Creativity, Self-Expression & the Joyful Pain of Writing | BRIght & Early, BRI’s Student Web Series

0:03 hello young people of the internet welcome to another episode of the Bill of Rights institute’s bright and early web series where we talk about today’s current events and what we’re thinking about and help you think about things with us so as always I am here with my colleagues Gary and Kirk a very special

0:23 guest today which is another colleague of ours the Institute the author Tony Williams everyone how are you good to see ya thanks for coming very good to be here I mean seeing all of you in person in a few weeks so it’s good to see all of your smiling faces it’s been a minute right we are so grateful that you have

0:44 time to come and talk to us today about creativity and journaling and our process of documentation of our lives you have you’re working on your seventh book now and so we are gonna look to you to kind of give us some insight into the creative process and how we and how we should think about documenting what’s

1:05 happening right now but first I want to check in with everybody how you all doing look don’t do it all right don’t okay you know the the weeks are passing I think are you know hitting a hitting a stride I’m starting to start new things and kind of getting used to to the things I have to do and the things I want to do yeah yeah I think that’s

1:25 right I think I’m finding myself making more phone calls and reaching out to more people and and I guess finding different ways of communicating that seem to get lost when we’re busier running around and doing everything we do when we’re not all not traveling and not going anywhere right I definitely am

1:47 reaching deeper into my community bench right so people I haven’t talked to or checked in with it for a while but then I’m also I’ve also we’ve gotten to the point where there there is a bit of a rhythm now and and a pacing and so the the thoughts on what my creative outlets are going to be in the next couple of months I’ve started to

2:09 burble up how are you doing Tony great a lot of thing only time finding some quiet moments to walk my dog many many miles per day like a lot of people our parkour pets are again there their legs walked off and read it reading a lot of books and watching a lot of great movies with my

2:30 son especially and so you know where we’re making the best of it absolutely well as we’re thinking about kind of what the next couple of months looks like we don’t have to start planning for for what our what our time is going to be filled with and I think that that’s where this conversation came out this is that’s what this

2:51 conversation came out of is thinking about what what documentation do we use to both process what’s happening right now but also leave behind so that we remember what’s happening right now so I think Gary I know has been thinking about what he’s doing and how how maybe you can join him in that journey so go

3:12 ahead Gary sure yeah absolutely no I think everything we’ve been discussing is is how I’m feeling we’re all on the same page I think because as history fans I think we’ve established we’re all sort of history fans there’s an interesting part to that because so often we’re reading other people’s history things that have happened long

3:35 before we were around but also that we are always living through it so so I think something Kirk was saying before is interesting about how we’re communicating with others and maybe doing it in a way we haven’t because I do have to say lately something I’ve gotten back into from a very long time ago but I haven’t is his letter writing I have my stationery and my envelope and

3:56 my stamps and there’s something about long handwriting sure I’m I’m still texting people and things like that but there’s something about sitting down and writing out this experience is a bit different and a bit a bit more powerful in a strange way so if anybody watched an early episode of ours I’m a big fan of journaling and I think that’s really

4:17 important and a lot of the historical record we have is luckily preserved writings of people who were perhaps writing from them for themselves as you would with journals the letters are really a – because it’s it’s still capturing your experience of what’s going on but it’s it’s for someone else and so that is at

4:38 the same time a very powerful thing to do for yourself but also can be very powerful to seek I share one one thing that we’ve got part of what I what I like to referenced was a letter that that we have in our curricula it this is in our curriculum and immigration but it’s a letter from Mary Garvey and it’s

5:01 from 1850 and it’s – her mother it’s a really interesting letter that I don’t know was intended to be read by by students of history and in the future but it’s it’s just a really powerful way that someone was expressing just very clear sort of thoughts but it captures

5:22 what’s going on I mean I noticed in the beginning here the first paragraph she starts off by saying my dear mother I write these few lines to you hoping that you are now and will continue to be in good health when these shall reach you and it reminds me so much of something I’m so used to saying now to friends about being well and and being okay in it and it really means something and so the

5:44 writing that I’m thinking of is very voluntary when it comes to letters um but I’m still writing and recording things because you know I’m working right and so so I’m thinking a lot about the skills of writing and that’s why I’m so happy that that Tony’s here and Kirk and you you all right but I’ve seen the two of you before but so I think about

