Fire Child
Refusing to optimize creativity, spaces, and faces.
Natural dyeing and block printing workshop update: the July 18th one sold out quickly, so we added another one on July 19th. Registration opens at 10am Pacific on Sunday June 7. // Thank you to Keris Fox for asking me all about creativity and MONEY! // And I sat down with Brendan Leonard for a fun interview. // The spiral is the process.
Hello friends,
My final book draft is due at the end of the month, and I am beginning to feel that intense energy that comes with an impending deadline. “Unhinged but in a good way,” was how I described it to a friend recently.
I also decided that it was a really good idea to work on not one but two additional side projects other than the book. Luc said to me yesterday, “are you distracting yourself from your deadline?”
I guess technically, from the outside, yes. But actually? No. A different, more diligent version of me would keep my focus on the deadline, not let any distraction get in the way. I know however that is not how my process works. At all.
I have almost always had a handful of projects on hand at the same time for my entire creative career. When I have a lot of them—or a tight deadline—that’s the exact moment even more come to surface. It’s like the ideas are sitting and waiting around for someone who is already well occupied, then they pounce, nagging at you until you bring them to life.
I really don’t know any other way. The other version of me doesn’t exist. I try and work with what I have.
There is so much guilt and pressure around how creative work is “supposed” to work. Pretty much every single artist and writer friend of mine has at some point lamented how intense their work is when a deadline nears. It is almost always followed by some version of “I know I shouldn’t” or “if only I did [insert productivity technique du jour].” Instead of acknowledging that this is a natural part of most of our processes, we kick ourselves for not doing it in a “better” way.
You don’t have to be messy and unorganized to be a creative person. This too is a trope. But I feel for my fellow artists and writers who have guilt wrapped up in how their process takes place.
Sometimes you’re in a frenetic flow and everything else falls to the wayside, and other times you’re wandering around digging in the garden debating which book on your enormous to read list you should start next. And then others you hit a wall and convince yourself you’ll never have another idea again. Rinse, cycle, repeat.
Yesterday morning in search of creative inspiration I went and pulled out Niki de Saint Phalle: The Sketchbooks, a book I bought earlier this year. It’s fascinating to get to flip through her sketches and see the unbridled energy that informed her work.
“When I think of Saint Phalle, I see a fire child. There’s a fierceness in her vibrant colors and whimsical creatures that speaks of an inner intensity,” writes Larry Warsh in the introduction.
Fire child. That’s the energy I am after.
As a society, we keep trying to quell that energy. Whether it’s through the manipulation of faces, as we’re told we should aspire to look like some version of ourselves that we’re not, or AI all up in my Word documents telling me that I should consider a shorter, more concise way to say what I want to say (I certainly didn’t do that in this awfully long sentence, but I think you’re still with me). At every turn there’s the option to take the optimized route.
Squash the fire, drain the soul.
I don’t want to package that energy up into some more optimized, organized, bland, distilled version.
Rosie Spinks wrote this week about her relationship to her aging face.
“I have spent much of the last year or so with a sense of disorientation — some days it veers into an acute feeling of grief— when I observe how few people seem to realize what they are giving up when they choose the machine over the creature.”
Faces, bodies, and what we do with them is an ongoing conversation both with my friends and with myself, silently in my head. If you’re a woman of a certain age, it’s almost impossible to avoid.
Yesterday morning at our weekly Friday swim, the topic of faces and fillers came up. We made attempts at pouty lips. Everyone looked ridiculous. There is no better place to feel good about your body than emerging from cold water, surrounded by women of all generations feeling strong and confident about what they just did. One of the women joked “I’m waiting for thin lips to come back in style.”
“Very early I got the message that men had the power and I wanted it. Yes, I would steal their fire from them. I would not accept the boundaries that Mother tried to impose on my life because I was a woman.”
-Niki de Saint Phalle
Niki de Saint Phalle’s creative world is full of over the top, curvy, energetic women’s bodies. They are colorful, potent, bursting with energy. In 1965 she made the first of The Nanas, the French slang term for “the girls” or “chicks.”
From Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker:
“Nanas proliferated at sizes small and gigantic, turning dancerly and acrobatic. Saint Phalle mastered gloss techniques for preserving their painted surfaces—in black-and-white and, often, sizzling secondary and tertiary hues—outdoors, in all weather. Nothing about the work jibed with anything then current in art. Most critics, especially American ones, dismissed it. Today, as categorical distinctions among art mediums and styles deliquesce, it comes off as heroic.”
Flipping through her sketches, I was also reminded of some of Leonora Carrington’s work, where the women embody fantastical, mystical, absurdist, otherworldly qualities. Energy unbounded.
In today’s cultural flattening, everything is designed for perfection, and everything becomes a performance. Slick textures and angles photograph well but leave you feeling lacking, bodies become so sculpted that they verge on robotic and grotesque, color palettes, fonts, and even light bulbs are easily swapped out when the next popular one comes along, all in the name of recognizable aesthetic.
I am as swayed by the promise of beautiful spaces, well designed things, curated experiences as the next person, but after the glimmer wears off I am always left grasping for something more. I want the energy that’s boundless, uncontained, spilling over. I want to be the fire child. I want to be around other fire children.
I used to think there was a need to provoke, to attack religion, and the generals. And then I understood that there is nothing more shocking than joy.
— Niki de Saint Phalle
Saint Phalle was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, and painting was a way to get her through. Art had saved her, and she wanted to ensure she shared it with others. The Tarot Garden, which became her life’s work, is as she called it “a sort of joyland… where you could have a new kind of life that would just be free.”
These words that keep surfacing—unhinged, uncontained—they indicate a kind of over-the-topness whose energy goes beyond the bounds of what society deems “normal” and “appropriate.” They’re also tinged with a vocabulary of mental illness. As my friend Sabrina Y. Smith wrote in a beautiful piece on mental health and creativity, “historically, our definition of ‘crazy’ has often proven to be nothing more than natural expressions of being human — viewed through the lens of misunderstanding and judgment.” Sabrina points out that creative expression is a way that many of us manage our mental well-being, and certainly art has been a lifeline for many.
“Disturbed,” “distraught,” and “unstable” is one way of looking at the word “unhinged.” But I like the more literal interpretation: to take off the hinges. To remove the door, let everything out. A kind of enormous exhale and release for anything that can’t, or refuses, to be contained.
In the rise of the automated, machine world, I keep wondering what our societal capacity is for acknowledging the full experience of being human. Currently, it appears we’re doing everything we can to whittle the last bit of humanness out of everyday life, and we have condensed the box down into such a tiny form that few of us can fit in. The cost of conforming isn’t just monetary, it’s our soul. If we’re not careful, the inner fire goes out.
As always, this is where creativity becomes our lifeline, our lesson.
Fuel the fire, protect the soul.
If you’re an artist or a writer then you know one hopeful, promising truth: creativity cannot be optimized. You can try all you want to keep it organized and contained, but eventually, it comes seeping out the edges.
Better not to waste time trying.
-Anna
ps: So what are these mysterious side projects? I’ll tell you about one: an analog newsletter! I’ve been thinking about doing this for so long, and because I’ve been quite exhausted by the digital sphere as of late it felt like time. I hope to have an update (and signup) for you next weekend? The following weekend? We’ll see, hopefully soon!
Nature is offering up excellent color palettes right now. Go out and find some.
Summer Creative Workshop: Natural Dyeing and Block Printing
Come join me and my friend Christie at her beautiful flower farm for to a day of creative exploration.
Taking inspiration from the garden, we will explore both color and form, translating it into print and fabric. We’ll do lots of wandering in the garden, learn how to make natural dye, draw and sketch plants, and explore making graphic prints to use on paper and fabric.
When: Sunday July 19, 2026, 9am to 4pm.
Where: Moon Mountain Farm, Key Peninsula, WA
Registration: Opens at 10am Pacific on Sunday June 7. More info + tickets.
I am coming out of a period of unanticipated (broken leg) reduction of my normal high energy life and self. Today you gave me the frame for what I want and need as I re-enter the world physically. My fire child is rising from the banked embers of my wintering. Thank you.
Thank you, Anna, for this lovely-in-every-way post. I'm a writer going through the familiar, "I've written everything I have to say" whining, inside a very messy house I have no desire to clear/clean. No matter how many times I go through these periods of restocking my mind and spirit, I need this sort of reassurance. Bless you!