Creatrix: she who makes

archetype of the Creatrix. I learned to embody her energies more fully – to work with her, rather than sacrifice myself at her altar.

She is one who has committed herself to exploring terrains little spoken of in our culture and mapping them for others to see.

We don’t make art because we have perfect lives or immense privilege. We create in order to live through the lives that have revealed themselves through us, because of, in spite of, the chaos, the confusion, the grief, the anger, the overwhelm, the terror, the trauma, the tragedy, the feeling of powerlessness. We cannot control much of what happens

How can we justify being continually broke because we refuse to get a ‘proper job’?

In order to create, we have to find ways to be comfortable in the void. This tends to involve keeping our bodies and hands busy whilst our psyche travels through this space, doing something that requires a degree of concentration: knitting, sewing, cleaning, sorting materials, exercising, driving…tasks that novelist Kate Atkinson describes as “mind

This is the legacy that creative women – even in the twenty-first century – have inherited. This is the education – conscious and unconscious – that we received: not seeing people like us creating things that speak to our souls in ways that reflect our experiences, our feelings, our bodies.

Our culture teaches us about Art as a commodity, and celebrity as something that goes along with it. It has little to teach about creativity, the lived process, the reality…

All of us have to learn how to invent our lives, make them up, imagine them. We need to be taught these skills; we need guides to show us how. Without them, our lives get made up for us by other people. Ursula le Guin

Since then I have written lots more books and started a publishing company more aligned with my own vision: one that celebrates women’s creativity, supports them emotionally as they launch their work, pays them fairly and promotes them sustainably.