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Tim J. Myers does a bit of everything: he’s a writer, songwriter, storyteller, visual artist, and senior lecturer at Santa Clara University, where he teaches writing. We got together to talk about the nature of creativity, which Tim calls a “sacred mystery,” including everything from the way our childhood creativity is changed by the culture as we become adults, the necessary role of play in the creative process, the transcendent experiences of awe and wonder and how they fuel us, the wisdom of following your gut, and a whole lot more.
Episode breakdown:
01:39 Kids are instantly creative, often play traditionally.
06:50 Creativity influenced by nature, nurture, educators.
15:50 Importance of creativity in education and society.
21:22 Differences between play in childhood versus “professional” adults.
24:56 Nancy switched to teaching, advisor, and writing lit mag.
30:49 Encouraging exploration of language and creative thinking.
37:04 Parents see child, lifetime of giving love.
40:35 Zen story about finding wonder in life.
45:27 Believing in progress through challenging circumstances.
50:34 Art, festivals, play as a primal need.
56:21 Semantic split between “religion” and “spirituality.”
01:01:14 Falling in love based on unique personal idiosyncrasies.
01:07:23 Experimenting with writing schedule structure.
01:13:45 Craft is in choosing words for impact.
01:19:22 Writers and feedback.
01:25:00 Tim struggles with generalist vs specialist identity.
01:26:31 Passion for storytelling and visual art emerges.
01:35:38 Weekly writing schedule reduces overthinking and focus on perfection.
Connect with me and fellow creatives on Substack.
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The photography study we mentioned is detailed here.
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Transcript: Tim J. Myers
Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:06]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Ordinary people, creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host, creativity coach Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go. Tim Myers does a bit of everything. He’s a writer, songwriter, storyteller, visual artist, and senior lecturer at Santa Clara University where he teaches writing. We got together to talk about the nature of creativity, which Tim calls a sacred mystery, Including everything from the way our childhood creativity is changed by the culture as we become adults, the necessary role of play in the creative process, The transcendent experiences of awe and wonder and how they fuel us, the wisdom of following your gut, and a whole lot more.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:52]:
The subject matter may be deep, but the conversation is lighthearted. I think you’ll get a lot out of my conversation with Tim Myers. Tim, welcome to Follow Your Curiosity.
Tim J. Myers [00:01:05]:
Nancy, I am so delighted to be here and so grateful that you allowed me to be part of this whole thing. I think it’s wonderful what you’re doing with this. I think creativity is becoming I think there’s even greater awareness that is becoming more and more important in the modern world for lots of different reasons. So I think that the fact that you’re doing this is really out there contributing in a major way. Plus, I just think this is gonna be a blast.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:30]:
Me too. So I start everybody off with the same question, which is?
Tim J. Myers [00:01:34]:
Sure.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:35]:
Were you a creative kid, or did you discover your creative side later on?
Tim J. Myers [00:01:39]:
I absolutely was not a creative kid. I was a kid who was well, it it’s funny because kids often people sometimes stereotype kids. Like, People talk about children’s imagination. They all have great imaginations. Well, if you teach kids, they have the same human schmear as adults do. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t have a much greater open mindedness and openheartedness to it. So kids are I think one reason adults often say this is because they miss that themselves, and they feel it’s underdeveloped in themselves or repressed. And when you see kids playing, they are so open, so into flow.
Tim J. Myers [00:02:15]:
They’re, like, Instantly into playflow, and they can be very creative in the way they play. Although kids also play traditional games all the time. So I was a kid in that same sense. I can remember things we did and talked about and not things I wondered about. I can remember again, I’m saying this is kinda like Minor creativity that could happen to any kid. I can remember being really bored during class when I was in 3rd 4th grade, And the nuns up there talking, and I had this thing I would do in my head where I’d imagine firing a slingshot and ricocheting off the room and And hitting the statue of the state of the saint, it’s shattering that I was such a little heathen. So I typed there there probably were signs in me at that time, but, what did happen to me, though, and I there actually was a starting point me, which actually so in a way, I answered incorrectly. So I was in 6th grade, and, sister Mary Boniface I went to a Catholic school as you can probably tell.
Tim J. Myers [00:03:13]:
Mhmm. Sister Mary Boniface was our teacher, very tall, very slender, slight German accent, Boniface. And, she her mouth was aligned. She never smiled. And so, of course, as kids, we just always assumed she was mean. Actually, looking back, I realized she was a very shy woman. Right. So she called me in after class one day.
Tim J. Myers [00:03:34]:
For some reason, she’d asked us to write a an essay or something. You know, I’m 11, for school, and then for some reason, I wrote a poem. Now it was about Saint Stephen the Martyr, the guy who got shot with all the arrows. I was actually a pretty cheerful person, but but I I don’t know why I did this, Nancy, and I turned it in. And then the day after, At recess time, I heard the words that every kid dreaded, which was, alright, boys and girls. It’s time to go to recess. Tim, will you please come and talk to me? And I was just scared to death. And I’m standing there, you know, little kid, and she’s sitting at her desk, and she said, do you know that poem you turn in? And I’m just like, my god.
Tim J. Myers [00:04:13]:
Did not follow directions. Did not follow directions. And she said, I I still remember this. I kinda get the chills. She said, I liked it. You could’ve knocked me over with a feather. You know, I graduated high school in 71. I was born in 53.
Tim Myers [00:04:28]:
I’m not saying all parents were like this, but Parents talking to kids, adults talking actually talking to kids, that was not a common thing then. Parents and teachers talk to add kids. Mhmm. So she was actually talking to me, and she liked something I did, and I had no idea why I’d done it. She encouraged me, so I started writing more poems. She put them in a little booklet. I just Got a huge kick out of that. So she and I, you know, I I’ve often thought I have I never thanked her.
Tim J. Myers [00:04:56]:
I was too young to understand, but she set that free. You know, she opened that gate for me, and then I kept on from there. So I guess so I guess it is true that it happened when I was a kid. But even then, I was very, very gradual and very slow to get into it over time. I was not, Like like, my wife is one of those kids when she was a little kid. She was awake and aware and watching what’s going on, and I was more like an apple on a tree, just, like, Slowly ripening, and that’s yeah. And and then, you know, it picked up speed and intensity over time. How about how about you? Were you a creative kid, or were you a later
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:35]:
I’m not sure if anybody’s turned this question on me before. So It’s
Tim J. Myers [00:05:39]:
such an interesting question, isn’t it?
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:40]:
Great question. Yeah. That’s why I use but exactly. Yeah. I mean, I was I was writing stuff. The the first thing I remember writing was a story when I was in 4th grade when my brother got the chicken pox, and I wrote a story about it.
Tim Myers [00:05:57]:
Okay. So that’s young.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:58]:
So Yeah. Yeah. And then, you know, little things here and there. And and I think I think I was about probably 4 or when my parents put me in my 1st children’s choir, which is something that I’ve never stopped doing. So
Tim J. Myers [00:06:14]:
Oh, how
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:15]:
So yeah. So that that has always been a thread, though not for the last couple years for various reasons. But, One one day, I shall go back. But Yeah. But yeah. I mean, that’s that’s been a huge was a huge part of I mean, that’s choir is literally how I picked my my undergrad college. So No.
Tim J. Myers [00:06:35]:
No. No.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:36]:
I I used to tell the kids what I was teaching. I was like, don’t ask me how I picked my school. And especially if I tell you how I picked my school, don’t go tell the college guidance people how that I told you how I picked my school because it’s not how you’re supposed to do it.
Tim J. Myers [00:06:50]:
But I mean, but that’s a this is wonderful too because because I was gonna say, obviously, the way creativity arises in us, has a lot to do with nature, but it also has a lot to do with nurture. And people in your life and, obviously, it could be parents and it could be teachers. Surprisingly often, it is not. And, again, not I’m not I’m not out here to judge all parents and all teachers. I was a teacher educator for almost 20 years. This is one of the things my wife and I my wife is a PhD educator, and I learned 80% of what I know from her. And we would always emphasize in working with our teacher candidates how much they need to put creativity into the curriculum, and we had to emphasize this because that is not the default position
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:37]:
Isn’t it?
Tim J. Myers [00:07:38]:
For most teachers. You it’s like, Are you guys not reading the papers? Are you not seeing how these created creativity gurus are making beaucoup bucks by going it’s like this is something we should start Reschool, obviously. But how wonderful that your parents would have you in a choir at age 5. Why is a 5 year old not in a choir singing? That’s Yeah. That’s fantastic.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:58]:
And I think my dad started singing in choirs when he was that little.
Tim J. Myers [00:08:02]:
Okay. So Well, there you go.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:04]:
You know?
Tim J. Myers [00:08:04]:
The torch is passed on. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:05]:
But, you know, it it yeah. And I think they did the same thing with my brother, though that one didn’t take.
Tim J. Myers [00:08:10]:
But It doesn’t always take.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:12]:
But he is the one who can pick up any instrument and just start playing it, and we just sit there going, that’s disgusting. But you still
Tim J. Myers [00:08:21]:
So maybe it took a little.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:23]:
It took in a different direction. Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [00:08:25]:
Well, I can tell you what happened to me. As I told you before in emails, I’m really, really interested in songwriting. Well, in fact, I’m interested. I’ve been doing it for decades, and I’ve probably written over a 1000 songs. And I’m working on a musical right now. And it’s interesting that your your point about your brother. My mom this it’s funny because this fits with my earlier story, Which happened when I was in 6th grade. And in 7th grade, my mom by the way, I’m the oldest of 11 kids.
Tim J. Myers [00:08:52]:
My mom was overwhelmed. Yeah. And I when I think back to this, I am so grateful to her for because, I mean, just keeping the house from exploding was a major accomplishment. Not to mention putting food on the table. She bought an old piano, an upright wooden piano. $75, I remember this. And she encouraged me to take piano lessons. So I’m a 12 year old boy.
Tim J. Myers [00:09:15]:
So this I’m like, what? I don’t know about this. And I took the lessons, and it this very sweet, Kind of vacuous older lady who had doilies on her tables, and I started, you know, with the. The lessons lasted, I took about 5 of them, 5 weeks. And I what I realized early on talk about pedagogy and how you should teach. If I didn’t practice, I got a b. If I did practice, I got an a. So it would that was a pretty easy decision. So I stopped taking the lessons, but I had learned the structure of the the 3 note chord, the 1-3-5.
Tim J. Myers [00:09:52]:
And that’s when I started songwriting. So like your brother, it’s it’s this whole thing about creativity is such, At its heart, such a mystery. Mhmm. At its core, in my opinion, in my feeling, at its It is a sacred mystery.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:10]:
Oh, yeah.
Tim J. Myers [00:10:11]:
It it is a divine gift in my opinion, but it’s also very weird like a lot of divine things are. So that you never know what’s gonna spark what. So if, you know, again, parents, teachers, expose kids to these Experience as early, and not just, hey, who was the you give me the name of 3 classical composers. Put instruments in their hands. Put paintbrushes in their hands. Take them outside where they can pile rocks to you know, there’s so many ways you can do this. You never know what’s gonna you never know what’s gonna spark. Does your brother play regularly?
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:46]:
He he doesn’t as much now that he’s got kids.
Tim J. Myers [00:10:50]:
Right. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:50]:
And, you know, they’re 8 and 11, and they both play. They they both take piano lessons. So Yeah. I think maybe that helped him kind of get back into it. And for a while, I don’t think he had a piano. But but he he used to like, the whole time that he was in high school and college, like, I would come home—he’s younger than I am, and I would come home, like, on, you know, fall break or something. He would spend hours in the basement at the piano. And and just as as one example, He literally destroyed my copy of the vocal selections from Phantom of the Opera because he played it so much that the pages fell out. But he wouldn’t just play it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:34]:
He also listened to the CD constantly, so he’d figured out all the stuff went in between. And he would sit down there and play for an hour or 2 and just play the whole thing straight through just for fun. You know, he also played trumpet, and now he plays guitar and harmonica. Like I said, he picks up stuff and just goes with it.
Tim J. Myers [00:11:54]:
Well, so so but he’s clearly. So this is another thing about this mystery of creativity. It’s not only the mystery to me that these things exist in the natural world either in as actual manifestations like birdsong or the the sound of waves coming on the shore. I mean, rhythms obviously, extric exist in nature constantly. Tones not quite so much, but they’re there too. But what the hell happened in this brain of ours that causes us to flip out in reaction to these things. Now your brother needs to keep doing music. He needs to.
