Julia Margaret Cameron

Julia Cameron, author, film director, dramatist, theologian, teacher and poet, came from an artistic family where experimentation with imagination and art opened her early to play creatively and to learn through her own experiences. At the age of 18, she was working as a journalist, and has writing credits for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times as well as The Chicago Tribune. Much of her work related to the arts, and she also wrote for New York magazine and Rolling Stone, covering the Watergate incident in a series of columns for them. Her stories have appeared in Vogue, Mademoiselle, Redbook, Cosmopolitan and Ladies Home Journal. She has been a contributing editor to American Film magazine for more than a decade.

But Julia Cameron’s life was not always trouble free. She fell early into the trap of seeing herself as a suffering artist, and when, some years later she realized she had to stop drinking in order to write sober and stop throwing away her life on spastic bits of unblocked writing, she discovered the key to unblocking the imagination and the creative flow. Face the page and do it, she told herself. You can.

Retreating in a New Mexico hideaway at the time, Cameron knew there must be a way to find out what she should and could be doing with her talents. She began writing a few pages every day into a journal, and soon discovered characters and plots evolving from those pages. Within a short time, she had written a novel. Other works—poetry, do-it-yourself books, even musicals—followed. The kind of wisdom Julia Cameron teaches, that borne of personal experience is the most convincing kind.

Her first non-fiction book, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, evolved from her creativity class notes, and has achieved bestseller fame, continuing to rate high sales—over one million--over the past eight years. In it, creative types, or would-be creatives, follow a process of opening up their imaginations and inner creative powers. God, or the Creative Impulse, for those who prefer to think of the deity that way, plays a major role, and readers are advised to attend to what that divine voice is saying, especially through techniques such as the morning pages and artist dates, times Cameron refers to as “Filling the well” of creativity. On these dates, the artist should spend time fostering their own imaginative powers by, for example, walking through art galleries, playing with fabrics, painting or dancing, listening to music of many sorts—restoring, in other words, the creative juices that sometimes seem to have run dry.

Following the chapters in The Artist’s Way, readers progress through stages of developing honesty and into the innermost creative selves. Most find tremendous success in uncovering or beefing up creative talents, partly because many of us have submerged our own creativity when it was not approved of in the home or school, or we lacked courage to “try”, and based our lives on other people’s gifts instead. She cites literary agents and editors, therapists, art critics, and more, as those who possibly have denied their own gifts, and focused their lives on those of others.

The artist child within each of us needs paying attention to, the author insists. The early impulse to create through paint or words, clay or music is so often stilled in us that nothing less than neuroses and trauma in life could follow. These instincts need to be freed, we need to give ourselves permissionto play, to play with blocks, and paper, dance steps and violin music—whatever we hunger for in the realm of expression.

For we are all creatives, Julia Cameron insists, and all we need is to unlock the well of creativity within—with tender loving self-guidance and redirected energies. The stories and anecdotes with which she peppers the pages of Artist’s Way are inspiring and paradigmatic. And the proof of her own ongoing creative urges are evidenced in her expanding corpus, such as The Vein of Gold, a follow-up book which deepens the approach of The Artist’s Way, The Right to Write, and books of poems, prayers and a musical located in Ireland. Partnered with her companion Mark Bryan, she has also produced The Money Drunk, and The Artist’s Way at Work: Riding the Dragon, a book and a workshop to guide those in interpersonal settings which may be hampering their creative styles and outputs.

Her workshops continue to be offered in many venues. She herself has taught her method at The Smithsonian, The New York Times, Omega, Esalin, the Open Center, Interface, Wisdom House and many others. As an outgrowth of her books and theories, other Artist’s Way workshops and creativity groups have formed across the United States and other far corners of the Americas, from the jungles of Panama to the Outback of Australia.

As if in verification of her philosphy of life, there is apparently no limit to what the creative brain of Julia Cameron can achieve. Her inspiration seems to come at least to some degree from the C. G. Jung quote she features in the Artist’s Way: “The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.” If we played more and droned on at work less, Julia Cameron asserts, our lives would be filled with color and vibrant sound, beautiful poetry and novels and and films that stir the heart and deepen the human soul.