The Discipline of Inspiration with Carey Wallace

"Just try harder. Work harder. Think harder." But what if the key to creativity, whether that’s in our art or in the art of our daily lives, isn’t more effort but surrender? Carey Wallace, artist and author of The Discipline of Inspiration, joins Amy Julia Becker to talk about:

• How discipline and spiritual practices nurture inspiration
  
  
• The role of surrender in the creative process
  
  
• How all humans can explore their creative potential and embrace the joy of creation
  
  
• Art as a communal experience
  
  
• How the discipline of inspiration empowers meaningful change in our world that is good and mutually beneficial

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REIMAGINING FAMILY LIFE WITH DISABILITY WORKSHOP
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ON THE PODCAST:

The Discipline of Inspiration by Carey Wallace

Image Seminar: The Discipline of Inspiration (a five-week craft workshop)

Slow Productivity by Cal Newport

Jon Batiste interview on Fresh Air

Once a Queen: A Novel by Sarah Arthur

Once a Castle by Sarah Arthur 

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CONNECT with Carey Wallace on her website (disciplineofinspiration.org), Instagram (@disciplineofinspiration), or Facebook (@disciplineofinspiration).

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WATCH this conversation on YouTube by clicking here. Read the full transcript and access detailed show notes by clicking here or visiting amyjuliabecker.com/podcast.

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ABOUT THE GUEST:

Carey Wallace is the author of The Discipline of Inspiration (Eerdmans), The Blind Contessa’s New Machine (Penguin), and The Ghost In The Glass House (Clarion). She works to help people from all walks of life find inspiration and build strong creative habits to sustain a lifetime of creation. She performs as a songwriter, exhibits her own fine art, and has spoken on art, faith, and justice with students at Princeton, Julliard, Emory, Pratt, and Yale. Her articles and poems have appeared in Time, Detroit’s Metro Times, and America. She is the founder of a retreat for artists in Michigan, and the Discipline of Inspiration creative habit formation program, which has been in operation for over a decade across the US and internationally. She grew up in small towns in Michigan, and lives and works in Brooklyn. 
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Connect with me:

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• Website

Thanks for listening!

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Creativity and Inspiration
• 8:09 All Art Comes from God
• 17:59 The Discipline of Inspiration Explained
• 26:50 Creating Individual Disciplines for Inspiration
• 33:07 The Role of Community in Artistic Expression
• 38:22 Understanding Inspiration and Incarnation
• 45:23 Reimagining the Good Life through Inspiration

Transcript

Note: This transcript is autogenerated using speech recognition software and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.

Amy Julia (01:46)
We are starting out the new year here at Reimagining the Good Life with my friend, Carey Wallace. Carey, welcome.

Carey Wallace (01:56)
I'm so delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Amy Julia (01:58)
Well, I am so delighted to have you here. And if anyone is watching this on YouTube, you might notice there's a Christmas tree in the background. is not I mean, it may be that Carey keeps her Christmas tree up until like mid to late January, but that's actually not when we're recording. So it's completely seasonally appropriate. I just want to say that from the get go that there is a Christmas tree. And I really appreciate that we are recording in December. So with that said, I want to now dive into this beautiful book that Carey has written, and it is called

The Discipline of Inspiration, The Mysterious Encounter with God at the Heart of Creativity. I feel like we could actually just take the title kind of word by word because I know how thoughtfully that title was crafted. And maybe we will do that eventually. But I wanted to just start by asking you to give a little bit of the origin story for this book, which I know could be a long answer. But so tell us what you want to about how this book came into being.

Carey Wallace (02:52)
Yeah, well, so this book comes into being as I am. So I am a writer myself. And when I published my first book, I was interested in creating a program for artists to help them develop strong creative habits, which is something that almost no teaching in any kind of art school teaches you how to do. So we're not given that tool when we leave. And if we don't have the luck to go to art school, you know, we just have to figure that out on our own. And as part of putting that program together, I was like, I want to have

speech by artists on art. Like I don't want to, a lot of the kind of tomes on art are written by people who weren't necessarily that successful as artists themselves. You know, cause Rembrandt didn't sit around writing, know, Toni Morrison didn't write a textbook on how to be a novelist. She gave you some novels to work from, right? So.

Amy Julia (03:37)
Sure.

Right.

Carey Wallace (03:45)
So I went through all these places where I could find direct speech by artists on art. So Paris Review interviews and Rolling Stone interviews and books of songwriters on songwriting and dancers on dance. And I was looking for a whole host of categories. I was interested in the artist's life. Do you have to be unhappy? The artist's character. Do you have to be a jerk? Right? The purpose of art, the definition of art, the artist's religious experience, because I myself am an artist of faith and was interested how those things entwine.

Amy Julia (04:07)
Hmm.

Carey Wallace (04:15)
And what I found was just like this total cacophony of opinions, like, and diametric opposition from people who like nobody else has the authority to argue with, right? Except for on this one point, which was the sensation of inspiration. And inspiration, as I am defining it in this book, is the thing that tells you how to sing, even if you're a really good singer, how do you sing this song?

