Creativity & Constraint

by Heather Tosteson (Editor), Charles D. Brockett (Editor), Kerry Langan (Editor)

Creativity & Constraint, A Wising Up Anthology Heather Tosteson, Charles D. Brockett, Kerry Langan, Michele Markarian, Editors We often think of true creativity as unfettered liberty-but is creativity something that only takes root, flourishes, within bounds? What happens to our ideas if they must work their way through the material world-often being materially changed in the process? Why is it that we often feel more empowered, more intimately related within the artifice of a story, a song, a painting than we do in the world at large? What do we learn when we try to take that expansiveness back out into the world? What, if anything, do experiences of creativity and constraint have to do with real world challenges, where our desires and drives are checked daily, where our playing fields are far from level, where hard work isn't always rewarded? Join forty writers of poetry, fiction and memoir as they muse on the various permutations of creativity and constraint in their own lives and in their artistic process. Contributors: Deborah Bacharach, Patricia Barone, Barbara Crooker, Vida Cross, Deborah Pratt Curtiss, Maureen Tolman Flannery, Diane Giardi, Jo Going, Jim Govoni, John Grey, Patrick Hansel, Michael J. Hess, Paul Hostovsky, Celine Keating, Tom Leskiw, Katharyn Howd Machan, Mike Maggio, John Manesis, Michele Markarian, Milt Montague, Michael Onofrey, Carl Palmer, Richard King Perkins II, Mary Kay Rummel, Frank Salvidio, Ira Schaeffer, Ruth Margolin Silin, Laurence Snydal, Anna Steegmann, J.J. Steinfeld, Alan Swyer, Don Thackrey, Hannah Thomassen, Claudia Van Gerven, Bill Vernon, Rosemary Volz, Joel Wachman, Petra Dai Walech, John Sibley Williams, Tyree Deshawn Wilson

246 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2014

About the author

HEATHER TOSTESON, a fiction writer, poet and visual artist, is the author most recently of the poetry collection, Source Notes: Seventh Decade. She is also the author of the novels The Philosophical Transactions of Maria van Leeuwenhoek, Antoni's Dochter (1668-1696), which explores questions of sexual generation. She is also the author of the novel Visible Signs, and two collections of short stories, Germs of Truth and Hearts as Big as Fists & Other Stories. Her other two books of poetry are The Sanctity of the Moment: Poems from Four Decades, and Breathing in Portuguese, Living in English.

She is also the author and co-author of two non-fiction Wising Up Listening projects, most recently Sharing the Burden of Repair: Reentry After Mass Incarceration which looks at reentry from multiple perspectives. God Speaks My Language, Can You? explores spiritual journeys across many faith traditions.

She has co-edited and illustrated seventeen Wising Up anthologies, including most recently Flip Sides, Goodness, and Re-Creating Our Common Chord.

She has received a Nation/Discovery prize for her poetry and fellowships for poetry, fiction, and photography from MacDowell, Yaddo, VCCA and Hambidge. She holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (UNC-Greensboro) and Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing (Ohio University). She has worked extensively in the public health and the health sciences as a writer, editor, and researcher. She is the founder, with Charles Brockett, of Wising Up Press and the Wising Up Press Writers Collective.