Tim J. Myers [00:12:31]:
I mean, when you that level, you know, he’s, like, he was on fire, and that fire is not gone. Yeah. And and, again, I laugh because a huge part of why artistic life has been dictated by the fact that we had kids. You know, that makes a huge difference. But I I when I think of that fervor, and when I think of how utterly anti practical it is, I mean, it’s like he’s spending hours in the basement playing this music over that he loves. Accomplishing what? Well, for god’s sakes, accomplishing everything as far as I’m concerned. Yeah. That’s amazing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:05]:
Yeah. And and we had lots of conversations because I was very I was very anti my parents’ anti music degree idea with it because I was like, hi. What’s he doing all day?
Tim J. Myers [00:13:18]:
Right. Right. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:19]:
And and he is an architect, and he’s very happy being an architect. And so, you know, he’s he’s got plenty of of places to put his creative energy. But
Tim J. Myers [00:13:27]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:28]:
Right. I just kept thinking you know, because because my parents were very much of the You don’t do that as a profession. You do it as an avocation. And and in a way, I get it because if you turn what you love into a profession and it doesn’t go quite the right way. It ends up owning you instead of you owning it in ugly ways.
Tim J. Myers [00:13:47]:
Well, quite.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:48]:
And you can end up hating the thing that you loved, and nobody wants that. But, you know, at the same time, I was like, double major. Come on. Let me let
Tim J. Myers [00:13:57]:
him Exactly.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:58]:
You know? But but yeah. No. He he’s picked up the piano again, and he’s definitely, you know, lost some in the intervening years, But but he still picks up and and plays.
Tim J. Myers [00:14:09]:
Good then.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:10]:
And and what is amazing is to watch him with with my nephews, you know, who are still learning this stuff, and it’s it’s kind of that What was it you said? Sacred?
Tim J. Myers [00:14:26]:
Sacred mystery?
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:27]:
Sacred mystery. That’s it. So it’s it’s exactly that because he, he just is so tuned into that stuff
Tim J. Myers [00:14:37]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:38]:
That there was a moment When, you know, he was talking to the boys and he was like, well, you just pick this up and do it. And my sister-in-law and I immediately like, no. You just pick it up and do it. It doesn’t work that way for them. That’s right. And and I know the same thing happens with me. I mean, I can’t necessarily break down for you, Like, how I wrote a a really good paragraph or something like that. I can tell you how to fix your bad paragraph, but I can’t necessarily tell you what magic happened that that I I just know how to do it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:11]:
You know? And and that’s that I think is is part of that sacred mystery. It’s like, I I don’t know. It just happens. So so yeah. And I I get why why people struggle with things like that. I also get why it’s hard for us to forget with the stuff that comes so naturally to us that Right. Yeah. We learned it once upon a time, but it just clicked more easily in our heads, and we didn’t have to work at it as easily or something.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:36]:
And so you gotta remember not everybody else had that happen with that thing. They probably have their own thing where they can do that, but it’s not necessarily your thing, so maybe go easy on people. That’s right. It’s hard to remember.
Tim J. Myers [00:15:50]:
And, you know, this is a good example to me too of this wider, Not just importance, but crucial importance of creativity. There is a tendency to kind of ghetttoize creativity with artists. I don’t mean ghettoize in necessarily a bad sense because a lot of people really admire that. But what gets lost in that is the tremendous foundational amount of creativity that happens in the lives of all human beings whether it’s fully accepted or not. I mean, it’s it’s kind of there. It’s there in potential. So these questions about education and creativity always come up, And I think they should come up because it’s not just about I mean, I’m sure it’s obvious as hell, but I’m all for more school funding for the arts. And and you I know you’re more than familiar with all those arguments and how it does pay off, and there’s all kinds of research now.
Tim J. Myers [00:16:43]:
But it but also as an educational principle across the board having nothing to do with the arts, one of the best principles is, And, again, having taught teachers for so long and having been a teacher so long myself, I tend to think of these pedagogical ways. Right? I will often say this to my writing students as well as to my teacher candidates that I had back then. If you had a basketball coach, And he or she sat you down and said, okay. Let’s talk about physics. Let’s talk about the laws of physics. The basketball is a sphere. It’s moving in space. The movement curving movement is covered by calculus or that, you know, you would go coach.
Tim J. Myers [00:17:22]:
This is all well and good, but What are you talking about? Well, of course, the coach is exactly right in that every second of playing basketball is physics. Yep. But that coach would be, and of course no coach would ever do this. It’s 100% wrong in terms of how to do basketball, because it’s experiential physics. Yeah. So the more we put students into doing situations, The better they get at artistic things and at nonartistic things. And part of that is a solution for those of us who teach creative writing or or other forms of the arts is Is that we don’t have to because I’m I’m totally with you, Nancy. I’m like, I can do so much for you as your creative writing teacher, But I can’t teach you how to do creative writing.
Tim J. Myers [00:18:09]:
What I can teach you is how to approach it, some possibilities here, how to set up the circumstances in your own head. I can show you models. I can talk to you about how I did it. But even then, I mean, again, this all comes back to the sacred mystery. Why did I use that word. Oh, I I can tell you. I thought that word was great because it was a contrast with the previous but how did I come up with that? I was watching a Sting video sometime back. He and another guy I I forget this other guy’s name has been with Sting for years, wonderful guitarist.
Tim J. Myers [00:18:40]:
And the interviewer was asking them about, you know, how do you write the song, how do you write the song, or anything. The phrase that kept coming they because they they never I’ve I’ve watched a lot of these videos. They can never answer the question directly because there is no answer. And what they tend to say is and Sting, who’s, by the way, very articulate, he kept saying, well, I was messing around at this. Oh, yeah. When we were messing around that day, while I was with Richard in the studio, and we were messing around with this chord. And I’m like, messing around. Messing around is as good as we can do, and the answer is exactly yes. It is as good as we can do.
Tim J. Myers [00:19:14]:
It’s a form of play. So the more we involve play in not only human recreation, But the more we involve playing actual normal practical skills, not to mention artistic skills, not to mention thinking, learning to be a better thinker, The more people are allowed to play and encouraged to play with that, the better they get and the richer life is for everybody. And, of course, like you said, doesn’t always work. When you mess around, 9 out of 10 times you get crap. But the 10th time?
Nancy Norbeck [00:19:45]:
Right. Right. And and you’re reminding me of the example. I read Keith Johnstone’s book, Impro, back almost a year ago. It’s like the the bible of improv, basically. And it’s Okay. It’s not even that new. I think it came out in the seventies, maybe even a little bit earlier than that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:20:06]:
But there’s one example that he gives in there where, You know, somebody did a study with a group of I think they were bankers or something like that. You know? Something that you don’t think of as as being much more than being counting. And had them do an exercise as themselves and rated what they came up with. I think it was some kind of idea generation kind of thing. And then told them that they were gonna role play being hippies and, you know, flower children and and whatever and do the same exercise. And when they were allowed to free up that way
Tim J. Myers [00:20:42]:
Wow.
Nancy Norbeck [00:20:43]:
The results improved dramatically both in quantity and quality, and and I think that’s the same kind of thing. You know? It’s like you’re allowed suddenly to stop being be straight laced. I am very serious, and I’m going to keep all of the beans and and just have fun like you did when you were a kid. You You know, when you were saying earlier, people look at creative kids kind of like, I miss that, and I think you’re right. I think we think we’re not allowed to do that anymore. And and culturally, we we have not caught up with the idea that, yeah, actually playing and having fun is really good for you, and it makes everything work better. But it does. Right.
Tim J. Myers [00:21:22]:
And being behind the behind the curve culturally is this big critical part of this. One of the things that also drives me nuts about this is a lot of these aspects of play are dismissed automatically because they’re associated with childhood. Mhmm. I don’t know the degree to which they are gendered. I mean, that might be worth thinking about some more, but It seems to me that that domestic world I mean, I what I’m thinking about is that elementary school world, which traditionally has been children and women. That’s changed some, but it still tends to be there more women teachers there. That world where play is not only accepted but centered. Of course, not everybody in that world centers it, and some teachers don’t get it in every but that whole thing is in direct contrast to the super important money dealing male bankers.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:15]:
Yep.
Tim J. Myers [00:22:16]:
You know? Or so so, again, there’s this The the sense that hit this is serious and this is play. So there’s a great book by, Dutch I think he’s a Dutch philosopher. Huizinga is his name. It’s called Homo Ludens. It’s a super scholarly book. In fact, if you read it, you gotta be ready for it. And it’s an older book. Right? It’s, I mean, it’s just so scholarly, footnotes, everything, philosophy, everything. But his basic point, which he says in this most Classic hierarchical language is play permeates culture.
Tim J. Myers [00:22:50]:
Culture itself, he identifies with play. And when you think of that, you’re like, well, yeah. What’s the difference between chimpanzees and homo sapiens? Well, We play more. We we go beyond the norm. I mean, chimps even do that a little. It seems to be an evolutionary capacity. But our our whole thing is, like, Why would you wear a red shirt when you could wear a gray shirt? Well, that’s why. There’s something there that is it doesn’t have a I mean, if you’re a firefighter, maybe it has a practical benefit, But for most of it, it doesn’t have a practical view.
Tim J. Myers [00:23:22]:
Why do we love music so much? Why do we love the arts? You know, we could we could feed ourselves without great taste and amazing recipes and all that we so this idea of play is still not having caught up and still being, you know, you’re not serious. I just love bankers and hippies. I mean, that’s that’s perfect.
Nancy Norbeck [00:23:42]:
Yeah. And there there are there’s so much research coming out that confirms all of this. And it’s it’s like, you know, you kinda wanna take out the billboard in Times Square and be like, oh. Exactly. Please. Please. Can we do something with this? It out.
Tim J. Myers [00:23:54]:
We’re not just a bunch of dumbasses over here. We’re not just, like, hippy dippies. We’re actually we’re talking about stuff that is now science is backing it up. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:24:02]:
Yeah. Yeah. But it’s also you know, I mean, we all thought that the the way that work worked was gonna change with the pandemic, and an awful lot of people are trying to put that genie back in the bottle. So that seems to be a cultural characteristic too. Like, we know better, but, no, we want it to stay the way it was because because we know how that works.
Tim J. Myers [00:24:19]:
Well but, you know, that’s the thing about genies. As the stories tell you, when genies get out of bottles, they don’t always get put back in. And something and even when you get it back in, sometimes there’s a little blue smoke floating around. You know? We’ll see. Yeah. So I’ve listen. I’ve gotta ask you. Uh-huh.
Tim J. Myers [00:24:35]:
I think I can’t remember if I asked you this in email, but and forgive me if I did. But how did you get interested in creativity to this level?
Nancy Norbeck [00:24:44]:
I think what really did it is when I was teaching and I taught for 8 years at a private school, The first 2 years, I taught tech classes because my first jobs were in tech support.
Tim J. Myers [00:24:56]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:24:56]:
And then I switched over because because I said, I have this English degree. I’d kind of like to use it. I switched over to teaching English as a second language. And when that happened, then, you know, I I kind of became more of a full fledged real live teacher, and they gave me advisories and stuff that, and I became the adviser of the literary magazine. And this was also around the same time that I started writing again myself after not doing it for several years. So I was playing around with all of these things, and I wanted my kids to play around with all them. And, also, I had this lit mag I had to fill.
Tim J. Myers [00:25:35]:
Go ahead.
Nancy Norbeck [00:25:36]:
And where was I getting submissions? There was no creative writing course at the school. The closest thing Are
Tim J. Myers [00:25:42]:
we talking about high school?
Nancy Norbeck [00:25:44]:
High school, middle school.
Tim J. Myers [00:25:45]:
Okay.
Nancy Norbeck [00:25:46]:
Yeah. So the closest thing was that the 9th graders would always write a short story after they did their short story unit. And when I started my MFA, I realized—I actually kind of started laughing. No offense to anyone that I talked with because I get why you do it this way. But, you know, they they would go through all of the traditional elements of the story, setting and the theme and all of that kind of stuff. And that was what the kids were armed with to write a short story. And I’m sitting there going, That’s not what you need to know to write a short story.