Amy Julia (04:20)
Hmm.

Hmm.

Carey Wallace (04:44)
Right? Like if you can hit all the right notes, still how do you sing? And if you are a writer and you can always write perfect sentences and you actually even have the talent to observe things very well, what do you do with that? What do you say? What is the thing that lights that up? And when people talk about that, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks and right up to the present day, they talk about that as being something that comes from beyond them, that has a different personality from them.

that if they don't accept it, it will go to somebody else. So you get quotes like Ernest Hemingway, and it's cross genre. people talk about this in sculpture, they talk about it in writing, they talk about it in dance. so Hemingway says when he reads his writing, he can't believe he wrote it, it must have come from somewhere else, he probably read it in the Saturday Evening Post. And Hokey Carmichael, who wrote Georgia On My Mind says,

that great songs aren't written, they're discovered. Great melodies aren't written, they're discovered. They seem to be preexisting, which is another thing that people talk about when they talk about the sensation of inspiration. And there's a real dividing line as well between things we know are inspired and things we know aren't. And we can get real confused about that, but deep in our hearts, we actually know, right? So, and Michael Jackson at the end of his life was about to go on tour actually before he died. And he was also feverishly recording.

Amy Julia (05:42)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Carey Wallace (06:08)
And he was telling his entourage that his higher power was giving him these songs. And one of his entourage was like, Michael, can you get your higher power to give you these songs after the tour? And Michael Jackson said, I can't. Then he might give them to Prince. So I got very interested in this testimony. And the other thing that happens around inspiration is that whether you have a religious background or not,

you need religious language to describe it. It feels like a religious experience, even if what you need to say is can't be God. But many people actually from all kinds of backgrounds do describe it as an encounter with God. And that had been to some extent my experience, not that I necessarily believed that God was speaking to me, but that some of the ideas, not all my ideas, but some of my ideas came with like an insistence and an authority.

and a difference from my own daily patterns of thought or even my patterns of thought in the like elevated, quote unquote, elevated space of being a writer, that it felt like it was something beyond me. It felt like it might have a piece of what I experienced in prayer or experienced in worship. so I started thinking, what happens if we take this testimony of artists seriously? Where can that take us in our art? Where can it take us in lives of faith?

you know, what does it offer us in both of those places? So that's essentially the question the book is trying to answer.

Amy Julia (07:39)
Yeah, and I remember talking to you over the years about this book and early on you said there's a really simple premise and it's actually also a somewhat controversial one, which I think you just spoke to, which is that all art comes from God. So like what? That's five words. All art comes from God. And I wanted to dig into that sentence, which shows up in the book as well, and which you've just kind of explained to us how you got to that as your central, like if there's one thing

Carey Wallace (07:54)
Yeah.

Amy Julia (08:09)
that all of these different, in terms of what this inspiration is, and you're obviously using the language of God when you say it that way, other people might put the universe, the divine, the higher power, the whatever, but still, all that comes from God. why is that, like, what do you mean by that statement and why is it maybe not quite as simple as it seems?

Carey Wallace (08:28)
Yeah, well, you know, I make that claim very early in the book. There's an introduction and then the first part of chapter one is all art comes from God. This is art's only source and its only definition. And I wrote that and I knew that that was what I wanted to write over 10 years ago. And then I, you know, I worried about it for almost a decade because I could just hear all the shouting, right? Like I could hear religious people being like, does this horrible thing come from God? You know, I could feel I could feel like

Amy Julia (08:38)
Ha ha ha!

Carey Wallace (08:58)
people who really care about art being like, does this piece of trash art come from God? I can feel people who are in the art world who had horrible experiences in religious spaces being like, keep your religion off my art, right? But it felt like such an important thing and it felt like actually a place where some of those tensions and harms could maybe be unwound if it was understood.

properly or understood well, maybe is a better word there. So I make that claim and then I spend the better part of an entire book bracketing it, right? So, you know, one of the first things I say is that I don't believe that all cultural products are art, right? I think art is both more prevalent and much more rare than we think. I think a lot of the things that we don't understand as art at all are actually art, by which I mean

Amy Julia (09:25)
Mm-hmm.

Carey Wallace (09:54)
places where God has intruded into the world and a human has answered that call to make something wonderful that they wouldn't have made without that intrusion, that sacred spark. And I also think that an enormous amount of what we're calling art is not in fact art, right? So I do in the book talk about, think, four other major categories of cultural production, which are propaganda, things that seek to convince, entertainment, things that are

Amy Julia (10:03)
Yeah.

Carey Wallace (10:23)
kind like a medicine that can take the edge off, but can also become an addiction And also pornography, which offers you the simulacrum of a desire and keeps you from ever getting what you actually desire because of the pornography that you hold in your hands. And then I think another major category of cultural production is just failure. It just doesn't work as anything.

Amy Julia (10:47)
Hmm.

