Being a Creative Force with Melanie Hoopes

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Maintaining that connection to the creative spirit is an act of revolution because change comes through art. We're in an incredibly difficult, uncertain, changing environment right now, and things could also change in a positive way if we imagine it. - Melanie Hoopes

Lucia: Today we're having a conversation about reawakening our creative instincts. This boils down to reconnecting to our humanity in a time where there are so many forces creating more and more of a disconnect.

Melanie is extremely well qualified to have a conversation about creativity as she is a lifelong artist. Melanie makes plays, podcasts, and films. She was a writer on the Netflix show Bloodline and the creator of a long-running New York based episodic stage show, Lori Stanton's Sound Diet - a dark, modern twist on Prairie Home Companion.

She's the producer and host of Yesteryear Stories From Home, a podcast about the history of living on the Hudson River, and of POed, a podcast companion to the literary magazine. Melanie is also the drummer with the Go-Go's tribute band Hot Flash. She has lots to share about the vital need to stay connected to the thread, as she calls it, to our creative soul.

This is a conversation for anyone who might have gone through those deserts where you start to feel dry and uninspired and can't even remember the piece of you that used to feel that spark. This is about the small, subtle, profound ways we can tune back into that space and why it's necessary.

This is a period when so many people are walking through massive external and internal transformation. As much as this can feel like a very scary time, it's a time of great change. In that comes our opportunity to choose and to create. If you didn't identify as an artist before this podcast, by the end of it, I hope you'll see that being an artist, being creative, is really about a way of seeing that you can tune into, tune back into, or awaken to a totally new level. This conversation inspired me. I hope it inspires you, and keep on listening to lead.

Lucia: Welcome, Melanie, back to Listen to Lead. You are my first repeat guest. The last time Melanie was here, she was speaking about leadership storytelling. The reason I invited you back on the podcast today is you are one of my Success Circlers. Every now and then we'll jump on a call and do 30 minutes of coaching each.

The last time we spoke, I entered the call and started crying in three minutes, feeling like I had abandoned myself. All of my artistic instincts were dying, and I was no longer a fruitful garden - just feeling really dry and kind of depressed. You said to me, "Being an artist isn't a job, it's a state of being." I wanted you to come on to the podcast to speak to anyone who might be feeling that sense of being detached from their creativity and what you want to share in terms of how we can reconnect to that.

Melanie: That's a beautiful thing to talk about. My heart goes out to any artist who is not feeling like an artist at this moment. I feel you. When I was pregnant, one of my biggest fears was: will I ever make anything ever again besides this child? I happened to sit down feeling this strong feeling with my hands on my belly, and a woman sat down next to me and said she was a playwright. I asked her if she had children and she said yes. I said, "I'm really worried about this." She said, "It ebbs and flows, and all you have to do is just hold onto the thread, and when you can pull it down, everything will be there."

Holding onto the thread has always been this beautiful idea for me - to know that there really are these big deserts that you can get in, not of your own making, but sometimes just what the world brings to you can interrupt that channel. It comes from almost like this tube that goes up to the heavens and down to the core of the earth. All of our work as artists is trying to keep that channel clear. It is constant fostering, protecting, nurturing of your relationship to your creative self.

Lucia: You can have periods where you feel you're in the desert and life is presenting many other things that have nothing to do with your creative expression, and that's okay. But how do you keep yourself in that space? What are the practices that help you stay close to that thread?

I want to circle back and think about the word artist. There are people who listen to this podcast who might be in university settings or in industry. We all are artists in that we are creative, whether we intend it or unconsciously. We are constantly creating. I feel like it is a way of approaching our lives that's empowering and artful that makes one an artist.

Even people who are professional writers who write every day have trouble saying, "I'm an artist" sometimes. So how do you define artist?

Melanie: I feel like there's a responsibility that comes with being an artist, and it's about a practice. Don't tie it to financial success. Thank God I don't tie it to any kind of financial gauge where you have to make money by selling something that you created.

