Thank you to Joseph Carrabis and RoundTable 360°

March 28th, I was invited to participate in a Roundtable 360° discussion about creativity and the imagination. Joseph Carrabis and other creative personalities from music, art, theater, and writing wanted to answer the question have you ever wondered what makes creative people creative? 

Each participant in the round had their own perspective about what makes creative people creative. 

Summary

Being with a group of talented people - regardless of their chosen media - and listening to them discuss their work, how their work choice has shaped their lives, their goals for their work, et cetera, has been a dream of mine since my college years.

Now that dream has a name and place - RoundTable 360°. We get together the last Thursday of each month, share how our disciplines have shaped and changed us, and explore how one discipline can inform another. For example: What can authors learn about setting scenes from photographers? What can dancers learn from painters about expression?

What do you think? Is everyone creative in their own special way? Left brain or right brain, it doesn't really make a difference? Architects are creative with specs and drawings of a building. Biologists are creative in developing new methods to research cells and diseases. Artists are creative in how they use color and geometry to create paintings. 

Humanity sets itself apart from the animal kingdom by being creative for entertainment and developing a culture.

Creative people have to learn to shut off the outside world and cultivate their inner stirrings. The present moment is the time that supports the creative function. 

It was a nice talk. I enjoyed the informal debate and dialogue between the Roundtable members. I even got to throw in my two cents worth. 

If you would like to be a participant, then please contact Joseph Carrabis. 

Thank you for inviting me!

Have a great and creative day.

_____

Undawnted's DL Mullan, can be booked for your online Blog Tour, Book Event, Book Review (w/ARC), Interview, Writing Conference, or Genre Convention. Ms. Mullan has years of experience in public speaking, readings, presentations, events, and tours.

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Should We Cite Creativity with Mental Illness Labels?

A friend posted an article on Facebook about Highly Creative people being ADHD.  

i am highly creative and could identify with the list of attributes creative people have: not finishing projects, procrastination as a tool,and so on. 

What irked me is that we have labeled a creative process as a Mental Illness.  ADHD has been used to place children on psychotropic drugs, dismiss people, and make creativity a problem instead of an asset. 

With my creative quirks, I have had to learn to plan and budget my time. What gets done, gets done. Play time has to wait until I am done with important chores. I am on and off blogging due to my health problems as well as daily life can sometimes interfere. 

My elderly cat has been ill so giving him medicine, probiotics, and hand feeding him has been the priority over almost everything else for the last two weeks. 

For those people on the high spectrum of the creative pendulum, if we are raised to be self aware and understand how to cope with spurts of creative energy, the lows, and daily life, then we can become a very intuitive, mature inventor of ideas, creations, and life. 

The only reason ADHD was defined was to control creative energy in the classroom and home instead of allowing that energy to positively transform life. Not everyone is created to sit and be still, watch TV, or play video games. 

Some of us are born to change the world, one idea, painting, poem, or story at a time.  

So the next time the authorities want to label something that is perfectly natural, just remember what they do NOT want labeled and call it safe. I rather know what is in my food so I can choose to avoid mad scientist tech corporation syndrome than to label a child or person simply because their process is different.

If we have become too rigid as a society to be effective unless highly creative people are medicated, then we are all in big, big trouble.

Danger, Will Robinson.

So the moral to the story is let kids be kids, within the realm of common sense. Label your food, not your children.

Isn't it our lives anyway? 

Have a great and wonderful day!