We recently connected with Lisa Segal and have shared our conversation below.

Lisa, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today How did you learn to do what you do? Knowing what you know now, what could you have done to speed up your learning process? What skills do you think were most essential? What obstacles stood in the way of learning more?

I was my own obstacle: shy and afraid of not doing everything one hundred percent correctly one hundred percent of the time. I was afraid to fail. That made me leery of what I didn’t know and of new situations, and, of course, got in the way of learning. I also didn’t know that the creative process was within my realm of proactivity. I thought of the creative process as magic, as something that happened when a Muse deigned to visit. But it isn’t. It’s comprised of actions I can take to wrangle and facilitate art making. In retrospect, being fearlessly-not-afraid-to-fail and fearlessly-not-afraid-to-make-things-people-might-not-like are an artist’s most essential skills. Being willing to fail makes learning possible. Not caring if people like what I make makes it possible to be adventuresome, which leads to making work I could never have foreseen. I learned to “be an artist,” as well as to lead and guide and teach, when I released myself from my self-imposed high bar of perfection and stopped fearing failure. 

I’ve had the pleasure, and thrill, of being the chairperson for StudioEleven Artists, the Los Angeles-based artist collective I helped form in 2014. When it was time for new leadership, I took a deep breath and raised my hand, even though I’d never done anything like that before. From 2017-2019, in addition to performing the position’s quotidian tasks, I oversaw our six stellar group exhibitions and a series of excellent continuing education events. Not only did holding this position enable me to grow into the furthest corners of my leadership skills, it revealed them to me. But I didn’t come into the chair position cold. In the arena of my other art practice (writing), I’d been co-teaching creative writing with Jack Grapes in his Method Writing classes since 2015. (And how did that come about? By taking a deep breath and stepping forward when the opportunity to teach was offered, even though I’d never taught before.) (By then, I’d caught on that a crucial part of the way things worked was in saying “yes” and in believing I knew enough to figure out the rest.) By 2018, I was solo teaching a Method Writing class. The confidence and skills I acquired teaching and running writing classes transferred directly into my leadership of the art collective. 

My two art practices had intertwined before. Since 2006, when I began to approach my studio art and writing with renewed seriousness and dedication, my writing practice has been informing and supporting the creative process in my art studio, and my studio art practice has been doing the same for my writing. [See my “Voyage LA” interview <http://voyagela.com/interview/check-out-lisa-segals-story/> and my “Shoutout LA” interview <https://shoutoutla.com/meet-lisa-segal-poet-writer-artist-teacher/>. ] And, of course, being the chair of StudioEleven Artists added to and enhanced what I offer as a teacher.

Lisa, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m an artist and poet/writer. I also teach writing and the creative process. I became a teacher of those two things because, at the insistence of an acquaintance, I took a chance on poetry and took a Method Writing class with Jack Grapes in 2006. It was nothing like what I thought a writing class would, or could, be. When I enrolled, I didn’t consider myself a writer, but that first class spoke to something buried in me, so I took another class, and then another. After a while, I’d taken quite a few classes and, class by class, exercise by exercise, year by year, a thing in me that had been slammed shut when I was a kid opened and became available to me again. After a few years of working the Method Writing exercises—a large part of which was acquiring a new understanding of how one goes about being an artist—I had become a published (and award winning) poet. A few years after that, I was a Method Writing teacher. This didn’t just happen to me, mind you, as a result of being in the classes. It happened because I worked hard to figure out this new (to me) approach to being an artist and how to work it so it worked for me. Nothing changes the fact that making art always remains work, but every time I go to work, I make it count by becoming more skilled at the craft of making art.

That experience is at the root of how I teach Method Writing. I haven’t forgotten what it’s like to learn this different way of making art. I’m familiar with the obstacles that make it difficult. I’ve encountered and overcome them. That makes me a good guide for others who want to approach their work this way. That, and my understanding of the Method Writing methodology. I have written a textbook (Jack Grapes’ Method Writing: The Brush-Up Book) for the Method Writing Brush-Up class I teach. It’s a class designed to reinforce Method Writing concepts and techniques, the most important of which are the notions of fearless exploration, craft-building, and understanding that producing a first draft has nothing (yet) to do with editing.