If you want to be comfortable calling yourself an artist, you have to have some discipline. That doesn't necessarily mean sitting in a chair every day at a certain time, but it means when you're starting to feel that connection of the creativity siphoning out, you work really hard to get back to a place of play, a place of wonder. How you do that is totally up to you.

To me, it's almost like an outlook. It's kind of a state of mind. I had a hard time calling myself an artist because I did tie it up to money and capitalism. But then when I really looked at what I spend the most time thinking about, it is making things and being amazed at things that other people or nature has made.

That outlook involves being in that creative process and also being inspired by the creativity around you.

Lucia: When you think about making that channel accessible for yourself, what are the things that have worked for you?

Melanie: Reading is a huge thing for me. Fiction, nonfiction, poetry. Seeing movies, documentaries. It's almost like consuming things can put you back into that world. Having conversations with people that can go really deep and hold difficult things. That's one of my favorite things - to know there are certain people in my life that can really dwell in uncertainty and pain and difficult areas and not try to back out of them immediately because it's uncomfortable.

That to me is a beautiful place to be - to go dark. And then there's a practice of writing. I wake up and write almost immediately. The minute I wake up, I get a glass of water and I'll just write. Julia Cameron gets a lot of credit for the morning pages, but it actually came from a writer named Dorothea Brand with an E on the end, called "Becoming a Writer."

I think she was writing in the thirties or forties, but she was really the one that said, "Here's how you become a writer. You have to plug into your subconscious as quickly as you possibly can and just write and have no thoughts of outcome and do it in the morning first thing." That has been one of the most tried and true forms because a lot of ideas come out of the dream life into writing on the page.

It doesn't work if you pour a cup of coffee first. You have to go straight from your bed to your desk. If I go get a cup of coffee first, then I start making lists of stuff that I need to do.

Lucia: I'm hearing that the three pillars that help you plug into your channel are: a consistent practice - for you that is the waking up and writing at that same time and place, making that really regular; plugging into inspiration - sometimes we go to comfort television or relaxation content, and that's fine, but making the space for art that really is going to elevate you and open your mind; and then conversations that go dark - those safe containers to explore the crevices of your mind that we sometimes stay away from.

Melanie: I find that anything I've ever created that has any value artistically is coming from the pain - the thing that you're trying to get away from or around is the thing you have to paint from, make music about, do comedy about. If it's not raw from the vein, it's kind of not worth it.

Lucia: I had a conversation with a woman I met last night who is working in advertising. She got really dead when she started talking about her job. She said explicitly, "It's a job. I don't care about it." But when I started asking about photography, she started to light up. She was talking about how she goes around Los Angeles and finds really interesting people, takes their photos and interviews them.

This is a way that she is crafting a life. Who knows if those two will meet and her experience at work will ever interplay with her artistic life that she's cultivating. But for her, it felt like a lifeline. So I want to talk now to the person who is never going to capitalize on their creativity, who might not even know in what way they could artistically express, but feels almost a deadening and wants to reconnect.

What are some ways in for that person?

Melanie: There's a really beautiful poet called David Whyte who wrote this book called "The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America." He writes about that space between your soul and having a nine-to-five job, and how do you nourish and find yourself?

One of the things he says is it's impossible to keep your creative world strong at the workplace if you don't have a sense of belonging, because the energy of fear is diametrically opposed to the creative spirit. How do you be who you are when you're in an environment that isn't able to monetize the fact that people are incredibly different? Just by virtue of having a soul, they're incredibly unique.

They can't quite figure out how to deal with lots of different energies and identities in a way that makes everyone feel like they belong. So much of your whole philosophy and your leadership trainings is about how do we welcome the whole person in? How do we see the good and the bad and everything, and maintain a human quality when you're in these environments.

Lucia: Absolutely.

Melanie: To me, I just want to hack the day. I temped for so many years in corporate environments for super high-level people in the entertainment industry, and I would always try to memorize poems while I was there. I would just keep little poems by my desk while I was typing.

