Author, teacher, screenwriter and creative daredevil, Julia Cameron lives the artist’s way, and her appearance announces this to the world.
On a recent afternoon, Cameron showed up for lunch at The Third Coast on Delaware Place carrying a musical keyboard in her handbag, wearing a billowing gold dress, resembling a cross between Bernadette Peters and a young Bette Davis. Though her outfit raised some eyebrows, it seemed fitting for the coming release of her latest creativity guide. Slated to hit bookstores this fall, “The Vein of Gold” is Cameron’s follow-up to her best seller “The Artist’s Way.”
These are not haughty “how-to” manuals for art students. “The Artist’s Way” is part creative tool kit, part spiritual path, part ad hoc 12-step program–it is divided into a dozen weeklong stages, aimed at bolstering a group Cameron refers to as “recovering artists.”
No, recovering artists are not addicted to art, but those toxic diversions–work, chocolate, excuses, inner demons, crazy relatives and, yes, alcohol–that keep them from making art.
These are everyday people: the frustrated poets, playwrights, painters and musicians of the world whose ambitions were squashed by practical parents, critical teachers or cynical friends. Or they may be artists whose creative juices have dried up.
Cameron’s prescription for getting unstuck combines self-help tools and serious spirituality; in her view, recovering artists need to protect themselves from unsympathetic critics and their own doubts. Fledgling creatives should bond not just with each other, she advises, but with a higher force.
“I am suggesting you take the term creator quite literally,” Cameron writes in “The Artist’s Way.” “You are seeking to forge a creative alliance, artist-to-artist with the Great Creator.” It’s not important to Cameron whether recovering artists call it God, Jesus, Allah, Higher Power or no name at all–as long as they stay open-minded toward bonding with it. “Accepting this concept can greatly expand your creative possibilities.”
To hear Cameron tell it, her books are not just pen-and-ink ruminations on art. Flesh and blood is more like it.
“I think of `The Artist’s Way’ as being my daughter,” Cameron said. “People were able to walk into it from an informal place and wind up in a more heartfelt place. `The Vein of Gold’ is a book I think of more as my son. It’s a pilgrimage, where you really get in and play.”
Books as brother and sister? “I think brainchildren is a very literal term,” Cameron said. “This is probably the impulse that led me into teaching, the instinct to defend our creative `children.’ “
For Cameron, creativity and family seem to go hand in hand; she grew up among four sisters and two brothers in Libertyville. “Five of them still live here, and all seven of us are writers, musicians, painters or all of the above,” Cameron said. Two of the more well known are Christopher “Hambone” Cameron, keyboardist for the rock band Sonia Da Da, and portrait artist Libby Cameron-Evans.
Family values
Cameron’s parents, by comparison, had normal working lives. Her father, James, was a senior vice president at Foot, Cone and Belding, an international advertising firm in Chicago; her mother, Dorothy, was a housewife with a master’s degree in English.
“I don’t remember our parents telling us we couldn’t be artists or shouldn’t be artists,” said Cameron, who received an English degree in 1970 from Georgetown University. “I think that’s very rare.”
Cameron even refers to the inner creative impulse as the “artist child.” She gears each week of “The Artist’s Way” toward cultivating a different aspect of creativity, and coaxing the artist child out of hiding. She teaches two basic tools–“morning pages,” three stream-of-consciousness pages written each day by hand; and the “artist date,” a weekly two-hour block of solo time for exploring new experiences and locales.
“Doing your morning pages, you are sending–notifying the universe of your dreams, dissatisfactions, hopes,” Cameron writes. “Doing your artist date, you are receiving–opening yourself to insight, inspiration, guidance.”
“The Vein of Gold” picks up where “The Artist’s Way” left off, prescribing daily walks, autobiographical narratives and exercises with storytelling, sight and sound as ways to mine the creative mother lode.
The two books are meant to complement each other, but given the popularity of “The Artist’s Way,” there’s bound to be some sibling rivalry.
Cameron–who was in Chicago last month for the American Booksellers Association convention–has sold more than 700,000 copies of “The Artist’s Way.” It spent 26 weeks on the Publishers Weekly best-seller list last year. It has encouraged thousands of would-be artists, and in the process has turned the 48-year-old Cameron into something of a muse.
Her following stretches from the “Melrose Place” set to behind prison walls. “Artist’s Way” aficionados pop up at Cameron’s signings and speaking engagements, bubbling with stories of how the book changed their lives or bearing works of art inspired by her book.
“I understand their impulse to thank me, because the tools work,” Cameron said. “At heart I am an anarchist and I realize people are taking back their creative power. That’s very exciting, totally fun.
“The difficult part,” she mused, “is that some people want me to be what I call `St. Julia of the Artist’s Way,’ a figure considerably more maternal and abbess-like.”
Music too
Cameron has no time for the saint role; she would rather create. While working on “The Vein of Gold” in London, Cameron also completed “Avalon,” a musical love story about an apprentice of Merlin the Magician. It is her first musical–Cameron wrote the book, music and lyrics–and she is writing a second. Cameron, who plans to take the musical back to London for its premiere, has no formal music training.
“I know that all of us are creative, but our cultural mythology tells us only a few of us are creative,” Cameron said. “I believe we can always open further than we think we can, and `Avalon’ was my most dramatic proof of that.”
The seed for “Avalon” sprouted on Cameron’s own morning pages. “One morning I wrote, `Wouldn’t it be fun to write a musical about Merlin?’ ” Cameron recalled. In the weeks that followed, she began hearing madrigal melodies in her head. There was one problem, though: Cameron had no idea how to write music notation or play an instrument. “I had six weeks of piano lessons as a little girl.”
Instead, she sang the songs into a tape recorder and bought a mini-synthesizer (the same one she carries in case inspiration strikes). “I found middle C and started labeling the keys with a Magic Marker,” Cameron said. “When I finally had a song someone else could play, I started crying.”
Call it beginner’s luck or artistic pluck, but Cameron’s melodies have appeal and warmth. “She’s a risk-taker,” said Mark Bryan, Cameron’s second former husband and longtime teaching partner (her first husband was director Martin Scorsese). “I’ve watched her walk her talk for a decade. She just keeps moving. She’s a very talented, prolific screenwriter–10 screenplays in the last eight years.”
“The first bunch I wrote, I sold them all, mostly to Paramount,” Cameron said. None of the studio-bought screenplays were made, though. “Technically, you’re a successful screenwriter, but if you’re interested in making movies, it’s quite a frustration.”
Cameron also wrote for “Miami Vice” and was an uncredited writer on the movies “Taxi Driver” and “New York, New York,” though she is acknowledged by Scorsese with special thank-yous in the credits. “That’s what wives used to get,” Cameron said.
Sane, sober and creative
In 1977, Cameron was not even a recovering artist. She was battling a drinking problem, “trying to write before the booze closed in like a fog and my window of creativity was blocked again,” she recounts in “The Artist’s Way.” “The idea that I could be sane, sober and creative terrified me.”
Sober and determined at the start of the ’80s, Cameron began outlining the principles that would become “The Artist’s Way.” She invented morning pages while living at the foot of a mountain in Taos, N.M., (she makes her home in Taos today).
She first taught the course in New York City in the early ’80s, and refined it in Chicago while a writer-in-residence at Columbia College and Northwestern University during the mid-to-late 1980s. Bryan encouraged her to assemble a manuscript. Scorsese gave her a jacket quote.
“Julia’s just a brilliant writer to begin with,” said Gayle Seminara-Mandel, co-owner of Transitions Bookplace, 1000 W. North Ave., which carried “The Artist’s Way” before it was picked up by a publisher. “It’s incredible. There are so many changes that you go through. . . . It’s like group therapy, it’s so intense.”
Seminara-Mandel took one of the original Artist’s Way classes co-taught by Cameron and Bryan at Unity Church in Chicago. It helped her make the transition from stuck actress to productive author, and helped countless others too, she said.
“She has an incredible message because she was once a blocked writer. She walked that path, and came out on the other side with this program.”
Making magic
Cameron still may be, in some senses, a recovering artist. While working on “Avalon,” she experienced moments of creative magic worthy of a Merlin-inspired musical.
Cameron wrote the show while living in a London flat; “I needed to leave America and be in this foreign country where nobody knew who I was or what I did,” she said. “There I was, in the middle of London, hearing these Arthurian songs in my head. I would go to this church to practice my songs, and I later found out it was the place where (John Newton) wrote `Amazing Grace.’ “
The most powerful healing episode, she said, came when she and her teenage daughter Domenica discovered an injured baby raven while jogging through Regents Park.
“He was being dive-bombed by other birds,” Cameron said. “I took him home under my shirt and put him in the bathtub under a towel. . . . I named him Magellan and promised I would heal him, but I wouldn’t tame him.”
Cameron nursed Magellan back to health over several weeks, returning to the park daily to dig for worms. When the day came to release him, Cameron took four friends to a spot near where she found the bird.
“They made a joke about it,” she said. “He was in this great big wooden cage, it looked like the Ark of the Covenant.I took him out of the cage and at first, he was like a little king. Then he got out, stopped and hopped back to me.”
Magellan pecked gently at her arm. “I grabbed him, put him in the lowest branch of the smallest tree. Then he started to act wild and I thought, `Good, I haven’t tamed him.’ “
Finishing her story, Cameron stared off into the golden glare of the mid-afternoon sun. Her eyes fixed on a black bird perched in a nearby tree, beholding its restless spirit.
“I always think of Magellan when I see a raven or a crow,” she said. “I have no way of knowing whether the timing was right. He was probably cocky, had tried to fly a little too soon. I hope he’s all right.”
MINING A VEIN OF CREATIVITY
Julia Cameron’s “The Vein of Gold” contains more than 100 “inner play” exercises: Here are four:
– Narrative Time Line. A stream-of-consciousness autobiography of 5,000 to 20,000 words. “Although the Narrative Time Line is not in and of itself `art,’ it is the wellspring from which our art flows,” Cameron writes.
– Time Capsule Collage. “Collect and save 20 images that in some way resonate with your memories, associations and life experiences from years 1 to 5. . . . This collage is meant to reflect your child self.”
– Valentine to Your Past. “Make a valentine to one of your great loves. For this task be sure to include everything you received from this love. . . . Use this valentine to celebrate the win, not the loss, of this love.”
– Believing Mirrors. “List 10 friends you consider to be believing mirrors–those who mirror back your dreams in a possible, positive, affirming way. Every artist needs a few good friends. Not sycophants, but positive thinkers.”
