Clare Murphy - Storyteller

Clare Murphy is a Storyteller by trade. In this episode she talks about the long history of storytelling in Ireland, her birth country, and how storytelling culture differs around the world but is ultimately essential to humanity.

Clare lives in Bristol, England now, but she has worked with organisations across the globe as diverse as NASA, the NHS and the New Zealand All Blacks. She realised early on in her career that Storytelling was going to be an isolating and lonely road if she didn't cultivate connection with like-minded people. She talks about how she is inspired and kept company by artists, poets and dancers both living and dead. 

Transcript

Are You Still Working?!
Series 2 - Episode 7 - Clare Murphy - Storyteller
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[00:00:00] 

Courtney: Hello gorgeous listeners. Welcome to Are You Still Working? How to Take Your Creative Ideas Seriously. I'm Courtney Collins and today I'm talking to Clare Murphy. Clare Murphy is a professional storyteller, renowned for captivating audiences with her voice and her presence. Claire is Irish, but she now lives in Bristol.

She's performed at festivals and stages across the globe, [00:00:30] weaving narratives that inspire awe and wonder. Claire not only tells stories, she also shares her craft, teaching storytelling skills to a diverse range of clients, including NASA, the New Zealand All Blacks, and the NHS in England. Our conversation with Clare took place via Zoom, with a nine hour time difference.

Clare joined from Bristol, while I was on Gambangia country. I've been so excited about this all day. I feel like we've already met [00:01:00] because I've been listening to you and doing the research.

Clare: And I've been following your book tour. 

Courtney: I know. And for beautiful insight into my, epiphany at the big prawn. So on my Meet the Booksellers book tour, I was having a moment at the Big Prawn in Ballina, which I'd never actually seen in the flesh. and Clare in her perceptive storyteller way, said something like,

"You will be blessed with an exoskeleton and the ability to survive in the [00:01:30] deep". It was so wonderful. That is what I need to be. That is who I need to be. I need to be a prawn.  

Clare: To be fair, I was only thinking about prawns, but, I'm glad it resonated. 

Courtney: I just took it. It's exactly what I needed to hear.

So knew you were a special someone. Clare, if your grandmother or grandfather said to you, are you still working? What would you say?

Clare: I would say yes. And then I would try to find an example that they would [00:02:00] understand. So all my grandparents have passed away, but I had a very similar thing happen when I was about five years into being a storyteller. My brother could not grasp the concept that I had a job as a storyteller, and it wasn't until I appeared in the Irish Times, which is the national newspaper, where we got interviewed and this wonderful woman Lorna Siggins, came to our little gig and, wrote about storytelling, wrote about us.

And my brother calls me up and says, did you know you're in the Irish Times? So this [00:02:30] storytelling is a thing? And that's the way it works though, right? Because if people don't have a frame of reference, It's very hard to quantify how this could be a job. So for people who have no connection to the arts, I try and give a concrete example of a job I just did that they can grasp. Because the question I get asked the most, is, Do you get paid? Do you make a living at that? you have to give them certain facts. So I say things like well, I've been doing it for 18 years and this is my only job. [00:03:00] And then you can see them trying to do the mathematics needed in their heads for them to make sense of that.

And then it's, but what, that, what so what do you do? And the only bit we can tell them about, is the book in the bookshop or the performance in the place. But actually what goes into living like this is a completely other conversation that I don't think most people can get into.

Courtney: Who do you talk to about the work that you do behind the front facing work? Do you have a community that are literate in that [00:03:30] invisible realm. 

Clare: Yeah. I realized really early on that it was gonna be a lonely road if I wasn't careful. And so I started looking out for not like-minded, but people who had a similar level of curiosity and reflection as me.

So I have a tribe of artists worldwide who I stay in touch with and we have these conversations. 

For me, I need them pretty regularly because I think about giving up the job about every three to six months. 

and some people [00:04:00] need them all the time, and some people need them once a year, or once every ten years, not just storytellers, writers, dancers filmmakers, circus, it doesn't matter what you do, but if you work in this realm, let's call it the arts for a general title, I have to have conversations.

