On Sustaining Your Creative Life (Livestream)

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With rejection and intense commitment being such integral parts of any artist’s life, many struggle to stay with the creative process. Author and CIIS Faculty in the Interdisciplinary Arts program, Cindy Shearer has spent decades helping artists stay with their craft. In her latest book, Stay with Writing, Cindy offers practices to help sustain and live a creative life.

Join Cindy and theater artist Emlyn Guiney for an inspiring and supportive conversation exploring how to nurture and stick with your artistic practice. Drawing on knowledge from many art forms, from dancing to visual art, this conversation dives into the nature of artistic process and practice.

Cindy encourages writers to understand themselves as artists, and for artists across all mediums to learn about themselves from writing. She discusses how to recognize failure as a way to probe what you really want to create and how to claim an artistic process that you can rely on for support again and again. She shares how to practice perseverance, intention setting, riding through failure, and meaning-making by bringing oneself fully into one’s art.

Cindy invites all artists, no matter their form, to find tools to sustain their practice that are adaptable and unique to them.

Meet the Hosts

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Cindy Shearer, Professor and Program Chair for the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing at CIIS, is the author of Stay With Writing: Practices for Sustaining the Writer’s Work and Life. A writer, text-image artist, and curator, she shapes innovative interdisciplinary spaces where writers and artists converse across disciplines, mediums and forms, further develop their skills and capacities, and engage the complexity of and possibilities within writing and artmaking. She also co-designed and co-leads the Creative Dissertation Pathway, focusing on art practice as research, for the Ph.D. in East-West Psychology at CIIS. Her essay, “Thirteen Acts of Seeing Further: Creative Writing as Text-Image Art and A Quest for Care,” appears in Empathy in Creative Writing: Ethics, Diversity and Communication. Cindy is also an experienced writing consultant and coach.

 

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Emlyn Guiney is an Oakland based theater artist and director working in physical theater and devised performance for the last 20 years. She creates original solo and ensemble performances that illuminate the magical, wild, and absurd of everyday life. Emlyn has a BA in Theatre from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and studied devised theater and Butoh (Japanese dance theater) with companies in Canada and Australia. She currently leads solo and ensemble explorations at Wild Theater, a laboratory for devised performance making. When she is not making art, she curates public conversations and workshops for CIIS Public Programs. She can often be found staging her 10-year-old daughter’s plays in her living room.

Important Event Information

Accessibility Information

If you need to request accessibility accommodations, please email publicprograms@ciis.edu at least one week prior to the event. For more information, explore our Accessibility web page.

Recording Policy

Ticket holders will have access to an ad-free replay of the event for one month after the live event, after which unlimited viewing with ads will be available. Portions of the audio will also be released on our podcast. Only registered ticket holders who choose to watch live can participate in the chat and Q&A.

Refund Policy

All tickets and add-ons purchased for this event are nonrefundable.

Related Academic Program

Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing