Transcript: Episode 13

Hey friends, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

I also hope that you’re entering the new year with whatever kind of energy is appropriate and desired for you right now! I feel like both hyping up the new year and sort of pooh-poohing the New Year are equally well represented philosophies lately, to which I say: awesome, neither is right or wrong, everybody just do what they like! February is gonna come no matter what, and whatever you’ve done so far in January, you’re doing enough.

In general, I’m not usually a big New Year person in the sense of the calendar year, but I did start this podcast in January of last year… so without realizing it, I created a major yearly anniversary that’s always going to coincide with calendar year energy.

One of the New Year memes that I see a lot in online spaces is the idea of picking words of the year that basically encapsulate the way you want to feel for the next twelve months and serve as guideposts. And as I’ve been thinking about how I want to keep showing up in this little container and space of the pod, I found myself reflecting on the words that I use to try to encapsulate this project.

There are two terms that I’ve been using in a sort of abstract or poetical manner when it comes to describing what I’m up to with this podcast: “visionary,” and “praxis” (And because I’m aware that my voice tends to have some extra sibilance going on, I’ll just clarify that I’m not saying “practice,” I’m saying “praxis” as in p-r-a-x-i-s.)

The first term, visionary, is right in the introduction to every episode, when I say that this is a podcast for “visionary but disenchanted writers.” And the second term, praxis, is the way I label the prompts and resources that accompany each episode in the newsletter that goes out to the folks on my mailing list.

I’m describing these two terms as “poetical” sort of to poke fun at myself, since I have a tendency to somewhat airy-fairy language. But I also mean that in a genuine way. These terms are signifiers or metaphors for the real core of what I’m grappling with through this podcast – the disconnect so many creatives experience between all the beautiful and transformative things we believe about creative craft in theory, and all the doubt and dismissiveness we often feel about our own work in reality.

“Vision” and “praxis” are terms that make me feel something larger than the simple definition of the words, and I think they can be guideposts for rediscovering how to make our experience of our creativity also feel larger, and more filled with meaning.

But I’ve never actually talked about what those terms or metaphors might be conveying in the context of writing and storytelling. And I also haven’t fully unpacked that for myself either, to be honest.

So that’s where I’m starting with this year’s episodes. Today I’m going to be getting into what I might actually be saying when I say “visionary writers” or “visionary storytelling,” and why I think cultivating a visionary approach could free us from all of our creative hangups and blocks and neuroses, now and forever.

I am clearly joking with that grandiose claim… but also, I’m kind of not?

Okay, so, first things first: Why is the term “visionary writers” in my podcast intro?

If you go to the pod website, which is also my editing website, you’ll see that this phrase is in the copy at the top of the homepage as well. In business-y web-speak, this is referred to as the copy “above the fold,” which originally comes out of newspaper publishing. It’s the copy every visitor to a webpage will see even if they don’t “unfold” your virtual newspaper by scrolling deeper down the page. So this is always important marketing real estate.

When you’re coming up with the words you’re going to put above the fold to describe something like a podcast or a business, the smart, market-savvy advice goes something like this:

Number 1 – You’re supposed to describe your ideal audience in words they’d use to describe themselves.

Number 2 – You’re supposed to describe a problem or concern your audience has, in words that show you understand their “pain point” on a personal level.

And Number 3 – You’re supposed to offer them a concrete but inspiring vision of how your thing (the podcast, the book, the service) can transform their lives by fixing or alleviating their pain point.

Here’s the short version of the story of the intro copy for the Inspirited Word: I tried to follow this reasonable and effective marketing advice, failed pretty miserably, and then decided I was okay with that. (Whether that decision was creative integrity or just smart-ass self-sabotage both remains to be seen and is probably very much in the eye of the beholder.)

As I tried to come up with concrete ways to describe the “transformative vision” offered by my work, I just kept getting hung up on the idea of having “vision” as a storyteller. As I thought about who the audience for this podcast would be, that word just kept circulating in my brain, and it felt a lot more important and interesting than any of the more concrete descriptions I came up with.

At the time of first launching this podcast, I was in a membership program for small business owners, and I actually had my above-the-fold copy critiqued as part of a group call. And sure enough, the first thing the very gentle and polite facilitator said to me was “Okay, Mary… do you think the people in your ideal audience are currently describing themselves as ‘visionary writers’?”

And I had to sheepishly admit that no, they probably weren’t.

But what I really wanted to say was “Maybe they should be describing themselves that way. Maybe that phrase would wedge itself inside their brains the way it’s gotten wedged into mine, like a seed in sidewalk, and maybe that little tiny spreading crack would create space for wilder stories to emerge, stories that feel deeper and richer and more alive, weird and weedy stories that have gotten smothered underneath the asphalt of guaranteed-bestseller outlining techniques and snarkily phrased critique group feedback and quasi-spiritual self-branding advice.”

Anyway, so I failed to write a clear and effective intro for the podcast or my website. Which really says a lot more about me than it does about the usefulness of the advice that well-meaning facilitator was trying to knock into me. Like, seriously, if you’re ever attempting to follow marketing advice, which you likely will be if/when you publish your work, you should probably exercise better faith in the whole thing than I did.

For better or for worse, I opted to lean into “visionary writing,” even though it’s a concept and phrase that is by nature pretty hard to define. Which is exactly what I’m trying to do now, a full year after I started using the phrase. (Better late than never?)

I decided to come at this by looking at how other people are using the term “visionary” in connection to writing. Mainly to make sure I wasn’t just riffing in a vacuum and totally ignoring existing ideas, but also to help tease out what feels so compelling about this word that does get tossed around in a lot of contexts that actually sort of drain it of meaning and power.

It’s in the same linguistic box as words like “revolutionary”  or “transformative.” We hear language like this used to describe everything from smartphone cameras to anti-aging cream, as if wanting and attaining certain kinds of stuff is synonymous with having a truly powerful vision for the way we want to live in the world.

So if you google “visionary writing” or “visionary storytelling,” I’m not gonna lie – a lot of the hits are a bit of a letdown. Many of them are actually variations on the style of branding advice I just described. (“How visionary storytelling can make or break your tech leadership,” or “How visionary writing can connect your business with quality prospects,” etc.)

The term “visionary fiction,” however, is currently being used in ways that are more relevant to storytelling outside the realm of marketing. When you plug that into google, one of the things you’ll find is a group of professional authors called the Visionary Fiction Alliance, and I’m actually about to talk about why I don’t completely vibe with their definition of the term.

I hesitated a bit to bring up this organization by name just to basically immediately disagree with them, because as far as I can tell from casual research, this is just a group of authors doing their best to promote their work (as we all must in this hyper-saturated era). So I don’t intend to throw any undue shade. But, thinking about why I wouldn’t personally use their definition of “visionary” did help me ultimately come up with my own, so, I figure it’s fair game to talk through that.

Here’s how they define the term: “Visionary fiction embraces spiritual and esoteric wisdom, often from ancient sources, and makes it relevant for our modern life. … Visionary fiction emphasizes the future and envisions humanity’s transition into evolved consciousness.”

The full definition on their site is a bit longer, but that’s the core of the way they’re using the term. And I have to admit that I don’t love the idea of tying the word “visionary” to ancient wisdom, or to the ideal of evolving into a higher level of consciousness. This is partly because I think both of these criteria have the potential to be skewed or misused.

Looking to ancient sources for wisdom can certainly be done respectfully and can indeed lead to deep insight. But it can also lead to simplifying and extracting certain pieces of a culture without retaining the full context – and that can in turn can lead to harmful misappropriation when living marginalized cultures are viewed as historical and therefore sort of up for grabs.

And in a similar vein, if our goal as humans is framed in terms of “evolving” a new kind of consciousness, that can also be skewed into overly literal interpretations of higher and lower levels of humanity (which can obviously get pretty unsavory real fast).

I’m genuinely not insinuating that this is the vision of the Visionary Fiction Alliance (if you’ll pardon my wording there). Like I said, based on their site this is an organization that just wants to help a certain niche of spiritual fiction reach larger audiences. But, I do think their definition of visionary storytelling leaves openings for misinterpretation that I’d like to avoid in my own take on the term specifically for this podcast.

And even setting the possibility of misinterpretation aside – I think it’s easy to associate visionary stories with turning away from where we actually are now, literally and figuratively, and looking either to an idealized past or an idealized future. So there’s an aspect of groundedness that I want to pull into my own concept of the visionary, an aspect of cultivating the present and finding meaning here, and not necessarily just evolving toward a future ideal.

The phrase “visionary fiction” has also been used recently by the poet, scholar, and science fiction writer Walidah Imarisha. She describes visionary fiction as, quote, “fantastical writing that helps us imagine new just worlds” and “literature that helps us to understand existing power dynamics, and helps us imagine paths to creating more just futures.” She goes on to say that she coined the term to, quote, “be able to differentiate from mainstream science fiction, which so often just replicate[s] the power inequalities of this world and grafts them onto the future.”

(I’ve pulled those quotes from an interview with Imarisha that is well worth checking out, so I’ve included that in the show notes, along with links to some of her work.)

I am all about being aware of the way the stories we’re telling interact with existing power structures, so Imarisha’s definition appeals to me more than the first definition I cited. And as a big fan of fantastical writing, I think her take is infinitely useful for examining what we’re actually being asked to imagine when we read a fantastical work (and yes, I do think it matters).

In the specific context of this podcast, however, I want to add some of my own shading to the definition – partly because this pod isn’t just about genre fiction, but also because here in this space, we’re exploring what it actually feels like to write visionary stories, to claim that sort of experience for ourselves and our work. And while we hopefully have a goal that our stories will help readers envision more just realities, that’s a statement of storytelling ethics, or a statement of intent. It’s not really an entryway into the actual experience of connecting with and writing a visionary story.

To kind of wrap ourselves around that creative experience – and to talk about how we can cultivate our ability to have that kind of experience more often – I think we have to bring back part of that definition I originally discarded, the one about spiritual wisdom and human consciousness. We have to consider what type of consciousness or awareness brings us into connection with stories that really express wisdom and vision.

I recently read a book by Aboriginal scholar, writer, and artist Tyson Yunkaporta, called Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. The book is primarily focused on how Indigenous systems of knowledge can be applied to sustainability solutions, but cultural concepts of narrative and storytelling are a major part of the framework for thinking that the book is sharing.

Before I start talking about how I think the ideas in this book connect to writing, I should reassure everybody that I am not getting ready to ignore my own earlier critique by suggesting that writers outside of Indigenous cultures should be directly co-opting them in order to rewild ourselves and discover our most creative inner being or something like that.

Yunkaporta makes it clear that he’s not advocating for specific aspects of Aboriginal culture to be sort of copy-pasted and commodified by European people. So I’m going to do my best to steer clear of that in the way I reference his work.

(And as is generally the case on this podcast, when I use the collective “we” here to talk about the experience of writing, I’m using it to mean people who live within cultures that have been shaped and dominated by modern European ways of thinking. In my case, I’m also speaking as someone who doesn’t have any living connection to an Indigenous culture. But I just want to acknowledge that not all writers and listeners of this podcast have the same relationship to European culture. I’m using the word “we” in a sort of loose way to be able to talk about cultural standards and ideas that are held up as the Western norm.)

In Sand Talk, Yunkaporta describes the Aboriginal way of thinking as one in which any act of creation is one that mediates between, quote, “the abstract world of mind and spirit… and the concrete world of land, relationships, and activity.” And he goes on to say that “communication between these worlds… occur[s] through metaphors. These metaphors include images, dance, song, language, culture, objects, ritual, gestures, and more. Even written words are metaphors that help carry communication between the abstract and the practical realms.” (end quote)

This way of thinking about the role of creative work encapsulates what I think most (if not all) creatives are really reaching for when we set about making something – we want what we create to carry communication from one realm to another, in some large or small way. And we believe that this communication has inherent and primary value to our existence as humans.

As Yunkaporta says: “Creation is not an event in the distant past, but something that is continuously unfolding and needs custodians to keep co-creating it by linking the two worlds together via metaphor and cultural practice.” (end quote)

So, if this is what we believe to be true about creative work – where does this belief go when we’re doubting our ability or even our right to make a thing or tell a story? Why do we doubt our capacity and our prerogative and our responsibility to be custodians of creative metaphor? Why do we get so disenchanted with ourselves, and with the actual practice of writing, of communicating a vision through storytelling?

I suspect a key part of this disenchantment and disconnection is that we so often lose any sense of the “co-creation” part of Yunkaporta’s description of creative work. In his words, “creativity is now widely regarded as a vaguely defined skillset falling randomly on individual geniuses. Deep engagement encompassing mind, body, heart, and spirit has become replaced by a dogged ethic of commitment to labor and enthusiastic discipline.” (end quote)

We want our creative work to feel different from just another arbitrary task, the kinds of labor we don’t choose for ourselves – we want to experience it as a process with meaning, because why else are we doing it?

But most of us living in Western cultures haven’t been culturally equipped to do the actual work of creating in ways that preserve both the mystery and the humility of being a mediator between realms. We don’t typically see ourselves as true co-creators in partnership with something that depends on us but isn’t wholly defined by us.

Instead, the practical and concrete acts of our craft either get overly skill-ified and formularized (so, all concrete world, no spirit), or the practical stuff gets sort of waved away under the exceptionalist shorthand of “genius” and “inspiration” (all spirit, nothing concrete).

(I did a whole episode unpacking some of the concept of genius last year, so I won’t make regular listeners sit through that again. But if you missed it the first time, it’s episode five.)

I think we can see the loss of our sense of co-creation in the words many of us use when we hit challenging obstacles during the creative process. We say things like “I can’t get this plot to come together,” or “Why can’t I ever write good descriptions?” or even just “I’m so bad at this, why am I so bad at this, I’ll never be good at this.”

Maybe it seems sort of silly to read too much into this kind of talk. But on the other hand, it does reflect a belief that the creative process fundamentally consists of us as individuals being either good or bad at a set of skills. As if communicating between the world of spirit and the world of the concrete were a matter of lining up dominoes and knocking them down in a correct, predictable order. And also that correct order of dominoes is determined by complex calculus we have to do in our heads and if we get it wrong, everybody will laugh at us and we won’t graduate from high school.

(This particular metaphor comes courtesy one of my recurrent anxiety dreams in which I have forgotten that I’m enrolled in calculus until the day of the final exam.)

I have for sure made this disclaimer in other episodes, but I’ll say it again: Skills are absolutely part of the practice of any creative craft, I’m not saying that thinking about writing skills at all is bad. But if, as Yunkaporta says, creativity is at its heart a practice of custodianship, of collaboration with an ever-unfolding world, then the real heart of creative practice isn’t about proving whether or not we’re good at stuff. It’s not some sort of artistic proof of concept for our ego or identity. It’s about whether or not our craft is connecting us with the world in a spirit of learning and stewardship and co-creation.

So, how can we shift our basic understanding of what the creative process actually is? Or is that even possible? First off, I don’t think it’s our fault that writing doesn’t always (or maybe even often) feel like co-creation. The reality of how writing gets done and how written art gets shared can make it feel like a fundamentally isolated experience, for both the writer and the reader. We’re working alone when we write, and we’re reading alone when we read. That’s the nature of printed storytelling.

There are subsets of philosophy and cognitive science that get into the nature of written language and how it shapes the way we think about the world, in comparison to oral traditions, and Yunkaporta mentions this element of how stories typically function in Indigenous cultures compared to modern Western culture.

He says, quote: “Oral cultures are known as high-context or field-dependent-reasoning cultures. They have no isolated variables: all thinking is dependent on the field or context. Print-based cultures, by contrast, are low-context or field-independent-reasoning cultures. This is because they remain independent of the field or context, focusing on ideas and objects in isolation.”

When Yunkaporta talks about the “field or context” in that excerpt (and in the entire book), he’s talking about a deep interconnectedness between all aspects of knowledge and culture, and all the beings and objects involved in an ecosystem or culture. So, he’s talking about knowledge and culture that’s based on tangible relationships.

Oral storytelling traditions are more inherently adapted to this kind of relational knowledge than written traditions are, just by nature of how written stories operate (or at least, this is usually what theories about the nature of written language are arguing, and it’s what Yunkaporta says as well). Printed writing is available at any time to anybody who can access and read it. This increases the accessibility of a story, but it also makes it possible to read a story devoid of its living context, and it creates a static narrative instead of something that adapts in relation to the reader or to culture.

But with all that being said, I still felt my ideas about written storytelling shifting as I read Yunkaporta’s description of creativity and learning in his own culture.

He says, quote: “If you learn something with or from another person, this knowledge now sits in the relationship between you. You can access the memory of it best if you are together, but if you are separated you can recall the knowledge by picturing the other person or calling out their name. This way of thinking and remembering is not limited to relationships with people.”

The last line of that quote makes me feel an immense amount of hope as a writer who gets really wrapped up in what my creative process might be saying about the validity of my existence as a human being.

What if my creative process isn’t actually saying anything about me at all?! What if the writing process is actually a practice for learning and thinking and remembering, by way of my relationship with a story? What if the words I’m writing are simply the method of recalling and sharing that relationship and all the knowledge that sits within it? What if the words are just the way we call out the names that we love?

As Yunkaporta puts it, “it’s strangely liberating to realize your true status as a single node in a cooperative network.” I don’t think he had neurotic writers specifically in mind. But it does feel extremely liberating to think that whatever I create is actually the expression of a network of connected nodes, nodes made up of people and beings and places both real and imagined, concrete and spirit.

Another way of phrasing this might be that it actually feels good to realize that I’m not special, and that my work in the world doesn’t actually have to be special either, whatever that even means. To tap into meaning (and maybe even wisdom), my creative work just has to be an honest expression of the relationships I experience and what they are teaching me.

I’ve been talking about writing as a relationship between the storyteller and the story since day one of this podcast. But the way of thinking described in Yunkaporta’s book puts a deeper and wider lens on that concept – it affirms that making this kind of shift in framework can be so much more than just, like, a cute conceit to help with writer’s block.

This brings me back to Walidah Imarisha’s definition of visionary storytelling as writing that helps us imagine more just futures. I think that if we can shift the goal of our writing practices to be more about experiencing genuine learning through deep relationship, and less about meeting our ego expectations of what it means to be a good writer – that’s far more likely to bring us into contact with stories that imagine a more just world. A world that is also co-created out of continual learning and relationship and care.

After all, we’ll never be transformed by meeting our own existing (and exacting) creative expectations. And the world’s not going to be transformed by that, either.

Yunkaporta describes it this way: “You must allow yourself to be transformed through your interactions with other [beings] and the knowledge that passes through you from them. This knowledge and energy [flows out] in feedback loops, and you must be prepared to change so that those feedback loops are not blocked.” (end quote)

This gets at the heart of some questions I’ve been asking myself lately about how I relate to storytelling. How open am I to actually being changed by the practice of writing? How willing am I to truly let go of creative practice as an exercise in ego? Am I really prepared to allow my craft to be defined and shaped by something bigger than just how I feel about myself?

Because if I am, then that means I don’t get to control how or when a story might completely transform my sense of myself and the world around me.

There’s one last definition I want to reference today, a definition of the visionary storyteller in the form of the mystic or the seer. It’s from a recent episode of The Emerald podcast: “The seer comes to wake culture up to how it is and how it could be.”

I don’t think you have to identify as a seer or a mystic to feel the deep potential in that description. And when it’s combined with the sense of the storyteller as a custodian of creation, as a steward and student who is always learning from their relationships with stories – that’s the definition of visionary storytelling that I want to aspire to.

Visionary writers are those who tell stories as their medium for participating in the ongoing creation of the world. We are practitioners and mediators of transformation. And we are never alone, because every story we tell is a living memory of all the beings who are patiently teaching us who we are, and who we’re becoming.

Next month, I’m going to talk about “praxis,” that other poetical term I mentioned at the top of the episode, and how we can start connecting the kind of writer we want to be with the actual way we actually write.

But, if you’re intrigued by the concept of praxis, good news! You don’t have to wait until next month. Just scroll down in the show notes and join the newsletter circle to get access to the praxis tip that goes along with this episode. You can also join by visiting inspiritedword.com/contact – just look for the big peacock green button that says “Join the newsletter.”

Thank you as always for being part of this virtual circle, and until next month, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.