life as a work of art
📢 soft launching a new platform for creativity & community
Hi, I hope you’re doing well. It’s been about 10 months since I last wrote, so I’ll make the life catchup segment of this post short and sweet. If you subscribed in the interim, thank you, and know I intend to make it worth the wait. I guess I’ll begin with the biggest changes which should also excuse my extended hiatus:
I moved to Paris in September 2023.
I took an extended hiatus from writing.
I started a new business. (Welcome to the soft launch!)
In the span of a year, my life and identity shifted significantly. Lots of traveling, a relationship and a subsequent breakup, followed by a transatlantic move. But one of the strangest changes has been “growing apart” from writing. I came to realize there’s just so much more that I am interested in than writing, but for all of my adult life, I had identified as a writer, professionally and personally… and it just no longer fit.
Throughout the storms of stress and internal spiraling, one thing has helped me feel grounded: my creative practice — and the routines that anchor me in a creatively generative way of life.
For a long time, I had felt the desire to pursue my other creative passions, especially music and design. I have always dabbled in music, drawing and painting, and taken strange pleasure in obsessing over details of design (clothing, interiors, etc.) since I was a kid, but writing took over my life and career.
I decided to set my novel-in-progress aside and allowed myself to go all in on a new creative project of recreating my life and my identity to better suit my growth.
That started with exploring my number-one love, music—I grew up playing guitar, but hadn’t picked it back up in years. I wrote a few songs, and taught myself to make mixtapes. On New Year’s Day 2024, my first mix aired on NTS Radio. (Listen to it in the NTS archive.) My second mix for NTS will be airing this spring! I’ve also taken to uploading occasional mixes on Soundcloud for fun.
My lifestyle has always been built around creativity. From filling my place with ambient music, to strategically placing notebooks and pens and other tools around my living space for “creativity snacks” (see: exercise snacks) — my home environment is curated specifically to be conducive to a free flow of ideas and the ways to act when my receiver picks up a signal from the void.
After many conversations with friends who shared their observations about my “peaceful, well-curated, ambient lifestyle” when they’d visit my home, I started to wonder why I intuitively do these things.
Besides curating the right space for creativity, I’m consistently focused on setting the right mood, which includes, almost always, ambient music1. It eases me into the right state of mind and feeling to be in a creative flow, which began to pique my interest—why is that? What is it about this kind of sound that helps me enter a state of creative flow?
With a little digging, I found studies2 that show slow-paced, repetitive, ambient music without lyrics or complex melodies can relax the brain3 and let it wander4. What else had I been doing intuitively all this time that might be a function of human nature, in some interesting way that connects to the ever-elusive “creative process”? My creative process has always felt so fluid, spontaneous, and hard to pin down.
And so, my interest in our creative abilities, and how we can advance and encourage them, took me down yet another rabbit hole. Way deeper than Brian Eno’s ambient music and Oblique Strategies — both of which I love, for he is the leading artist/thinker that I know of on ambient aesthetics and thinking well about creativity. (Speaking of, Celine Nguyen’s Substack post about it is a fabulous read.)
To give you a peek into this particular rabbit hole: I’ve researched the neuroscience, psychology, critical theory, and yes, best-selling books that shall not be named here. And I realized I wanted all of the best stuff on creativity in one place that would be readily available, like a virtual “break glass in case of emergency” stash.
Introducing œvra: an experiential learning portal, content platform, and community — providing proven practices to optimize your creativity.
The namesake is the French word “œuvre,” which describes an artist’s entire body of work, the life-long collection of their creative output.
œvra is about exploring creativity in its limitless forms. It’s about cultivating an internal ecosystem fertile enough for your imagination to thrive.
This Substack, formerly known as “upward spiral,” was (unbeknownst to me) an early iteration of œvra: having open-ended conversations with creative people I admire, to learn more about their process and inner lives. Going back through my 12+ year career as a writer, one of my favorite parts of my job has been having conversations with fellow creatives to then write about. It’s how I’ve developed my international creative community, and each conversation has been memorable and generative for me personally.
We hope to build this kind of experience and community with œvra.
Offering 01. The creativity course
A library of edu-taining content, creativity tools and exercises, and guided audio experiences (we’re calling them “imagination meditations,” because it’s fun to rhyme) available in an all-access membership for anyone interested in creativity.
The platform will also include access to a community Discord server with daily creative prompts, creative co-working sessions, monthly playlists, and a place to share generative inspiration with one another.
This Substack is now a part of the œvraverse.
Free weekly creative prompts and insights
Bonus content for paid subscribers
A place to share and contribute — comment, connect with others, and let us know what kinds of creativity content you want more of
Founding members of this Substack will receive one free month of œvra membership
My intention is that œvra will help you become more creative, unblock your creative flow, recover from and prevent burnout, and activate your flow state with our tools and techniques… And we’ve got much more planned, too.
I’m so excited to share it with you.
Can I ask you a favor (or three)?
Please sign up for the waitlist on www.oevra.com.
Share this Substack with your friends.
Follow our Instagram @oevra.creativity for more creative inspiration every week.
Absolutely love this for you! I’ve been obsessed with career shifts and how creatives reinvest their energy in new domains over the last 3 years. I find it so inspiring. Also ngl oeuvra is reminding me of the imaginary app in the creative copy class 😂 so funny how that idea meshed with ur future ideas for urself! Cheers to the new you!
I am SO stoked for people to experience œvra! Cheers to this new chapter, Tasha :)