On Creative Cohorts and Collaborative Magic

Finding a community of co-creators can bring expansiveness into our lives and art, opening us up to new directions and keeping us from becoming too limited by our own ideas of how things should look or be.

Collaboration frees us up to be more playful in the creative process, to break our own rules and see with new eyes. It's easier to shirk the sticky tentacles of the ego when you have someone else on board to help you laugh at life and not take yourself too seriously.

Part of the reason I'm starting this blog is to connect with others who are also on the creative path. My hope is that through sharing our experiences and insights, we can spark new ideas, spur each other on and enjoy a deeper sense of connection through community.

So, by means of introduction, I'd like to share with you a bit about my life in art, and some of the friends and co-conspirators who've inspired me along the way.

First Taste of Artistic Community
The summer of my 17th year I attended the California State Summer School for the Arts as a student of creative writing. I arrived there a slightly geeky, journal-clutching girl from suburban San Diego. A matter of hours after stepping foot outside my parents' mini van and waving goodbye, my mind was totally blown open.

There were young artists from all disciplines there—theater, pottery, painting, music, animation, dance, writing. There were dudes with blue hair wearing fishnet stockings and beautiful sculptor chicks and lanky actor-types and gothic kids with violins. I thought I had stumbled into utopia.

The best part of that summer was that we were encouraged to collaborate. And that's where the real juice was for me. I posed for painters, wrote scripts for actors, drank tequila in the bushes with animators and held impromptu poetry readings set to violin music. We made food sculptures with left-over cafeteria inedibles and read and listened and learned from each other at work.

The experience of that summer planted a seed inside me, and I recognized myself as someone who wanted to live and breathe and share creativity, to manifest in the world what I saw and felt inside, to defy the ready-made reality that was being sold all around me.

Encouraged by the sense of community, I felt ready to live my life differently, to make it my own.

Pranks and Play in Academia
The next year I enrolled in school at UCLA. Planting myself down in the structured world of academia was by no means easy. Though I loved my course of study, English literature and creative writing, my spirit was at odds with the climate of critical thought around art. The study of writing and literature often felt sober and calculated as opposed to the heart-opening experience of creation that I'd had so many times on my own.

I like to think that I survived my academic experience with the help of a few indispensable friends and cohorts. We found ways to sabotage the staid university milieu by becoming prankster poets and fools. We were always coming up with plans and schemes to disturb the peace.

Once, my friends Amaranth and Farnoosh and I sneaked into our poetry professor's office and planted a copy of a lurid Fabio romance novel in his book shelf, amongst the weighty tomes of modernist poets and contemporary critics. The book had a particularly unseemly cover, with an image of Fabio, his white shirt opened to expose his rippling, tanned chest, and his lion's mane of hair flowing in the wind.

Keen-eyed and percipient as he was, it did not take long before our professor discovered the offensive paperback planted on his shelf, put two and two together, and called us into his office. Peering over his spectacles, with a smirk on his face, he asked whether we'd like back the "bodice ripper" novel we'd so kindly lent him.

Outside of the lecture halls and long hours of study, life became our palette for creative play. Whether it was filming pseudo-operas in shopping markets with my friend Kat, sabotaging poetry critiques by planting squeaking stuffed animals under the classroom table, or dressing up in tutus and cowboy hats to go to the airport, we found ways to bring art into our lives and make the journey of formal academic life a little less cumbersome.

A Call to Engage
There are, of course, many more tales to tell, and many other artists and creative comrades who've touched my life. But I'll save those stories for some day down the road.

Until next time, I'd like to invite you to write to me, if you feel so inspired. I'd love to hear what's got you fired up, what project you've got cooking, or what demons you're tangling with. It's not always easy to navigate the uncharted, and often rocky, terrain of a creative life. My hope is that we can trade tips, share our foolish foot-slips, and help cheer each other on along the way.