Carey Wallace (10:48)
And I think that those things very rarely appear on alloyed, right? Like I think you very rarely get pure art unencrusted with any of those other things. And I also think that like, even when you're making horrible propaganda, you can accidentally, if you are an artist who has been in any way accustomed to responding to inspiration, that there can be glimmers of true art that shines through that stuff.

Amy Julia (10:52)
Right.

Can you give like a couple of examples without trying to like, you might not want to name names, you might want to name names, I don't know, but even just if it's like a little more broad as far as, because you do some of this in the book, like Instagram influencers, for example, or like, you know I mean? Even if you don't, of some of those different types of cultural products, the pornography, the propaganda and the entertainment, like just so that people can maybe distinguish between them.

Carey Wallace (11:40)
an example of what is what. So I will name names, think an enormous amount of culture, yeah, sure. I think that a lot of beautiful art has been made within the church. I also think that there's quite a bit of sort of modern commercialized Christian art that is art, quote unquote art, that is actually propaganda.

Amy Julia (11:42)
Yeah.

I'm like, you might be willing to, but I don't want to put you on this spot.

Carey Wallace (12:05)
that is not actually seeking to welcome a spark of God into the world and follow it wherever it takes us, but is very interested in getting a certain message across in what they feel is most effective way. And I don't think it operates as art. can be valuable in its own way. It can be valuable in carrying that message, but I don't think that it has the sort of capaciousness.

Amy Julia (12:20)
Hmm.

Carey Wallace (12:33)
and the resonance that real art has. And I think that's partly because God is not actually captured by these positions and by kind of sterile messaging. God is actually much bigger and broader than that. in entertainment, I I love, like I love junk candy TV. Like it's one of my favorite things, right? And it's something that can really take the edge off for me.

It's something that can keep me from getting into worse addictions, right? But it's also something that as a steady diet can really, really make you sick, right? pornography, think we've got an enormous amount of actual pornography in the world. But in a very traditional sense, it's more and more widely distributed in the general culture. But I also think we as a culture,

Amy Julia (13:10)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sure. Yes.

Carey Wallace (13:28)
We've watched a lot of cooking shows where we don't get to eat anything. We watch a lot of home shows that aren't actually us in our own homes, doing things with the people we love. I think all of these things have good sides and bad sides. I think they can inspire us. I think they can be their own art form. I was watching the Great British Baking Show already this afternoon. It's great company.

Amy Julia (13:32)
Okay.

Carey Wallace (13:57)
really lovely pictures of humanity in there and some, you know, some of it rises to true art. But I actually define that as anything where you are looking at an image of the thing instead of having the thing itself in your hands or instead of you yourself having to be face to face with that thing with your own face. So.

Amy Julia (14:21)
I want to come back to that a minute, I'm going to read just as a kind of cap, tapping off what you just said. This is from your chapter called Not Everything is Art. I found it really helpful because you say, like propaganda, art has the power to change minds, but by revelation, not persuasion. Like entertainment, art distracts us from this world, not by temporary illusion, but with a greater truth. Pornography creates hunger without offering food.

Art satisfies our hunger despite the fact that we haven't eaten. So I really appreciated just those distinctions and the examples you just gave, but it kind of leads to this other question of like, so what is, let's give some examples of what is art. And you've mentioned Toni Morrison already and you mentioned, you know, Michael Jackson, but like, how do you know, yeah, real art when you see it? Like what's the, and are there some things, I know the answer is yes, but like, what are some things that would kind of

perhaps surprise a listener that you are defining as art that aren't in the, you that you're not gonna find them in a museum or in a hall of fame that goes to rock and roll stars or whatever.

Carey Wallace (15:29)
Yeah, that's an interesting question. So one of the things I say at the beginning of the book is that like a lot of the conversations we have around art are about what is and isn't art. And I think it's useful to have these rubrics, but I also think that it's, you know, there's just so much, you know, we have entire pages in New York Times devoted to this question. We also have like boys running down each other's favorite bands in high school locker rooms, you know, so.

And I think none of them really ever arrive at any agreement. But I think that rather than naming things that I think are definitely arts, I could say something more about the qualities of art as revelation, as giving us something from beyond. And I think the question of have we done it or have we not done it, if you are a working artist is like a

profound questions. It's a matter of your whole career sometimes, or it can feel like it. So I don't think it's not one that's worth asking in certain contexts, but I also think that even when you're somebody who has to know whether you've done it or not, because you're going to put something into the world under your own name, and it's going to really matter to you whether that was good or not, we both know absolutely whether we've done it or not at some points. And we also will maybe never know whether we have done it or not.

So yeah, I think we walk that line of knowing and not knowing what is and is not. And I think we also walk that line as consumers of art or as viewers of art.

