January’s book discussion will be Eric Maisel’s classic, Coaching the Artist Within: Advice for Actors, Visual Artists, and Musicians from America’s Foremost Creativity Coach.

Creativity Coaching Essentials shows people how to become more effective creators by guiding them through 12 self-coaching lessons. Eric Maisel, a leading creativity coach, writes each lesson with a novelist's flair, as a narrative complete with examples, exercises, and questions to help readers explore and reflect on underlying issues that may be keeping them from pursuing their urge to create. Topics include committing, planning and doing, generating mental energy, achieving a centered presence, becoming an anxiety expert, upholding your dream, and maintaining a creative life. Maisel has worked extensively with creative people — poets, filmmakers, novelists, dancers — and he revisits some of them in coaching sessions in San Francisco, Paris, London, and New York. Typical are the rock musician who wants to pursue a solo career and the screenwriter anxious to become a poet. Their examples both entertain and instruct, outlining how to discover one's personal muse — and the motivation to keep creating.

We invite creatives of all disciplines—not just the visual arts— to join us on Thursday, January 23, from 7-9 PM (tentative date) for what is sure to be a thoughtful discussion. This book is readily available in libraries and used books shops. Interested in the topic but haven’t read the book? Please come anyway. Your experiences as a creative will be enough of a prerequisite to join the conversation. Book discussions are free and open to the public. Location TBD.