That's one of the ways I keep going.

Courtney: Tell me, what is it about the job that you want to give up on 

Clare: Well, the lack of stability. 

Clare: You know, we ride those waves of instability all the time.

Like, Did you know, Courtney, [00:04:30] that there are people in the world Who get a paycheck every week and on their paycheck, I've heard rumors that it like tells them how much is going towards their pension and it tells them all kinds of interesting facts, and someone else helps pay their tax, so there's things like that.

There's a stability aspect and of course the world has changed massively and the security of long term jobs is gone and all of this sort of thing. But yeah, that constant invention and innovation that we have to do as artists all the time [00:05:00] can be tiring. So I let myself, my family are really used to this now, I let myself get into a fantasy.

I should quit and make coffee because I was trained as a barista, 25 years ago by an ex cop. And I thought, I could probably get that back if I needed to, coffee's never going out of fashion, so I let myself do that as a little release valve, but the payoff for what we do for being in the creative work is so high that I want to do this until I die.

Courtney: Tell me what's pleasing you about it [00:05:30] now or this week particularly. 

Clare: This morning I was looking into some science Australia actually, which is really nice, from Flinders. around soil health. And they've come up with this beautiful way of talking about soil health, that if you listen to the soil, much as you would listen to a human body with a stethoscope, so they have these acoustic instruments, they listen to the soil.

And if they hear the singing, the music that they're expecting, that indicates the soil is healthy. And if they hear silence, the soil [00:06:00] isn't healthy. And this comes out of Flinders University. And that is such a delightful... I know about the idea of the planet singing from Pythagoras. I made a whole show about it.

It's the health of our planet and everything. So that was what I was doing this morning alongside researching mythology around soil because of a new show I'm making.

And when I'm in there, This is my two favorite places to be. And I've got questions for you, by the way, it doesn't, I don't want it all to be me answering questions. Is when I am on stage telling stories with people and when I'm in the [00:06:30] creative making space, because those are the places where I get to sink into a state of wonder or elevated wonder.

And then I lose the feeling for my body because I'm inside this creativity. That's when I'm doing the kind of research bit or if I'm on stage, I'm inside the living relationship with creativity where the audience are participating, which is one of the great joys of storytelling. So there's no fourth wall.

And that's incredibly intoxicating. So there are two different states of creativity, but they're so nourishing and delicious. Do you know that I'll [00:07:00] often be standing in my room sort of buzzing as I'm trying to grab onto ideas and information and sometimes I work on big bits of paper.

I'm going to ask you the same though, cause you just had this book come out, which is a very different process. It's a long process. where does that deep joy of creativity come for you, do you think?

Courtney: So on release day, the day the book landed in bookstores, I really felt keenly, the best part of it Was the doing, you know, the writing of the book, there was this energetic [00:07:30] clinging. It's called release, right? You need to release something that's in your body that you've been carrying for such a long time.

And I just actually couldn't, I couldn't release it. So I had this really tortured day where I took myself on a bushwalk. Got royally lost, missed my first interview, came back to my parents place where I was staying because that's where the book launch was in their hometown, was unpacking champagne from their fridge to take to the bookstore, stood up, cracked my [00:08:00] forehead just had blood, and it was just this punishing, I was punishing myself, I'd had such a delicious time writing it.

I really, honestly, every day asked myself, does it please me? Does it please me? And if it didn't, I would make sure that it did, or I would find a way that it pleased me sentence by sentence. Does it please me? So when I finished the book, how could I not be pleased? I was really pleased and proud.

But then the relinquishing of it, it's been a [00:08:30] semi torture. I'm good now that I have the prawn analogy to have the exoskeleton and to know that I can survive at these depths, which is why I'm so grateful to you because I was missing a kind of a new way of being.

I know how to be in that space of the focus and the line by line. yeah, there's an exchange when it's working. So that's a long way of, yeah, of answering. Yeah. I'm in a new phase.

Clare: But there's an, so it's really [00:09:00] interesting to me.

