Creativity & Constraint

We invite fiction, memoir, creative non-fiction and poetry exploring the theme of creativity and constraint in all dimensions of our lives. What is the river without the river bed? The answer without the question? We often think of true creativity as unfettered liberty—but is creativity something that only takes root, flourishes, within bounds? William Carlos Williams said, "no ideas but in things." Is this a stance that limits or liberates? What happens to our ideas if they must stay attached to and work their way through the material world—often being materially changed in the process? "You don't have to move my mountain, but give me the strength to climb. Don't take away my stumbling blocks but lead me all around," the old spiritual goes. What, if anything, do experiences of creativity and constraint have to do with real world challenges, where our desires and drives are checked daily, where our playing fields are far from level, where hard work isn't always rewarded, where dreams can be gaping doorways to despair but where the absence of them can be far worse? Why is it that we often feel more empowered, more intimately related within the artifice of a story, a song, a painting than we do in the world at large? What do we learn when we try to take that expansiveness back out into the binding but unbounded world around us? Or take our real world constraints into story?

Country of Publication

United States