I would covertly work on something that was feeding my soul and my brain. If you're able to keep some connection to the outside world when you're in these tanks that can be very dehumanizing - I don't know if you've been watching "Andor," but "Andor" has depictions of corporate dread. It's a lot like "Severance" too. There are all of these depictions in our culture of the soul-deadening inequality of working on a project that you have no connection to, making sure you push the launch on a certain date for a piece of technology you're not exactly sure even how it's going to help or hurt the world.

How do you do it? It's about changing your gaze, switching yourself in relationship to the world. I'm going to sound so crazy now, but touching base at your desk and marveling at the ergonomics of your stapler. If you're literally trapped in a job that is killing you, how do you keep the sense of wonder in that job?

Are you an incredible doodler?

Lucia: We talk a lot on this podcast about the idea of being in observer mode, and that's from Buddhism - that you can be doing, but also who is the person who's perceiving? What I'm hearing is it's bringing your artist to work and letting her covertly play around. It could be you're having a stressful meeting - watch it like a show. That alone is an artistic process to say, "Oh, look at these characters and how they're behaving." Or as you said, the stapler - what a fascinating piece of equipment. Once we give ourselves that little liberating thought that cultivating our creativity is about a way of seeing things, it can really shift and become more playful and open and interesting in ways that could really surprise us.

I just want to circle back about belonging. We met in the improv world, and I always think that growing up as an improviser, it's a life philosophy. It's much more than just making people laugh on stage. The whole idea is saying yes to every idea, right? The first rule of improv many people know is "yes, and..." Building upon each other, and when you're in a really great comedic environment with your group and you're in that ping-pong energy, there's collective effervescence. That is what's going on in a super team where they're throwing out ideas, on the edge of their seat and risking themselves by saying, "Here's a crazy one, let's go with this and let's see this." That's when real innovation and creativity at work happens. That idea of belonging and creativity - there's a deep intrinsic connection there.

Melanie: I've led ideation workshops. We started by playing improv games and then we threw up the whiteboard and we got our markers out. After you did some improv games and after they got goofy, the team was able to come up with the most beautiful ideas.

The people that hired us were like, "I don't know what it is, but when they're in the room with you guys..." They couldn't quite put their finger on it. Is it because we just bring them to a different location? They can't figure it out and we're like, "No, because they're safe at this particular moment."

It's a really hard thing to do any ideation in a room where there's fear.

Lucia: Absolutely. When we're in fear mode, we have tunnel vision. All we can see is the problem. We put our heads down and get into this slightly tight place. When we're relaxed, we can take in the whole room, observe so much more. Things from the sides can come in. There's that whole peripheral vision. Accessing those two modes inside ourselves - fear and direct focus versus openness - we can feel how we shift into a more creative space just by opening up.

Melanie: I love that exercise where you look at your fingers in front of your face and then you bring your fingers around to either side of your head, but stretch your arms out where you can still barely see them in your periphery vision. Your vision expands and your brain follows. You have bigger thoughts that way. Whenever I get too tunnel-visioned, or I even start feeling a little sad, it opens up my perspective. There's just a shift that happens where your eyes are focusing and your brain opens up as well. It's great to do that in nature because so often when you're walking around a trail, you're looking at your feet, and every once in a while, just having that kind of expansive vision is so wondrous.

But then there's the small too, right? So that's the big way to expand. And then there's the small of looking at the stapler.

Can I read a poem? This is a David Whyte poem. It speaks to what we're talking about - changing your lens when you walk into your work environment, which probably if it's a job that you've associated with deadening, there's already a reaction the minute you get into the elevator. How do you switch that mindset when you're in the elevator?

I was brought into a corporate environment and I walked into a room and a woman sat down at the table and she said out loud, "Nothing good has ever happened in this room." And I was like, "That is so profound." The meeting hadn't even started yet. It just broke my heart a little. And the CEO came in and nothing good did happen in that room.

But here's the poem: "Everything is Waiting for You" by David Whyte.

"Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone, as if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny, hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely even you at times have felt the grand array, the swelling presence, and the chorus crowding out your solo voice. You must note the way the soap dish enables you, or the window latch grants you freedom. Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity. The stairs are your mentor of things to come. The doors have always been there to frighten you and invite you. The tiny speaker in the phone is your dream ladder to divinity. Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. The kettle is singing even as it pours you a drink. The cooking pots have left their arrogant aloofness and seen the good in you at last. All the birds and creatures of the world are unutterably themselves. Everything is waiting for you."

Lucia: It's beautiful. I even want to push back on the word "escape" because that's not escaping, that's being here. It's a reminder that we can have discoveries that really shift. Like that room where "nothing good happens here," and that job where we don't really get the meaning. That is our responsibility to shift and it's possible. I think sometimes when we say responsibility, it sounds like we're chastising ourselves, but it's an empowerment and a liberation to realize that there are so many things that are outside of our control, and by the act of shifting our consciousness, we can start to see those doors as not scary, but invitations. We start to follow that thread with more clarity. Because the truth is maybe that thread is going to help you pull yourself out of that room, or maybe it's going to help you discover something in that room. But either way, it is an inside job in terms of how we can start to feel that aliveness.

Melanie: I agree wholeheartedly, beautifully said.

Lucia: Those of us who have gotten far by being Type A and controlled and planning everything - that is antithetical to the creative process. So coming into a meeting where you're like, "I am so prepared. I know everything I'm going to say" - how present are you actually? And if everyone is in that mode, how much are they in fear versus creativity?

So let's talk a little bit about how we can sit more comfortably in the uncomfortable of not knowing and not feeling like that's because we're not doing our job well, but actually letting that be part of our job.

Melanie: It's all about presence. Staying in the moment and feeling the feeling and noticing. I think that word "noticing" - the word "mindfulness" needs to take a break for a little bit. Mindfulness somehow seems inaccessible to a lot of people. And meditation does too, but the word "noticing" - just really, "Huh, she never wore that shirt before. Huh." Something that throws you off the track of your absolute grind of having to be incredibly prepared, having to have a response.

That leadership training we did for people in the pharmaceutical business - we had to respond a lot to "what if they ask us a question that we don't know?" And they couldn't really reconcile that. We were like, "You tell them that you don't know."

Lucia: Very common concern is what if there is an actual question that people are wondering about. You just say you don't know, and let's explore.

I heard someone say, what do you do when your kid is saying "why?" For anyone with young kids and they're in their "why" stage, parents always try to give an answer and think that'll be the end. The invitation the child is trying to invite you into is explore with me. Let's lie on the ground and look at the sky and let's ask about the clouds and explore together.

But instead, the parents think I need to give an answer. And that's why it's unsatisfying to the kid - they keep going because they're really saying, "Come explore." So back to that idea of what if they ask a question I don't know - it's like let's explore that together.

Melanie: That's so right. There's kind of a hierarchy of what you should know. You're the expert on the situation, or you're the one that was given this project. You should know everything. And it's that top-down thing. It's the authority versus the parent versus the child. You are the one that's supposed to know everything right now. And the panic that some people in leadership feel when they give a project to someone and they don't know the answers.

And that's very contagious too, to not be satisfied or to be disappointed when there aren't answers to questions. To have an opportunity to explore that answer with a group of people - it's all basic human skills that somehow are forgotten with that kind of top-down leadership, right? It's like "I'm appointing you. You need to be perfect. This is your job. Don't disappoint me." And that tension of not knowing.

Lucia: What's so fascinating is this conversation is more and more about being a human at work. We experience our humanity most through our artistic expression. Tapping into our creativity is so intricately connected to just being a person at work.

Melanie: It really is. I feel for the people in positions where they just feel no mobility - not upward mobility, but the mobility just to shift and be themselves and dive into a project that's interesting that they're curious about. You understand money's got to be made. We don't want people to lose their jobs because there's not enough money coming in.

But there has to be that balance of curiosity, creativity with delivering what needs to be done.