The exchange when it's working is you and your creativity and the exchange when you release the book is you and the audience in a living relationship with the book. So you go from a couple, that's you and the creative muse to being a triangle, right? And that's a huge shift. And I have to, if you don't mind, I have to comment that I actually don't think of it as you punishing yourself at all.

If you think about that day, metaphorically or mythologically, it's spot on, right? Because you were in a living [00:09:30] relationship with this book for a long time, which is extremely intimate and personal. It's like having a lover, or a sibling or whatever, do you know? It's it's a very intense working relationship and you had to move from that into another type of relationship.

And to do that, you went walkabout in nature. You got lost, really important, right? And then you cracked open your cranium. You literally drew blood. Your clever body, or your clever spirit, was actually going right. So in order to get her where we need to get her, we're going to get her [00:10:00] lost in nature, and then we're going to stop her brain working. Which, when you look at the way shamans work, often shamans have a period of sickness or illness before they can become fully embodied spiritual doctors for their, people.

And I, I don't think artists are shamans, but there is a small area of crossover. Injuring yourself and getting lost are like incredibly important for your development.

So I think that's right on track.  

Courtney: Thank you. I don't feel like [00:10:30] such a goose now. There was a moment when I was lost and I had a little fantasy of curling up in a ball and actually dying, It would be okay. It would be okay. I know that the local newspaper has a very good picture of me.

It would be author died on publication day, 

Clare: It would be beautiful, symbolic. You wouldn't have to deal with reviews. 

Courtney: I wouldn't have to deal with whatever was about to come next.

Clare:  And that's the [00:11:00] truth, right? That's the truth. As a successful writer, successful performer, you're still that scared on publication day.

I think that's a real sign you're alive. As opposed to resting on any laurels and going, Oh yeah, I got this. Do you know? I don't know a lot of artists that live there. I know a lot of artists that live where you are. Yeah. 

Courtney: I have been wanting to ask you, you have the very immediate feedback of your audience.

You know, there's something tribal, isn't there, about standing in front of your community or your peers [00:11:30] and, the body is responding in a certain way.

And have no doubt your mindfulness and skill helps you override that kind of, I guess fight flight response. when you come to your community to gift something that you believe is a gift perhaps instead of warm, open hearts, you're receiving are cold hearts or we don't like this. We don't want this gift. Yeah. How do you be in that?  

Clare: How long do we have to [00:12:00] answer this question? Because it's really, no, it's really juicy because there's so much in it.

So the work is to show up. For whatever happens, that I don't control the outcome. I have to be alive enough and present enough to pay attention to whatever comes and to work with whatever comes. So I actually love the fact that there's no fourth wall. I love the fact that me and my audience go there together and it's my job to pay attention to them.

What's different from my work versus say a piece of theater [00:12:30] or a one person show is that they know what they're going to do. So with some of my work, I know what I'm going to tell. It's preset. So people are saying, Oh, I'm going to go see Clare's show Spanking Goddess, or I'm going to go see Clare's show universe.

They bought a ticket for that. At other points, I'm part of a festival and I've been asked to respond to the festival. So that we're going to put you on in the evening. You've got, 10 minutes at start, 15 minutes at the end. But it's part of a, an evening of voices. When I have that kind of freedom, it's very interesting because you're choosing in the moment what's needed for the audience.

[00:13:00] So the use of the word gift is interesting. I don't know if it is a gift. I think of stories as medicine, the act of telling and listening as medicine and access to the act of telling. When you read a book, you're privately alone in your room and you will have, depending on the writer, you will have access to your own creativity a little bit.

The writer does a lot of the work though. Creating the world. With theatre, the stage is built. With film, it's all done for you. You get your emotional realm to yourself, but even [00:13:30] that's controlled by music. But with storytelling, you do, as a listener, a lot of the heavy lifting. It fully engages the imagination.

I think to say it's a gift is kind of interesting, because I think it's actually, both the teller and the listener are doing the work. Will I get it wrong sometimes? Yes. Will I tell the wrong story? Yes, I will. And then the audience will let me know that I've told the wrong story.

And then I'll adapt and tell something else. So the work is for me to show up as fully embodied as I can with as many stories as I might need or the right show for the right [00:14:00] situation. And then also within the moment to be constantly responsive to what's happening in the room.

