cover image The Creative Life: True Tales of Inspiration – Finding Your True North

The Creative Life: True Tales of Inspiration – Finding Your True North

Julia Cameron, Tarcher, $23.95 (256p) ISBN 9781585428243

In her life, Cameron has learned to seize whatever moments of creative time she can get. "Small tidbits add up to a larger whole," she says, one of the compact yet insightful truisms that make up this volume of enlightening analogies, confessions, and vignettes of Cameron's life on New York's Upper West Side. From dinners and musicals to teaching engagements and writing sessions, Cameron's latest contribution to her already extensive list of titles is something of a diary, exposing her personal life with unexpected honesty and humility. A spat with her inner censor, a made up "gay British designer" she's named Nigel, gives the book a light-hearted and relatable tone. Colorful characters, including actors turned writers, musicians turned songwriters, poets turned playwrights, and songwriter-bakers, make up an encouraging community of creators. Practical, productive, and passionate, Cameron and her Believing Mirrors ("people who see our power and potential and reflect it back at us") show the artistic way in an organic light that makes it seem approachable and attainable, revealing how living creatively can be as calibrated as a work of fiction. (Sept.)