Amy Julia (17:08)
Yeah, I'm just thinking you have another quotation Art is God's constant continuation of the original creation through the hands and minds of humankind. And I think that idea of, which gets back to the idea of inspiration, that there's something that is coming kind of upon us, through us, but that we also must surrender to in order to have that come into the world and

there's just a degree of like a lack of control that is going easily can easily lead the creator or the artist to doubt whether or not that's what's really happening because it's like, I don't know what happened actually. And also it perhaps is its own little hint that maybe this was something more than entertainment or propaganda or pornography. Yeah.

Carey Wallace (17:42)
Yes. Yup.

Amy Julia (17:59)
So I'm thinking about the title of your book which might seem contradictory to some people in terms of the words discipline and inspiration so I'd love to just dig in there a little bit like what is You've said a little bit about what inspiration is but why the discipline of inspiration because the kind of common understanding I think of inspiration is and even the way we've talked about it a little bit is like it just kind of hits you upside the head you can't say when it's coming when it's going you know, I

And so you better, you know, the example of Michael Jackson, like that's not a picture of like discipline. That's a picture of like frenzy almost like when, my gosh, I need to be on tour, but actually I'm writing down the songs.

Carey Wallace (18:40)
Yeah, so I'm really glad you asked that question. And also, I'm glad that you introduced the word surrender to the conversation, because when I started to believe that this might be true about art, I realized that the fundamental gesture then of an artist is not drawing the line or singing the note, but surrendering to that thing that is trying to come through us, through that line or through that note, that it's going to tell us how to sing or how to draw. And I got very curious about how

Amy Julia (19:01)
Mm-hmm.

Carey Wallace (19:10)
we could do more of that in a culture that has virtually no tools that teach us how to surrender, right? That is all about clench and control and thinking harder and trying harder and like the grind and like there's all sorts of words for it, but none of it is about surrender. And when I started thinking about that, what I realized was that the spiritual disciplines I had used in my own practice as a Christian, think this is, I hope these ideas are valuable beyond.

Amy Julia (19:16)
Hmm.

Carey Wallace (19:36)
beyond sort of Christian circles, but that is my background. And I realized that the disciplines I had used of praying and silence and solitude and community and even worship, fasting,

Amy Julia (19:38)
Yeah.

Carey Wallace (19:52)
those were all things that would help us get out of the way of a spirit beyond ours and come through and let something like that come through us. So whether you believe that that spirit is God or not, I think that the great wisdom of humankind in the space of how do we surrender is actually contained in the classic spiritual disciplines that you find not just in Christianity, but in Buddhism and Islam and across the, you these practices are similar across the great world religions.

So when I think about the discipline of inspiration, first of all, I think it has a bad name. It's very interesting. There's a gendered thing that happens here where male artists in particular who I think may struggle with whether what they're doing is productive or manly or whatever enough have a real resistance to it will often be like, no, no, what I do is I go to work and I show up and I have like a regular job.

regular man. And, and, but when you push them, and I actually got in a brawl with a costume designer about this at a salon, and he, he had done all this really interesting stuff, and he insisted that it was just a job. And then at the very end, any, any, you know, he called me sweetie a number of times in the middle of conversation. And then at the very end, he was like, but the best things I've ever done didn't come from me.

Amy Julia (20:52)
Yes.

Carey Wallace (21:21)
correct that is inspiration. So, so, you know, I think it does have this loosey goosey we're in a, you know, we're in a frenzy, we're in a trance. I actually think that inspiration is very consistent. I think it is speaking all the time and what is inconsistent is us. And we are not always able to show up for it. But that when we do, it is there. And I also think that when it doesn't speak,

Amy Julia (21:24)
Hmm.

Carey Wallace (21:50)
you know, and nobody understands these mechanics perfectly. But one of my suspicions is, you know, one of the questions this book answers is, what, why is it good to have a God instead of a muse, right? Why do we need it? Why do we need a God instead of a muse? And one of the answers is because

Amy Julia (22:02)
Mm-hmm.

Will you pause

for just a minute in case people are like, I don't remember what amuse is. Like just make sure where terms are making sense.

Carey Wallace (22:10)
So a muse, yeah, yeah.

So thank you. So a muse is just somebody who gives you ideas for art, right? So, and that can be just, with the Greeks, it was actually like a spectrum of the gods were muses. And they told you, they were actually in charge of different art forms and they would give you ideas for different art forms. in modern life, sometimes like Eminem's wife, Kim would be considered a muse.

because he wrote so many songs about her. So there's an idea that like sometimes people are your muse. But the idea, in general that idea is it does have a spiritual valence, right? And you're talking about a spirit who keeps wanting you to make stuff. Well, does that spirit care about you? Like does that spirit care about anything else that happens in your life? Like your mental health, your relationships? Like there are no answers to that. And actually the answers that we do have are often like,

Amy Julia (23:03)
Mm-hmm.

