I’m an over-thinker. That’s not exactly breaking news LOL, but here’s the thing: Despite people urging me to chill (sometimes in the comments of this blog 🙄), I’ve believed my whole life that overthinking is ultimately to my benefit. Yes, there’s a steep downside, but more often than I fall on my ass and slip off the edge, I successfully sort my shit out.
Know where that doesn’t work? Art making. Whether it’s the first draft of a poem or early lines on a sketchbook page, thinking gets in the way. That’s fairly fundamental and broadly accepted, and yet I forget it easily. And often. I regularly convince myself that thinking about writing or painting is creative progress.
It is not.
Yes, noodling on a problem with something I’ve already created/started can lead to solutions, but the real learning happens in the process of doing.
This month’s paintings in my sketchbook have hit it home: To progress, I need something physical to work with. And to make that happen, I have to trust something deeper than mental chatter. I have to trust the wisdom that lives in my body.
It’s been a month of lessons like that, and I’m grateful.
I’ve been exploring power lines and utility poles (enough to nearly fill up a sketchbook and soon to flow over into a second sketchbook) and gathering reference photos.
Focusing on one theme has been intentional — a way to create the kind of momentum and excitement that fuels a regular practice. Painting more regularly (instead of thinking about painting) has not only accelerated accumulation of sketchbook pages, which delights me, but also revealed so much about my inner dialogue and how it relates to my process.
Here are just a few observations:
- I’ve been hanging onto some black and white thinking as an artist. Specifically, that I was either talented or worthless and that each piece of art I made was “proof” of one or the other. No wonder I felt so much pressure! I’m guessing the stark “talented or worthless” thinking is a remnant from my 1980s gifted and talented programming. Wild to discover at age 52 that there is a vast middle ground and that not everything I make reveals or exposes me! Important to understand that black and white thinking as an artist is entirely unhelpful.
- So if “ugly” drafts/sketches aren’t assessments of my worth, what are they? They’re information. They’re teachers. They’re showing me the technical things I need to work out. They point to skills I need to practice before I’ll be ready to fully execute. It’s about more than technique, too; it’s about experimenting enough to know what treatment or approach might be most interesting to me. There’s no way to know ’til I try, and not every attempt is going to “work.”
- I’ve been wringing my hands about what success looks like for me with the art I’m making. It’s not the kind of thing people would purchase and hang over their fireplaces. It may not even be interesting to anyone but me. (I have a similar version of this fretting as it applies to poetry.) So, what am I going to do with it? Why even bother? But then it occurred to me recently as I painted a particularly weird spread in the sketchbook: I have to believe my own pleasure is worth it.
These insights may seem obvious to some, but they are especially momentous for me. I think I’ve examined them intellectually on previous occasions. But these are now in my body, like muscle memory. They were earned by doing not thinking.
As my creative coach Christine Evans has been telling me, the thinking brain leads with a finished concept, and that’s extremely limiting. Only when setting that aside and playing do we open to more possibility than we can imagine. And ever since she helped me see it, the universe has been reinforcing it.
Here’s just two of the messages that have come my way in recent weeks:
- “Some students avoid experimentation and play, because they don’t want to ‘waste time.’ Others have the problem of trying to finish every painting within a single session, as if an unfinished piece means the time spent was worthless. But here’s the truth: art isn’t about finishing — it’s about growing. When we rush, we rob ourselves of discovery. We don’t allow ideas to evolve, take unexpected turns, or deepen over time. We don’t nurture those tiny, quiet sparks that could grow into something truly exciting. If we never give ourself permission to explore, how can we ever stumble upon something new? So many artists believe their job is to complete paintings. But I truly believe that’s the least interesting part of the process. The minute a painting is finished, it loses its magic for me. That magic happens in the curiosity, the layering, the problem-solving, and the risks. Yes I finish paintings – that happens naturally when you’re not pushing it – but finishing is never the focus of my attention. Learning is.” / SOURCE: An email newsletter from artist Louise Fletcher
- “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind, there are few.” / SOURCE: Shunryü Suzuki Roshi, quoted in an email from Emily Mohn-Slate’s Be Where You Are Substack
It’s all still a work in progress, but I’m excited by what my utility pole/power line series is teaching me. ❤️
I’ll end here with my notes about — and some photos from — March’s activities, which included a DIY writing retreat in Rochester with Sarah Freligh. (Remember, if this kind of thing doesn’t interest you, feel free to skip it.)
MARCH 2025 WRITING
- Completed 15 free writes (paused intentionally mid-month)
- Typed up all remaining drafts from the August 2024 micro-a-day challenge
- Re-surfaced 12-15 old poems to revisit
- Revised two old poems
- Participated in biweekly workshop with fellow poets via Zoom
MARCH 2025 ART-MAKING
- Started my second “line of inquiry” sketchbook (exploration for a series of paintings) and completed 17 spreads in it.
- Painted a portrait of my husband while he painted a portrait of me for a fun at-home date night.
MARCH 2025 BLOGGING
I’m really excited about how the blog is doing. Through March, it already has more traffic than in all of 2023 and more than half of 2024. It’s earning more than 250 views each day and appearing in the #1 slot on search engine results pages for a number of poetry terms. I have no benchmarks for how poetry blogs perform decades after their heyday, but I’m happy with how it’s doing. Mostly, I’m thrilled that the resources I’m creating are valuable and inspiring. Thank you to everyone who cheers me on and shares links.
Here’s what I accomplished this month to keep it going:
- Tended SEO (March 2025 saw all-time highs of views/visitors)
- Completed a post re-capping February’s creative life
- Finished and published a resource with 40 examples of anaphora in poetry
- Finished and published my fifth installment of 30 poems for NaPoWriMo
MARCH 2025 INSPIRATION & ADMIN
(I could have placed these under their respective art or writing categories, but I’m trying to be honest about if I’m consuming inspiration more than I’m doing the work.)
- Daily Morning Pages
- DIY writing retreat (pictured below) in Rochester with Sarah Freligh
- Sandi Hester YouTube videos: Sketchbook tour, drawing skills
- A Google doc (with many sections) as a “hub” for creative life and creative growth (an attempt to bring notes, to-do’s and inspiration into one spot so I can use them/act on them vs. having everything scattered and lost)
- Sandi Hester’s Abstracted Still Life class
- Artist’s dates in Albany and Saratoga with Jill Crammond (At the Albany date, we founded “The Wheel of Fortune Writing/Art Residency,” which is our name for making an effort to identify “wasted” time/dead air in our schedules and use it for creative projects instead. It’s name comes from the Wheel of Fortune half hour after the news when I’d realize I was still on the couch… and calling out letters.)
- “Art Juice” podcast on developing ideas (episode 277 with Sally-Anne Ashley)
- Translated some of the art inspiration I’ve saved on Instagram into tasks/lessons for upcoming practice
MARCH 2025 READING
- Poetry: Seven collections
- Fiction: The Life Impossible (a novel) by Matt Haig and Orbital by Samantha Harvey
- Nonfiction: Read and commented on a memoir drafted by a friend and started The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin
MARCH 2025 PUBLICATIONS
- Still zero; still not submitting
- Updated notes on upcoming lit mag deadlines
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