I do get fight, flight, freeze. I do get stress and nerves. I think anyone who presents publicly does that. It's a mix of adrenaline and cortisol and caring about what you do and all of these things. That doesn't go away. 18 and a half years in that doesn't go away, but I manage it so that my nerves aren't controlling my speed or my choices.

And that took a long time to figure out, but people really want to go there. That's the thing. People really want to go into [00:14:30] myth. They need myth and story and folklore because it allows them to leave the world that they live in, which is often full of worries and stresses and woes and sickness and death and all the stuff that we have to deal with every day, being alive.

And they get to move into their imagination for a minute, ten minutes, an hour, and in that time their brain does this beautiful dance of giving them dopamine and serotonin and, oxytocin and they get to remember and they get to imagine and go places they've never been without having to go through an airport or, any of that [00:15:00] stuff.

It's the cheapest form of time and space travel. but ultimately people want what happens when a storyteller and an audience get together. And they need it in a physiological way and sometimes in a spiritual or a psychological way.

I'm in service to the space between me and the audience. And it's all of us that put in the effort to get there together. Generally, story is quite a heart centric environment and people are there because they want to listen. However, there's lots and lots and lots and lots of cultures in the world where talking [00:15:30] during a story is not only considered normal, it's essential. Nigerians are really good at it.

They will shout out in the middle of stories, encouragement to the character or to the storyteller. And that's also, there's an old Irish practice of that called "good manning". Good man, go on. I had a beautiful experience of this in a school. It's about 300 kids. I'm up on stage. In the assembly.

So many faces stretching back, and there's teachers, speckled in amongst them. And I'm telling a story, and I spot this little kid. And he is [00:16:00] nearly crawling out of his skin with excitement. He is nearly tearing his own hair out. And he's grabbing his face and covering his eyes, and he's so into it.

And I love audience members like this. So I'm telling this and something else happens and he's "Nooo!!!", out loud. And I see, I clock in this moment, there's a teacher one row back I'm watching everything all the time when I'm telling, right? there's no pausing on what I'm doing, but I'm clocking everything's happening.

And I see this teacher, body language gets all [00:16:30] tight and they lean forward and they interact with that boy in a way that I know that boy has been reprimanded a lot. So he basically leans forward and is "You better sit still or I'm going to remove you", kind of thing. Which to me is terrible.

Because I know what's going on for that boy is that his imagination is on fire right now and he can see everything. So I managed in a split second between sentences, I managed to lock eyes with the teacher. And give [00:17:00] him a very distinct shake of my head and put him back in his seat. Also telling him, I know what's going on here.

It's not disruptive to me. Leave the kid alone sort of thing. Which manages to land in the split second I do, which I'm delighted by. So the boy is back to regular in his seat and like crawling out of his skin and enjoying the hell out of the story. And afterwards it comes up to me. So I'm sat there afterwards, I sit around after my gigs, especially with kids and teenagers. Just give them a chance if they have any questions and stuff and they don't want to ask in front of people. And this little boy comes up. He's about [00:17:30] eight years old. And he's holding his little sister by the hand. And they come up to me, real confident, and he sits down like a little old man.

He puts his hand on my shoulder and he gives me a pat and he says, You're a great storyteller. And I could feel my heart explode and I said, thank you very much. And we got chatting about a few things and then he pottered off. And I knew from that interaction that he was one of the traveling community in Ireland.

So he [00:18:00] would be, there's lots of different words used for that community. They would be nomadic in their nature and they are an oral culture through and through. And they have, so much transmission, orality, stories that have been preserved over so many more generations than ours. So that's his living culture.

So when he saw it then on stage in front of him, that's just himself being recognised. So I love a good heckle when it's something like that.

Courtney: I can really see [00:18:30] what he gave you. 

Clare: Yeah.

Courtney: Is there a difference in your idea of a storyteller?

And it's the Irish word, is it seanchaí? Am I pronouncing it?  

Clare: Yeah, yeah. Perfect pronunciation. seanchaí is the, yeah, is the, is one of the old forms styles of being of telling stories. Yeah. So what was your question? 