Tim J. Myers [00:26:16]:
The physics of basketball. Yeah. It’s the physics of basketball again. Exactly it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:26:20]:
Because what I was doing in in my MFA was the, you know, complete different planet Yeah. From all of that. But, you know, part of what I was encountering too was that people were convinced that ESL kids couldn’t do creative writing. And I was like, What? Do you, why? Why? Why do you think that? Do you think that they’re, like, subhuman somehow I mean, they’re
Tim J. Myers [00:26:43]:
Do they not speak in their first language?
Nancy Norbeck [00:26:44]:
Right. They’re kids, and they have words, and they have imaginations. And so it may not be perfect but so what?
Tim J. Myers [00:26:53]:
Oh. Oh, so maybe that was their problem is they thought it didn’t make sense because the language difficulties. But I’m like, no. The motivational force alone is gonna help them.
Nancy Norbeck [00:27:01]:
Right. And and so I started doing creative writing units in my longer ESL classes because I’m also that kind of person who would look at people like that and go, oh, really? Let me prove you wrong.
Tim J. Myers [00:27:16]:
Oh really?
Nancy Norbeck [00:27:17]:
Let me show you how wrong you are. And and so, like, probably, I don’t know, 70% of the lit mag would end up being stuff that my kids had written in my class.
Tim J. Myers [00:27:27]:
Oh, that is so wonderful.
Nancy Norbeck [00:27:28]:
Because that was what I was mostly getting, you know, because nobody would help me. I kept saying, how am I supposed to do this when they’ve got no feeder to give us stuff. And and from there, I decided to go get my MFA because I had felt like I had done what I could do with my writing on my own, and also I was hoping that it would give me the street cred that somebody would finally let me teach a creative writing class. Didn’t quite
Tim J. Myers [00:27:53]:
Absolutely right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:27:54]:
Work out that way because there was this whole recession just as I finished my MFA and stuff like that. But, but, yeah, that that was really what what did it. Kind of somewhere in there, a switch got flipped. I mean and I think the switch had always been at least partially flipped, but it really, you know, it was just cranked after that. And then shortly after that, I discovered their that creativity coaching existed and was like, there’s there’s my people. You know? No. But but yeah. And, you know, when when I had when I had ESL kids doing creative writing, it was it was so cool to see the things that they had written.
Nancy Norbeck [00:28:33]:
Like, the the kids who spoke Chinese were so influenced by Chinese poetry that they would write things that you could tell even if you hadn’t read a whole lot of Chinese just like the way that they used images and things like that. You’re like, that is really cool. And, also, you see this, you people who say they can’t do creative writing? Like, come
Tim J. Myers [00:28:53]:
Exactly.
Nancy Norbeck [00:28:53]:
read this and then talk to me. And and, also, I mean, I had 1 kid who wrote this multipart story. I don’t even wanna call it a short story because I don’t think it was all that short. And and it was kind of you know, you could see the influence of, like, manga and video games and stuff like that. There’s a lot. And there were these moments, and and this wasn’t the only one. It’s just the one that I remember.
Nancy Norbeck [00:29:17]:
But he had a character who you know, two characters are fighting and the one knocks the other one out. And the way he wrote it was that the one the character fell down and lost his mind. And it was one of these moments where I just looked at him and I said so here’s the thing. As your teacher, doing my due diligence. I have to tell you that the expression you want is that, you know, he he was knocked out, he lost consciousness, anything like that. But I also have to tell you and I have to tell you that losing your mind means you’ve gone crazy in English. But I also have to tell you that I really kinda like that.
Tim J. Myers [00:29:52]:
Exactly. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:29:55]:
Like, I get it, and I like the way that that works there even though any other person picking this up is gonna be like, What? You know, but this was like, he’s using words in a way that makes sense.
Tim J. Myers [00:30:07]:
That’s right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:30:08]:
You know? It’s There’s nothing wrong with it. I mean, I hated having to correct it. I hated having to correct it.
Tim J. Myers [00:30:14]:
Well, I mean, the that’s to me, this first of all, it’s really wonderful that that experience would start you. Again, you are already on that path, but that would really send you hurtling down that path. But I love your point about lost his mind. And to me, there’s a word for this, and the word is poetry. You know, poets are the ones who are, you know, insane about language. You know, we’re the ones who are like, oh my god. That word sounds so weird there. Does it fit? I you know? And, like, to shoehorn something an expression anywhere it doesn’t belong.
Tim J. Myers [00:30:49]:
Now I think you were absolutely right to tell him that. Not only is his ESL teacher, but, again, there’s an audience problem with that. Mhmm. But but the potential what I love is that you immediately went oh, there is some rich language potential here that could, you know, like, where could that lead? And, again, look what we’re back to. We’re back to this core of the sacred mystery. Why does that particular idiom in English have these overtones that suggest something else? And, again, the first thing I feel, which I’m sure you felt the same way, is like, oh, let’s play with this. Let’s see what we, is there a way you could do where somebody knocks, every time he hits somebody, they actually lose their mind? Could it be a wizard who can put us you know what I mean? And he just roll this thing and see where it goes. And, of course, the kid didn’t know what he was saying, but because you set up that context, like we were saying earlier, where it’s valued and encouraged, then he starts discovering things.
Tim J. Myers [00:31:47]:
And then, you know, how many times well, you know, I don’t know if you play, but I cannot tell you how many times I have written a song based on a finger mistake, where I’m playing a chord and I hit the wrong chord, And the essence of creativity there is actually having your damn ears open. Yeah. Right? Because it’s like, oh, wait. I was I’m trying to play that, and and and what’ll happen again, 99 times out of a 100, it’s like, oh, no. No. I’m sorry. You missed the chord. Here.
Tim J. Myers [00:32:12]:
Do this. Then the 90 the 100th time is like Oh, wow. Do that again. How does that sound? So, again, we’re talking about that whole thing of I mean, in a way, maybe there are three elements to this. I’m just, off the top of my head here. That context which values this play. Mhmm. And then in that context, there’s the doing of it.
Tim J. Myers [00:32:33]:
And then the third part is paying attention. One of the most I mean, people talk about that now is a very important spiritual practice, actually paying attention. I love that you loved that phrase in that context. Because because, again, this is what poets are like, Nancy. They—poets are like people who can smell a color at a 100 paces, if you know what I mean. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:32:56]:
Yeah. Well and that’s why I remember it.
Tim J. Myers [00:32:59]:
Right. And it’s still in your head.
Nancy Norbeck [00:33:00]:
It’s so it was so vivid, and I just sat there looking at it going, he’s not actually wrong. Literally, his character has lost his mind.
Tim J. Myers [00:33:08]:
Has lost it. It’s just temporary. And he temporarily lost. See, there’s gotta be a way to use that. I’m like Yeah. I’m I have a big file for this novel I wanna do, which right now is called fantasy novel with magic. And that’s the kind of thing that I I when I hear about that something like that, I’ll think, could there be a way that one of the magic users in this thing was able to create a temporary you know, again, I’m just I’m just riffing with it. But Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [00:33:39]:
No.
Nancy Norbeck [00:33:39]:
I mean and I think that’s absolutely right. I mean, there’s there’s so much stuff that is happening around us all the time that we’re not necessarily tuned into or noticing, you know, that weird little dissonance or or the turn of phrase that you’re like, That’s not what I meant to say. And yet.
Tim J. Myers [00:33:59]:
And yet. I like the and yet.
Nancy Norbeck [00:34:01]:
Yeah. Like, there’s something there’s something about that. There’s there’s something, you know, this is this is not the color I meant to mix, but this is the color I seem to have. So what am I gonna do with that?
Tim J. Myers [00:34:12]:
Yeah. That’s nice. I like that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:34:13]:
Yeah. There’s
Tim J. Myers [00:34:14]:
Well, you know, In a way, this partially contradicts what we both agreed to earlier. I can about teaching creativity or teaching creative writing, just to give a specific example. Again, I will always say, I could teach you a, b, c, and d. I can teach you the alphabet. I can’t teach you how to put the letters together. I can teach you words, but I can’t teach you lines, that kind of thing. But one thing we can teach them through practice is paying attention. And when you think of it, at the heart, and I mean, not just as part of creativity, but at the solid bedrock core of it is radical paying attention.
Tim J. Myers [00:34:54]:
That’s not a good phrase. A a radical level of paying attention, which you do. And, again, it’s easy to see too how this, melds or shifts into the spiritual. You wanna pay attention with your whole self. You know, body, mind, heart, and spirit. It’s not just I mean, I don’t do that all the time. I mean, I I don’t wanna be unrealistic about it. And this can get also really new agey and hippie people can take this way too far.
Tim J. Myers [00:35:22]:
But you think, like, so few because I again, I do visual art, so color is a huge thing for me, and I’m looking at color all the time, like when I’m out riding my bike. Well, sometimes I’ll just look at it and go, wow. That’s a cool color. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen, I don’t know if you all have, crepe myrtle trees there. Anyway, they sure. There’s a particular brick red kinda scarlet you have crepe myrtle trees that just I just drives me crazy. But well, that’s actually a good example of what I’m saying because I could just go, wow. I like that shade of green.
Tim J. Myers [00:35:50]:
I start thinking of that crepe myrtle. It’s like, oh, wait a minute. That is drawing me. That that feels more about the nature of the world. That feels more about I’m a human body with eyes in this world in which another being Sending a color to me. There’s almost—I don’t wanna call it sexual, but there’s there’s like an attraction there. Mhmm. So so, again, at that point, And especially if I go touch it or I’m standing closer to it or and if I smell it I mean, again, radical level of paying attention.
Tim J. Myers [00:36:25]:
And I think one of the things that does happen with that is, in fact, my my word for that is beholding Mhmm. As opposed to just looking? Sure. I think I think that probably I hesitate to say this because, again, like you said, people who are to whom this is natural, it just kinda happens for us. Right? It just does. Mhmm. But I feel like when people behold In that deeper sense, creativity is almost inevitable. You know, there’s there’s it’s almost like it inevitably is gonna restructure your neurons in some way. Now whether that’s gonna lead to art or whatever is a whole another question.
Tim J. Myers [00:37:04]:
But I think, for example, that for most parents, When their child is born, they behold the child. They don’t just they don’t just see it. I mean, this is Forgot to what are we at? 7,000,000,000 now? How many 1,000,000,000 people lived in the past? This is a very common occurrence. This is a very common being here in front of you. And yet, For most parents, it you just you see with a capital S. You don’t just see. And what’s funny is when you think of parents, what that usually leads to is not just that one moment, but a lifetime of giving, Which is analogous at least in some way to creativity. You know? It’s like you’re gonna do everything you can to make the life right for that person or make life right for that person.
Nancy Norbeck [00:37:49]:
Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [00:37:50]:
I love your story. I just love it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:37:53]:
Well, and you’re talking about awe and transcendence in all of this, too.
Tim J. Myers [00:37:56]:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Nancy Norbeck [00:37:58]:
Which, you know, there there have been a bunch of of books in the last couple of years about awe. And I’ve I read one of them this year because I just think it’s such a fascinating things.
Tim J. Myers [00:38:07]:
I I just bought my wife one. Which book did you read? I haven’t read it yet.
Nancy Norbeck [00:38:11]:
Doctor Keltner’s book, It’s called awe. Yeah. I that’s the one.
Tim J. Myers [00:38:16]:
That’s the one I’m gonna be reading it. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:38:18]:
Yeah. I mean, and he breaks it down into, I don’t know, 5 or 6 different categories, I think, and and talks a lot about everyday awe, which I thought was really interesting because I don’t tend to think of it as an everyday thing. But, you know, the more the more you go looking for the everyday awe, the better your life gets.
Tim J. Myers [00:38:39]:
Absolutely right. You know? Absolutely right. And, again, this is one of those practices that can so easily be turned into, like, I don’t know, Weekend symposium at the local motel or whatever, which isn’t necessarily bad either. I don’t mean to say that everybody is doing that as a huckster. But that sense of wonder, it’s really hitting me right now too because, like, now is particularly bad. The news is really, really bad at the moment. Yes.
Nancy Norbeck [00:39:08]:
We are we’re recording this just after Hamas attacked Israel, just a couple days later.
Tim J. Myers [00:39:14]:
And we’ve got the war in Ukraine and the continual crisis of the climate, you know, all of these things. And still people getting over the pandemic and all kinds of effects of that and all that stuff. I often you know, like anybody who’s paying attention, And I don’t pay attention all the time because I can’t. It’ll just drive me into the ground. Right. But, you know, you you have this feeling. You get up and you’re looking at the mirror in the morning, and you’re like, I wanna help, but I’m just 1 tiny little cog. I feel powerless, and I’m like, no.
Tim J. Myers [00:39:48]:
No. No. No. No. Waging peace means I always say this to my students. You know? We’re just us little people here in this room, but waging peace means two things. Not the absence of war. You know, the time between World War one and World War two was not peace.
Tim J. Myers [00:40:01]:
That was halftime. That was they were building. They were building. It was all coming back. Right? Waging peace is not an absence of war. Waging peace is two things. It’s building up individuals and building communities. And, obviously, that can take practical forms, but to go back to our point about play, the seeking of wonder and awe is an act of play.
Tim J. Myers [00:40:23]:
It’s not it doesn’t put food on the table. It doesn’t create products coming out of the factory. Right? It doesn’t it’s not life insurance. Although, I suppose in some ways, it really is healthwise.
Nancy Norbeck [00:40:34]:
Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [00:40:35]:
Yeah. You know? So the idea that we can actually find wonder at daily life I’d love this zen story, and I was actually just thinking about it, so I have to put it in here because it’s about ynlightenment, but it can also be about transcendence, and it can also be just about wonder. So the all the the abbot is sitting with all the young monks in the hall doing zazen, and he notices one of the young monks is missing. So they’re all meditating, and suddenly the the missing young monk comes screeching in and just, you know, without a word, he doesn’t bow. He runs straight to the front, and he spits on the statue of Buddha. And all the other young ones just jump up and grab them, and they’re about to beat the hell out of them. And the abbott raised his hand and says, wait. Why did you spit on the statue of Buddha? And the young monk says, Show me somewhere to spit that is not Buddha.
Tim J. Myers [00:41:25]:
Oh. What is the world that we live in. I mean, for God’s sakes, I’m in this ordinary world too. I got bills to pay. I got rent. I wake up with a sore back. I, I’m having trouble with that student. You know? I’d argue with my wife about something.
Tim J. Myers [00:41:41]:
She’s always right, so those usually end up great. And yet, where did the greatest mystics have their mystical experiences? Right down here. Yeah. Where that that moment you have when you see some beautiful thing in nature. Like, remember the first time we drove into Yosemite Valley? We got out of the car. My wife and I our daughter’s, like, 12 or whatever. We got out of the car, and my daughter’s actually super sensitive. My wife and I are sitting there with tears running down our cheeks.
Tim J. Myers [00:42:09]:
And my daughter’s like, what is it? What is it? Well, okay. But that’s also that world is right here.
Nancy Norbeck [00:42:15]:
Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [00:42:16]:
You know? It’s like, I don’t mean there’s no ordinary in the sense of our regular experience. Of course, we experience that. And, of course, It’s like, oh, god. I got a stomachache or I drank too much or whatever. But this is the same place where all these other pinnacle moments of human experience have happened. So I love the fact that you’re saying that that was something. And, again, I think more people are starting to chew into this. It’s like you find it in everyday life. It’s
Nancy Norbeck [00:42:42]:
Yeah. Well and while you were talking, it occurred to me that, you know, when when there is so much awefulness in the world, finding moments of awe and wonder is is not just an act of play, it’s an act of resistance.
Tim J. Myers [00:42:57]:
That’s exactly right. Beautifully said. You know? And and it’s funny because I thought you were gonna say it’s it’s an act of self care, but you took it even further. But no. You took it even further. It is an act of resistance. And, again, I’m not kidding myself. It’s not gonna save anybody in Ukraine.
Tim J. Myers [00:43:13]:
It’s not gonna save a Palestinian. It’s not gonna save an Israeli, but it is part of the the the accumulation of good that we’re trying to constantly add to, it is an act of resistance. And, of course, hope is an act of resistance, so it’s very much aligned to hope. It certainly works that way for me.
Nancy Norbeck [00:43:30]:
Well and all of this is how you change the culture, ultimately. You get enough people to commit the little acts of resistance and and the acts of play and whatever. And eventually, it will reach its its tipping point and take hold.
Tim J. Myers [00:43:43]:
That’s right. And and it’s funny to think of this too. I say funny, meaning, like, funny odd that paying attention. I’m just repeating a point I said earlier. Paying attention is a form of creativity. Mhmm. It’s not the full on thing. There’s not a a product, But there’s an inner change or an inner product of that, and and it actually takes doing like creativity does.
Tim J. Myers [00:44:08]:
It actually takes that, You know, stopping you know, getting disconnected from all the things that are distracting you and whatever, you know, making you tired and open it up to something big, which is exactly what we see kids do when they Right. See kids come out of school at recess, and they’re tired and they’re, you know, their heads are swimming or whatever, or they’re they’re just tired of the whole thing. And it’ll go, tag, you’re it. Everything opens. Yeah. The whole body, the whole mind, and boom, off they go.
Nancy Norbeck [00:44:38]:
Yep.
Tim J. Myers [00:44:43]:
Well, I think we’ve solved the problems already. I think I think there should be we should send this to Biden and have him send it out. We we gotta we gotta work it here.
Nancy Norbeck [00:44:52]:
Send it to him. Send it to, I don’t know, the pope, the Dalai Lama. Yeah. You know? But yeah. I mean, I can only hope that eventually we get to a point where people start to clue in and figure out that It really is that simple even if it’s only in your personal world. Because if you if you let yourself be so downtrodden by everything that’s in the news. That’s not good for you either. So you need that balance.
Nancy Norbeck [00:45:20]:
You need a way to to stay in touch with the transcendent and the wonder in light of all of that.
Tim J. Myers [00:45:27]:
Well and, you know, this is one of the other reasons I have for affirmation or optimism, whatever you wanna call it. I mean, to me, it seems like I’m saying this all the time. I believe in progress, but I believe progress overall is three steps forward and two steps back. That still leaves room for progress, but I mean, I’m realistic about how this thing happens all the time. But it’s encouraging as hell to me to think that it’s precisely these terribly difficult circumstances that help us hone our sense of why this is important. You know? And I’m not saying it isn’t important all the time because it is. But we’ve been I mean, domestically, politically, we’ve been in a contentious state for years now. Right? And then we have these problems going on in the world and then these greater problems that are affecting all humanity, nuclear war and climate.
Tim J. Myers [00:46:18]:
It’s the old darkness light thing. Right? You just know the light more by the darkness that you feel, And it’s encouraging to think I mean, I actually think you’re right. Here, you and I are having this conversation. When I was younger, I don’t remember people talking about creativity. I mean, maybe I’m sure there were some out there. I’m sure there were some psychologists who are looking at it. But from what I read, you know this better than I do. That wasn’t even a big thing on the radar of most psychologists back in the day.
Tim J. Myers [00:46:44]:
So we’re talking about something that’s really powerful and really new, and the fact that it’s making any inroads at all shows you that there’s a great need. Another thing I think that’s hilarious about human and creativity, particularly when you look at adults in play, is that adults actually cannot live without some play. So even in the most high bound traditions, even in the most dismissive of play, we’re serious adults and everything, We have all these forms of play. Mhmm. Sports is a huge one. Yep. And being a sports fan is a huge one. It’s almost I often think of sports fans as kind of like art fans.
Tim J. Myers [00:47:21]:
Like, the sport is like an art, and they fall like an art. This gets into all kinds of other questions about legality and health and all the rest, but substances that alter the mind have long been substitutes for—I’m not saying they’re always unhealthy. I like to drink. I have no problem with that. But they are very dangerous, obviously, and they can easily be abused and they lead to addiction. They’re an unhealthy they’re a sometimes unhealthy substitute for these other healthier forms of play and creativity that I think a lot of adults would do. They would would feel much better about themselves, like you said, if they were involved in it. So it’s like we always make room for it somehow.
Tim J. Myers [00:48:03]:
But what you tend to do is starve ourselves. You know? It’s like when you you can play a little bit. You can play. You’re a man. You’re a heteromale. You can play in this way, and, of course, a lot of that gets pushed to drinking. Like, if you get super drunk and you scream at the football players that you follow. You know? It’s like, oh, that’s okay.
Tim J. Myers [00:48:20]:
Play. I’m like, well, okay. Let’s expand our definition here. But it it’s not going away. Right?
Nancy Norbeck [00:48:26]:
Right.
Tim Myers [00:48:26]:
It’s not going away.
Nancy Norbeck [00:48:27]:
Right. Yeah. Adult forms of of play tend to be what’s the word I want? Contained, I guess. Yes. You know? We have to put a safe container around them because I think
Tim J. Myers [00:48:39]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:48:40]:
I think we are, when we look back at kids and how freely they let their imagination run, I think we’re jealous, and I think we’re scared at the same time. And so we that’s absolutely right. We put these boundaries on them so that we feel safer, but that also means that we never really get back to the thing that we’re jealous of.
Tim J. Myers [00:49:02]:
Right. Right. I think that idea of of jealous of jealousy is a really good point. In fact, when you—I love contained, and it it also struck me that We have a tendency in it for adult play to see it as psychobiological release
Nancy Norbeck [00:49:18]:
Mhmm.
Tim J. Myers [00:49:18]:
And relief. So it’s about drinking or drugs. It’s about sex. It’s about, the kind of public emotion that you can express, Like when you’re screaming for a team, and then you see, for example I often think of Prince’s song, “Dance, Music, Sex, Romance.” You see, there’s a huge amount of the play impulse, in young adults more than maybe older adults, but that goes into music concerts, you know, like Coachella. You know? I, my students I teach, we have like a, What do you call that? We call it CTW, critical thinking writing. It’s like freshman comp. That’s what I’m trying to find.
Tim J. Myers [00:49:56]:
So I have a music theme for mine. So my students are often writing about their experiences. I can’t afford to go to these things. They go to Electric Daisy Festival or they go to Coachella or to Glastonbury or whatever. And, a number of them have written, really, they’ve been very moved by the crowd all being gripped by this rhythm, All in sync. They often talk about making friends. And, you know, again, there’s a shallow side to this and a temporary side to it. And what’s interesting is they often do not mention any use of substances to accompany all this, and sometimes a few of them will mention that.
Tim J. Myers [00:50:34]:
It, I think it’s both a good and a dangerous thing, you know, that these things become very much rituals of release and play, and it’s around art. And a lot of those festivals too, there’s art all over the site, and they’re you know, it’s it’s this whole alternative thing like Burning Man. Burning Man’s got its bullshit and its positive side. Right? So, of course, there are gonna be a bunch of rich yuppies and tech people from the Bay Area where I live going there. And I’m not against all them. I don’t mean that. But it, and, again, it just shows how primal this need for play is. Yeah. Which again gives me hope in the long run.
Tim J. Myers [00:51:11]:
I mean, it’s because it’s one of those things that’s like, I don’t worry about humans starving to death unless they run out of food. People aren’t gonna stop eating just because they’re not interested. They’re interested. And they’ll eat crap they’ll eat crap, but even that’s better than not eating. At least it would keep them alive. And also this–and, I mean, look at the food movement now. People are actually going, oh, wait. Maybe we can eat healthier food. Maybe these processed foods aren’t so great for us.
Tim J. Myers [00:51:34]:
Maybe we can, You know, I’m thinking that the same thing is happening with play because it’s a need that’s just as deep and that the more expansive or uncontained, to use your word, flipping it around, that people get, the more that they will understand.
Nancy Norbeck [00:51:50]:
Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [00:51:50]:
To their own to their own benefit.
Nancy Norbeck [00:51:52]:
Well and and I’m wondering because I know that, you know, you talk a lot about following your gut. And I’m kinda wondering, like, you know, is that I wanna talk about following your gut all on its own, but I’m wondering if there’s just, like, that gut instinct is finally reasserting itself after so long and saying, hey. You know what? I’m tired of being all buttoned up. This is not—this is okay for certain occasions, but it’s not a way of life. And, you know, I’m, yeah. I’m done with that way of life.