Carey Wallace (23:08)
really dangerous answers. Like it doesn't matter how I live my personal life as long as I make this great art. Like the pressure of this is so great and like the response that I get to my work is so wonderful that like who cares how I treat my family, who cares how I behave, who cares if I'm happy, right? Like, and I think we all participate in it. Like how many of us cared that Michael Jackson was happy when he was a little kid? Cause his music made us so happy, right? So,

I do think that it is actually a very consistent quality and when it doesn't speak, which is the point I was trying to lead up to, it may be because it is a God who cares for us and not a muse who's just trying to choke out as much art of us as it can before we die, right? So, and sometimes when the muse doesn't speak or when inspiration doesn't speak, it's because God knows we need to rest, God knows we need to grow.

Amy Julia (23:46)
Hmm.

Yeah.

Carey Wallace (24:03)
God knows that something else needs to happen in our life before the art can come back. And that is actually like a mercy and a grace, even though it can feel terrifying. And it's a sign, even if we can't accept it as mercy or grace. So, yeah, so going back to the title, like I was very interested in the idea of creating a discipline around this thing that people think is ungovernable, because I actually think that when we approach it in a disciplined fashion, it can become this very healthy, beautiful relationship.

Amy Julia (24:14)
Right, right.

Yeah.

Carey Wallace (24:32)
between us and inspiration. We can trust it not to run out. We can trust that it's not, we know how limited we are. It's terrifying if all this stuff is just coming from us. Like we can't even like, we don't get enough sleep and we can't do anything, right? So like what's gonna happen to our talent? What's gonna happen to our ideas? So it can be a great comfort to realize that that power doesn't come from us and it's there, it's available at any point that we're in shape to receive it.

And our job is to be in shape to receive it, not to be a genius. But I was also interested in the idea, one of the conclusions I came to is that the acceptance of inspiration is not us training inspiration, inspiration is training us, right? So we're not disciplining inspiration. The experience of inspiration, the consistent negotiation with inspiration can actually be a profound spiritual discipline in the same way that all those other disciplines can shape us.

Amy Julia (25:29)
One of the things you don't do in this book, which I think the title might suggest to some that you would, is say, wake up and write your morning pages, or make sure that you have 72 minutes in the afternoon at least three times a week, or nothing will ever come. I'm curious how you think about time and discipline and inspiration.

Carey Wallace (25:48)
Yeah.

Yeah, well, I'm somebody who has, I mean, it's rest and discipline because it's been a big part of my life. I am a writer. I come from a family of musicians. So when I was like, you know, I was young, I wanted to be a writer. They were like, of course you will practice, which is not a response that most, you know, it takes a lot of writers. They were like, you'll put in hours every day. And so I did. And that was, you know, from the time I was 18 years old, I wrote a couple hours a day, every working day.

Amy Julia (26:12)
Yeah.

Carey Wallace (26:21)
And that's a habit that in seasons I still apply and it has been very, powerful for me. So I could see the power of that. And I could also see, you know, as I kind of move through life that anyone I knew who's making it as an artist had some kind of discipline around their creation, but they're all very, very different. So I don't think it's, and I also think that you can spend a lot of time getting lost in like, what did Maya Angelou do and what did, you know, and you know.

Amy Julia (26:26)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Carey Wallace (26:50)
what did Chris Wyman do and what did anybody that you respect do? On a daily basis, what they did is not gonna work for you, your life is different. So I do actually teach classes around creating those strong disciplines in your life. That program that I started, that I was talking about at beginning, I still run. And I think that we can create habits and community that are really strong and important for us. But I also think that...

those habits always need to be individual to us and that it's better for us to spend more time experimenting in our own lives, experimenting on ourselves, than to try to follow the path of other people. Although it is good to educate yourself to some degree about what has happened in the past. I'm not saying there's no usefulness in that, but I've watched it be a sand trap for people. So.

Amy Julia (27:41)
I also just happen to read the book Slow Productivity by Cal Newport, which is much more of like a self-help how to get things done. Although what was interesting about it, I was reading it kind of simultaneous to yours, was that he gives these examples of, for example, John McPhee, who was a prolific writer and who describes his writing process in various times of lying on a table for hours, like literally just being like, I have no idea how to...

make order out of all this, in his case, nonfiction writing. So information I've got. And what I do know, however, and this maybe goes back to the surrender idea, is that like, I can't force it to happen, but I can open myself up to it happening. And so, and the way I do that is by, in his case, like lying on a picnic table. Like he was like outside, just like lying down. And I've had times like that where I've had a deadline and I'm like, I have enough.

Carey Wallace (28:23)
Amen.

Yeah.

Amy Julia (28:37)
physical hours in the day to write the number of words that you want me to submit by this time. And they're not here yet. And if I try to make them be here, it's not actually what's supposed to be here. Like I just have a sense of that. So there is a, to your point, there's a goodness to that kind of disciplined sense of time for any of us in almost anything that we do.

Carey Wallace (28:46)
Yes.

Amy Julia (29:02)
But there's also that place for rest, that place for surrender. I love what you were saying earlier, just about like, just might, that you might not be ready. And guess what? Like inspiration might also care about you and not just what you're producing, you know? So, yeah, that really resonates with me personally, but also with a lot of what I've also heard and read from other artists. I was listening to an interview with John Battiste today and he,

Carey Wallace (29:16)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nice.

