THE STORY SPOT

Creativity Expert Sir Ken Robinson explains how we grow out of creativity via our global educational mores rather than into it. As Sir Ken says, “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” Another fascinating and entertaining talk brought to you by TED, my new best friend.

And while you’re at it, you may want to give his books a read:

Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative

Arts in Schools

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity? on TED

Crossposted today on Canuck Out of Water

Novelist Amy Tan takes a look at her personal sources of creativity. It’s lengthy at 22 minutes (as if that matters) but entirely endearing and great fodder for the grey matter. But Amy, let’s try to make friends with PETA, shall we?

“Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide?” on TED.com

Recently, the always-insightful Michael Silverblatt interviewed Pulitzer-winner Geraldine Brooks, author of a new work of fiction, People of the Book.

They discussed the possible prevention of great cultural loss in the future as has been in the past. I wanted to transcribe this for you, as I find it to be most eloquent:

I think it comes down to whether or not we can bring people to appreciate that what unites us is greater than what divides us.

We don’t have a really good track record over the centuries. We make these wonderful multicultural societies from time to time and when we make them, they turn out to be the prosperous ones and the creative ones and they’re the ones that move the ball forward with human knowledge.

But then we have this fear of otherness that comes up and smashes them over and over again and then you’re left with something harrowed and sterile and monocultural. Just as monocultures aren’t healthy for agriculture they’re not so healthy for human culture either.

True and true.

Keep reading brazenly and doing so in public.

Geraldine Brooks on Bookworm, March 13, 2008
More on Geraldine Brooks
Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm on Santa Monica-based KCRW

“There is a disbelief in our culture that writing, or the creation of any art, is actually work.”
– Betsy Lerner in The Forest for the Trees.

The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers at Amazon