creativity
unleashed opening the door to imagination.
by Gavin Ryan
You have a terrific life story – tell us about how you came to decide that you were an artist? It was just a calling. I had an impulse to write. I went to Georgetown University. They had a newspaper where they didn’t allow women to write. They wanted us to bake cookies! I didn’t like that and I wrote a manifesto calling for equality. This was back in 1966 and it was a very turbulent time in America between the sexes. I was responsible for starting a women’s group on campus and I started drawing cartoons and writing these feisty, fiery pieces and out of that came the impulse to keep writing. I had a wonderful professor named Roland Flint who didn’t have prejudice against women and I began writing poetry for him. The poems started getting published and that reinforced my calling.
Do you still feel strongly about feminism? I think The Artist’s Way has been a great teacher for me. That men suffer equally was not something I was brought up to believe. But when I started teaching creative unblocking, I found that men had as many difficulties as women. It did a lot to level the playing field. I would say that my habit of writing manifestoes is what lead me to writing The Artist’s Way. It was intended as a manifesto in favour of all artists, male or female.
You ended up married to Martin Scorsese and hanging out with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg before you’d all hit the big time. When I met Martin, I had been asked to write about him. Martin was directing Taxi Driver and he gave me the script to read and I thought it needed some tweaking and so I went ahead and tweaked. He shot my changes and they came out wonderfully and that was the beginning of my involvement with movies. I would say that I was very lucky to know the circle that I knew and I was very much in love with Martin and I subsequently fell in love with his work. This might seem old-fashioned, but when I married Martin, I felt it was my duty to be a helpmate. In this case, being a helpmate involved creativity.
You say that artists are inclined to help each other naturally rather than compete. I’ll give you a good example of this. Originally Schindler’s List was a Martin Scorsese script. Martin worked to shape the script and get the balance correct. Then he gave the script to Steven Spielberg. Not many people know that Martin was involved with that script. It was an act of great generosity and faith that he gave it to Steven and never said a word of this publicly.
photo: Robert Stivers
Julia Cameron is the creator of The Artist’s Way, a book which has inspired tens of thousands of artists to creatively unblock since its publication almost 25 years ago. Living in Santa Fe, New Mexico in an adobe house halfway up a mountain, surrounded by Piñon and Juniper trees, at 70 years of age she continues to write and teach and inspire. She tells us of her early years, her marriage to Martin Scorsese with whom she had a daughter (Domenica Cameron-Scorsese, who is about to release her first feature film as a director). She also talks about recovering from an alcohol problem and being guided on a spiritual path. I caught up with her while she was in New York on her way to teach a three day workshop in Massachusetts.