Seeking Creative Freedom
A Review of The Release: Creativity and Freedom After the Writing Is Done by Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew (Skinner House, 2024)
by Lory Widmer Hess
“Creative freedom originates within; it is responsive to the world but never beholden to it. When we’re creative, we’re nimble and relational rather than clinging and possessive.” — Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew, The Release
216 pp., paperback, $20
October 1, 2024
Skinner House
ISBN: 9781558969285
When my first book was released this year, I expected it would be an occasion for celebration. And I did experience joy and fulfillment, but also found myself at times feeling sad, disappointed, and insecure. I felt uncertain and reluctant about the efforts I ought to be doing to promote my book, as I struggled to cope with an unexpected inner conflict for which I could find no outer cause. Wasn’t I happy with what I’d accomplished? What was the matter with me?
Fortunately, before too many months had passed I got my hands on an advance copy of Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew’s new book, The Release: Creativity and Freedom After the Writing Is Done. I knew I could trust Andrew as a writing teacher because one of her earlier books, Writing the Sacred Journey, had been instrumental in my venturing toward publication at all. Her encouragement to write for myself first, before worrying about audience, along with her faith in the sacredness of the writing process itself, helped get me past the self-critical barriers that had stopped me before. I could relax more into the practice of writing as discovery, while staying mindful that truth-telling can be painful and requires self-care. These and many other valuable insights helped keep me oriented through the time of writing, revising, submitting, and editing my book.
But now it seemed I was in for a new challenge, one that was quite different from those of the generative and revision stages in writing. Once my book was finished, it needed to be released into the world, as a grown child needs to leave home and live their own life. I was facing that challenge as well, with a son on the cusp of adulthood, and I knew how difficult that was, how unmapped the territory. How could I best support my offspring, whether literal or literary, in the next steps of their journey, while letting go of the egotism that kept me feeling clingy and possessive? How could I release my unmet cravings for confirmation or security or any other irrelevant concern, as the work entered a new phase?
The first thing I learned from The Release was that I am not alone. Many authors find themselves struggling with uncomfortable feelings upon releasing work. But these feelings don’t get much useful attention, as the general attitude is that by the release stage it’s time to market a finished product. Writers are supposed to be selling their work, not dealing with insecurity, fear, and other unprocessed emotions. So those feelings get swept aside, in favor of a positive attitude that might be good for business but doesn’t help the writer’s soul.
There is also the conflict many writers feel about work they are unable to publish for one reason or another. When publication is equated with validation and worthiness, not-publishing equals failure. I’d struggled with those feelings as well, regarding pieces I’d written that remained unpublished. Some I’d held back because they might threaten fragile personal relationships, while others kept getting rejected when I did send them out. A frustrated, disturbed sense of incompleteness lingered around these pieces. This, too, is a common experience, but is also not much discussed, probably because of the sense of shame attached to not-publishing.
Andrew gently unpacks the feelings that surround both sides of the issue — the work we release to the public and the work we don’t — reframing the dilemma by focusing our attention on writing as gift. All true creators know that something beyond their narrow, ordinary ego-self has to get involved in the process, if their work is to come to life. This is the gift we experience in the generative phase, and revision is an effort to make what we’ve received even clearer, more refined, more true to itself. But what happens to this gift, this living force, when the work is done? Is it now only a matter of making a physical object into an item of monetary exchange?
When publication is equated with validation and worthiness, not-publishing equals failure.
No, Andrew asserts, taking inspiration from ideas about the gift economy, which provide an alternative to our usual competitive, scarcity-driven capitalist model of thinking. The gift still needs us to attend to it in the release phase, and releasing work does not necessarily mean publishing it. Gifts need to move, and the question of the release is how to best move the gift — whether it’s out into the world, or into and through the writer’s own soul and heart. Whether a piece of writing is published or not, and whatever its reception, we can be certain that the process of creating it has changed the writer. And our being, how we stand in the world, how we relate to others, is in a sense the Great Work of which our written output is just an offshoot. Creativity doesn’t stop once the writing is done, because we are in a constant state of creation ourselves.
This insight brought relief to my discomfort, on both sides. With my published book, I could see how I had hoped it would work some magic on certain relationships in my life, instantly transforming them, and when that hadn’t happened, I was disappointed. But that was simply not the gift this book (nor, most likely, any book) had to offer. Now I could release those unreasonable expectations and consider what my book’s gift really was, and how best to move it onward to the readers who would be receptive to it.
With my unpublished writing, whether it ever found a public audience or not, I knew for certain that it had changed me, brought me closer to truth, strengthened me for life challenges that required patient endurance along with faith in the creative heart of life. And that was a gift indeed.
