Creative pursuits often share one core quality: They are inspired by a personal experience of a universal theme. As a writer, much of my creative fiction and poetry is deeply personal, but what I end up creating always seems to speak to universal and timeless themes that writing, music and art have been shedding light on for thousands of years.
When I went to write my novel Sidewalk Ritual, I wanted to do it in a way that kept the act of writing the book as just an author and the text, but I also wanted to collaborate with other artists I know and have worked with.
I spent about a year drafting and revising my manuscript before publishing it. But after the first six months or so, I had a decent draft finished that had most of the elements, scenes, characters and themes in it that would be in the final version. I printed out 12 copies of that manuscript at Kinkos, bound them with packing tape, and mailed them off to six musicians and six artists, all of whom were friends of mine. I offered what commission I could to help pay for materials and production, but for the most part people were doing it because they were excited to be part of the project, which was awesome.
I asked each person to take a theme, scene or character from the novel and use that as inspiration to create something new. What I got back was amazing. The image at the top is a computer collage my friend Tahira created from photos she took around San Francisco (where the book is set), and the image below was painted by another friend and brilliant SF artist.
You can also hear some of the amazing music my team made on SoundCloud.
When I published the book six months later, I'd had time to gather all of the art and music that people had created in digital form. I uploaded it to my personal website on a password protected page. Then I put the password in my book so that everyone who bought the book could access the art and music.
It was an amazing experience that gave me an excuse to create great art with good friends, helped keep me motivated through the isolating process of writing a novel, and, best of all, got a whole lot of great creative work out into the world.
Main image collage credit: Tahira Ali
Internal image credit: Joshua Coffey
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