Author: Janet Maher
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The Creative Process: Part 3
It was a bit shocking to see how long it’s been since I’ve updated my own website. As the webmaster for Artists’ Cooperative Gallery of Westerly, apart from quite actively living and accomplishing a good deal of new work in the studio this year, the months have been significantly devoted to getting that site up…
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The Creative Process, Part 2
[Note: Some sections have been cut from my 1994 essay and I have done some new editing in this section.] Many people are content with life as a day-to-day process with rules to follow and a regular pattern, largely determined by factors outside themselves. Employment is often a way that lives are structured, with the…
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The Creative Process, Part I
The work of opening boxes and creating out of their contents the last archive of my life continues. One of my recent finds was a paper I wrote twenty-eight years ago for a Philosophy class. I’ve decided to share some of it here only slightly edited, since I still abide by the thoughts I expressed…
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Unpacking My Library
Walter Benjamin famously wrote about his deeply felt and avid book collecting as he opened boxes to organize his books to place on shelves (a chapter in Illuminations, Schocken Books, 1969). Although he spoke lovingly of particular details about his collection that included memories of acquisition, his approach to collecting books seems to me to be…
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Downsizing
Several years ago I had the opportunity to visit the former homestead and studio buildings of one of my seminal undergraduate teachers. Once there I experienced the déjà vu memory of a field trip during a semester with him. Having become familiar with his work in the 70s, seeing it again in the 2000s cast…
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Bumbling Into Awareness
(Updated 6.14.20 at 11:56 a.m.)† (Updated 6.14.20 at 4:12 p.m.)†† While masses of individuals across the globe have been still enough to notice, much evil has been revealed. The virus that caused the shutdown of life as we knew it exposed the virus of systemic racism that has been running through American history since…
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Resilience
Wednesday night a beautiful new song by Wilco was aired on Stephen Colbert’s Late Night. Seeing Jeff Tweedy and all the band members in their homes, most with partners and children, gave me an entirely new appreciation for my brother’s favorite band. Tell Your Friends is set up on Bandcamp as a fundraiser for chef José…
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Creatives Rise to the Occasion
The past six decades in my experience of the United States included unusual, perhaps interesting, times. Seared into my memory are events that altered my future engagement with the world and the dreams I’d had when young. Each disturbing or tragic event taught me something I could not have learned as well or as deeply…
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Settling Into A Pandemic
It has been quite a long time since I began this fledgling blog. Perhaps its time has arrived. Like everyone else immersed in the COVID19 Pandemic I am trusting the process that will allow a constantly mutating virus* to die out – if people will pay attention to science and protect themselves from becoming host…
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The Still Point
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is. But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,…
Trusting the Process: Getting There From Here 