6:06 that a lot I think about some of a lot of our resources that there’s a structure in a way to writing that frees you up and so this is this is part of just the many many resources I can’t show you everything that we have on writing but it’s really helpful part of what I think of when it comes to creative writing is having that structure really helps and I learned a

6:28 lot not from necessarily doing it but that is kind of the way right you start off just just practicing and not worrying about it but also my experience when I was teaching so I was the the coach of our literary magazine so we took a lot look at a lot of things like poetry this is one of my favorite books by the way it’s the making of a poem by Mark strand and Evan

6:50 Boland and really we found that giving structure freed you up sometimes I found and I don’t know if you all feel this way that a blank page itself can be a wall can be really difficult thing to get over because I there’s this feeling like it has to be perfect before I even put the first word down and so the students and I when we were together

7:11 found that having some kind of constraints could make beautiful things and they did and and there wasn’t to worry about it I mean this is an example of the zine that we put out and and it went through phases and drafts and work through it but but there is such a joy in that that I just highly recommend just trying it tossing it out there and

7:33 if you’ll give me another moment I want to talk about just another it’s an organization that really helped me through with all this which is yeah this has been a goal of mine throughout life I’ve never it started exactly this is

7:54 National Novel Writing Month or nah no rhyme uh I guess is that was no rhyme Oh probably um but it started as just a way to to encourage people to write in the original form is to write a novel in a month but it’s really turned into this really supportive program it’s a

8:16 nonprofit that helps people of all ages and and they’re really focusing on young writers too a lot just to say you know you have this burning thing inside you whether or not it’s it’s truth or fiction and and there are ways to to have support to just try doing it and

8:36 you’ll see what amazing things happen and so I encourage all of us to say best thing to do just give it a shot and I think you’d be surprised and I think it’s so cool it’s making this a better time absolutely and I think what we’re what we’re encouraging all of you you out there to do is to kind of remove

8:57 the filter of schoolwork and performance and do this as an act of of externalizing what’s happening internally for you because as Kirk is gonna mention in a bit we have a lot of Records not only of letters that people were writing that that show Kissel they’re their internal struggles with

9:18 what what was happening in their in their time and in their moment but also a lot of journals where people were we’re doing it for themselves and then also I’ll talk about a little later a lot of art which is both for the self and for the other often so art goes both ways journaling goes both ways letter

9:39 writing goes both ways Mary Guardians gary said likely did not know that we would be reading her leather 150 years later on the internet to young people around the United States I don’t know like she knew that yeah but in in it was fulfilling a need for her so now I’m

10:00 gonna turn it over to Kirk as he often does to give us some context for the kinds of writing and documentation and all the primary sources we love primary sources at some point no one was thinking about our primary source they were just externalizing some need that they had to communicate right and so Kirk take it away yeah that’s right no I thinking about

10:21 what you know what Gary was talking about with the letter Mary Garvey I think it’s a great example of this right when we think about history and we think about how things are recorded they’re not all laid out for us right so the job of historians is to take things like the letter of Mary Garvey and sort of knit them together and breathe life into them and so they become a story that we can follow in interpret and understand and

10:42 analyze there’s lots of ways of doing that I’m gonna pull up Mary Garvey’s letter again because I think it’s interesting looking at it from from different perspectives so we’re thinking about Mary Garvey and so what do we know we know that she is an Irish immigrant who has moved to the United States but historians look at this and they start to ask a bunch of different questions so for example how long did it take this

11:03 letter to get across the Atlantic back to her home how is it that they were traveling back in or what was it that she was doing in the United States and how do all of those answers tell us things about the Atlantic world in about the economy that was existing and about sort of the society that Mary Garvey was living in whether or not you know she

11:23 had you know what opportunities she had how was she was going about her day all of those are questions of that historians tackle and it’s amazing how many of those questions are raised in just a simple letter so it’s we’re experiencing the current pandemic and things that we’re recording we have to keep in mind we don’t have to keep in mind but we do have the opportunities to

11:44 have in mind that our reflections and the things that we’re observing are actually really powerful for historians of the future to really know what it’s like to live during this time because no matter how detailed the stories that we tell and that we remember and how good our memory is at a certain point we’re gonna have to relay that somebody else

