Workshop teaches artists to use solitude, nature in their creative practice

Not enough time, too many distractions, no clue what to create – there can be a lot of reasons to not pick up the pen, the paintbrush, the instrument collecting dust in the corner.

Novelist and nonfiction author Michael N. McGregor understands the dilemma, but he’s also found a solution, leaning into solitude and the natural world to quiet a busy mind and connect more fully with feelings and emotions that can live below the surface.

In his workshop “Solitude, Nature and Art,” McGregor hopes to guide artists of all mediums to a point where they can not only embrace solitude but use it in their creative pursuit.

“Solitude, Nature and Art with Michael N. McGregor” takes place Sunday at the Bowl and Pitcher Kitchen Shelter at Riverside State Park. Writers shouldn’t bring works in progress to the workshop but should rather be prepared to start fresh via writing exercises.

McGregor began writing as a second-grader growing up in Seattle. His teacher would write a word on the board and challenge students to write a story about that word.

“There was something I felt, some freedom, some joy, something I felt in doing that that really stuck out to me,” he said.

Years later, as a high school student, McGregor took a short story writing class, which sealed the deal for him.

Though he was surrounded by other creatives in Seattle, writing was a mostly solitary activity for McGregor. He’d gather with a group of friends, including a playwright and a poet, and share work from time to time, but they never reviewed each other’s writing line by line, pointing out what worked and what didn’t.

Though the goal was always to write creatively, McGregor knew he needed to pay the bills, so he earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Oregon and began working as a journalist. Soon after he found magazine writing and began moving toward creative nonfiction.

“Journalism can make it difficult to write more creatively,” he said. “I’ve taught a lot of journalists and tried to unlock them from the nonpersonal approach to writing, which some of that is loosened up in journalism too in the last couple of decades …

“It gives you good grounding and the basics of writing, thinking about an audience, a lot of things that it establishes for you as you move on.”

McGregor also earned an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University and taught there, as well as Southern Illinois University and Portland State University.

One of the good things about teaching was that McGregor found himself surrounded by people who were enthusiastic about creating. On the other hand, a majority of his students were not as far along in their craft as he was, so he had to think about writing at a very basic level “as opposed to the more intuitive way you tend to make art once you’ve been doing it for a while.”

“In some ways that can be good, because sometimes it calls you back to things that you hadn’t thought about, and sometimes that can unlock some things that get you unstuck, but a lot of times it can interrupt the creative process too,” he said.

Through his workshop, which grew from a conversation he had with author and Spokane Public Library writing education specialist Sharma Shields, McGregor hopes to help participating artists connect with their intuition.

He wants them to get “freed up” so they feel a looseness to be able to write what they feel like writing, something that comes directly out of the participant rather than something they feel like they should be writing or something that comes from the current cultural moment but doesn’t necessarily resonate inside.

“We’re trying to get at what is that deeper and, I think, ultimately freer, place that art can come from,” he said.

McGregor details various experiences with using solitude in his creative practices in his book, “An Island to Myself: The Place of Solitude in an Active Life.” It started when McGregor, then in his 20s, traveled to a remote island in Greece, spending two months writing during the day and walking in the evening.

“That was my first experience of really extended solitude and what it can bring out of you and what it can do for you,” he said.

After returning home, he continued to seek out solitude, in nature and other quiet spaces.

For his workshop, he’s chosen Riverside State Park with the idea to get participants out of a stuffy, indoor environment and into a place among the art making of nature.

“The workshop is really going to be meant to peel back the layers of life, to get us away from the phone, to get us away from the news, to get us away from all these things that impact us, impact our minds, impact our hearts, bring out emotions from us that we may not know what to do with,” he said.

Participants will envision scenes and look at pieces of art with the goal to be completely present with the art and see what’s actually there. They will then disperse and spend time by themselves in the park, again trying to be completely in the moment.

“Essential to art making, really, is the ability to take things in from your senses, be open completely to the world that is there, both outside you and inside you, and seeing the connections that are there,” he said. “This world that we live in makes it very hard to get to a place where you can be completely open and aware and make those connections.”

McGregor understands the apprehension participants might have, but he said it’s his job to make them feel welcome and secure. Then, he advises participants to look at that apprehension, that anxiety and see what’s causing it. Not to get rid of the feeling, he said, but to find ways to “decouple” it from the things that are being drawn out of them so they’re able to use them in their creativity.

Emotion is central to art, he said, and not just positive emotions. It can be normal to want to run away from the negative emotions or experiences, but McGregor instead wants artists to face them in a safe environment, through creative writing, for example, and learn to have control over them in the way a ceramicist has control of the clay they’re working with.

“They’re making something out of it, and that’s what we want to do with our experiences, our memories, the emotions that we have, whether they’re fired by what happens in our daily lives or what we see in a phone, or whether they’re things that rise from us and haven’t had a chance to show themselves or be used by us because we haven’t really recognized them,” he said.

It’s about unlearning what you already know, about letting go and trusting yourself. A lot of new writers feel like a story has to be written a certain way to be published but McGregor challenges them to find their true voice.

“The thing that makes something someone wants to read is that it has a sense of authenticity,” he said. “It comes from a voice, from a place, from a person that I haven’t heard from before. You want to be surprised by that writing, and you can’t do that if you’re borrowing what you’re writing. You can’t come to an authentic place.”