Courtney: So do you think of yourself as a seanchaí? 

Clare: No, No. So seanchaí was a 

Courtney: How is it different?

Clare: It depends on who you ask, [00:19:00] but seanchaí was a form of the village storyteller. Yeah. And sometimes they would have been trained up by another storyteller or by the grandparents and they would know the lore of their village. it's funny because becoming a storyteller and that's the first thing you hear, are you a seanchaí?

And I suppose it depends on your reference point. Maybe I'm a modern seanchaí, but actually I think of myself more as a Scéalí. Scéalí is the old Irish word meaning teller of tales. Whereas seanchaí is the bearer of lore. And the lore [00:19:30] might be the wisdom of knowing how to read the weather, knowing how to understand animals, what they're trying to tell you about what's going on, reading, knowing the family histories, knowing the names of the fields.

Every field in Ireland had its own name and that was tied to something. I don't have that kind of knowledge. That's not the way I tell. I tell tales. But there's loads of different kinds of storytellers, right? You've got griots. Griot would be a type of storyteller you'd see in West Africa.

You'd see in Mali, Kenya, Ghana. You've got bards. You've [00:20:00] got minstrels. You've got Story Knifers up in the Arctic Circle. The Inuit, from what I've read, would carve their stories into ice in winter and into bone in summer. You've got the tea house tellers in China, so there's not one way to do it.

And you simply have to find your road with it. So some people are out there telling true stories. Some people are out there telling myth. I suppose the kinds of stories you tell might determine the shape of the path you take. But seanchaí would be, you know, I don't [00:20:30] think I have the traditional accolades. to make me a tradition bearer in that same way. And that kind of frees me up to be a bit of a world storyteller where I can attend to what's happening now in the larger village I live in.

Courtney: In terms of the stories that you choose to tell and when you choose to tell them. How do you decide, how do you decide what the right story is for the moment? 

Clare: You're coming at me with all the big questions. I'm going to need more coffee. 

Courtney: It's all [00:21:00] research. 

Clare: It's that is, that's the really interesting, very hard to quantify work. Because what are you being asked to do?

I'm doing a fundraiser next month for the Women's Equality Party. They're meeting in Bristol, they're like, just talk for 15 minutes. And so what I sit with then is I think about who's going to be at that fundraiser?

What's the moment in history we exist in? How many strands of things are happening? What's my living embodied knowledge of being a woman in the world at this age, at this time? [00:21:30] What's been happening in my experience with stories and women and how they're represented? How is that useful to this group?

What can I bring them that they will carry forward that will give them strength? And how do you keep it funny and light enough? And I, trust my subconscious.

Your subconscious is a genius. We don't allow our brains to breathe and think and reflect.

And with the rise in the amount of information coming through the internet, we have very little breathing space. So if we don't allow the [00:22:00] default mode network to kick in, And that's some stuff that neuroscientists are getting into. So that's that time when you stare out the window, you're in the shower, you go for a walk, you're not reading anything, you're not scrolling, you're not on your phone, you're not on a screen, you're not reading a book.

Your brain will make connections, it won't make it any other time, it's the most productive time. So I allow my default mode network, my subconscious, to do a lot of thinking about what's the right story. Because I have had a huge amount of things happen when I trust that. 

Courtney: Hmm. when you're a consultant storyteller for an [00:22:30] organization with an existing culture, such as the NHS in England, how do you build that relationship? 

Clare: So the work changes from gig to gig. project to project. So with the NHS, which was incredible, I got to work as the storyteller in residence for one of the academies within the NHS. And so there are these academies set up to support the staff and I might be supporting the doctors and the nurses or the nurses and the administrators, whatever it is.

And so during the pandemic, they were [00:23:00] very time poor, but they were also very fraught and in need of something. So what I ended up doing to my great pleasure, was running salons. So I run a salon at my house, with my husband, and we bring in people from all different disciplines, and we host an evening where we ask a scientist and an artist and a a mechanic or could be whatever, right?

