Every year during the summer run some 35mm film through my Grandad’s old camera. Nearly 45 years ago he used it to take thousands of photos of me and my kid brother. When Grandad got ill it was passed to me to put on a shelf like an ornament. But I keep picking it off the shelf and taking it camping.
Read moreWe are a work in progress. We’re always a work in progress. Coming to the point where we finish the creative process is always difficult. How do you know when a song is finished?
Ruth and I went for a walk last autumn where we were talking about creativity and why we don’t see it out in the wild like we used to. We could wax lyrical about the failure to invest in the creative arts… or we could encourage creativity. Always wanting to be part of the solution rather than the problem, we picked the latter. For the last 9 months or so we have been planning events to encourage creativity in the place where we live. I am fortunate that in my role as parish priest, I have a really supportive community at Holy Nativity who encourage us to do this kind of thing. So we have organised a few live music performances – something we hope to continue to do over coming years. And as part of this drive for creativity, we’ve organised a Multi Arts Retreat next week.
Brian Eno took apart the idea that creatives work as lone geniuses by coining the term “scenius”. People create within community and alongside each other. They are part of a scene. Creative people bounce ideas off of each other and dig each other’s work. They are friendly critics of each other, building each other up and inspire one another to reach higher. Ruth and I have spent the last five years being part of the Resound scene, a community of songwriters and musicians who write adjacent and sometimes in collaboration with each other. In the coming week Ruth and I are going to spend a week writing music together and we’re really happy that we’re going to be doing that together with a load of other Resound writers at the Song Writing Retreat.