Amy Julia (29:30)
Also was just talking about that sense of the music being out there and him being a receptacle for that and like being trained in how to listen and offer and a willingness to offer. So I really appreciate all of it. Another question I wanted to ask you is who is this book for? Is it for people who call themselves working artists in whatever genre? Is it for?

them plus other people, like who's it for?

Carey Wallace (30:00)
Well, so one of the conclusions I come to in the book is that I believe that everybody has the potential to be an artist. And I don't believe that because everybody has world-class talent at anything that we would think of as a classic art, at drawing or singing or whatever, writing a poem.

But I do think, although one of things I think about a lot is like how sad it is that we have commodified art to the point that like people think that they shouldn't sing if they are not Aretha Franklin, right? So, you know, we come from a world where every town used to have many singers and everything was celebrated with dancing and song and cooking and all these things that we've now decided had to be done by like the trained professionals.

And even like a hundred years ago when a song was a hit, it would sell a million copies of sheet music, right? Because people would then play it in their homes to their friends. And I think it's actually a real tragedy that that doesn't happen anymore. But aside from that sort of like, that's the social sciences argument, right? But for me, the philosophical theological argument is that anybody can welcome God.

Amy Julia (30:59)
Yeah.

Carey Wallace (31:15)
into their activities. Anybody can respond to these. And also, everybody has them, right? Like, people love to be like, I could never do that when they look at, you know, when they look at a great painting. And it's like, that feels to me like a denial that says you feel a call there. Like, it tells you something. Like, you don't look at a bridge and be like, I could never build that bridge, right? Like, you don't, there are all kinds of things that you look at.

Amy Julia (31:36)
Hmm.

Carey Wallace (31:43)
And you never say, I couldn't do that, right? But art provokes consistently this reaction, I can never do that. I think that's because there's a tug in all of us to do it. And I think it's very interesting that people in all kinds of places where they can't do what they had been doing, whether they're in prison or whether they're retirees or that, you we've got all these retired heads of state who become painters, right? And we have prisoners who do these sort of one, there's a whole like school of

Amy Julia (31:45)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Carey Wallace (32:12)
prison art by people who were never trained, who make these absolutely wonderful things. so I believe it's for everybody actually. Like what I hope that it can do is unlock, know, unlock the artist who is sort of like hidden or buried or hiding in everybody and that it doesn't have to take the form of.

having an audience or a big audience, right? And it doesn't have to take the form of technical proficiency, but it can take the form of, know what it's like to think I want to experiment with this recipe. I'm going to listen more to that, right? Like I, as I'm driving my truck, think about like how I want to plan the garden in my backyard. And I'm going to go ahead and invest in that. And I'm going to see what comes from that and see who I can share it with and see.

Amy Julia (32:55)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Carey Wallace (33:07)
how it might grow if I just listen to it. And I'm also gonna believe that that might be how life with God could be elsewhere in life, right? That these intimations of I do something that I don't understand why I'm doing it and it turns out beautiful. Or it fails and I learned something from the failure, you know, like that could be a model for us for what it means to follow God instead of...

I'm not saying that doctrine doesn't matter, but instead of things that are

sort of more, more doctrinaire or, or, or can feel much more closed and with much less possibility for many people to, to recognize that these religious faiths of all kinds are about the idea of a living presence among us, right? And, and think about what it can be like to engage with this living presence, which, I think that art is a wonderful way into those experiences.

Amy Julia (34:06)
Well, and I wonder, whether for people who don't kind of count themselves as artists at the same time, the idea of being an receptive audience for art is, I think, maybe a part of that, sense of. Yeah, we, as you said, we don't have much time and space in our life, whether it's because it's crowded out by the propaganda and the entertainment

there's not as much of a commitment that we have culturally to actually receive art as there once was. And I wonder whether that is another application, I guess, of what you're talking about here, that there's like being a recipient of art is also a way to be encountering that inspiration.

Carey Wallace (34:40)
Yeah.

Amy Julia (34:55)
whether or not I'm gonna go and create my own art or whether it's, I don't know, it seems like that's part of the process.

Carey Wallace (35:01)
Yeah, well, and I think that the, that,

Art is a training in opening ourselves up to something else coming through us, right? And I think in the best cases, it's a cascade of inspiration. It's inspiration that comes to the composer and cascades through the conductor to the members of the symphony and then through us, right? Then into us. So there's a community there and there's also a sort of progressive surrender, you know, through these sort of stages that I think can be...

Amy Julia (35:11)
the

Carey Wallace (35:36)
can open us up to surrender and risk in our personal relationships in ways that make them deeper and in ways that help us to take chances that are worth taking in the rest of our lives. But I also think that, yeah, the state of the arts today, at least in the West, is very sad. And I think one of the things sad about it is that we actually are taking in art all the time. The radio is always playing, right? There's always a song playing somewhere.

