My forthcoming book, Circles: Nurture and Grow your Creative Gift was born out of a collection of writings from a crazy time in my life when I had two very young children and a third on the way. I was longing to create but felt that all my creative energy was being sapped by parenthood. In the book, I write;
‘There have been times, whilst sitting on the carpet playing Duplo when a poem has flitted through the room like a butterfly. I have heard a brief line of it before it has flown out of the window and gone; forgotten or trampled over, before I had the time to snatch and it and write it down. And for a while I thought fine, let them go, there is no time to catch them. But now I am ready to wait for them again.’ The frustration birthed a desperation for time to write, and actually sometimes the pressure is a good thing for it clarifies what we really want.
I am a writer and mum of four and in this book, I share my insights and struggles in living creatively in a busy world as a fellow creative. There are many issues we come up against when pursuing creativity; how do we justify the time spent on our projects? What is success? How do we find our voice? How do we get our works out in the world? Is it selfish to pursue our creative dreams? This book is a story of my creative walk and intertwined with that is the way that my Christian faith influences my creativity. For me, I can’t separate the two because who I am is interwoven with my call, my purpose, my value.
I believe that all of us hold creative potential but so often we are scared to let it come to light. It seems there is a great chasm in creativity of those who have ‘made it’ and those who are too scared to try, but the reality is that there is a whole army of people working two jobs, or working in the evenings to fulfill their quiet dreams. And what is ‘making it’ anyway? The reality is that success is what you name it, it is attainable, and, for me, producing and letting your work go out into the world brings a deep satisfaction that can hardly be equalled by anything else.
Circles: Nurture and Grow Your Creative Gift (ISBN 978-1-78815-733-9) will be released on April 1st 2019 and is published by Onwards and Upwards. It will be available from onwardsandupwards.org and all good bookshops. You can also find it in my Etsy shop: https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/LittleBirdEditions
elisabeth pike 