Beth Nielson Chapman – HuffPost 7.16.10

Mike Ragogna: …as a journalist of life, what you’re going through is obviously affecting your writing and creativity in some big way.

Beth Nielson Chapman: Well, you know, I teach a lot of workshops and do a lot of lectures on creativity because I’ve been fascinated by creativity and how it works since long before I noticed how being creative has helped me get through all these things. I love to get in front of young students who are being inundated with academia, and I try to remind them, “The real thing you want to stay in touch with is this child like thing.” The reason we all started writing songs or painting pictures is this child like thing, it doesn’t have anything to do with the brain. It’s really about this flow that we have, and when you go through some kind of crisis, it actually increases. Some of the greatest songs and the greatest works of art have come out of big things being, sort of, upended. I always tell my students, “Anything that blows anything else apart, it’s like turning the soil, it becomes fertilizer for something good.” And that’s kind of been the way my life has unfolded. But creativity is the greatest thing we’ve got going for helping us get through all that stuff.