Resources + Reading

You have the rest of your life to do the reading.
—Joseph Campbell, to a student who complained that the reading list on his syllabus was too long.

This page collects recommended books, essays, resources, and tools to support your creative practice. Nothing here is required. Use what serves you.

Seminal Books for Creative Practice

Books are, for me, a salve.

I don’t read like normal people. I develop an enduring attachment to a particular book if its insights guide me to what feels like the underlying nature of things. I’ll read and re-read, earmark and return to passages, more like scripture than just a regular old book that you read once and put back on the shelf.

While my reading style can be a little obsessive (and slow — and getting even slower as I age), there’s a contemplative quality to reading this way. It’s served me well. It is, I believe, the style of reading Joseph Campbell was advocating to his students. Reading as an extended relationship with seminal (if not sacred) texts, not as a transaction of extraction and/or accomplishment. As a meditation.

Here, then, are some of the seminal books I have shared my life with. They have helped me immensely as I try to develop the mindset of writing more mindfully.

On Creativity & Sensitivity

The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You and The Highly Sensitive Child by Elaine Aron

Essential reading if you suspect your Creative Spirit is best understood as a highly sensitive child (which it probably is).

Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Five Minds for the Future by Howard Gardner

Gardner pioneered the theory of Multiple Intelligences — linguistic, logical/mathematical, kinesthetic, spatial, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, environmental, and spiritual. His work validates the many ways people are gifted and the importance of developing specific aptitudes rather than forcing everyone into narrow academic molds.

The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything by Sir Ken Robinson

Four questions: Do you get it? Are you good at it? Do you want it? Where is it? This book is about finding your element and why that process is crucial for all of us, not just high school students.

The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis Hyde

Gifts are for giving. Hyde argues that the free exchange of creative gifts is crucial for the health of any culture. By turning creativity into a commodity, we restrict the flow and growth of our collective imagination. As a letterpress print in my office says: “The essence of art is generosity.”

On Writing & Voice

Writing Without Teachers by Peter Elbow

Practical, accessible, accurate about how writing works. Elbow believed in student-writers finding their own authentic voices and using the writing process to develop ideas and better understand themselves. I’m an Expressivist.

Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke

Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I’m grateful for: patience is everything!

Not everybody is a poet. Not everybody wants to be a writer. But if you’re drawn to the Write Mindfulness Project, it’s probably because you can’t always (comfortably) live a “normal” life. That makes you and Rilke kindred spirits.

The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron

A (maybe the) classic guide to creativity and the creative process. If you haven’t read this, stop reading my work and go read Cameron’s first.

On Faith + Love + Openness

Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith by Anne Lamott

Also Bird by Bird, which is about writing, among other things. Really anything by her. It’s not so much what she writes about; it’s her voice. She presents the raw, sometimes ugly versions of herself, and while she kicks herself a lot, she’s pretty good at forgiving herself too. I’m not so good at forgiving myself, but I want to be better at it, so it helps to see how somebody else does it.

True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart by Thich Nhat Hanh

Your heart is open. Or it wants to be. But “open” and “awake” are slightly different things. This book — all his books — can encourage you towards that kind of openness. So open that even your hurts become the path to pure Love.

Just Kids by Patti Smith

Labors of love, true love, Big-Love. Love that transcends romance and circumstance. Even time. Also: Art. Smith is a rock-and-roll icon and a cracker-jack writer and thinker to boot.

On Risk + Adventure + Intensity

Man on Wire directed by James Marsh

Documentary about Philippe Petit walking a tightrope between the Twin Towers. For inspiration. Chill bumps. Tears come to my eyes every time Petit steps out on that wire. In conjunction with this, read Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann — a reminder that extraordinary things are always happening in the ordinary world below sky-high feats of derring-do.

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

After divorce and her mother’s death, Strayed hiked the Pacific Crest Trail alone — despite never really hiking before and maybe kinda-sorta trying to kick a heroin habit. A different kind of intensity than Petit’s, but complementary.

On Noticing + Drawing (Hope)

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

If you’re quiet by nature — if you’re a contemplative sort who listens more than you speak — the world needs you, and so does Susan Cain. This book might help you strategize your way into the fray.

Bento’s Sketchbook: How Does the Impulse to Draw Something Begin? by John Berger

Berger is a painter, writer, critic, farmer, and all-around bon vivant. If your talents are interdisciplinary, you’ll find inspiration in his work. This book offers a great model for a commonplace book and includes this essential wisdom about storytelling:

There are two categories of storytelling. Those that treat of the invisible and the hidden, and those that expose and offer the revealed… The heartfelt hopes, once exemplified in triumphant Hollywood stories, have now become obsolete and belong to another epoch. Hope today is a contraband passed from hand to hand and from story to story.

There may be no better expression of the animating spirit behind Write Mindfulness.

Books from Childhood

Beverly Cleary (Ramona books, Henry books), Judy Blume (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Then Again, Maybe I Won’t; Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing), Katherine Paterson (Bridge to Terabithia)

These books spoke directly to my experience as a neophyte on Planet Earth. They inspired me to read and re-read, and they made me want to write. Revisiting childhood books reacquaints us with something essential and vital, something perennially new. That is always a good thing. What were the books from your childhood that spoke to you in this way? Go read them again.

Writing Craft Resources

Essential Texts

Essays & Interviews

Newsletters & Ongoing Resources

Blog Posts from The Stream

On Pre-Writing

On Necessity

Submission & Publication Resources

What do you do with writing now that you’ve turned it into a thing? “Nothing” is a perfectly acceptable answer. But it’s also perfectly acceptable to search for an audience and to seek remuneration and accolades for your work.

Note: There are no affiliate links on this site. I strongly suggest using your local public library to access these books. My family also uses Thrift Books with good results.