Creative Wordshops December Newsletter 2025

The aim of every artist is to arrest motion, which is life by artificial
means, and hold it fixed so that 100 years later, when a stranger looks
at it, it moves again. (Faulkner)

The Apple and the Egg

This December I wish to share and respond to Irwin Yalom’s Staring at the Sun (2008). A book to contemplate. I read it a decade ago, reread this week. His dedication reads, ‘to my mentors who ripple through me to my readers.’
enjoy meeting his mentors, the thinkers who inform his work all the way from Gilgamesh.
(‘Sorrow enters my heart, I am afraid of death.’) through Pascal, Dostoevsky,
Schopenhauer, Theroux, Rinpoche and and…

He writes. ‘The act of writing feels like renewal. I love the act of creation, from the first glimmering of an idea to the final manuscript. I find the sheer mechanics to be a source of pleasure. I love the carpentry of the writing process, finding the perfect word, sanding and burnishing rough sentences, tinkering with the tiktoks of phrase and sentence cadence. ‘

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