12:04 who did not live through this period and and how that happens and how historians will understand it is really going to be built on the records that we have whether or not it’s the newspapers that were reading or whether or not it’s you know the tic-tock videos that we’re creating or it’s the letters that we’re writing and the things that we’re recording all of those things will add up to the narrative that’s built and so

12:24 we have an opportunity to be a part of that which i think is really powerful and interesting and I’m excited that we have Tony here because Tony has actually worked through a very similar incident in one of his previous books the pox and the Covenant and I was hoping that he could just talk to us a little bit about what that process was like how it is that he strung together these different primary sources these different letters

12:46 and logs and things to create a story so Tony why don’t we start just by telling us a little bit about what the pox and the Covenant is about and how did you came upon that topic are you sure I’d love to Curt thank you the pox on the covenant was a book that came out about 10 years ago and has a lot of relevance to today because it’s

13:07 about a smallpox epidemic in Boston in 1721 and the discovery the introduction of smallpox inoculation why was a great medical discovery and this you know devastating epidemic but you know it set off a firestorm of

13:27 debate because very curiously and what drew me to the story originally is that cotton matter and the Puritan ministers were the ones who introduced the inoculation supported by just one doctor and we’re opposed by the doctors of Boston and a young Benjamin Franklin and his brother who actually started an anti

13:49 inoculation newspaper you know the historical facts are sometimes Warren Qing them stories we can make up and so is there really fascinating twist on that and so it made me read more biographies about them and read more books about colonial America and to try to figure out what was going on and then I started digging around the primary

14:10 sources started reading the lighters and IRAs of Cotton Mather which have been preserved and are available at my local university library and started reading through letters that Benjamin Franklin wrote as well as William Douglas who was an opponent of smallpox and very

14:30 interestingly and very useful for historians Puritan Massachusetts around this time was a highly literate Society they had a strong educational system and they really promoted literacy so that people could read the Bible but they also read newspapers and pamphlets and material coming out of Europe and so

14:52 they wrote a lot of there were two newspapers in town and they also wrote pamphlets for and against the inoculation show is a kind of a treasure trove of different primary sources that I can use to piece all this together and try to understand the motivations of the people involved and really you know like

15:14 a detective put the story together in a narrative form so in that process Tony I guess it sounds like you kind of get to know these people is that the case I mean do you feel like you you actually are speaking to them at a certain point well you know I really trying to do that I felt like in this book probably more than any other I

15:34 I I think I did and and I think one of the reasons why is I really try to not only just read their letters and their Diaries and so forth but but to put myself in their shoes to understand you know how would a you know Tata now there was a public figure but it was also father and so when his son came to him to get the smallpox inoculation which

15:57 could you know could have resulted in his death you know yeah I had to think about how I was a father as well and so I try to make kind of those human connections and thinking about human nature and human interactions and to try to figure out well it’s all it’s fine and great for Mather to promote this for

16:17 a Boston but how would he react to his own son doing it or it was first tested this inoculation practice on William Douglas I’m sorry dr. zabdiel Boylston who was the the doctor who tested at first he tested it on a six-year-old son and you know I have a six-year-old my

16:38 son was six years old at the time and I was trying to think would I test this on him it was as we’re actually trying to get into their heads and and and step into their shoes for for a little bit and to think about how how I would react and similar circumstances but it wasn’t always easy but I think I have a little bit more of an understanding now even in

17:00 2020 with our or our pandemic and our reaction to it it helps bring a little bit more understanding even 10 years after at the book very cool well so that book is available on I’m assuming Amazon and all of the places one can buy books Oh Adam sadly but yes you can you can find a youth copies all over the

17:22 Internet ok and we can find used copies all over the internet make sure people will want to grab those up um so let’s talk about the present moment for you Tony as a creative as someone who has a lot to say about a lot of different things I know you’re working on a new book but what is the creative process for you right now how are you working through kind of that process well I I’m

17:44 doing you know I have more time at home now to do that and so even though there are more people around the house than normal you know it’s still pretty similar in terms of doing research and primary sources luckily I have a lot of books behind me and I have the internet at my fingertips but I can’t really go to libraries right now so so that actually

18:07 does make research a little different but I’m still able to get get everything that I need to done and it’s just really it’s like you know exercising your muscles or whatever you just have to do it every day and you have to have the discipline to just sit down and do it and even if even if the words aren’t coming out perfectly or you’re feeling a