It’s important to note that viewing writing as a gift does not mean giving work away for free. A principle of the gift economy is that gifts are not free; they create relationship and involve responsibility. But we do need to acknowledge alternative forms of value, which may sometimes outweigh monetary compensation. The Release offers a number of examples of writers who kept faith with the value of their work in surprising or innovative ways, from one writer buying back books from a publisher to regain creative control, to another forming a friendship with an editor who had repeatedly rejected his stories.
Creative ways of releasing work without conventional publishing are also manifold: writing a haiku on the back of an envelope containing your church collection money, for example, or recording a bedtime story for a child that then gets nightly play for months or years. An audience of one is still an audience, even if it’s only yourself. Coming into right relationship — with one’s creative self, and with the others who share our journey through life — is ultimately the most reliable sign of a healthy cycle of generating, revising, and releasing work.
From a spiritual point of view, our very existence in this world is a gift; the question is how each one of us can take in, experience, transform, and give it back from our unique standpoint of self-consciousness. As we become aware of that reality, our self-importance starts to take its proper place in the whole, soothing the egotism that pricks and burns our souls. It’s not that our ego is unimportant, but it needs to locate itself within a larger process. The concept of the gift — writing as gift, life as gift — helps us to do that, and The Release is a valuable guide along the way.
Andrew enters into her exploration by describing her own painful experience of a release gone wrong, a novel she hoped would make a splash in the literary world. She found an agent, they shopped the book around, but nobody wanted it — until, as they were about to give up, the last publisher on their list nibbled. Andrew felt uneasy about this publisher, but she signed the contract anyway, and suffered through the results of the mismatch, which extended to disturbances of her physical and mental health.
Coming into right relationship — with one’s creative self, and with the others who share our journey through life — is ultimately the most reliable sign of a healthy cycle of generating, revising, and releasing work.
Looking back, she was able to learn much from that difficult time, and her candid sharing of the mistakes she made, as well as her feelings of guilt and anxiety, demonstrates how honestly engaging with adverse emotions and events can be a valuable source of growth. This is itself an example of writing as a spiritual practice, a path toward personal transformation. When we have the honesty and humility to admit we are in need of change, and view our writing as both an expression of and a tool in that process of change, rather than a protective shield for our untransformed self-image, then the work can really begin. By letting us into her own process, which involved struggle and sacrifice, Andrew reassures us that our struggles are not meaningless.
The book is organized in two parts. The first half is a survey of the principles of a healthy release, including a consideration of the hazards involved, and pointers to orient writers toward “flourishing in creation’s gift economy.” The second half is composed of short chapters that go over the same material from the viewpoint of how to put it into practice, with chapter titles including “Identify Your Longings,” “Grieve,” “Celebrate,” “Trace the Life of Your Audience,” “Receive the Gifts of Failure,” and “Ask.” As a foundation for practice, we are invited to “accept desire, unwrap it, and attend to it rather than dash off in a frantic attempt to deny or satisfy it.” This becomes a healthy way of engaging with the longing that drives us to write, with “desire’s holy dimension,” defined as “our human need to be part of something bigger than us, to participate in some way; to contribute goodness, knowledge, or beauty to some larger conversation.” Only such an orientation toward holiness and wholeness can soothe the cravings that arise from partial satisfaction and incomplete release.
Abundant exercises, questions for reflection, and suggestions for cultivating contemplation and discernment are offered, to be taken up as the reader finds them relevant and useful. These take up Andrew’s assertion that creativity does not stop once the active writing on a project is done, encouraging us to keep our imaginations active and open to possibility. Such creativity can take a variety of forms. For example, in a chapter about “Orienting the Heart,” there’s a suggestion for readers to write a love letter to their project, to describe how that love will continue to be cultivated, even to actually write vows. But if that’s too over-the-top for you, there’s also a suggestion to more prosaically “identify your fuel-source” and reflect on what energy drove your writing. Nothing is required, no “rules” are prescribed, but an abundance of suggestions are offered as a banquet from which readers can choose what is most nourishing for their own soul and writing practice.
Although Andrew addresses writers because those are the artists she knows best, the principles she discusses are surely relevant to all kinds of creative endeavor, and I hope they’ll reach a wide audience. The creative life is hard enough without our giving ourselves more pain than we have to.
I know I’ll be using The Release as a manual for my own practice, and I look forward to bringing its gift into my life and work, its orientation toward joy, abundance, and gratitude. I’m grateful for this book, a true work of love, for shedding light on how the love which is our deepest inspiration can be freed up in all stages of creation, moving through us into the world. That’s a release we can all celebrate.
Lory Widmer Hess lives with her family in Switzerland, where she works with adults with developmental disabilities and recently completed a training in Spiritual Direction. She is the author of When Fragments Make a Whole: A Personal Journey Through Healing Stories in the Bible (Floris, 2024). Visit her website at enterenchanted.com.
