From my early teens until my early forties, I spent most of my free time writing. Novels. Short stories. Essays. Whatever. I was fiercely and madly in love with the written word. But, I also spent many of those years running publishing companies where so much of my time was dedicated not to the art of the written word, but to the business of selling books. That meant, instead of getting lost in the beauty of a sentence, I was busy asking myself questions about reviewers and cover designs and the costs of production. I had to be fluent in the “rules” of publishing at the cost of the joy I found in writing.

Unfortunately, that had a negative effect on my creativity. No matter how hard I tried to shut off the scolding business and academic voices I’d mistakenly internalized as my own, they always found a way to punch through into my playful and exploratory goals.

In the fall of 2021 I was co-leading a writers’ retreat in Salida, Colorado with my friend Anita when she mentioned that she’d spoken to Carl Ortman, a Salida based artist who had volunteered the use of his studio for writers to try their hand at painting. For whatever reason—I really don’t remember—I decided that I’d rather document the event than participate in it. I don’t remember being scared of the idea of painting or afraid of not being “good” at it.

The next year when we did the retreat in 2022 I told Carl I wanted to paint. We ran a similar event to the one we did a year earlier. Immediately after putting paint on a brush for the first time since elementary school I felt a sense of relief wash over me. I didn’t know anything about technique or the rules of painting or how the art market worked. I could simply create and be fully present for the joy. I continued painting in Carl’s studio after most everybody else had left for the evening.

As soon as I got back to Madison I purchased paints, brushes, cavasses, and the other assorted materials needed to paint. Then I set up a studio in my house and began painting every night. The process unstuck gears that had begun to rust. I was very protective of the joy it provided and chose not to watch how-to videos on YouTube. I simply asked myself questions like, what paint color most accurately communicates how you’re feeling right now? Then I would load some of whatever it was onto a brush and I would—without conscious planning or intentionality—start moving across the canvas. I just wanted to play and figure it out for myself.

A pleasant byproduct of my effort was that in unintentionally and unconsciously painting, I didn’t ever know what was going to show up. When I thought I was done, I’d step back and see what I saw. Sometimes it was nothing. But other times I would see something that felt related to a novel I’ve been working on since 2012 and I would get a better understanding of my writing without having to go through the tunnel of critics and sales department devils that often sat on my shoulder. When I finished interpreting the painting, I’d rotate it 90 degrees, try to forget about what I’d seen before, and then set about taking in the painting anew.

I talked to some writer friends of mine at a different writers retreat (Wellstone Center in the Redwoods) about what I’d been doing. I then spent time with each of them individually, two of us working on the same canvas, talking about their book, where they were stuck, etc. We had no plan for what we were doing with the canvas, but when we got done, we looked at the paintings through the lens of the books they were working on and found insight and understanding that helped overcome blocks.