Julia Cameron - The Sound of Paper

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sophy Burnham, for her creative courage

Elizabeth Cameron, for her loyalty

Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, for her artful heart

Sara Carder, for her meticulousness

Carolina Casperson, for her belief

Sonia Choquette, for her believing mirror

James Dybas, for his generosity

Joel Fotinos, for his faith

Candice Fuhrman, for her support

Natalie Goldberg, for her example

Kelly Groves, for his enthusiasm

H.O.F., for his artistry

Linda Kahn, for her clarity

Bill Lavallee, for his service

Emma Lively, for her catalytic collaboration

Larry Lonergan, for his vision

Julianna McCarthy, for her creativity

John Newland, for his lessons

Bruce Pomahac, for his friendship

Johanna Tani, for her care

Jeremy Tarcher, for his leadership

Edmund Towle, for his perspective

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Julia Cameron has been an active artist for more than thirty years. She is the author of nineteen books, fiction and nonfiction, including The Artists Way, Walking in This World, The Vein of Gold, and The Right to Write, her best-selling works on the creative process. A novelist, playwright, songwriter, and poet, Cameron divides her time between Manhattan and the high deserts of New Mexico.

I AM BACK IN NEW YORK. The return drive cross-country was uneventful, but the entry into New York was an adventure. I changed apartments, from my Riverside Drive perch to one with city views. My writing desk now looks out across brownstones, down avenues where passersby duck their heads under shiny black umbrellas while a cold late-autumn rain stings their skin. The leaves have turned and the season is turning. On my morning walks, a light mist rises from the reservoir in Central Park. The maple leaves underfoot are lightly frosted. Tiny plumes of steamy breath puff up from my cocker spaniels muzzle. It is good to be back. It is my hope that you have enjoyed your time spent with this small book. Creativity is an ongoing process. We can always become both larger and stronger. It is my hope that you will consider yourself on an openended adventure. I think of myself as a companion on the trail.

IT IS A BRIGHT AND CHILL early spring day. The air is crisp but the earth is insistent. In Riverside Park, jonquils are in bloom wherever they are sheltered. On a slight and unshaded hill, purple crocuses push past frosty grass. Small bushes sprout tiny buds, some green-gold, some reddish-brown. The distant trees are misted by the lightest tincture of green, like a delicate Japanese watercolor. The wind is stiff and needling. It still feels like winter, but spring itself is positive and determined. Something is afoot, and it is festive and uncontrollable and undeniable. Just wait and see, it says, but who wants to wait? Spring invites and invokes curiosity. Mine has been as insistent and pushy as the not-to-be-denied buds.

This afternoon, scratching this itch, I took an Artist Date. I went to the Museum of Natural History and walked through an exhibit on pearls. My fellow viewers were as interesting as any of the glassed-in exhibits. There were fine old ladies, alert as tiny songbirds. There were sturdy, bespectacled teacherly types peering owlishly at the fine print. There were misplaced shoppers, strutting like peacocks, fingering their gaudy modern clothes and gazing at the past centurys finery. And there I was in the middle of them, a pale, wild-haired woman sporting real pearl earrings and wincing at the documentary that showed in gory detail exactly how cultured pearls are induced and harvested.

As is often the case when I stick my nose into things, I learned more than I bargained for. I do not live well with excruciating detail. What I am after is enoughenough to set the writing gears going, which may not be very much. Sometimes just a pinch of information is enough. A case in point: Today I learned, in my learning about pearls, that pearls are what happen when an oyster or some other mollusk is irritated by the invasion of some disturbing intruder into its closed shell. An infinitesimal shrimp may get caught in an oyster and become the tiny intruder around which a pearl is built. A grain of sand may be slight but not too slight to cause a pearl to form. Pearls are layers and layers of soothing nacre intended to insulate the delicate mollusk from the irritant that has abraded it. At root, a pearl is a disturbance, a beauty caused by something that isnt supposed to be there, about which something needs to be done. It is the interruption of equilibrium that creates beauty. Beauty is a response to provocation, to intrusion. How like art, I catch myself thinking. The pearls beauty is made as a result of insult just as art is made as a response to something in our environment that fires us up, sparks us, causes us to think differently. The pearl, like art, must be catalyzed. And we, unlike the mollusk, can invite the disturbance that provokes us into art.

Lately, I am trying to provoke myself into artat the least I am trying to provoke myself into writing. I spent a hard winter writing and rewriting a difficult book. That book, which may have turned out well after all, left me feeling stale and flat. I doubted I would ever have another book in me. I thought after thirty-five years of writing that maybe it was time to stop, that just maybe I had written enoughand a little more than enough by at least a books worth. I wasnt exactly in despairthat would have taken too much energy. I was in cynicism, which is despairs more torpid sister.

Cynicism lacks any real conviction. It doesnt like the game as its being played, and so it spoils it. At bottom, cynicism is a cheap and shoddy response to a life we are afraid to love because it might, for a time, be painful. My writing life, for a time, had proved painful, and so I wanted a way to wriggle out of it and have some other life, exactly what, I wasnt sure. Let me tell you how writing snuck back in on me.

First of all, I write daily. I do three pages of longhand morning writing, whether I am writing my real writing or not. The pages are not what I think of as writing. They are more my wake-up call, the pen-to-page that sends me into my day, with that day somewhat prioritized or at least freed from the gripes of yesterday. So, the three pages began sliding toward four pages and then toward five. This happened with disturbing regularity, and it happened because I wasnt writingexcept those three pages. Next I began binge reading, another way to cozy up to words. I whipped through a half dozen books and found myself browsing on the Internet for excuses to order more. Before I knew it, I had spent three hundred dollars on books. I waited for their arrivalsameday delivery here in Manhattanlike a ravenous dog. No, I wasnt writing and I wasnt going to write. I was just going to nose around a little and see what my other writer friends were up to, see if any of them still liked writing. One of them had told me not a month earlier that she had sworn off. Was she still on the wagon, I wondered, or had words started to have their way with her again? Was she staggering to the page punch-drunk with a need to say something, anything? Nothing gets a writer more off center than not writing, and she had certainly sounded crabby about her high-minded decision to just be a person.

The truth is that writing cannot really be given up any more than acting or music can. All that happens when you give up an art that you lovealthough you may hate it at the momentis that you get one of those divorces where you are much too curious about your exs love life. And so, while I toyed with the idea of never writing again or writing only music, I also knew enough to recognize that I already had the symptoms of recovery. There were the telltale extra pages tacked onto my Morning Pages. There were the stacks of booksall filled with words, glorious wordspiling up next to my bed like a delicious mound of mental lingerie. There were those snoopy calls to other writers to see how they were doing with swearing off their affliction. Do I need to tell you that my on-the-wagon friend was writing again, just a little?