On Being Creative  is more than a blog or web site . . . .  its a bench in the park where you can sit and chat with a fellow artist . . . a gathering of your peers for dinner before you spend the evening sharing work and discussing process . . . a library or that special book store where you may just find the guiding voice for whom you’ve been searching.

This web site/blog is an attempt to re-create, as best as technology can, some of the magic of a workshop experience. While not the replacement for the intensity or the humanity of a workshop experience, this web site will be a place where ideas and resources are shared, discussed and where questions may be posed (if not actually answered), where readings and Internet links are passed along. I’ll be here as the Stage Manager, or Editor, to keep the process flowing, but will rely on you out there to generate much of the content.

I spent more than 30 years guiding a summer workshop center for creative photographers and filmmakers here in Maine: The Maine Photographic Workshops.  It was privilege to meet and work with some of the world’s most inspirational (as well as frustrating) creative visual artists. The Library and Galley, built with the help  of Kate Carter, were sources of continued inspiration. The space where the workshops and master classes met each morning to share work were in old barns, the old Rockport Town Hall, a quiet spot by the harbor . . .  they all contained magic. The evening slide lectures by world famous photographers provided an insight into the world of creativity, process and careers. Sharing work and process, sharing hopes and desires, realizing each of us were individuals, but brothers and sisters on similar path, gave hope that we too might one day have a body of work worthy of the public. There debates and conversation over meals, with filmmakers, writers, painters, actors, photographers and students sharing and listening. These elements of a community of creative people left a lasting impressions on everyone who attended  . . . as well as me. I was the Wizard of Oz, the one who worked behind the curtain to make sure the magic happened. I looked at my role more as a Stage Manager, like the Stage Manager from Our Town, by American playwright Thornton Wilder--someone who helped the magic work. There were dinners at my lake house, with friends and compatriots that allowed me to participate, often just as an observer, in some of that magic that happens when artists get together to share.

We need stories, and this web site is dedicated to the sharing of those tales of confrontation, wrong turns, dead-ends, frustration and eventual success.

David H. Lyman

Rockport, Maine