About Bay Area Creativity - Artist's Way

This is a creativity-promoting Meetup centered around a book called "The Artist's Way". The book outlines a 12-week series of exercises to promote your creativity, of whatever flavor it might be (me, I write software), and to help you over whatever bumps you might be having with it. We add to the book by meeting in small groups to go through the sequence together, to congratulate each other on work accomplished, to commiserate on work not accomplished, to nudge each other a little from day to day, and to generally give support to whatever’s happening with your creative work.

The purpose of the Meetup as a whole is to organize these small groups. At the moment we have four "small groups" running, with about 30 people participating. The schedules are not posted here. Three of the small groups are completely full. However, we do have a weekday-afternoon downtown-Berkeley group that could use another member or two. Write to me if you're interested.

Once formed, the groups are generally not open to newcomers and do not appear on our schedule. This is because the groups work well when the membership is small and consistent. This allows people to get to know each other; it allows each person to have some good “quality time” at the meetings to talk over what's been happening with them, and it allows everyone to be on the same page (literally!) with everyone else.

From time to time, as enough people ask for them, I'll schedule official “New Group Organizing” events, that =do= appear on the Meetup schedule, to get people together to create brand-new small groups. Write to me if you want to encourage me to schedule one in your neighborhood!

When you participate, you'll need the book, a couple dollars once in a while for our expenses, and your creative self. The book is available from many bookstores and many libraries. As far as I know, it doesn't make much difference which edition you use. Online, Amazon has it at
http://www.amazon.com...

From the Amazon review:

With the basic principle that creative expression is the natural direction of life, Julia Cameron and Mark Bryan lead you through a comprehensive twelve-week program to recover your creativity from a variety of blocks, including limiting beliefs, fear, self-sabotage, jealousy, guilt, addictions, and other inhibiting forces, replacing them with artistic confidence and productivity.

Amazon customer reviews (there are nearly 300 of them!) are at
http://www.amazon.com...