Amy Julia (36:01)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Carey Wallace (36:05)
we almost never listen to it, right? Like the TV is on all the time. We hear like 40 % of what's said on it, you know? And so I think to some extent, there's not enough attention paid to it and to another, on the flip side, we are drowning in it, right? We can't respond to it because we're so overstimulated all the time. So I think taking the time to really...

Amy Julia (36:23)
Hmm.

Carey Wallace (36:31)
listen to something, to really watch something, to really be present to something is wonderful. But I also am like, I really insisted on people need to make things. Like I think that the like, I do believe that we are made in the image of God. I think that means that we're all capable of great love. But I think that like, even more than that, I think we're more creative than we are loving a lot of the time. Like people are, people are

uncontrollably creative, like whether they want to be or not, like they are creating the weather around each other, they are creating children, they are creating the, you know, they're creating the conditions of life for, for large and small numbers of people around them through the work that they do. So I think to back off from and deny how much that's already happening is dangerous. And I also think that like, wonderful things happen when we actually like,

make stuff when we actually do stuff, when it's not just about consumption. And I think that consumption is going to happen. We can get better at consumption. We can frame it as confrontation or conversation or all things that are healthier than consumption. But I think the thing we're really not doing is making things ourselves. And I think making space for that is really important. And I think it's something that God fundamentally does. And I think we're fundamentally built to do it. And I think we are all built to do it.

Amy Julia (37:29)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Yeah, this is another quotation from the part of the book that's about incarnation. And maybe we can talk about that a little bit, including a definition. But you write, art only emerges when inspiration becomes incarnate. So first of all, would you just talk about that word and the concept of incarnation, but also the relationship between inspiration and incarnation?

Carey Wallace (38:22)
Yeah, so incarnation is, think, I don't think it's a distinctively Christian idea, but I think it's a foundationally Christian idea. It's very central to the Christian faith, and it's simply that God came to earth in human flesh, right? So the spirit of God was clothed in human flesh. And what I think happens, I spend a lot of time thinking about, okay, so what is the process that art comes in?

the world comes into the world through. And because if you believe that it's coming from God, it doesn't all come into the world in the same language. It generally comes into the world in the language our mother spoke to us, right? And it doesn't all come into the world talking about whatever the world beyond this one is about. It's not about, you know, heaven or angels, or it's about the things that happened in this world and specifically the things that happened in our corner of the world.

Amy Julia (39:21)
Mm.

Carey Wallace (39:21)
And

even if we're writing fantasies, they are heavily informed by whatever actually happened to us, right? Like they're deeply inflected with who we are. So what is, and there's all kinds of, and these are in the book, there's all kinds of language used by artists to try and describe this. Like one of my favorite is, cause I love dogs, is that Martha Graham, who's like, you know, the choreographer talks about being a lovely golden retriever who would go off and find ideas and bring them back.

Amy Julia (39:30)
Yeah.

Carey Wallace (39:51)
Right? And Hemingway talks about being a well, you know, he takes stuff out of a well and then has to wait for the well to fill up. Right? And when I started thinking about it, and I think this actually goes back to the discussion, we just having on gendered responses to this idea. I think the best way to describe this encounter is pregnancy, is a woman who gives birth.

Amy Julia (40:08)
Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Carey Wallace (40:17)
And that is there in Christian theology. There's a fundamental way in which everyone in the church is considered the bride of Christ. whether you are, whatever gender you are in this life, you are female in relationship to God. And you are going to clothe the spirit of God in your own flesh in some way. And I think that that is actually what happens with art.

Amy Julia (40:23)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Carey Wallace (40:40)
that it is our whole self, it's not a well. Like it is not, we're taking, not taking out of something external from us. We're not going away from us to get something. We're actually taking the elements of ourselves and they are being transfigured and transformed by this external element into something that is not really fully of us.

Amy Julia (41:01)
Well, and is something again that you get in the book, just that sense of as much as you are claiming that all art comes from God, you're also saying all art comes from God through particular selves. And that that's kind of this amazing distinctive who knew, you know, type of thing. And I think about even, I think it's Anne Patchett and Elizabeth Gilbert who also talk about there being a book.

Carey Wallace (41:12)
Yes.

Amy Julia (41:26)
that one of them was going to write and then the other one ended up writing it. I can't quite remember the details, but it was like one of them had written down an idea, didn't do anything with it. Years later, the other one wrote the book. Years after that, they met. And the one was like, how'd you write my book? But it would have been written differently if it had been. But the story itself was like the idea that they both felt had been given to them. And one of them wrote it.

Carey Wallace (41:29)
Huh?

Amy Julia (41:55)
And but but there so there's this sense of kind of the other coming through, but then there's this distinctive and very personal aspect. And, I tend to one of the aspects, again, of Christian theology that I really appreciate is the idea of God being humble and the we see that in very kind of easily in Jesus. But I think about the spirit of God also having humility in.

Carey Wallace (42:21)
Hmm.