We try and get someone from science or someone from arts and a third thing. [00:23:30] And we have each of them speak. And then that generates conversation in the room. we create a cross pollination and interdisciplinary space. And I offered that to the NHS and they said, yeah, because I wanted to talk about something that was relevant to them, the titles of one of the salons was What is the opposite of blame? Because there's a huge blame culture in medicine. Another was about how do we reset? These are people that have to reset every day or every week in such a high [00:24:00] level of crisis. 

So we had our speakers speak and then we would move to Q and A. And one person wrote back on that and said, that has been the best two hours I've spent at work in the last two years.

And we covered everything from Why you should get in cold water, outside - to why humor can save your life when you're dealing with death. So we didn't shy away from difficult things. In addition to that, I ran workshops for teams. So that could be doctors. It could be [00:24:30] managers. It could be nurses. And they had so little time that I had to condense down what I could do. So I gave them a few little tools around how storytelling can help you survive. So help you make meaning and you can become a much better leader, thinker, everything if you get better at telling the stories of your experience.

So that was NHS, but as a consultant it just depends on the question that's being brought to me. What I'm being asked. it might be developing people's skills as a storyteller. It might be creating a bespoke performance for [00:25:00] something. It really varies. And then there's my own repertoire.

I have a library in my head of stories for everything from 30 seconds to 25 minutes. And then I have also a repertoire of shows in my head. So those get called on. And then I do things like I train football coaches and rugby coaches and academics and lawyers, because story goes everywhere.

And I work a lot with scientists. Oh, scientists. I love them. I love them because they really need our help. We need to build more [00:25:30] bridges in and out of science. People are doing it, but we need it. I have to sit and listen to what the person or organisation needs and then develop something that can be useful and in service to them.

Courtney: Wow.

So you worked with the All Blacks 

Clare: Yeah, All Blacks, Premier League, Welsh Rugby, NBA. I'm not a sports person, but I've worked with coaches because coaches, think about it, coaches have to talk to people and motivate people every week of the year.

It's all about human behavior. It's all about human [00:26:00] dynamics. And story is just this incredible ancient technology that allows you to build all kinds of thinking. I mean, that's what's at the root of everything is stories. Politics and religion and society, they're founded in stories. 

A lot of people aren't intentional about the stories they tell. Some people in the sports world are quite addicted to models and analytics and numbers, and this is what's going to get people over the line. But actually what I've heard from a lot of the coaches is the most powerful coaches are the [00:26:30] ones that can tell the stories of the wins and the losses, but also the smaller moments, these tiny things of building culture.

People are always contacting me looking for what's, What's the formula? What's the one story I can tell that'll win over everybody? 

We are coming from a world where everything has to be distilled down into a formula. There's only three kinds of stories. There's seven kinds of stories. There's 13 story formulas. People want those from me. And they want a list of books that they can read about how to tell a story.

And it's taken me years to finally [00:27:00] admit and say out loud, this is an oral art form. Read as many books as you want. There's some useful things in some of them, but actually the greatest work happens when you practice telling and you are listened to. So it has to be to another person. So with the coaches, I do a lot of that where I get them to tell things they would think of as completely pointless.

And then they tell it and they watch the reaction. And they realise that when you tell a story, when you're talking about personal stories, [00:27:30] personal experiences or experiences of teams, you turn it into a memory and the memory becomes a story. What you're doing is you're self reflecting and you're making meaning and you're turning what's happened into knowledge, and then you're passing the knowledge on, and when you do that effectively, you can help shorten the road of somebody else.

They don't have to necessarily go through the same set of difficulties to reach the same level of emotional intelligence, and that's why we tell stories to kids. Or that's why I hope everyone listening to this podcast tells stories to the children in their life, be they your [00:28:00] children or somebody else's.

Not read, but tell. Because what happens, the emotional gymnastics in the brain are phenomenal. So stories can affect behaviour change. You can change the way a player thinks about herself or about her team. You can change the way someone thinks about winning. You can change the way someone thinks about injury.

How you keep going. Just it's it's endless. This is why I do it, you asked me a question early on. You said, what gets you excited and what do you, what are you excited about? The truth is, once people start asking me about [00:28:30] storytelling, I get super excited because 18 and a half years in, I'm at the journey woman stage I think.