Tim J. Myers [00:52:21]:
I love your balance there too. The one way to avoid this, like, excess to the left to the just, like, you know, whatever feels good, you know, whatever. One way to do that is to talk about this very normal, mature balance between the things we do where we exercise restraint and the things we do where we let ourselves we let ourselves go. And I don’t mean, “let ourselves go” sometimes has a negative connotation, and that’s part of the problem. Right? I think you’re so right. I mean, I think I’m gonna generalize at a huge level here. Right? Okay. That’s always dangerous, though, because you don’t have exceptions.
Tim J. Myers [00:52:58]:
It seems to me that democracies themselves, which are far from perfect, at least they prioritize freedom. Now, again, I believe in this freedom that’s mixed with responsibility, like you heard when you’re in high school from every teacher. Right? But I think one of the things about freedom is it just tends to get closer to what human beings really are. So right now, we have a lot of people who are saying, All this racism? All this homophobia? All this sexism? No. No. I wanna be who I am. I deserve that freedom, and you shouldn’t be treating me in ways that curtail that freedom.
Tim J. Myers [00:53:36]:
It’s not good for you. So I put this in that category. Jeez. When I was in high school and a young adult, therapy was like, therapy was a horrible thing. Oh, yeah. Strong. Like, oh, you’re looney bin. You know, there’s been this huge movement to destigmatize mental illness, and we we have a stronger understanding, a lot of people anyway, that there are different levels, that we all go through things, that going to a therapist is not bad or weak.
Tim J. Myers [00:54:02]:
You know, I feel like it’s part of this whole movement to be that freedom begins, which allows the fullness of humanity to actually be expressed and valued. Not just to be expressed, but to be be valued. And I think play has—it’s funny because it you talk to almost anybody today, and they’ll say, oh, yeah. Racism is bad. Oh, yeah. We have to work on the climate. Oh, yeah. Look at the imperialism.
Tim J. Myers [00:54:25]:
Look at Russian imperialism. Plays on the same list, but it doesn’t make the list. It’s not in the mainstream mind in that same sense. So maybe, maybe it’s a harder thing to to sell, or maybe it’s just a naturally it’s gonna happen downstream from these far more pressing—I mean, if I could if I can wave a magic wand in the world right now, and my choice was I could stop all racism, or I can make people play in a healthy way. Well, of course, I’d stop racism first. This is triage. You know? The the damage is still being done in all the historical damages there. So maybe it’s one of those things that just happens in a natural order, which is maybe even better.
Nancy Norbeck [00:55:02]:
It also makes me wonder if we played more would be would we be less racist.
Tim J. Myers [00:55:07]:
I think I think that is absolutely true. I don’t think that’s a wild claim. I think people I mean, what creates racism? Well adjusted people? No.
Nancy Norbeck [00:55:16]:
No. No.
Tim J. Myers [00:55:18]:
Not at all. Yeah. Yeah. That’s something.
Nancy Norbeck [00:55:22]:
Yeah. So like I said, I do I do wanna make sure that we talk about following your gut because I think it’s an important concept, and I would love to hear how you’ve done it and how you how you include it in your teaching, wherever you would like to go with that that makes the most sense to you.
Tim J. Myers [00:55:39]:
You know, just because I love that you brought up this whole question of, wonder and transcendence. I didn’t grow up that way. I mean, I grew up in a very Catholic world that was pretty much—my parents are super Catholic. My uncle who kinda lived with our family was a priest. Ironically, my dad was much more of a a stickler for Catholicism than my uncle the priest, who was also a writer. But, a lot of that religion was taught by rote in those days, and there are still plenty of places in the world where religion is taught by rote. To me, it’s hardly as worthy of the name religion. You know? And this is one of the reasons why we’re having this huge semantic split between religion on one hand and spirituality on the other.
Tim J. Myers [00:56:21]:
I don’t I think the semantic split doesn’t make sense ultimately, but I totally understand why it’s happening. So I Approve of it like like my approval means anything. But my point in the is that there’s a a spiritual component to this gut thing that just thrills me. You know, I think a lot of what we’re talking about, obviously, you and I have emphasized play. And the other side of that, which has come up naturally with play, is imagination. And the role of imagination in terms of its cultural understanding, acceptance, and the way people look at it, it’s really kinda similar. There’s a tendency to dismiss imagination as the property only of the artistic or the creative people over here. By the way, the tech world has kinda opened that up a little bit Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [00:57:09]:
Because inventors have always been people of imagination, But tech has had so much—digital tech—has had so much influence on people that if people are more like, oh, she came up with this great idea. Now there’s a startup and, you know, again, I live right here in the middle of Silicon Valley. The way imagination is thought of, generally, though, still tends to be, you know It doesn’t get the I mean. Knowledge. Information gets the prime role in our society generally. Mhmm. By default, which is not the way it should be prioritized, but, of course, I believe in information. Knowledge comes next. Wisdom comes next, and some people don’t even believe in wisdom. And then imagination is like., is it even in the race? And you know what they did to [indistinct]? They beat him.
Tim J. Myers [00:57:58]:
You know? That that horrible saying. My god. But but so my point is that this this gut thing is I actually don’t like that phrase, go with your gut. It’s I don’t have any problem with the idea of going with the center of the body. I don’t have any problem with it being physical. It’s just that the imagination, again, has this ultimately mysterious source epistemologically. Extro And this now I could go off on a whole long thing at this, and I won’t promise you. But one of my big points is that we have been in intense epistemological crisis in the western world since the enlightenment.
Tim J. Myers [00:58:33]:
So for 300 years, we’ve been running this experiment based on the idea that to know something, you have to know it with either the certainty of logic and or reason, which is a little more diffuse or with a certainty of science. This is such an incredibly propressed and truncated reduced view of the world, Which has also, by the way, brought tremendous amounts of knowledge and wisdom into life. I’m not anti science. I’m proscience. Mhmm. What I’m against is scientism, Which is when you take the rest of the world and you say, well, science teaches me that your love for your wife doesn’t exist. It’s just molecules. And I’m like,
Tim J. Myers [00:59:11]:
Okay. So this gut thing, I mean, it is odd to think that we constantly use it. Our assessment of daily situations of people we meet. What’s the temperature of this conversation I’m entering right now? Can I ask her for this at this moment, or would it be better to wait? I wonder what he thinks of me. Imagination, for example, is the glue that holds society Together because the better we can imagine what another person’s life is like, the more we can you know? Mhmm. And then it has this role in in spirituality. And when I say spirituality, I mean to actual theology and art. The problem is, well, I love to think of some kind of dialogue.
Tim J. Myers [00:59:53]:
Right? So it’s somebody like Descartes or somebody who’s saying, well, it’s uncertain. It’s it’s not it’s not predictable. It’s not consistent. And people come up with all kinds of crazy BS based on it. I’m like, you are exactly right, but that’s the way it works. Mhmm. What what I think is funny is some people will just and, again, not everybody’s still a materialist.
Tim J. Myers [01:00:16]:
They’re nihilist materialist relative as well. They’ll say, you know, the imagination. Oh, you think you can come up with the truth because you’ve imagined it. Well, that’s ridiculous. I’m like, well, okay. Do you feel the same way about love? Epistemologically love is not science. You don’t you don’t you don’t fall in love with somebody by saying, oh, here are the 15 points I like about and hear the are my predictions based on formula of what our life you you have a feeling. Now that doesn’t mean if you banish reason from falling in love, you’re in trouble.
Tim J. Myers [01:00:47]:
People get themselves screwed over big time that way all the time, so we want the balance. But at the heart of love, yeah. My wife and I often say, you know, it’s funny. We not only like each other, we love each other. Or sometimes we say it the other way. We not only love each other, we like each other. Yates has this great line where he said, I gotta look this up again because I’m forever quoting it, and I’m not getting exactly right. He says a man doesn’t fall in love with a woman at—from sexist time,
Tim J. Myers [01:01:14]:
right?—because of who she is or what she says or whatever. Again, I should look it up, but he says, he falls in love with her because she has a certain way of scratching her head. And when I first read that quote to my wife, she said, That’s exactly right. I don’t know exactly what it is about you, and I said it’s the same from me. Mhmm. I don’t know exactly. There are plenty of other women who I think are wonderful, attractive, smart, funny, whatever it is. But I don’t feel for them what I feel for you, and that’s gut. Now the awesome thing about all this, the icing on the cake, when I sit down and try to put together a work of visual art when I’m working on my novel, I get to do that over and over again.
Tim J. Myers [01:01:58]:
Yeah. Oh, she just pulled the fish out of the water. What color is the fish? I don’t know. Maybe it’s yellow gold. Oh, my gut likes that. And in fact, I’ll go back and change those things. I’m sure you do the same thing Mhmm. In your own writing,
Tim J. Myers [01:02:11]:
go, oh, that that sounds great. My gut tells me. My gut is not reliable, but my gut is really good. Yeah. It’s not consistent, But it often achieves a tremendous amount. So one thing I said to my creative writing students all the time is, but trust your gut, trust your gut, trust your gut. Am I telling you that this is gonna solve all your problems? No. Trusting your gut is gonna not only not solve your problems, it’s gonna cause you other problems because your gut is not a 100% correct, But it is the best thing you have.
Tim J. Myers [01:02:37]:
And in the end, it can do more than anything else can in your writing. If you gotta learn your other stuff through hard work. Sure. Your technique, your structure, all that kind of stuff. But it’s like this beautiful little fire that’s at the heart of every artistic enterprise that can’t be extinguished and can’t be lit, which is the same thing I see in myself. There’s something in me that can’t be or could be extinguished in death. But, I mean, I, yeah. It can’t be extinguished while I’m alive.
Tim J. Myers [01:03:07]:
It—I can’t make it happen. I can’t light that fire. I can’t create myself. I see the same thing in my wife and I and seeing that. Maybe, maybe it’s those two things that somehow, you know, whatever—whatever that is, it somehow see each other and burn together or something like that. But
Nancy Norbeck [01:03:23]:
Yeah. And and, you know, as as I’m listening to you, what I’m thinking is that, like, I think that that’s where where that that creative spark really ignites for us. It’s not between our ears. I mean, it can be, you know, the question that kind of captivates you or whatever, but that’s not what pulls you to do something with it. No. No. It comes from a very different place.
Tim J. Myers [01:03:50]:
I’m gonna quote you on that. It doesn’t happen between our ears. I think that’s exactly right. So I’ll give you an example. I don’t know if you do this kind of thing, but I keep these so if I have a book idea, I’ll keep a folder, you know, file folder. Some are hard copy and some are computer, digital. So I have one, and it’s getting big. I mean, it’s probably this much of a file drawer.
Tim J. Myers [01:04:12]:
You know? So we’re talking about this much. The basic idea is about spirals and vortices. I haven’t gotten any from that. I may have a plot. I may not. I may have some plots for some individuals. Maybe it’s a short story collection. Maybe it’s a novel.
Tim J. Myers [01:04:29]:
Is it science fiction? Is it straight? Realist fiction. I have no idea. But one thing keeps me filling it up. Spirals. Vortices. Oh my god. I don’t know what this is. I mean, it’s it doesn’t make any damn sense, really.
Tim J. Myers [01:04:45]:
It is. This, this is—I love what you said. This did not happen between my ears.
Nancy Norbeck [01:04:49]:
Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [01:04:49]:
There’s something about that image that just—And, again, the likelihood is that, I mean, I’m getting old now. The likelihood is I would never write a book about that. I can’t write a book about it until the things that do happen between my ears happen, like, oh, this could be a character. This could be a conflict. Right? Or Maybe it’s a series of essays. It doesn’t it’s not even fiction. Whatever it is, the structure, whatever that comes to it.
Nancy Norbeck [01:05:13]:
Right.
Tim J. Myers [01:05:14]:
But I can’t leave the idea alone. I cannot. So I’m constantly throwing in every newspaper article I see about tornadoes, everything I see about any kind of math that’s about spirals
Nancy Norbeck [01:05:27]:
That’s so cool.
Tim J. Myers [01:05:27]:
I’m trusting my gut.
Nancy Norbeck [01:05:29]:
Yeah. Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [01:05:30]:
Yeah. And and the thing is what has happened is I’ve had ideas before that were vague and diffuse like that, and then the structure thing did come, and then then I’m ready to go.
