Midsummer Creative Retreat: Day 5

Standing at Process Point considering the value of creative work and creative community.

This is the final day of our midsummer creative retreat here on the Isles of Curiosity and Wonder. Thank you so much for being here. You can access Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, and Day 4 of the retreat, as well as all of the archives here.

I really appreciate all of you for being here and taking part! This kind of seasonal editions do take a lot of energy and time to produce. If you enjoyed this and want to support my work I’d love to have you as a paid subscriber. Or share this newsletter with a friend!

Hello friends,

Welcome to the final day of our creative midsummer retreat. Thank you so much for being here, I hope that you have enjoyed these days together.

We like to end these retreats at Process Point, right here at the very southern tip of the island where Imagination River spills into the sea. If you’re here during morning or evening light you may even be able to see how the color changes as the freshwater and saltwater blend together.

There is so much more to explore on the island, and after the retreat is over we do hope that you’ll do some of your own adventuring. The Solitude Range is beautiful this time of year, and filled with abundant wildflower meadows. It’s like wading through a sea of flowers. The bed and breakfast at Collaboration Peninsula is worth a stay, particularly if you’re needing some feedback and moral support. For those who are in need of some focused time to work on a project, you can book the cabin above the Shores of Extensive Research and Inspiration. 

It was also brought to our attention that we never mentioned the train service on the island! For all inland island exploring, you can get a Meander Pass, which will allow you to jump on and off as you see fit for a weeklong period. Just like our ferry system, the trains run very regularly and there is no need to plan around a schedule. There are also desks and artist studios aboard.

At the Process Point lookout, you’ll find a small silver box. This is the official Process Prompt box. We encourage you to take one, and if you’d like, there’s pen and paper so that you can write a prompt and leave one for someone else to find, a little seed for other members of our creative community.

We’ll also be holding a bonfire on the beach this evening. Bring whatever you’ve made during this retreat—or just any thoughts or inklings of ideas that have come to mind during these days—to share with other island visitors. If there’s anything you need to let go of, write that down on a piece of paper and we can toss that in the fire!

As you stand here at Process Point, we encourage you to grab a stone from the beach.

Pick it up, feel the weight in your hand. Stash it in your pocket.

Take a little of this magic with you.

The Isles of Curiosity and Wonder were first imagined in the summer of 2020. There was a lot going on back then, both personally and globally. I am going to guess that this was the case for many of you. It was a time when I didn’t feel much color or vibrancy, or even desire to come to my creative work. But many mornings that summer, I would get up early and try to go to my sketchbook.

I pulled that sketchbook out the other day. There on the page, dated July 27, 2020, there’s a blue watercolor painting of an island and this description:

“The Isles of Curiosity and Wonder. Where creative lessons are learned and inspiration is found. The isles are in a constant state of flux. These maps serve only as a general guideline. You cannot use them for navigation purposes. These isles can only be navigated in the moment you are in their waters.”

It might seem silly to dream up a place. To fabricate an entire retreat based around an imaginary place. Trust me, there are plenty of times when the pesky critical voice in my head says, “really, this? you’re just making stuff up??” The unstated sentiment is that there are more “important” things to do, more “serious” work to be done.

And yet… what is more important than our capacity for imagination? 

I think about Tove Jansson (Isles of Curiosity and Wonder patron saint, remember?) a lot and how her imaginary worlds not only helped her to process the traumas of war and envision a different reality, but how many other people they also touched.

As Jansson wrote in a letter in 1950 to Eva Konikoff about the beginnings of Moomin:

“[I] Started writing… when I was feeling depressed and scared of the bombing and wanted to get away from my gloomy thoughts to something else entirely. (A sort of escapism, to the time when Ham [Jansson’s mother] used to tell me stories.) I crept into an unbelievable world where everything was natural and benign—and possible. Then I went on writing whenever I felt like it, for my own fun—generally only when I was feeling carefree and cheerful.” (from Letters from Tove)

Papercut, Anna Brones, 2024

Fiction is not the bulk of my written work. In fact, aside from these island musings and maybe a few short stories from my younger days, I’ve never really taken a stab at dreaming up different worlds. But I will say this: the act of imagining is a clear invitation to the muse. 