18:28 little frustrated because you’re not finding the exact source you want to just sit down and put pen to paper or fingers to computer pad and just to sit down and do it and to try to do it every day well wonderful well thank you so much to me I think there’s a lot to learn both from that experience you had of writing

18:49 the book ten years ago and kind of personalization that you went through in your research there’s things to learn about your technique and you mentioned that that one of your practices is that you heavily outline in order to overcome the burden of a1 that blank page that Gary was talking about can you tell us a

19:10 little bit about that sure yeah yeah now writer’s block you know it’s not fun right for anyone and we’ve all been there for sure but but what am i one of my secrets just even for myself is to to try to avoid it in the first place and the way I do that is I really outline

19:30 everything really thoroughly I follow the model I learned in sixth grade myself but I learned Roman numeral one to capital a and B and one two three all that that system I actually still use it today so i really suggest all the the students listening today really really

19:50 take that to heart because what it does is it helps me organize my thoughts logically I throw my creative ideas down what I want to argue I put all the primer verses and evidence in my outline and so everything is highly structured and it’s drudgery and it takes a lot of work but it pays off and I sit down and write out

20:13 sentences write our paragraphs get the flow going in the chapters everything has already been laid out in the outline so it’s really really important part of I think my writing process and when I was a teacher I try to try to encourage my students to do it as well that’s good it’s always nice to be reminded of that

20:33 that you know whether you’ve written seven books and I’ve been doing this a while or kind of starting fresh that there’s gonna be winds and there’s gonna be frustrations and it’s okay to keep working through it and you have breakthroughs probably and the New York Times where you feel like you hit a wall but then you you work through it so it’s always it’s no matter how often you’re right it’s good to be reminded of that

20:55 oh that’s true and so I think one of our one of the things that most young people out there today you guys can let us know if I’m on the mark or not is McGarry you’re kind of you have a lot going on right now you have a lot of assignments it’s the end of the semester AP testing

21:18 is coming up decisions that you’re having to make for your summer and for next school year are all very vague and unclear they’re there just as I’m cleared for us as they I’m sure they are for you but you’re more into the decisions that are being made right now and there’s a lot of lack of clarity and so sometimes there’s the academic

21:38 writing and the academic kind of creative work that goes into that but then the truly creative expression is a different process of a different it feels a different need for you than your academic writing and so I want to talk really quickly about where we can go to find inspiration creatively who we can

21:59 look forward to to find inspiration creatively so firstly I think that there are a number of things that we can learn from poetry right now so Gary mentioned his favorite book what was the name of that book it is the making of a poem it’s a it’s an anthology of poetic forms by Mark strand

22:19 and eben Boland it just kind of walks you through examples of the structures of poems in a really interesting way and when I was I probably I think I was between the ages of 13 and 15 I think I wrote about 500 poems because that was the way that I was externalizing what I was going through and so when I think about ways to process big deep things

22:43 that are happening poetry always comes to me as a way to do that this is a great selection of poems there at the Christian Science Monitor saying poems to remind us of our strengths and Quarantine and I love this opening from the editor and it says Robert Frost wrote that poetry is a momentary stay against the confusion of the world and

23:04 so there are lots of great places to go for poetry online there are you know famous poems at poets not org or poetry org and then there are all the poems that end up going around the internet in their variety of forms my one caveat is always make sure you know the attribution has a lot of poems will get

23:25 misattributed so there’s a little bit of digital literacy worked there sometimes when you see an image and a poem together but so there’s poetry to do but then we also can learn from the great artists so if you’re not familiar with Frida Kahlo and her life and work she struggled with physical difficulties for most of her

23:46 life and she used that difficulty to really inspire her art and to take the pain and difficulty that she was experiencing and externalize that this is a really fascinating image of her painting on a body cast that she had to wear for a long time and so she was taking her internal struggle and

24:08 externalizing on her physically through painting the body cast if you’re not familiar with this website this is the history chicks podcast it’s a great podcast that focuses on women in history I loved it I loved it for years and they’ll have one two or three episodes that covered the life of a particular

24:28 historically significant woman the last thing I want to talk about kinda brings us all together so if you’re if you’ve ever listened to a TED talk or a TEDx talk as I’m sure you have you know that often they can be really powerful this is one of my favorite authors she she did a TED talk on the nature of creativity a long time ago that’s one of

