Life & Creativity Coaching
This is my invitation to you: Come and talk about the life you want to have and the work you want to create. We will work together to make your visions real.
Sessions may include discussion of such issues as:
creative aspirations and creativity blocks
the isolation of the artist’s life
resistance, rejection, recognition, comparison, envy, and other artistic perplexities
work-family-creativity balance
life transitions
child-rearing and parenting
sandwich generation challenges: caring for elders, children, and partners, while trying to do one’s creative work
During the life coaching-creativity advising sessions, I provide, according to each person’s need: close listening, mentoring, structure, assignments, writing instruction, writing exercises, art-making activities—or a blend of them all.
LIFE COACHING & CREATIVITY ADVISING
I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour’s writing is tonic. I’m on my feet, running in circles, yelling for a clean pair of spats.
-Ray Bradbury
Creating is bliss. It offers deep satisfaction and the purest and most dependable joy. On the other hand, sometimes being a person with an urge to create can be extremely challenging. The work itself may be frustrating and elusive, and it is often difficult to hold to a life structure that includes time for the creative work we most want to do. All sorts of things can get in the way.
As a creative person—a writer—I have led a life full of passionate interests and the need to translate experience into words. It has been the typical artist’s life: that is, a voyage into unknown seas, undulating with deep troughs and swelling crests—a mix of satisfying, hard work; frustration, disappointment, and struggle; and exhilaration. There have been long passages through calm waters, nights of fierce tempests, and deadening doldrums—and blissful days when the sailing is brisk, the wind at my back, and the sea and sky seem huge and bright and new, and full of limitless possibility.
As a writing instructor, trained as a social worker, psychotherapist, and human development specialist, I have advised and mentored writers and other creative people for many years. One of the things I enjoy most is to help people be creative, live creative lives, and bring out their creative work—in the midst of the inevitable obstacles life throws at us all. Talk with an experienced professional, trained to listen well, and who understands the travails of the artist, can help writers, artists, and others of a creative bent to keep going—to live the sort of life they want to live and to bring forth the work they’ve been put on this earth to create. Conversation itself is a precious thing: thoughtful, focused talk about your life and art can be healing, inspiring, and galvanizing—and key to getting your creative work done.
In my work as a life coach and creativity adviser, I am flexible in terms of session lengths and frequency. We can meet as frequently as needed to help you fulfill your goals.
Advisory sessions may be in person, by phone, or by Skype.
To schedule a session, contact me at sara@sarataber.com.
There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you in all time, the expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares to other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours, clearly and directly, to keep the channels open.
-Martha Graham to Agnes DeMille
You may enjoy these resources I've linked to below.
BOOKS ON WRITING
EXCELLENT BASIC TEXTS
Carolyn Forché & Philip Gerard, WRITING CREATIVE NONFICTION: Instruction and Insights from the teachers of the Associated Writing Programs
Julie Checkoway, CREATING FICTION: Instruction and Insights from teachers of the Associated Writing Programs
David Jauss, WORDS OVERFLOWN BY STARS: Creative Writing Instruction and Insight from the Vermont College of Fine Arts M.F.A. Program
Brenda Miller & Suzanne Paola, TELL IT SLANT: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction
Robert L. Root & Michael Steinberg, THE FOURTH GENRE: Contemporary
Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction
OTHER GENERAL BOOKS ON CREATIVE WRITING
Robert Pack & Jay Parini (Eds.), WRITERS ON WRITING
Brenda Ueland, IF YOU WANT TO WRITE: A Book About Art, Independence, and Spirit
Willian Zinsser, ON WRITING WELL
William Stafford, WRITING THE AUSTRALIAN CRAWL: Views on the Writer’s Vocation
Will Blythe, WHY I WRITE: Thoughts on the Craft of Fiction
Christopher Vogler, THE WRITER’S JOURNEY: Mythic Structure for Writers
Anne Lamott, BIRD BY BIRD
BOOKS ON MEMOIR WRITING
Sue William Silverman, FEARLESS CONFESSIONS: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir
Tristine Rainer, YOUR LIFE AS STORY
Judith Barrington, WRITING THE MEMOIR: From Truth to Art
Patricia Hampl, I COULD TELL YOU STORIES: Sojourns in the Land of Memory
Lisa Dale Norton, SHIMMERING IMAGES: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir
William Zinsser, INVENTING THE TRUTH: The Art and Craft of Memoir
Vivian Gornick, THE SITUATION AND THE STORY: The Art of Personal Narrative
BOOKS ON ESSAY WRITING
Phillip Lopate, THE ART OF THE PERSONAL ESSAY
Joyce Carol Oates, THE BEST AMERICAN ESSAYS OF THE CENTURY
John D’Agata, THE NEXT AMERICAN ESSAY
BOOKS ON LITERARY JOURNALISM
Jon Franklin, WRITING FOR STORY: Crafting Scenes of Dramatic Nonfiction
Norman Sims & Mark Kramer (Eds.), LITERARY JOURNALISM
Norman Sims, THE LITERARY JOURNALISTS
Kevin Kerrane & Ben Yagoda, THE ART OF FACT: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism
BOOKS ON FICTION WRITING
Wallace Stegner, ON TEACHING AND WRITING FICTION
Raymond Obstfeld, NOVELIST’S ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO CRAFTING SCENES
Jesse Lee Kercheval, BUILDING FICTION: How to Develop Plot and Structure
Ansen Dibell, PLOT
James Moffet & Kenneth R. McElheny, POINTS OF VIEW
John Gardner, THE ART OF FICTION
Thaisa Frank & Dorothy Wall, FINDING YOUR WRITER’S VOICE
Ursula LeGuin, STEERING THE CRAFT: Exercises and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew
BOOKS ON PUBLISHING
Betsy Lerner, THE FOREST FOR THE TREES: An Editor’s Advice to Writers
Susan Rabiner & Alfred Fortunato, THINKING LIKE YOUR EDITOR: How to Write Great Serious Nonfiction—and Get it Published
Susan Page, THE SHORTEST DISTANCE BETWEEN YOU AND A PUBLISHED BOOK: 20 Steps to Success.
Annik LaFarge, THE AUTHOR ONLINE: A Short Guide to Building Your Website, Whether You Do It Yourself (and you can!) or You Work With Pros