Nancy Norbeck [01:05:41]:
Mhmm. Then it suddenly makes sense.
Tim J. Myers [01:05:44]:
Then it suddenly makes sense. And there’s a place for whatever that pull is. There’s a place for that to be unloaded or whatever. Right. Do you keep folders for writing projects? Do you do that kind of thing? Or do you
Nancy Norbeck [01:05:57]:
I have a terrible habit of doing the thing that I know you shouldn’t do, which is thinking, oh, that’s a really good idea. I’ll remember it, and then not writing it down. No. And then, you know, two weeks later going, I had that really good idea. Now what was it? Hey. So yeah. Tell you what. One day, I will learn.
Nancy Norbeck [01:06:17]:
Yeah. Now that now that phone is more prevalent.
Tim J. Myers [01:06:20]:
Use the phone, man. It’s saved my ass many times. Yeah. Of course, the problem now is I’ve got too I’ve got too much on my phone. I have to transcribe it. You know, get a ton of stuff on there. But that’s a good problem to have.
Tim J. Myers [01:06:33]:
I don’t mind that.
Nancy Norbeck [01:06:34]:
Yeah. I mean, I have I I started a a Substack, which is kind of fascinating to me how many people do not know what Substack is.
Tim J. Myers [01:06:43]:
I kinda still don’t know. Say it, please. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [01:06:46]:
It is a platform for newsletters, but it’s It’s not just like, you know, a newsletter sending service. It it has a community built in and a feature called Notes that’s sort of Twitter-ish where people can share things and have conversations and stuff like that. Okay. Which I did not know when I signed up I just knew everybody’s using Substack, and I feel like I want a place to encourage myself to do more writing and play with it and just experiment. So I set up a Substack, and I thought, I don’t know if anybody’s gonna wanna read any of this, but whatever.
Tim J. Myers [01:07:22]:
Put it out there. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [01:07:23]:
More people seem to wanna read it than I would have expected. And so far and I haven’t decided if this is a good thing or a bad thing. I have kept with I post something every Monday. I was not sure if I wanted to do a structure at at first or not, but so far, it seems to be working. And then I post about the podcast on Wednesdays and see where stuff goes. But it is not, you know, they kind of try to preach you the gospel of, like, Pick your niche and tell people this is what you’re gonna write about, and this is how often, and this is what they should expect. And I was like, look. This is an experiment.
Nancy Norbeck [01:07:59]:
I couldn’t tell you what I’m gonna write about from one week to the next. You know, the first week I did it, I wrote the first post. I put something out about the podcast, and then Sinead O’Connor died, and I wrote a poem and I posted it, you know, twi days later because I was like, here it is. There you go. But I do have in the notes on my phone, like, working drafts for that. Yeah. The things that have caught popped up that I wanna play with for that. Good.
Nancy Norbeck [01:08:25]:
So so there are things that are you know, every once in a while, I’ll look and I’m like, oh, that one. I’ll play with that one today. You know? But that has been kind of an interesting experiment, and I make sure that I always call it experimental because, I mean, about a month ago, I had an accident where I fell and literally landed right on my face and had a lovely black eye.
Tim J. Myers [01:08:49]:
I’m sorry.
Nancy Norbeck [01:08:50]:
And I posted about it because, you know, among other things, you know, a friend had challenged me not to tell the same story twice about how I got it, and so I posted a couple
Tim J. Myers [01:08:59]:
Oh, that’s awesome.
Nancy Norbeck [01:09:01]:
I was like, oh, sure. You’re not the one who has to come up with something every time. Easy for you to say. Right. But but then somebody that I was talking to for the podcast just last week was like, you should totally write the story for all of those things. And I was like, I don’t know if I’m writing to all of them, but I’m willing to try one. So this past week.
Nancy Norbeck [01:09:20]:
What I kind of halfway gave myself the week off because it’s my birthday this week, so I’ve been on vacation.
Tim J. Myers [01:09:25]:
Good for your happy birthday.
Nancy Norbeck [01:09:26]:
Thank you. But I put them back up and I said, okay. Help me decide. You know, you guys vote, and the one that gets the most votes is the one that I will play with. So, yeah, I mean, there’s no way that I could anticipate that and put it into a neat little niche for people to no. This is completely experimental. It will probably be something completely ridiculous because as as it stands right now, the top vote getter is that my Borg implant didn’t go well.
Tim J. Myers [01:09:57]:
Well, you’ve got a built in audience for that one.
Nancy Norbeck [01:09:59]:
Who knows where that’s gonna go? It could be totally serious. It could end up it’s the Borg. It could end up being creepy. I really don’t know.
Tim J. Myers [01:10:05]:
That’s right. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [01:10:07]:
So it’s just totally an experiment, but it’s been a really fun place to just throw things out there and also meet other writers. So I recommend it to people who want a place to write and and to encourage themselves to have to do more writing because there’s a place to put it. Substack is a pretty cool place.
Tim J. Myers [01:10:26]:
Well and, again, this is all this is all trusting your gut and play. Right? I mean, I
Nancy Norbeck [01:10:31]:
And that one, that the impulse to do that is one of those things that I was looking from between my ears going, what is this about? Because I couldn’t explain it. It was just there, and it wanted to be done.
Tim J. Myers [01:10:46]:
It wanted to be done.
Nancy Norbeck [01:10:47]:
It wanted to be done. And I was looking at different platforms and looking at different things. And finally, I was like, look. Just do Substack. Everybody’s doing Substack. If you hate it, you could move it. Just do it. Just just you need to do it.
Nancy Norbeck [01:11:00]:
And I think I think I set the whole thing up in less than a week because it wanted to be done. I don’t know why, but it did, so I did it.
Tim J. Myers [01:11:10]:
That fits with our idea about play and about one thing that does—and I mean, we’ve referenced this a little bit. But one thing that does stand in the way of a lot of people, grown ups, and play is that you do have to take that step. Right? That that whole thing about taking this up and people say, get it out there. Take a risk. You know? Dance like nobody’s watching. I mean, I love that whole basic idea. And and it also, like you said. Okay.
Tim J. Myers [01:11:34]:
So I write something doesn’t work. This is this is another thing I tell my students all the time. Because of the nature of your gut, Follow your gut. You’re gonna get all kinds of crap. Just write new stuff. Right? This is this is how you get there. It it’s cause I mean, nobody thinks that’s odd in sports that your coach is gonna put you in scrimmage day after day, week after week after week before the season starts because that’s how you start developing this stuff. You get into the Right.
Nancy Norbeck [01:12:00]:
Yeah. Right.
Tim J. Myers [01:12:00]:
And I think that it’s great that you would also just the the one thing that the digital world adds to that is it has this public Mhmm. Exposure. And again, the thing about there’s an advantage to writing for myself alone because I don’t have to take any you know, I can I can be in creative control? What you are having is collaborative—Right—moment with people and meeting other writers. So, again, it’s a harder step to take because it’s more public, But it’s also more collaborative and more communal.
Nancy Norbeck [01:12:26]:
And I know at least one person who’s writing his new book on Substack because he wants the feedback on it.
Tim J. Myers [01:12:31]:
There you go. Oh, I I’m not surprised at all.
Nancy Norbeck [01:12:33]:
Yeah. Yeah. But also, you know, the other thing that it’s showing is, like, you don’t know—your impression of the thing that you wrote is only your impression. You have no idea how it’s gonna land. And and I’ve put a couple of poems in there. And one from a couple of weeks ago, I kinda looked at it and I was like, Yeah. I don’t I really don’t know if this is baked. I have no idea.
Nancy Norbeck [01:13:02]:
But it’s Sunday night at 8 o’clock, so out it goes tomorrow. You know? And the next day, I got an email from a friend of mine. She was like, oh, your poem was so beautiful. I was like, okay. I guess it was baked. What do I know?
Tim J. Myers [01:13:13]:
No. That’s a that’s a really good point. And this is funny. Because when you think of it, you’re not only trusting your gut, you’re trusting a lot of other people’s guts. And, I mean, it’s a different thing because you never know, like you say, what the responses are gonna be. But, one of probably the single best thing I ever learned about writing came from Peter Elbow, who’s a writing guru, big back in the Seventies. I still think it’s very you you know that a lot of people don’t. What he emphasized to me was what I realized was the essence of craft.
Tim J. Myers [01:13:45]:
And the essence of craft is figure out how what you the words you choose, figure out what effect they’re gonna have on other people reading them. I never did that for years. I mean, that doesn’t mean I wasn’t paying attention to it. You know, somewhere deep back in my head, I wanna write a good story. And if I said this, I thought that was good. But he really opened it up for me. It took me a long time to to get that sense, which is when you put it out there and it starts becoming an interaction, that’s where craft happens. Craft does not, I mean, my idea before was craft happens in here, And his point he didn’t say in these words, but I’m saying craft happens here.
Tim J. Myers [01:14:22]:
Craft is a, it’s a basically transactional thing. Mhmm. In fact, my wife influenced me a lot about it because she was reading I don’t know. So Louise Rosenblatt or somebody. It was transactional theory of literature. I don’t know all the details of that, but she kept emphasizing this, and she’s a reading specialist. So my wife is so I would—she had all this experience with how actual readers read far more than I ever have. Because a teacher can get up in front of the room.
Tim J. Myers [01:14:47]:
Teacher get in front of the room and just spew stuff out. Right. And your kids write stuff back, but you don’t necessarily know how they’re hearing what you’re saying and all that stuff. A lot of teachers are just like, well, did they give me a, b, and c? Because that’s what I’m asked for. I’m like, that’s not a transaction. That’s what going up to McDonald’s and ordering something from the window. You know? That you just, yeah. One thing out, and she would talk about all my wife would talk about all the incredible think of all the complexities.
Tim J. Myers [01:15:09]:
You’re sitting there with a with a classroom, say, 25 5th graders. The complexities of what they’re bringing to their transactions with language are huge. How much more is that true about adults, who have much more experience. Now I can’t control as a writer, I can’t control all of that.
Nancy Norbeck [01:15:27]:
Right.
Tim J. Myers [01:15:27]:
And, of course, I would say some of the some of you are gonna get it wrong. I didn’t intend it that way. Maybe I wasn’t clear, or maybe I was clear and you just missed it. But I’m not gonna get into judging all that stuff. The point is I’ve gotta think about how those people are reacting. So I salute you for putting those things out there and getting that response. For some reason, that doesn’t feel I feel like I wanna wait till the book comes out.
Tim J. Myers [01:15:52]:
And I don’t know if that’s what my gut’s telling me. Could be wrong. Could be right. It’d be very interesting to write a book like the your your friend or whoever you were just talking about, where your entire book is done like a focus group, Where you’re putting it out there, and people are responding to I mean, in that case, it’s multiple authors in a way.
Nancy Norbeck [01:16:09]:
In a way. But his is a nonfiction book, but I did talk to a guy last year, I think, who, and I’m trying to remember my his name off the top of my head. Started with a V. I think it was Vince, but I can’t remember his last name. And he wrote his book as a podcast. He released every chapter as an episode, and then he took that feedback and incorporated it. And I thought, wow. That’s a that’s an interesting way to do it.
Nancy Norbeck [01:16:39]:
You know?
Tim J. Myers [01:16:39]:
And, essentially, that’s no different from Dickens. Right. You know, serializing all his stuff. And, of course, he must’ve heard. I mean, people wrote him letters all the time. Yeah. Conan Doyle, you know, people are always, like, demanding more Sherlock Holmes and stuff. That’s So it’s not as new as it may seem even though the scale of it, the degree Right.
Tim J. Myers [01:16:57]:
Is very new. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [01:16:59]:
Yeah. But I think, you know, I think you’re totally right to listen to your gut.
Tim J. Myers [01:17:03]:
Well and that’s the thing. Right now, I feel that way. But what you’re planting in my head, which I think is really interesting, is to someday do something In that format where there’s that tremendous level of constant collaboration. Obviously, the writer would still be the one making the decisions, but people I mean, if you again, we talked about this earlier, like a teacher or a parent. If the writer in that circumstance created a an environment where people could feel really free to be creative, god only knows what they could come up with
Nancy Norbeck [01:17:33]:
Oh, yeah.