I have a really big project to work on right now. It has nothing to do with imaginary islands, so the incessantly chatty voice in my head has been there in the background as I put all of these essays together muttering: “hey you, shouldn’t be giving your creative capacity to your actual work?” 

I’m sure all of you reading have big projects, endeavors, and responsibilities somewhere in your sphere. It doesn’t matter if they’re creative in nature or not, they’re the things that take up the bulk of your time, the bulk of your energy. The kind of things that when you opt for something more fun, something more indulgent, something entirely unrelated, something where you just “waste time” for a bit, your inner critical voice has a tendency to rear its head.

Go ahead and tell that voice to pipe down. We’re always going to need our time and energy for those bigger things that take up the bulk of our days. But how we show up for those things is also fueled by what we do at the edges. They too require imagination. Not to mention play and rest.

The act of imagining unlocks something, clears a pathway. Imagining facilitates flow. Which is why I continue to return to the proverbial blank page. 

So much has been written about the value of sitting down and doing the work. “Butt in chair” and all that. I will always be an advocate for this, as I know it to be true for my own creative process. Creativity is not a lightning bolt, it comes through the doing. But I also think that sometimes we’re too attached to a certain idea of what “doing the work” looks like. We do not solve creative problems by staring at a screen, or by overworking a painting. In those moments of “stuckness” we’re often better off with a refresh—through movement, through conversation, through rest. In those moments, the creative work is in seeking out the inspiration, in taking a break, in letting our mind wander.

The creative work also doesn’t happen alone.

Solitude may inspire and inform, and is often essential when we need to cut distractions and just focus, but we don’t permanently lock ourselves inside our little creative caves. In order to feed our creative work, to expand it, we participate in our lives.

We allow creativity to weave its way in, no matter what we’re doing.

“When we sit down each day and do our work, power concentrates around us. The Muse takes note of our dedication. She approves. We have earned favor in her sight,” writes Stephen Pressfield in The War of Art. “When we sit down and work, we become like a magnetized rod that attracts iron filings. Ideas come. Insights accrete.”

We can be dedicated to our creative work in so many ways that are not just the work. I’d say the Muse approves of that too. [Sidenote: not sure if you noticed, but there’s that word accrete again—if you’ve been taking part in this retreat, you can be sure that you’re going to start experiencing some frequency illusion.]

To keep creativity at the center of our lives, whether we are at our desk, or at a dinner table, or out in the world, is to give ourselves a lens: a lens through which we start seeing connections, a lens through which there is poetry in the everyday, a lens through which serendipity strikes with regularity, a lens through which we can imagine. 

I think this is all the more powerful when we do it together. Creativity is no solitary feat. You are in conversation, in collaboration, in concert with the world around you. Sometimes that’s with a person, sometimes it’s with a group. Other times it’s with a forest, or with the sky, or with a garden. Creativity is an interaction, a way of responding. 

We gather with others in order to say, “I see your creative process and I value it.” Like we talked about yesterday, creative inefficiencies make it easy for society to question its inherent value. In our culture, we talk a big game when it comes to art and creativity, but in the everyday, we often struggle to make space for it. It’s what leaves us artists standing in our studios, looking at our work, and thinking, “shouldn’t I be doing something more important? Something more serious?” and also, “that was fun and easy, maybe it doesn’t have value.”

And so we need a mirror. We need other people to discuss our ideas with, to share our work, to help remind us that this path of creativity is important. That could be in person, in a text chain, on a phone call, or even just in an online community (like we’re in right here!).

In many ways, we too are kind of like islands. Individuals in our own little creative ecosystems. But the thing about islands is that underneath the water, they’re all connected. There’s a whole undersea landscape that we don’t see unless we go below the surface of the water. 

Some questions I’d like to leave you with, for today, but maybe also for the rest of this season:

How do you create space for imagination?

How do you value and honor your own creative process? How do you treat it with the utmost importance?

How do you bring creative community together?

As I’ve written before, we are all islands. 

Solitary, but connected to an underlying, supportive structure. If only we are willing to look for it. 

And if we can’t find it, we create it ourselves.  

-Anna

ps: you can address any Isles of Curiosity and Wonder musings to hello@creativefuelcollective.com

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