24:50 my favorite TEDTalks of all time her name’s Elizabeth Gilbert she wrote the book Eat Pray Love and then she went on to write a number of books about the creative process and they just had this beautiful conversation she just had a beautiful conversation with the founder of the Ted organization named Chris Anderson and all about what to do with

25:11 your big emotions and feelings right now and so this is an hour-long kind of conversation with a really nice transcript feature where if you click on it it’ll take you directly to that part of the video but I wanted to focus on two real quick passages that I think are just so powerful so right here at 26 she

25:34 says that she doesn’t think creativity right now necessarily means that you need to write the Great American Novel or start the business it doesn’t need to be literal we’re going to create new worlds and new lives on the other side of this and we’re going to be doing that individually and collectively I think of the shoots of small trees that can only

25:55 come up after massive forest fires where seed pods have to explode under great heat we’re in a kind of crucible moment now and there’s all this creativity that’s going to come out of it and it’s this really take what you are feeling and experiencing and externalize it in whatever way makes you happy and lets

26:17 you feel the moments clearly she then goes on to say down at 31 that she suggests that doing what’s doing what you thought what you enjoy doing at age 10 so earlier in the talk she talks about how people are always like find your passion find your passion and she’s like that’s that’s a lot of pressure just be creative right now do what makes

26:41 you what makes you feel happy and relaxed and she says often that’s Korea to be in play and she mentions that she was an anxious child and that at an early age children with anxiety learned that they can help manage that with their curiosity in their play usually at adolescence that changes and we become more more interests and more external

27:02 and we lose that sense of play but she encourages us to go back to how we what made us happy at age 10 whatever it was get some Legos get some coloring books get your hands in the mud do whatever it will to ground you in your own creativity and yourself because that’s going to make you able to serve others

27:24 better in whatever’s to come so on that note I want to ask my colleagues do many thoughts or responses or things you want to tell our audience today before we close and this was really amazing and I have to say it’s funny that one of the last things you were talking about is going back to what made you comfortable

27:44 because I don’t know if I even realize that when I was 10 I was a letter writer I would write to I wrote to Charles Schultz to tell him how much I like peanuts and I would write little notes to friends and things like this and and it’s funny I don’t think I hadn’t realized until you said it but there is finding great comfort and saying what is fundamentally something but I like and

28:06 often is a pretty creative thing yeah I think I think that’s great I also really like that passage about getting your hands in the mud because I think in addition to you know I think there’s a lot of emphasis right now on exercise which is which is great and you know we’ve been talking about writing which is something where you’re sitting down and kind of focusing a little bit but doing something physical with your hands can be really inspiring too so whether

28:26 or not that’s getting in the kitchen and learning something new to cook or it’s going out safely being social distance and you know you know digging up planting something in a garden or or picking up sticks or just doing something with your hands it’s amazing how much that kind of physical activity

28:47 could actually be really inspiring and can drive you to do some really interesting things right and you know my my kids are a little my daughter’s in college she had an internship that was cancelled and my son had is au basketball we still don’t know what’s gonna happen this summer but I said you know don’t see this as you know

29:07 things being canceled but rather seeing SIA as an opportunity you told my daughter well take a college class instead and something you just really want to just for fun you know don’t take something in your major just take something for fun and you know my son is finding new and creative ways to work out and you know runs a couple of vlogs on movies and so

29:28 forth so just finding new outlets and new opportunities rather than looking at it is you know you know those opportunities denied just you know kick down some new doors and I love that all of this and that moment at the end of the passage I read where you shoot where

29:49 Elizabeth Gilbert mentions that that we’re going to need all of you in the very near future we need we’re going to need all of the creative energy that every American every person in the world can bring on the other side of all of this so it’s our duty right now to figure out how we can uplift ourselves

30:11 to be able to bring that creativity and let’s start with some play and see where it takes us because that is the essential characteristic of the entrepreneurial journey that will allow us to come at the end of the the other side of this and ever more flourishing Society so on that note I want to thank

30:33 my colleagues thank you Gary Thank You Kirk it was specially to Tony Williams author who you can find on Twitter and thank you to all of you out there on the internet for all the amazing creative things that you’re doing to support your communities my name is Rachel this is bright and early and we will see you next time

30:54 Thanks thank you you