Creative Community Encourages Creative Living

By Carol Woolum Roberts

Having a creative community is an important part of living a creative life.

I love meeting on a regular basis with others to share my creativity with them and have them share with me.  I wrote this in our last week’s Weekend Watering newsletter that is emailed to our email subscribers.

Creative Communities have always been an important part of my life.

I love being around people to encourage them in their creative pursuits.

When I look over the past 30 years or so of my life, I have participated or started, or helped start a lot of creative communities.

When I lived in Meridian, I was one of the founding members of the Idaho Christian Writers group in Boise.  (I am not sure that was exactly the name, but that is close!!)

When I moved to Kellogg, I started Canyon Creek Creatives.  This involved a group of women who got together monthly to do creative projects and share them with one another.  It was also a way for me to share my writing with the group and get feedback from them on the book I was (and am) writing.

I have been in a book group for twenty years, another kind of creative community, where we share our thoughts on the book, how it is written, as well as solving the world’s problems monthly.

For a few years my friend April and I gathered our friends from high school together once a month for Creative Mastermind Group.  The purpose was to do creative projects and activities each month.

Last fall I gathered five other women to go through the book “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron in 12 weeks.  When we were all done, we all clicked and loved each other’s company so much that we decided to meet once a month. We take turns each month overseeing the location, a meal and a creative activity.  In less than ten months we have become a safe space for sharing and growing creatively with one another.

And through Grow Me A Story, we have our Sacred Community Garden, an online creative community, designed to help share our creativity with one another and engage with one another.  Paul and I are still trying to figure out the best ways to do this and keep trying new ways to get members to engage with one another.  We love our Sacred Community Garden members and how they are progressing in their creativity.

Today I added another creative community to my list.  Paul and I and two other people have formed a writing group.  This came from having a Creativity Cultivating session with one of our Sacred Community Garden members and realizing a writing group would be a way to keep her motivated and have some accountability.  We talked to another writer friend of ours who we knew may be interested in being in a writing group, and she also was interested.  Today we met and did a seven minute free write together using a prompt.  We had all brought a piece of writing to share with one another.  Each of us read our writing to one another then got feedback. I know personally this is going to be a great way for me to keep up on my book writing, so I always have a new piece of writing to share each month.

If you are not a part of a creative community, I encourage you to start one yourself, or seek one out to join.  If you need help finding something, Paul and I are always glad to help.