One of the things I want to explore in the blog is the relationship between fiction and non-fiction writing – particularly in terms of craft, techniques and the use of storytelling. Although I primarily edit non-fiction at the moment, I am in the process of developing my skills to also edit fiction in the future, so the blog’s focus may start to reflect that over time. For me, writing is about communicating and connecting with others. It enables us to develop and share our ideas and thinking. So I hope that, by putting more of my thinking out here, writers looking for an editor might learn more about me and my approach and whether we’d be a good fit. But, more generally, if you’re interested in the topics I’m writing about, I’m keen to connect with you whether you’re looking for an editor or not. I love geeking out and learning together with others passionate about words and writing!

Image by Albrecht Fietz from Pixabay.

07/18/2023