Tim J. Myers [01:17:33]:
And how that book might twist and turn or how that story might twist and turn. That’s that’s really interesting to think about.
Nancy Norbeck [01:17:40]:
Yeah. It it’s interesting to to watch this process because he’s definitely there’s a whole chapter that he completely rewrote based on
Tim J. Myers [01:17:48]:
A whole chapter.
Nancy Norbeck [01:17:49]:
On everybody’s feedback Yeah. Because, You know, the questions that we asked and the way that we reacted to it, and he was like, you know, because I think I Was a was somebody who said, I feel like there’s a story here that’s missing. Like, that there’s some kind of context piece that goes with this more theoretical thing that you’re talking about that’s really interesting.
Tim J. Myers [01:18:12]:
Interesting.
Nancy Norbeck [01:18:13]:
But I think that because he—the person in question is Kelly Flanagan. He’s been on the show twice, And he’s great. And so he’s a therapist, but he’s also started writing fiction, but this is more one of his nonfiction books. And and so, you know, he kind of started thinking about it. He’s like, I see what you mean, and I’m gonna think about this. And when he posted the new version. It was like, oh, yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [01:18:38]:
Oh, yeah. This is this is exactly, exactly right.
Tim J. Myers [01:18:43]:
This is it.
Nancy Norbeck [01:18:44]:
Exactly what you needed. Yeah. And I think it it was just enough to jog him, and he knew exactly what he needed to do, Which is the other interesting thing about feedback. Right? Because, you know, I think Neil Gaiman has said, like, when you get feedback on your writing, The things that people are telling you don’t work are almost always correct, but the ways that they’ll tell you to fix them are almost always wrong.
Tim J. Myers [01:19:04]:
Right. Right.
Nancy Norbeck [01:19:05]:
And and so, you know, I don’t think any of us were sitting there going, you should do this and you should do that. You know? It was more like Oh, yeah. There’s there’s a thing here, you know, that’s a little disjointed, that’s not quite not quite clicking. And he just knew exactly what to do with it, and the result was beautiful.
Tim J. Myers [01:19:22]:
That’s a critical point. And that, by the way, just dovetails perfectly into what Peter Elbow said. One of his points that I emphasize with my students is when you’re in critique group getting feedback from everybody, we have a few rules. The first rule is that the writer never defends himself or herself ever. The second one is that the the the critiquers, they can say anything they want, but they are never going to find out what the writer’s final decision is. I mean, they could ask me or they could ask a writer, but we don’t we don’t set that up in class because I want that writer to have the absolute freedom to take or not take. And I always tell the writers, wait at least 48 hours before you make any decisions. Listen to everybody as if everything they’re saying is right.
Tim J. Myers [01:20:09]:
Accept it all is true even if you hate it. 48 hours, trust your gut. Because by that time, you’ll be past a bunch of this stuff, Especially getting past that defensiveness that has been a normal part of lots of critique groups, which has ruined a lot of people for writing in my opinion. And then you can just say, you know what? I’m the boss, and I here’s what I’m gonna go with. And that that to me seems to maximize the the positive. Mhmm. But I love that this this, I mean, when you think of it too, that process isn’t completely brand new because what I’m saying is for me right now, I’m gonna wait and let an editor do that for me.
Nancy Norbeck [01:20:44]:
Right.
Tim J. Myers [01:20:44]:
Now the question then becomes, how are editors as opposed to readers? And the answer is, well, of course, editors are experts. So they have this advantage. But the disadvantage of being an editor is you’re one person. Yeah. And the advantage of readers is that you’re getting this response from all kinds of people who are your by the way, your ultimate goal is them. They are where you’re headed. So there’s a good and a bad side to both of those things. And it makes me think of the way popular music is going right now despite the horrible problem of theft and musicians not getting the revenue that they deserve and all the rest. One of the great things that’s happening is we’re getting all kinds of music that comes out independently. Right.
Tim J. Myers [01:21:26]:
People don’t have to sign with labels anymore. And, of course, just like in the world of independent publishing in the book world, of course, that produces a ton of, you know, a scale. Crap. Mediocre. A little better than mediocre. Whatever. Of course, it does that. I mean, my own work:crap, mediocre. You know, I run the same range too.
Tim J. Myers [01:21:44]:
No question about it. But it does mean that people can get out without with 100% creative control. Most of the time, 100% creative control for artist is not gonna produce good art. Some of the times, it’s gonna produce really good art and art that we wouldn’t have if we’re under the, like, editors say all, labels say all, you know, that that kinda controlled by them. Mhmm. Which, of course and the other thing with them is those things also inevitably have to be driven at least to some degree by market considerations.
Nancy Norbeck [01:22:14]:
Right.
Tim J. Myers [01:22:15]:
Which aren’t necessarily bad. I’m not against, you know, I’m not against marketing. But people will come up with things that are incredible hits. Whoever I mean, probably it’s because of the Barbie movie, but whoever thought Oppenheimer would make a billion dollars? I’m sure when they were putting that movie together, nobody thought that this book about this professor was gonna make a billion dollars. Well, guess what? It’s beautifully done. It’s on a critical theme. I mean, you know, again, this is all everything you and I have said for probably the last 10 minutes here has been about What do we wanna say? Not the dominance, the power of the gut. Mhmm.
Tim J. Myers [01:22:50]:
The power of the gut, which is a way a stand in for human intuitive imagination. Yeah. When you put it that way, it sounds a lot more it doesn’t sound fancy. Oh, no. I’m not using my gut. I’m using my human intuitive imagination. Well, it’s the same thing.
Nancy Norbeck [01:23:05]:
Yeah. Yeah. Totally. And it doesn’t get anywhere near enough credit.
Tim J. Myers [01:23:09]:
No. It doesn’t. And it’s hard to credit. I mean, What is it?
Nancy Norbeck [01:23:15]:
Yeah. Yeah. But what exactly is it? We don’t know. We just know it works.
Tim J. Myers [01:23:19]:
We don’t know. We just know it works. It’s just like love. I don’t really know what love is.
Nancy Norbeck [01:23:24]:
It’s that sacred mystery.
Tim J. Myers [01:23:24]:
And it’s and my whole I’ll base my whole life on it in a heartbeat even though it’s a mystery, and it’s like, god, I’m starting to feel very cozy with the mystery in that sense. Mhmm. I’m starting to feel familiar. It does it is I mean, these this mystery can be I mean, look at love. People say it. It can disappear overnight. It’s not under control.
Tim J. Myers [01:23:49]:
It’s not predictable. It has its terrible side, and this is true about, you know, nature itself. We you know, 65 million years ago, an asteroid plowed into this planet. If it happened today, well, maybe today, we could fend it off with all these new things we got going. But, I mean, I love nature. Nature is my mother. My mother could reach down and snap my neck, and and yet my mother also gives. And my life depends on that mother and what she gives.
Tim J. Myers [01:24:18]:
And I’m, like, that’s good. On balance that’s good. Mhmm. I’m grateful. I mean, you’re gotta take all of it together, but Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [01:24:29]:
I know.
Tim J. Myers [01:24:30]:
Now I feel like I need to jump up and say, can I get a witness? Get the organ get the organ start playing. All right, everybody. Pass, we’re we’re passing the we’re passing the what do you call that thing? The contribution pass What do you call that thing?
Nancy Norbeck [01:24:42]:
The plate. Passing the plate. Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [01:24:43]:
Passing the plate. We’re passing the plate. Right.
Nancy Norbeck [01:24:47]:
Well, I want to make sure, because we haven’t really talked a whole lot about all of the specific things that you do, and you do so many of them. I want to make sure that that we get some of that in here, but we have been at this for a while, so I also want to make sure that you have time.
Tim J. Myers [01:25:00]:
I do have time. Okay. Great. I very much appreciate that, that question. As I often say, I am a monogamist in life and a polygamist in art. And I realized years years ago that this was this is impractical to the point of stupidity for freelance artists. Right? I mean, I see myself as a generalist in a specialist world, And I think there are things to be said pro and con for being a generalist and pro and con for being a specialist, but I’m definitely out of the norm now, the way things go. The smart thing for me to do would have been to stick with one genre of art and just develop it, particularly for me because, my wife and I really believe in gender equality in marriage, and we really believe in parenting.
Tim J. Myers [01:25:48]:
And I was a K-12 teacher for years. I was a K-12 teacher for 14 years, middle school and high school, and I’ve been teaching at college level ever since. And by the way, when I was a K-12 teacher, 10 of those years, I was a coach. My god. The schedule. I you know? Mhmm. I’ve got kids at home. I have a family, a wife, and kids, and I’m a teacher, which is a job that never ends.
Tim J. Myers [01:26:09]:
There is no time clock. If you’re a teacher, you pray for a time clock because you would you’ll never get one. And then I’m coaching and you’re traveling all the same. So I just got done as much as I could. So if I had any sense at all, I would have said, okay. Pick one thing and focus on it. But I couldn’t do it. Music came early, and I can’t stay away from it.
Tim J. Myers [01:26:31]:
I absolutely can’t. Storytelling was a huge thing for me too, and I do work as an oral storyteller. Although, I haven’t had much work lately, pandemic and all that stuff. And then visual art. I thought I’d actually conquered visual art because I kept it on the back burner so much, but I would never—I remember one time I was working out. I was running around at, like, college fields all by myself, and I’d stopped in this place next to a big building. And I was at a little bit of cement there, like, at a doorway, and I was doing push ups and stuff. And I noticed these little flecks of black rubber and this, like, blue green glass and something else. And next thing I know, I was sitting there arranging them in little patterns.
Tim J. Myers [01:27:11]:
You know? I was like, oh, put this to it. I was like, what Are you doing? You know, there’s nobody around. I was like and and then I realized it was that itch. It was that visual art itch that I couldn’t scratch. And that’s come back really strong lately. And, of course, what happened there is once I got one of these, suddenly, there are all these possibilities there that I hadn’t, that I didn’t have before.
Nancy Norbeck [01:27:33]:
He’s holding up his phone. Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [01:27:35]:
Yeah. Oh, I’m sorry. Okay. I keep doing that. I keep forgetting this as a podcast, and I’m doing the thumbs up things. Anyway, that’s the thumbs up sound or whatever. Thank you. So, I do too many things, But I have two responses to the massively stupid impracticality of this.
Tim J. Myers [01:27:53]:
One is that, like I told you, I’m the oldest of 11 kids, and 11 kids is too many kids.
Nancy Norbeck [01:27:59]:
Oh, yeah.
Tim J. Myers [01:27:59]:
You know? I mean, it’s seriously, it creates problems. And we would talk about this sometimes, my siblings and I. We’d go, yeah, there’s too many kids. You know, mom and dad were overworked. All of a sudden. And then we look around and we go, but who can we leave out? Mhmm. You know, there was no I mean, the the conversation always ended right there because there was there’s nobody we wanna leave out.
Tim J. Myers [01:28:19]:
So I look at these things and I go, like, you have four major careers, and you have a full time job. What are you doing? Well, which can I leave out? I left out everything I could possibly. In fact, there’s some things I am leaving out of my life that I’m not gonna do. I just won’t have time. But the other thing is just the joy of it. I mean, not only the joy of what each art form is in itself, but the joy of turning from one to another. I mean, for me, inspiration is actually never a problem, and I rarely make absolute generalizations like that. But I write and write and write and write.
Tim J. Myers [01:28:56]:
And if I start getting you know, you get that little burned feeling, you know, like, a when it gets start feeling a little thin or whatever, it’s like, go do some songwriting. Mhmm. I was like, I haven’t done this for a long time. I can’t wait to get into it. You’re starting, you’re working hard on that. You get a little burned out, whatever. Like, oh, let’s put together some of these images and see what it come out. Oh, I’ve been waiting so long to get to these things.
