Julia Cameron is pissing me off, and it's not entirely her fault. Really, I'm just not her target audience. The Artist's Way and The Vein of Gold are for artists, and I'm not an artist. I knew this, but I decided to have a look anyway, because I wanted to read something on creativity that I could apply to my academic work, and because books on academic creativity and the writing process don’t seem to exist.

One reason for this, I would guess, is that many professors and graduate students don’t believe in things like academic creativity. After all, their job is to tell the truth about things: to hypothesize, get lost in the stacks, learn the first names of everyone who works in the Interlibrary Loan office, and then write the truth about what they have learned. Doing so requires that they craft a narrative, but they craft it in a way that makes it seem as devoid of craft--as free of subjectivity--as possible.

I’ve never dealt much with such scholars. The people I’ve worked with are much more likely to describe academic writing as a form of storytelling. You can’t just tell any story, of course, but you can—and should—approach your task having thought seriously about both your story and your role as a narrator. The difference between telling the truth and telling a true story isn’t always obvious, but whether or not the products of our efforts look alike, the differences in the ways we think and talk about what we do are significant. They help shape the goals of our teaching and the methods we use in the classroom; they help shape the professional standards we set in academic communities; and they help shape the methodologies we use when we examine and interpret evidence.

These are not new observations; scholars have done interesting work on many of these topics. Unfortunately, these scholars don’t seem to have developed the desire to tell stories about academic storytelling as a mode of production. I’m interested not so much in the finished products, but in the essays we haven't yet written: I want to know more about the relationship between our concepts of ourselves as storytellers and the early incarnations of the stories themselves. I want to know more about the kind of mental work we’re doing when we sit at a desk and begin to press keys (or despair when our fingers don't want to make words). I want to know more about how we choose to piece together our narratives. I also want to know more about those times when we get lost in the middle of them--about the moments when we can’t manage to thread a needle, let alone weave a tapestry.

Since I’m talking about what I’d like to see, not what I’ve seen, I will also take a moment to point out that these books I haven’t yet read delve into what might be termed self-help for academic storytellers. They might include strategies to help writers organize information or manage time, but they also address what is in many ways a more daunting question: what do we do if our problems aren't practical? What are some of the psychological techniques academic writers use to buoy themselves while they're organizing, drafting, and revising? Conversely, what are some of the most common ways we sabotage ourselves? How do we recognize self-sabotage when it's happening, and what can we do to either avoid it or work through it?

Some of these kinds of issues are addressed in more general books on writing that already exist. Many of these books are excellent; I might be tempted to claim that Anne Lamott's advice has been more helpful to me over the years than Strunk and White's. Still, it's obvious at various points in these books that the author wasn't imagining an audience of neurotic Phi Beta Kappas whose to-do lists include items such as "read Brenda Ueland book," "go see Derrida movie," and "buy hair shirt." It’s fine that the author didn't imagine such an audience; no one expected her to. Still, I wonder what she would say if she did have such an audience in mind.

I also wonder what she would say about Julia Cameron. I bet she would be tactful, but you know what? I can't help but hope that she would secretly make gagging noises when she came across sentences like the following: "This contact with the first--or authentic, or original--self can feel as magical as encountering a deer in a mountain clearing" (8). I bet my authentic self drinks only the freshest of spring water.

"I could tell you that I've been a working artist,” Cameron tells us a couple of pages later, “but that would not be true. What I have been is a playing artist" (10). Here, I would be pleased if my imaginary author flipped Julia Cameron a great, big, imaginary bird.

I don't hope these things because I'm spiteful--or not just because I'm spiteful, anyway--but because it makes me uncomfortable when people imply that artists who don't feel like they're playing all the time aren't in close enough touch with their "original" selves to feel the love. It annoys me when people infantilize creativity, and it incenses me when someone attempts to counter all possible objections by claiming that I’m just being resistant. Resistant to magical moments at the mountain with Bambi.

So maybe the fact that Julia Cameron is pissing me off is partially her fault, after all. It’s just as well. My Inner Eight Year-Old doesn’t know a thing about seventeenth-century English drama, though I will admit that if my committee agreed to sign off on her chapters, I'd be more than happy to let her borrow my notes.