And it's a long road with creativity. Where it goes is endless. What it can do when you're using it to try and make things a little bit better for people, so be they coaches or doctors or, firefighters or artists. And that doesn't mean we need a deluge of personal stories in the world.

Sometimes the personal story work is just for the person doing the telling and they need to use it in small areas. It's not about turning everyone [00:29:00] into a performer. But sometimes a well placed story at the right moment can change the listener's life. 

Courtney: Who is helping you at the moment, particularly as a thinker or an idea?

Clare: So many. Do you do the same? Do you draw on other artists? 

Courtney: Constantly seeking. Yeah. this is why this podcast exists. This is right. You are becoming a guiding light. Yeah. So thank you. 

Clare: Whoa. Yeah, I have a shelf devoted on my [00:29:30] bookshelf to me staying sane as an artist. 

No one makes it onto that shelf until they're tried and tested, have saved my soul a number of times. I've grabbed some of them. So I read a lot of poetry. I find poetry first thing in the morning with my first cup of tea. I have a bunch of different poetry books and I choose them at random.

And poets have this great skill of distilling. Truth into metaphor, into simple language, into a single line that can get a whole idea, it just rewires my brain. I find hanging out with poets, living or dead, [00:30:00] really helpful. So Pat Ingoldsby is one of the greatest Irish poets, and he still around, his books will just sort of fix my heart.

I came across Anna Deavere Smith on my friend Dovee Thomason's bookshelf. And she's quite an accomplished performer, so I love reading other performers. She's done a lot of verbatim theatre, where she takes other people's words and she speaks them in character. She's done Hollywood, she's done all this.

But this, which is letters to a young artist. Straight up advice on [00:30:30] making a life in the arts for actors, performers, writers. She invented a character and she writes this young artist letters and imagines the questions that they've asked her. And then she writes and I just, I will open this at random when I'm having a tough day and I'll read it.

So listen to this. One of the favorite quotes she quotes in a letter is A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover. Through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images [00:31:00] in whose presence his heart first opened. And then I'm going to throw loads at you because your listeners are all listening.

Courtney: Keep it coming. 

Clare: The incredible writer Amy Leach has done something in her book of essays. It's called Things That Are. I don't know how I came across it. Somebody might've said it to me. But I fell into this book and she's an absolute legend. Just writes about the world. Which bit do you read to?

Oh, I'll read you this. This is my all time favourite bit of this book. It's in the essay called The Wild What. [00:31:30] She's talking about the cosmos and stars. A star will not shine until it has assembled enough self. Once it has enough self, it cannot help but shine. Once it starts to shine, it cannot help but burn the self up and blow the self away upon the stellar winds.

There's more, and I'm not going to read from everyone, but Liz Lerman is a woman I found recently she's one of the living artists I hang out with, and she's a dancer and a choreographer.

I heard about her from a friend, [00:32:00] another artist, and he was like, you've got to hang out with Liz. So I started reading her book Hiking the Horizontal. One of her first questions is, why don't we see old people dance? Where are the old people?

And she starts breaking rules and asking questions. A really good one that I quoted recently was, Jeanette Winterson, Why be happy when you can be normal? That was an absolute lifesaver and a game changer. That's the autobiography behind Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.

There's a lot more on the shelf and I've got about 10 files on my computer of [00:32:30] quotations that I've captured over the years. Each file is about 60 pages long and I just use the living and the dead to keep me company, keep me afloat, for me it's essential. I don't know if every artist works the same way, but for me it rebuilds my belief when belief is thin.

Courtney: It also reminds me of the ways that we're connected.

So you have entered the space of my inner world, Clare. Thank you. And I feel like you've actually [00:33:00] planted these beautiful images inside it that, I'll be carrying with me. 

Thank you. 

Clare: My pleasure. 

Courtney: Is what I want to say. 

Clare: Always nice to talk creativity and disbelief with another artist. 

What a pleasure. 

Courtney: Are You Still Working? is an independently produced podcast by me, Courtney Collins, and producer Lisa Madden. Till next time.