Lucia: We all got kind of fatigued on the hyphen, especially living in LA where everyone is 15 things with a hyphen. One of my favorite clients is working in pharmaceuticals and every time I talk to him, he's telling me for the first two minutes before we start working about all the things that he's building in his garage, like a go-kart and a plane. That is what's lighting him up, and then that energy carries into the conversations. We are not compartmentalized.

Even if you define yourself in 12 different ways, you're still trying to put yourself in a box. So it's like let it go and just realize that we have more permission than ever before to just say, "I'm all of these things."

As Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes." So much of our pain is actually us looking in the mirror and saying, "Who am I? Who am I? Who am I?" When we can let that go and just be present, then we can just allow who we are to surprise us.

Melanie: That's something that you really get in touch with when you wake up and you start writing. I've felt the essence of myself without any qualifiers. It's not like you're this, you're a writer, you da da da. But there's an essence that follows you from your dream state that there's almost no words for, but you just feel kind of the humming of what makes you you. When we seek words for it, that's when we can feel like, "Oh no, I have no identity." And when we stop seeking, we can just be. You actually do have an identity - a wordless identity, and you can layer as much stuff on top of that as you want. But it doesn't come close to the actual vibrational individual soul pulse that you have.

Lucia: Let's talk about the seduction of being in that curious place and the contagion of it. Because I'm thinking about the person who's thinking, "These are all great ideas, but I don't work with people who are in touch with their creativity. I don't work with people who are relaxed enough to explore." And it is hard to be counterculture.

It's extremely uncomfortable to not go with the culture because we are tribal and everything in us is telling us to survive: be like the people around me. And being that person who asks a really curious question and is genuinely interested - we all know how that can put us into a place that feels so much richer.

And so a comparison of these dead conversations to this rich conversation. If you look at your whole day, that's a person you want to go to with your great ideas and explore with. A tiny, subtle shift in your attention can create a situation where people come to you with that energy. You start to recognize that energy in other people and seek them out too.

Melanie: It's very hard to sum up the energy to do your job, let alone do a hobby that you feel connected to. There's a beautiful book called "A Life of One's Own" by Joanna Field. It was written in 1934. She was suffering from terrible depression and was trying to figure out how to get out of it. She kept a notebook and anytime she felt a flicker of energy, just the smallest flicker of energy, she would write down where the energy came from. It could be a butterfly lighting on a flower. She could just say the feeling of my feet on the sand, whatever. She started collecting all these things. She had such a long list of them at some point that they started bringing her back to herself in life. They were pretty much all sensual. Then after she had amassed her sensual experiences, she was able to then have thoughts, and then those thoughts gave her things that she wanted to do every day and people she wanted to talk to. She was able to pull herself out of a very dark and difficult place by noticing the smallest moments of glee, curiosity, interest.

Before anyone starts a container garden, take a look at what is turning you on. Turn off the TV, turn off your phone. Go for a walk and just notice the things that are pleasing to you. They could also be maddening. You could find things that are absolutely maddening, which might lead you to picking up trash or something. But if you're not feeling a thread that you're holding, you can find threads on the ground and pull them in.

Lucia: That distinction you made between it bringing you pleasure versus maddening. What I think you're speaking to is those glimmers of aliveness. Depression is a state of deadening and those are glimmers of life. There's a show, Lena Dunham's new show, and one of the characters talks about how throughout life it's like bricks being put on your heart, and then all you have is these little tiny shimmering bits of light that can make it through. And that process for this person who was in a depression to look for those little bits.

A lot of our work is based on positive psychology, and there's this concept of broadening and building. So looking for the positive and recognizing that when we look at the positive and not look for the problem, we look for what's working. Broaden and build upon that. When it comes to our creative process, we might feel completely creatively dead, but then it's like, "Oh, this little glimmer or that little inspiration" and pulling them all in, as you said, picking up little tiny bits of thread to rebuild a thread.

There's "A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf, "A Life of One's Own" by Joanna Field. The story of women finding their creative voice feels like it's a through line in this. Women have always been multitaskers. When they say, "Stop multitasking," I'm like, the women in the caves would've never done a cave drawing if they weren't multitasking because they were holding a baby.

