The Queen Of Change

Julia Cameron wants you to do your morning pages.

- Penelope Green

On any given day, someone somewhere is most likely leading an Artist’s Way group, gamely knocking back the exercises in The Artist’s Way book, the quasi-spiritual manual for ‘creative recovery’, as its author Julia Cameron puts it, that has been a lodestar for blocked writers and other artistic hopefuls for more than a quarter of a century.

There have been Artist’s Way clusters in the Australian outback and the Panamanian jungle; in Brazil, Russia, the United Kingdom and Japan; and also, as a cursory scan of Artist’s Way Meetups reveals, in Des Moines, Iowa and Toronto. It has been taught in prisons and sober communities, at spiritual retreats and New Age centres, from Esalen to Sedona, from the Omega Institute to the Open Center, where Julia will appear in late March, as she does most years. Adherents of The Artist’s Way include authors Patricia Cornwell and Sarah Ban Breathnach. Pete Townshend, Alicia Keys and Helmut Newton have all noted its influence on their work.

So has Tim Ferriss, the hyperactive productivity guru behind The Four Hour Workweek, though to save time he didn’t actually read the book, ‘which was recommended to me by many mega-selling authors’, he writes. He just did the Morning Pages, one of the book’s central exercises. It requires you to write three pages, by hand, first thing in the morning, about whatever comes to mind. (Fortunes would seem to have been made on the journals printed to support this effort.) The book’s other main dictum is the Artist’s Date: two hours of alone time each week to be spent at a gallery, say, or any place where a new experience might be possible.