By Hyrum Blanchard
When you explore the online Habits of Creative Practice course, you aren’t greeted by a wall of modules or a humdrum home page, but by an interactive map. Navigating through it, you’ll find troves of resources designed to support your creative practice. The whole class follows this choose-your-own adventure format.
Unlike traditional courses that prioritize output and evaluation at the expense of process, Habits of Creative Practice, WR 390, is designed to help people from any background develop a foundation for their creative work. Clare Braun, who designed and teaches this course, explained, “The goal is to learn more about yourself and your relationship with creativity.” Taking inspiration from several acclaimed sources including Ritual by Dimitris Xygalatas, The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp, and Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey, Braun is interested in reframing creativity “as a form of rest and getting back in touch with self.”
While some students do increase their creative output as a result of this class, it’s more interested in developing the self-awareness that fuels creative work. Rather than a quick fix, Braun described this class as a foundation that students would continue to create from going forward. And that means, for one thing, the class is about understanding the way creativity fits into the bigger, messier, everyday picture of our lives. “It tries to emphasize the embodied nature of creative work, trying to push against that narrative that creativity is some kind of bodiless ether,” Braun said. “Our bodies are the site where that creativity originates.”
Instead of traditional assignments, the class is built around creative experiments and reflections meant to foster that self-awareness and maybe even begin some meaningful habits. Out of nearly twenty experiments ranging from embodied (refining your creative space and sleep schedule) to practical habits (keeping a daily writing journal), students will choose 5 exercises
that seem the most valuable to them. But while the class is almost entirely self-directed, it has a high emphasis on community.
Even in its online iterations, Braun noticed, “People were just really ready to open up with each other and be vulnerable and have these meaningful connections.” Even across majors, the shared interest in creativity is a uniting force. One of the most common phrases Braun heard from past students at the end of the term was, “I realized I’m not alone creatively.”
Braun is currently preparing to teach the class again this summer.
For anyone still on the fence about whether to try out this course, Braun left these parting words: “You’ll have fun, you might eat better, you might sleep better, you might have some big epiphanies about your life, you might have some epiphanies about your creative work, and you’re definitely going to find community with other creative people in a meaningful way.”