Spark : How Creativity Works
Why did Richard Ford's childhood cat influence his work as a novelist? How is Chuck Close's portraiture driven by his inability to remember faces? What pivotal moment convinced Rosanne Cash of the healing power of the stage?
Creativity is an elusive subject. We enjoy its fruits -- movies, novels, paintings, songs -- but rarely are we privy to what happens during the creative process. In Spark, Julie Burstein traces the roots of some of the twenty-first century's most influential and creative thinkers, including Joyce Carol Oates, Yo-Yo Ma, David Milch, Isabel Allende, and Joshua Redman. Julie pulls back the curtain to reveal the sources of these artists' inspiration and the processes that bring their work into being.
"These artists may not change lead into gold," Julie writes, "but they lift materials from their familiar contexts, combining, reshaping, transforming them into works of art that change the way we see the world."
Spark is an Official Selection of the TED Book Club!
Spark is on the WSJ Psychology Bestseller list.
Here's what Vanity Fair has to say about Spark:
"The act of creating art is eternally shrouded in mystery. For 10 years public radio's Studio 360 show, created and produced by Julie Burstein and hosted by culture-quaking journalist-novelist Kurt Andersen, has revealed the unique sources from which the artist's creativity flows while pinpointing the hot spot 'where art and real life collide.' In Spark (Harper), Burstein, with a foreword by Andersen, offers enlightening answers from the culture's heavy hitters, including Chuck Close, Yo-Yo Ma, and Richard Ford, on which experiences, memories, tragedies, or landscapes ignited their imaginations, as well as the process by which they stoked these embers into a roaring fire, and how you, yes, you, might too."
“Through enlightening conversations, these creative individuals demonstrate how they lift raw materials out of familiar contexts and create art that changes how we perceive the world.” (Publishers Weekly)