AND THE WINNER IS....

NICKI! (one of my e-mailed entrants) Now, Miss Nicki, if you will send me your mailing address, I will get your prizes in the post, posthaste. And just what is this "life-altering" book that Nicki has won? The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron. Along with the book, she will receive a sketchpad, a large spiral notebook for her morning pages (a fancy journal is too intimidating - you feel you have to write something important in it. Since "morning pages" are supposed to be stream-of-consciousness ramblings, an ordinary notebook is best), and a smaller notebook to take with her on her "artist's dates."

So, who is Julia Cameron, and what are her creds? Just what was it that qualified her to teach countless others to unlock the door to their creativity? Well, she was a drunk. A very successful drunk, who'd managed to land an office on the Paramount lot, but who only knew how to write using alcohol as a prop. She told herself "if sobriety meant no creativity I did not want to be sober. Yet I recognized that drinking would kill me and the creativity. I needed to learn to write sober---or else give up writing entirely. Necessity, not virtue, was the beginning of my spirituality. I was forced to find a new creative path...I learned to turn my creativity over to the only god I could believe in, the god of creativity...I learned to get out of the way and let that creative force work through me. I learned to just show up at the page and write down what I heard." She let go of the drama of being a suffering artist, and by resigning as the self-conscious author, she wrote freely.

Julia never planned to be a teacher. She was only angry that she'd never had a teacher herself. Why did she have to learn what she learned the way she learned it: all by trial and error? But, as synchronicity would have it, the universe sent her a fellow blocked writer to work with, and then a painter. She discovered that the tools worked for visual artists, too. Then, before she realized what was happening, she was teaching at the New York Feminist Art Institute. As word of her successful techniques spread, she began sending out packets of materials world-round. Eventually, she put on the page what she had been putting into practice for a decade - a blueprint for do-it-yourself recovery. Each chapter includes essays, exercises, tasks, and a weekly check-in. Much of the "work" is actually quite fun, and should not take you more than one hour per day. "This modest commitment to using the tools can yield tremendous results within the twelve weeks of the course. The same tools, used over a longer period, can alter the trajectory of a lifetime." And it matters not whether you are already a writer or artist who has become blocked, or an ordinary person who wishes they were just the tiniest bit creative. Trust me.