Pencil Dancing: New Ways to Spark Your Creative Spirit Book

The back cover of Pencil Dancing asserts that "there is a creative genius within you." Chapter titles include "Going into Your Egg," "Wake Up and Notice the Fuzz on the Rose Petals," and "The Value of Being Weird." The book's author, Mari Messer, leads workshops on creativity, writing, and art, and she loves similes: she likes to think of creativity "as a seagoing vessel encrusted ... with barnacles"; she uses her writer's notebook like a net, "where I could catch a thought and preserve it like a butterfly under glass." She emphasizes the need both to break out of your shell and to build your own chrysalis. Her exercises include designing a coat of arms "to symbolize your vision" and molding in clay "an image of a person, animal or thing that represents your creative muse." She peppers her book with anecdotes from her life and those of her artist and writer friends, as well with quotations from the works of Betty Edwards, Alan Watts, and Ram Dass. She writes about creative visualization and taking "soul days." Pencil Dancing is clearly written to appeal to the spiritually inclined, though it does balance its New-Agey earnestness with a healthy dose of humor and some solid ideas on fostering creativity that will appeal to others as well. --Jane SteinbergRead More