Notes from Creating in Fragments
Artist at Easel by Marc Chagall
A few notes and quotes from the Creating in Fragments presentation I did for the Knowledge Management Leadership Forum in Melbourne, 28 Sep. 2022
Quotations:
Ben Okri, The Guardian:
“Write as if these are the last days.”
“I have found it necessary to develop an attitude and a mode of writing that I refer to as existential creativity. This is the creativity at the end of time.”
“How do I define it? It is the creativity wherein nothing should be wasted… It means that everything I do must have a singular purpose.”
David Mitchell, Light the Dark:
“What’s the difference between you and your great-great-great-grandfather? What makes you different?
I think the answer is this: what you take for granted.”
Mary Oliver, Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches?:
“Listen, are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?”
Mary Oliver, Sometimes:
“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention
Be astonished
Tell about it.”
Junot Diaz, Light the Dark:
“… what a monumental work of art does: takes the pieces of you, reassembles them, and hands them back to you in all the right order.”
Summary of points I made:
Lockdown was a catalyst:
The end of something. Liminal. It gave me:
Connections with forums, networks, ecosystems, organisations, movements.
Connections with knowledge: Transformative and creative facilitation, collective imagination, futures literacy.
Connectors: Zoom meetups, masterclasses, conferences, newsletters, blogs, and Twitter.
Relying on the digital world for connections to new knowledge and people made me reconsider how to source, create, adapt, develop, curate, and share material digitally:
New tools: Zoom, Substack, ebooks.
Reinvigorated my use of blogging, emailing, and social media for service delivery and / or marketing.
Who was engaging with my stuff?
Knowledge workers – academics, arts workers, designers, facilitators, trainers, consultants, librarians, E-learning designers…
From learning and development, change management, human resources, community development, community engagement fields;
In community, university, arts, public health, local government sectors.
Their challenge?
A yearning for a greater connection to their creativity versus the demands of a busy life that makes them split their attention over many places, people, and tasks.
These people are tired and frazzled. Where do they find the time to be creative?
My answer: the Substack experiment.
Small, easily digestible creative prompts: quick fixes of attention, astonishment, inspirations to tell.
Lead to me:
Re-assessing myself as a curator of knowledge.
Re-assessing curation as a creative activity.
Challenge – how to make little prompts meaningful, impactful, or compelling? Not just a cat memes or feel-good quotes.
Creating in fragments:
If fragments of time and energy are all you have, then that’s what you’ve got to work with. Creating in fragments won’t help you to create monumental works of art, but it can be enough to reintegrate that little piece of you that one day could. Keep the potential of yourself as a creative person alive.