So normalizing the complexity of female experience is part of this.

Melanie: I think so too. I also think women are really affected by technology and attention deficit - how our attention is being pulled away from our connection to other people and ourselves. Women are relying a lot on technology to connect with people, but it's not the connection that brings us closer to people.

Women need to feel that connection and we grow from and we learn from. These books like "A Room of One's Own," "A Life of One's Own" - setting time and space aside has gotten so difficult with technology. It would be a total act of revolution if all women just threw their phones away.

But how would we get in touch with one another? I don't know. And how would we compare ourselves constantly?

Lucia: But what I'm hearing is I think we're pretty keyed in to the fact that the tech industry is exploiting our desire for connection and giving us something that's not fulfilling. Women really thrive in connection. So finding those real connections, and that can be with oneself, I think we forget that. So it's like that caretaker instinct - even if that's a beautiful instinct, are you letting your phone life take over more real connections?

Melanie: It's such a revolutionary act to make someone a meal now. Or just seeing people in person and making dates with people. It feels almost subversive now. It's not the norm anymore. I had some people at dinner the other night and it was so beautiful. I introduced some friends who hadn't met, and it fed me for like a week.

They spoke different languages and just hearing them speak Italian at my dinner table together, it was such a wonderful moment. I can see the candlelight on their faces and they're talking Italian and the wine's being poured and it was that whole sensuality, right? That's the thing we do have that AI does not have. Life. We have our bodies, the feeling of breezes. That connection to nature has always been so inspiring for the imagination, for our hearts, for connection. That's the one advantage that we have in this AI versus human fight.

Lucia: Oh my gosh. I know. And as you said, if you have your coffee before you're writing, you'll make a to-do list. We all can relate to that experience of trying to get into that artistic place, but still operating like a computer. I think that the invitation that AI gives us and this tech - I can't even say revolution - this hurricane. It is just unreal how crazy it feels. It's an invitation to go to the most human experiences and the humility it takes to say, "I'm going to go for a walk, or I'm going to spend my whole night with these friends and I have no idea if this is going to quote unquote check anything off my list."

And that's absolutely the point. It's a counterculture moment to be a person.

Melanie: Absolutely. And also that darkness comes with being human. Something David Whyte talks about a lot is there's this drive to make everything positive in the workplace and to not recognize that there is a lot of suffering in individual people's lives and darkness. To not recognize that is also soul crushing. To take that into consideration, but to keep people productive and happy - how devastating that can be if you are not starting in that place at all and you're asked to smile.

Lucia: And that's something I'm hearing more and more - the violent experience of having something horrible going on and then having your boss come in with a big smile and say, "We're going forward."

It doesn't work. And it's once again that very human skill of being a person who's available and present. It doesn't mean you even have to discuss any of the things that are going on, but just allowing people to have a human experience while working.

Melanie: I think we both have used the word revolution. Maintaining that connection to the creative spirit, to your soul is an act of revolution because change comes through art. We're in an incredibly difficult, uncertain, changing environment right now, and things could also change in a positive way if we imagine it. Getting into a place where you can actually imagine and be a creative force is really important.

Do this for the generations to come to be a beacon, someone who sets a foundation for other things to be built on in the way you connect yourself to your creative spirit, to your soul, and to the people around you.

Lucia: That's beautiful. We're going to close right there. Thank you, Melanie, for coming on, and thank you all for listening to lead.

How great was that? Melanie spoke about the thread that you pick up, and it brought me back to a moment in Mexico after a healing retreat with a group of wonderful people. Our friend Mark gave everyone a bracelet with a little pearl on it, and he handed one to each of us, and he shared this poem that I will share with you now.

"The Way It Is" by William Stafford

"There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change. But it doesn't change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the thread. But it is hard for others to see. While you hold it you can't get lost. Tragedies happen; people get hurt or die; and you suffer and get old. Nothing you do can stop time's unfolding. You don't ever let go of the thread."

May we all hold on to the thread.

Learn more about Melanie: www.melaniehoopes.com