I help writers acquire ways of working that are fundamental to the Method Writing way and are the secret to working the creative process: always be practicing a specific technique, always be open in your first pass/first draft to where that technique might lead you, and even though a first draft/practice piece can end up as finished product through the polishing and refining of editing, that’s not the point of it. Process and editing are different stages. When a Method Writer sits down to write, we do so to explore a specific writing technique. We start out not knowing what we will end up writing about. And we are not concerned about finished product because we understand we are in the process pass, not an editing pass. We learn to keep the stages separate. In this way, we arrive at finished products, and, most wonderfully, finished products we didn’t know were in us.

Working from these bedrock operative principles changed everything about how I approach my art and writing. I do my best to pass them on by helping others acclimate and adapt to this work model. I also provide feedback that lets a writer see how a piece that came into existence to explore a craft technique might have landed on so much more. 

Method Writing teaches tangible writing techniques, but more importantly, it provides a way to work the “creative process” (each writer in their own connected, authentic voice) versus working from the “flow.” For an in-depth overview of Method Writing, I recommend this 2021 Film Courage interview with Jack Grapes. It’s four hours, but is topically broken into seventeen segments: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba9jAVzADY0&list=PLez8jOvskc-N_QkhuBOm9HmYmLKVRj632&index=175>

Are there any resources you wish you knew about earlier in your creative journey?

I wish I had known the creative process was comprised of tangible parts I could manipulate. It wasn’t until 2006, when I was decades into finally calling myself an artist (versus trying-not-to-be-one) that I began studying with Jack Grapes (writing) and Tom Wudl (studio art). Working with them, I came to understand the creative process as something quite different than what I’d thought it was. I learned it isn’t an amorphous entity, fickle-natured and invisible, that settles like a wrap around my shoulders when I go into the art studio or sit to write and upon which I’m dependent if I want to make art or write. I learned to be my own instrument in the creative process. I learned to approach my artistic endeavors in a way that separated the first pass/first draft from the finished product. I hadn’t known it was important to do that. I learned to work that way by focusing on a technique and not on the “what” of what I’m writing or making. It required a completely different orientation towards producing work. Adapting to this was not immediate or easy. I had many entrenched habits I needed to shed. As a bonus, my craft improved because I got better at technique.

I learned that the “process” part of “creative process” means that of the many stages a piece (no matter what the art) must go through before its final iteration, the initial first pass is very different than those subsequent (and many) editing and refining passes. I have learned to keep these stages separate. I’m not concerned with editing when I’m in the creative pass. (Editing is also very creative but in a different way.) I learned the value of being open, available, and willing to go in the direction of what might show up for me. (That holds true for editing passes, also.) I learned to welcome the unexpected showing up as part of my artistic process and to acknowledge the unexpected possibility as a crucial element of creativity. I no longer believe I have to know where I’ll go when I start. (Goodbye writer’s or artist’s block!) More than that, I know I don’t want to know what I’m going to write about when I start writing. (Okay, there are situational exceptions that require beginning directly with a predetermined subject matter, but even with deadlines on a specific topic, I always give myself a chance to approach the piece from an unknown direction.) Now when I write, I want to go where I didn’t know I would go. I want to surprise myself when I see what I have written. After all, I always have my original destination in my back pocket, if I need it.

In short, I make things for myself because I want to, because I need to, because I’m more complete when I’m engaged in making art or writing, and because I want to become better at doing these activities. That last thing is the key to being in the “creative process.” Instead of working towards an already decided upon outcome, I focus on a particular technique each time I write or make something in the studio. I don’t dictate beforehand where I’m going to end up. I would have loved to have had guidance about this from the time I was young. Instead, I was guided by the belief that to produce art, in addition to technique, I also needed to know, in advance, what I was going to write or make, and that the inspiration and guidance of a Muse was crucial to whether or not it happened. But that’s not the way it happens. It happens by work, by hard work. Of course, no matter how hard I work, I’m not guaranteed success. But I engage in the work because I’m an artist. I make art. It’s lovely when a Muse shows up and gives me a hand. But, meantime, when she’s not there, I’m working on a technique. 

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

The goal of my creative journey now is to see what I’ve got in me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.lisasegal.com
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/lisa.segal.5
• Other: Jack Grapes’ Method Writing: www.jackgrapes.com
• Other: StudioEleven Artists: www.studioelevenart.com

Image Credits
Alexis Rhone Fancher, Peggy Dobreer, TJ Convertino, Gali Rotstein, Baz Here, Lisa Segal, Scott Siedman