On Sustaining Your Creative Life (In Person)

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With rejection and intense commitment being such integral parts of any artist’s life, many struggle to stay with the creative process. Author and CIIS Faculty in the Interdisciplinary Arts program, Cindy Shearer has spent decades helping artists stay with their craft. In her latest book, Stay with Writing, Cindy offers practices to help sustain and live a creative life.

Join Cindy and theater artist Emlyn Guiney for an inspiring and supportive conversation exploring how to nurture and stick with your artistic practice. Drawing on knowledge from many art forms, from dancing to visual art, this conversation dives into the nature of artistic process and practice.

Cindy encourages writers to understand themselves as artists, and for artists across all mediums to learn about themselves from writing. She discusses how to recognize failure as a way to probe what you really want to create and how to claim an artistic process that you can rely on for support again and again. She shares how to practice perseverance, intention setting, riding through failure, and meaning-making by bringing oneself fully into one’s art.

Cindy invites all artists, no matter their form, to find tools to sustain their practice that are adaptable and unique to them.

Cindy Shearer, DA, is the founding director for the MFA programs at CIIS. She serves as Department Chair for Interdisciplinary Arts and Professor in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Writing. She also chairs the PhD in Integral Transpersonal Psychology. A writer, text/image artist, and curator, she practices and teaches writing as art, a process she writes “reconfigures the boundaries of writing and visual art.” She created Ten Not-So-Tangible Tools for Writers, a meditation on the writing process in text and image. Cindy has also worked extensively in program development and curriculum design and as a developmental editor, consultant, and writing coach.

Emlyn Guiney is an Oakland based theater artist and director working in physical theater and devised performance for the last 20 years. She creates original solo and ensemble performances that illuminate the magical, wild, and absurd of everyday life. Emlyn has a BA in Theatre from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and studied devised theater and Butoh (Japanese dance theater) with companies in Canada and Australia. She currently leads solo and ensemble explorations at Wild Theater, a laboratory for devised performance making. When she is not making art, she curates public conversations and workshops for CIIS Public Programs. She can often be found staging her 10-year-old daughter’s plays in her living room.

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Recording Policy
Ticket holders will have access to an ad-free replay of the event for one month after the live event, after which unlimited viewing with ads will be available. Portions of the audio will also be released on our podcast. Only registered ticket holders who choose to watch live can participate in the chat and Q&A.

Refund Policy
All tickets and add-ons purchased for this event are nonrefundable.