Communities and Creative Practice

I am realizing I need to learn to talk about my creative work better. Until now, I have mostly resisted talking "about" a poem or sequence, because what is happening in it—what has come through during the process/stages of writing—as per my sensing feels far more entangled with mystery than I want to describe. Silence then is a way to protect the space of the poem or sequence instead of sprinkling a dash of the mundane all over it. 

But perhaps in this the disservice I do to the work? By not inviting into the work people whose engagement would enrich the creative work?  

Sometimes, communities of practice help one make greater sense of the work by bringing their receiving of it into its cauldron—not to fill the silence around the work, but as true collaboration. 

I have been feeling the need to surround myself with more practitioners who place value on what I have grown to care for, so that such a collaboration can happen organically and deliberately, through shared vision, making space for the multiple ways in which emergence and expression interact. 

Rightminded collective space counter the algorithm of loneliness and, even more significantly, create synergies where reality itself can be recontoured through the connections generated. 

Tarkiib Collective is such a collective space. A salon for writers and artists who believe something important happens in relationship with the sacred, and that this is an integral part of presenting—through our work and practice—transformational alternatives to the systems, structures, and narratives that further inequality and persecution.  

If it calls you, I would love to hear from you.