Amy Julia (42:22)
saying,

yeah, the way I work is through these humans, not through shebang. You know, I'm just going to like razzle dazzle you with cosmic whatever, whatever. But actually by entering into human flesh by patiently waiting until the person is willing to pay attention and listen to the idea. And then I want you to put your stamp on it. Like I want this to be a some sort of cooperating, participating activity.

Carey Wallace (42:50)
Yeah. Yeah. And I also think that there is urgency. I'm not sure Michael Jackson was wrong to be recording that stuff. Like I think there is something to be said, but I actually just had an experience like that and I'll talk about it because it happened with a friend of mine who's a writer. I was just introduced to a CS Lewis scholar who was saying, you know, that he always thought that somebody should write a book about Susan, right? Who people talk about how poorly Lewis treated her.

Amy Julia (42:52)
Yeah.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Carey Wallace (43:20)
as a character and he was saying he had read letters by Lewis saying, know, where somebody actually directly asked Lewis this question and said, why did you do this? And Lewis said, you know, I didn't have what it took to write about her. Like I didn't know how to, I didn't know that character well enough to do it well. And I hope maybe that somebody will maybe, maybe even you will write that book. And so this guy was saying, maybe you're the one to write this book. And I was like, actually.

Amy Julia (43:38)
Hmm.

Carey Wallace (43:44)
My friend Sarah Arthur just wrote a book called Once a Queen that is actually that book. So these ideas do, and I actually was able to introduce them to each other that night, which was amazing. So they're in conversation now and her second book is coming out probably around the time this podcast does. So it's worth looking at if I'm allowed to make that plug for her. So that'd be great.

Amy Julia (43:56)
Right, amazing. Totally.

cool. Well, you sure are. We will link to it in the show notes. That sounds fantastic.

I want to read one more quotation just because I really I think it speaks to a lot of what we've said here. And then I want to ask you one final question. So you write the central activity of creation is not to think, but to pay attention, not to concentrate, but to yield, not to speak, but to listen.

The action that welcomes inspiration is surrender. And I just love that as again, somewhat of a summary, for lack of a better word, of some of the things that we've been discussing because it does seem like this, yeah, this kind of active waiting or this posture of like, yeah, paying attention, all is really crucial to the idea again of art and not just a production.

And of creating and making and not just producing and I really love that and I wanted to ask though as we kind of come to the end of this time is You know, this podcast is called reimagining the good life and I'm curious what you think about how a discipline of inspiration Helps us to reimagine the good life. How are those ideas connected?

Carey Wallace (45:22)
Well, I think a discipline of inspiration expands our imagination, for one thing. I think it's a muscle and it requires, it has a range of motion that's wider depending on how it gets used. And I think inspiration, I think if we just try to quote unquote use our imagination, first of all, what does that mean? What does that even mean?

Amy Julia (45:37)
Hmm.

Carey Wallace (45:53)
And I think the sort of traditional sort of like flights of fancy we might take ourselves on can actually just become grooves or anxiety patterns, you know, or escape hatches that are not actually imagination, are not actually constructing a truly alternate, a truly better world than this one. And my experience of inspiration, of actual inspiration, of like trying to form myself so that I can catch that voice.

when I hear it, and so I can respond right away, right? Like, you know, some things you need to marinate, sometimes you need to lie on that table, sometimes you have to write it down or it's gone, right? Sometimes you need to write the book or somebody else is gonna write the book. So I think, but I do think that regardless of whether you feel like you need to get a book out the door as part of your life, you do need, you need imagination.

Amy Julia (46:32)
Right, right.

Carey Wallace (46:45)
to love, you need imagination because you need to think about what the other person's experience is. You need imagination to make choices about your life because you need to imagine where that is going to take you. And I think our imaginations can be very limited unless we allow inspiration to be part of that. And when we allow inspiration to be part of that, all of those choices can turn into art forms, right? Our relationships can turn into art forms, by which I mean they can be like deeper and better.

Amy Julia (46:50)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Carey Wallace (47:14)
and different than anything that even as our best selves we could ever do our plan.

Amy Julia (47:20)
Well, Carey, thank you. Thank you for this time, but also thank you for this book. And I do commend it. You know, I even as a writer do not typically have other writers talking about things like writing on this podcast, but I really wanted you here because of all the things you said and the ways that I think you're again calling us out of a space of consumption and production.

and into a space of receptivity, surrender, and creation, and creativity, and the ways that that does expand our imagination for what is good, what is life, and what is mutually beneficial in the world. So I'm really grateful for your time here, but also for the book that you've given to all of us and the way you responded to inspiration.

Carey Wallace (48:11)
Well, thank you. You are one of my very favorite voices in the space of thinking about these things. So it's a thrill to get to talk with you about all of these topics. I'm delighted to connect with your audience in part because I think these ideas are for everybody, not just for people who we have anointed or who have self-anointed themselves as artists. So I hope that they find some resonance among the people who you're speaking with.

Amy Julia (48:37)
I'm sure they will. All right. Thank you.

Carey Wallace (48:38)
Okay, right.

Thanks, Amy.