Tim J. Myers [01:29:18]:
So it’s just like this carousel of of joy and anticipation that happens over and over again. And, of course, they inform each other a lot. So one of the things that’s happening now and one of the things I hope to do during this, I’m actually on sabbatical, so I have a year to work on these things. It’s to take some poetry and put it with some visual art and put them together and make a book right I combine those things, which has been done many times before, but, you know, so there’s this constant intersection of these things. Do you write and do something else? Your brother does music. Does he write? Do you guys
Nancy Norbeck [01:29:55]:
have to do this approach? He’d he’d But like you
Tim J. Myers [01:29:58]:
said, he’s architect. Yeah. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [01:30:01]:
Yeah. So those are 2 his 2 big things, but he also does photography. He used to do Like, in high school, he did more, you know, painting in art classes and things like that. I think he’s done that for a long time, but he he he still does a lot of photography along with the architecture and the music. Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [01:30:18]:
So he’s a multiple as opposed to singular. Yeah. Again, pros and cons for pros and cons for Both sides. Some of the greatest work in the world is done by people who Mhmm. Focus on a on a single thing. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [01:30:30]:
Yeah. But it’s it’s interesting. It’s interesting to see how they how they come together. And, you know, like, what you were saying, how they inform each other. And and I find myself wondering because I noticed this when I’ve not done something for a while, and it’s not something creative. I mean, when when I jump in the pool for the 1st time in a while and start to swim laps, I have the same feeling, which is, wow. I forgot how good this feels.
Tim J. Myers [01:30:57]:
That’s exactly that’s exactly it. Yeah. That’s exactly it. I I part of my approach True is like I often say, I was not at all precocious, but I am prolific. It took me a long time to find my way to art, and it took me a long time to get better. I was terrible for a long time. And in fact, with my visual art recently, A bunch of my visual art that I started doing, like, during which is during the pandemic, by the way, because I had some time. Stuff that I thought was wonderful, and I’m looking back now, and I’m going, Tim, oh my god.
Tim J. Myers [01:31:31]:
That is Terrible or at best, mediocre. And and this is one of the reasons I’m really sympathetic with my students because this this is a natural part. And I’ve learned now because I’m old enough. I’m like, I don’t get bent out of shape now when I produce crap. I’m like, oh, yeah. That didn’t work. You know, let’s move on to the next thing. But but that, that whole The prolific part when you by the way, to describe myself as prolific, I don’t mean that as a self compliment.
Tim J. Myers [01:31:56]:
There are people who are mentally ill who are prolific writers. You know, they filled notebooks up with gibberish. It just being prolific doesn’t mean anything having to do with quality. But I like the way, so I grew up in Colorado Springs And Denver, mostly Colorado Springs. We have cottonwoods in the Midwest. You guys have cottonwoods in New Jersey? Think so. Yeah. Well, they like, when June comes, they just, like, They start putting out seeds, and it’s like snow.
Tim J. Myers [01:32:21]:
Because they’re these they’re really soft little cottony things, filaments, and they float. And if you get a big cottonwood tree, it looks like it’s snowing in June. Right. And, of course, like a lot of things in nature, they’re gonna put out probably 1,000, maybe a big cottonwood tree puts out millions. Well, how many of them are gonna turn into trees? Yeah. Not very many. They’re gonna be eaten. They’re gonna fall on the rocks.
Tim J. Myers [01:32:40]:
Seems like the New Testament parable of the sowing seed. And that’s kind of my approach. And I found, like so for example, with my visual art lately, I do it whenever I can. It’s definitely on the back burner because I’m working on this music. I’m gonna work on this novel, and those are taking a priority for sure. But I look at all the stuff I’ve done. That’s not right. Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [01:32:59]:
I don’t know. That didn’t oh, I thought that was good, whatever. Oh, wait. I like that one. That one worked. And now, I’ve got a lot of those that I really like. Now, of course, of that 100%, other people aren’t gonna like them as much as I like them. I made them.
Tim J. Myers [01:33:14]:
Right? So it’s gonna go down again. Like the cottonwood tree, every time the seeds go out, a certain percentage just falls to the wayside and dies. But if I end up with a new cottonwood tree, you know, then I feel good about that. So I have that approach. I’m just way too much of a generalist in all areas. It’s like multiple genres. Like, even as a writer, I write in 20 different genres of writing. There’s all that, and then there’s this, like, just just produce work and see what happens and and see how that goes.
Tim J. Myers [01:33:45]:
So that’s how it goes.
Nancy Norbeck [01:33:47]:
That’s not a bad thing, though. I mean, you’ve reminded me of that
Tim J. Myers [01:33:49]:
It’s a wonderful thing. It just worries me.
Nancy Norbeck [01:33:51]:
That study where, you know, they sent students out and said, I want you to take 10 really good photos. And and that batch went out to deliberately try to take the best photos they could, and they told the other group, just go take as many photos as you can. And, you know, the the quantity of really good photos came from the ones who produced more stuff, not the ones who deliberately
Tim J. Myers [01:34:14]:
I didn’t know!
Nancy Norbeck [01:34:16]:
set out to take the best things they could possibly take.
Tim J. Myers [01:34:20]:
You could not have said anything more designed to make me happy than that. I honest to god. Because this is something I worry about, and I’m getting old. I mean, now I feel like I’m in a race with death because I have all these big projects I want to complete. But that makes me feel better because that makes me think, okay, I’m actually doing better even with this pace. Right?
Nancy Norbeck [01:34:42]:
Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [01:34:42]:
That that’s amazing. That has really powerful implications.
Nancy Norbeck [01:34:46]:
I’m gonna try to, I know I read about it somewhere. I’ll see if I can find the link.
Tim J. Myers [01:34:49]:
If you can find it. Yes. Don’t worry if you can’t.
Nancy Norbeck [01:34:52]:
And if I find it, I’ll throw it in the show notes, too, for everybody who’s listening.
Tim J. Myers [01:34:55]:
Perfect. Yeah. Yeah. No. That just sounds very, very interesting. By the way, I have to say, That’s a very play way of approaching.
Nancy Norbeck [01:35:02]:
Right?
Tim J. Myers [01:35:02]:
Right?
Nancy Norbeck [01:35:03]:
Right?
Tim J. Myers [01:35:03]:
Just go play.
Nancy Norbeck [01:35:04]:
Just go play.
Tim J. Myers [01:35:04]:
Just go play.
Nancy Norbeck [01:35:06]:
Yeah. Just go have fun taking pictures.
Tim J. Myers [01:35:08]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [01:35:09]:
And that it makes perfect sense to me that that’s how it works. Because you’re not—you’re not overthinking it.
Tim J. Myers [01:35:17]:
No. You’re right. But that was counterintuitive to me until you told me that. Yeah. And overthinking is a problem. Overthinking can easily be a problem for writers. No. And, again, what I’m doing too is overthinking a life choice I made, which I made long ago, which I’m obviously not gonna pull back on.
Tim J. Myers [01:35:30]:
So why even think about it? It’s like, you know, just eat just eat better so you can live longer. You know, that’s that’s what I need to do instead of overthinking.
Nancy Norbeck [01:35:38]:
Well and that may also be the beauty of something like Substack. If you’re gonna put something out every week, you can only chew on it for so long. And, I mean, I have things sitting in in my notes that have been in there for weeks and weeks, but that doesn’t necessarily mean I’m working on it every day. It’s, you know, like I said, today, I feel like that one’s pulling at me, so I’m gonna look at this one. You know? Right. But and other things, I just suddenly you know, I may have thought that I was gonna publish this piece next week, But now I realize, nope. I need to write about this, and I need to write about it now, and that’s what’s going out on Monday, and there goes my weekend. You know? But you don’t really have that opportunity to sit and chew on it until it’s half dead.
Nancy Norbeck [01:36:23]:
And so, yeah. It may not be perfect when it goes, but it goes.
Tim J. Myers [01:36:27]:
Yeah. You know? Well and, again, that’s that play approach. There’s a great deal of freedom in that, and there’s a great deal of actually reflecting immediate life experience as you live it now.
Nancy Norbeck [01:36:39]:
Yeah.
Tim J. Myers [01:36:40]:
And that’s, I mean, obviously, too, this is a big part of what social media is, is that it can be very, very immediate for good and ill. Right? Obviously, it creates these problems, but then there’s that other dynamic side to it. And I love thinking about the dynamic side of all this because, obviously, there’s so many bad things, you know, bad effects happening with tech right now that need to be addressed. And I think they’re being addressed, but I like to, I mean, it’s like, again, I live in Silicon Valley. Ten years from now, the big tech companies could do no wrong. 10 years ago, I mean.
Nancy Norbeck [01:37:10]:
Right?
Tim J. Myers [01:37:11]:
Right now, they can do no right. You know? So I again, there’s there’s a balance in there somewhere. And I’m not saying it’s, like, 50/50 because they they are having some really big problems and some bad effects. But, you know, again, that immediacy is a very powerful thing, a powerful part. Democratic immediacy is a huge powerful part of the tech revolution.
Nancy Norbeck [01:37:33]:
Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s interesting. But, you know, I feel like it also is, like, say, Today, you don’t feel like you’re producing any work that is worth reading, seeing, hearing, whatever. Could be the same thing ten years from now.
Tim J. Myers [01:37:48]:
Absolutely.
Nancy Norbeck [01:37:48]:
Be in a completely different place.
Tim J. Myers [01:37:50]:
Absolutely right.
Nancy Norbeck [01:37:51]:
And the only way you get there is by not giving up.
Tim J. Myers [01:37:54]:
That’s exactly right. Just and, again, that’s it’s funny to think that “go play” is both a it’s both a liberation and, like, not an admonishment, but it’s like, “Get off your ass and go play.” You know what I mean? It’s like Right. Do it. It’s the doing. You know? But, but it’s fun. So go out there and have that, but don’t just sit around thinking about having fun. Go actually mess around with this stuff.
Nancy Norbeck [01:38:19]:
And isn’t that interesting too? Because, like, I think we think about doing things now more than we actually do them, and I wonder how much of that is because so much of life seems to happen on a screen now. Like, we’ve forgotten that, no, life is a thing that happens In a world with trees and grass and markers and paper and, you know, refrigerators and whatever, you know, all the other people. All of this stuff is where life actually happens. It’s not—it’s not on the screen.
Tim J. Myers [01:38:52]:
I’m a member of the TV generation. In fact, I was born in ’53, which was the year I have found out since TVs, just television blew up over the country, everywhere. We started that. Of course, people were glued to their radios before that. And they’re you know, I mean, people have always been looking for these forms of communication, so I’m not I’m not a Luddite about them. But I think you’re absolutely right. I really worry about phone bots, and my wife particularly, and I agree with her, really worries about, phone behavior with kids, especially young kids. Parentally and adult, are not inculcated, but, you know, adults are enabling this behavior.
Tim J. Myers [01:39:32]:
Giving kids phones when they’re sitting at a family sitting at a restaurant, and they throw the kid a phone to keep the kid. It’s like, you have a moment to bond as a family. You could be talking to each other. You could be telling stories. You could be joking, and you throw a phone at that kid. In that moment, I’m not against the phone. I’m against the misuse of the phone. Yes.
Tim J. Myers [01:39:51]:
Yeah. So so, again, that’s a problem. And yet, there we go. There’s the digital tech dilemma. My phone has allowed me unbelievable creativity. Efficiency, safety with my family. There are all these things that it does that are it’s just unbelievable. So, again, It’s the freedom responsibility balance that we always have to come back to.
Nancy Norbeck [01:40:10]:
It’s always it’s always the balance. Always the balance.
Tim J. Myers [01:40:15]:
It has been wonderful talking to you. I knew this was gonna be super fun, and I was not wrong.
Nancy Norbeck [01:40:22]:
Me too, and I suspected that we would go long, and I wasn’t wrong either.
Tim J. Myers [01:40:27]:
Hey. Listen. When you’re talking to me, it goes long. It’s kind of a pub tendency I have. Whatever.
Nancy Norbeck [01:40:34]:
But it’s been a great conversation, and I’m so glad that you came and spent some time with me today. I really appreciate it. That is this week’s show. Thanks so much to Tim Myers for joining me and to you for listening. Please leave a review for this There is a link right in your podcast app. And in it, tell us how play influences your creative process. If you enjoyed our conversation, I hope you’ll share it with a friend. Thank you so much.
Nancy Norbeck [01:41:02]:
If this episode resonated with you, or if you’re feeling a little bit less than confident in your creative process right now, join me at the spark on Substack as we form a community that supports and celebrates each other’s creative courage. It’s free, and it’s also where I’ll be adding programs for subscribers and listeners. The link is in your podcast app, so sign up today. See you there, and see you next week. Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts, and don’t forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners.