Join me in this live, two-hour class, and discover the Five Things I’ve Learned about the practical and spiritual techniques that have helped me to keep the faith and to keep going as a creative artist – and how you can better adapt your own creative practice to a busy life full of relationships and obligations.

Hi, my name is Matthew Zapruder. I’m the author of six books of poetry and the non-fiction books Why Poetry and The Story of a Poem. I’m a professor at the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California, and an editor at large at Wave Books. I’m a husband, as well as father of a ten year old boy. 

When I was first starting to write poetry seriously, as a graduate student in my 20’s, I had all the time in the world. The few obligations I had — to go to class, to teach composition to bored freshmen — were barely noticeable. This blissful indolence was predictably fleeting. Soon, I had a full-time teaching job, and eventually a family. It became a challenge, probably familiar to most of you, to find time to write, not to mention just sit and think. The encroachment of the internet into my life, first in the form of email and then eventually through the omnipresence of content and social media, greatly exacerbated this problem. 

A central question arose that should be familiar: How to develop and preserve a creative space in the midst of all this chaos, external and external? How to continually adapt my creative practice to what Zorba the Greek famously called with great affection, “the full catastrophe” of a busy life of relationships and obligations? And how to keep the faith, and keep going, with so much instability in the world?

It’s all this that I hope to talk with you about in my upcoming two-hour session, Five Things I’ve Learned about Maintaining a Creative Practice in the Chaos. In this two-hour course – and throughout the larger series of two-part conversations of which it’s a part – I’m eager to share all I have learned about maintaining my creative practice, and how to focus my attention and energy in the ongoing chaos. I’ll share my struggles as well. I’ll talk about creative rituals to protect myself from obligations and distractions; how I deal with both personal and professional doubt and uncertainty; the logistics of my craft and my creativity; what I’ve learned about getting started; and what I’ve learned about finishing. In addition to my experience, I will share real, tested, and practical approaches to maintaining the force and balance I need – strategies that have worked for me, some of which I am sure will work for you. Amid fires, climate change, political and economic instability, it can feel not only hard to stay focused, but also hard to keep the faith that making art is important. Keeping that faith is part of the creative practice as well, and something we will discuss together. 

I hope you’ll join me for this first class, and then throughout the coming weeks, as I talk with brilliant and generous artists who are at the top of their fields about these same issues – Amber Tamblyn, Victoria Chang, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Daniel Handler, and Maggie Smith. Together their work spans multiple genres, from fiction to essay to memoir to poetry, as well as other disciplines.

In the conversations that follow this one, we’ll pick up the conversation I’m hoping I’ll establish in this first, personal session. I’ll talk with each artist about their own creative struggles and successes, and they’ll similarly share what they have learned about how to stay creative. You will have plenty of time to ask them questions in the sessions as well. I want you to leave this course – and, if you’re so inclined – the whole series, with renewed energy, and plenty of creative strategies to try, as well as with confidence that you can continue to find your own solutions to the inevitable challenges posed by a full and busy and challenging life. 

Please join me, right from the start!

-Matthew Zapruder