The Complex Relationship Between Silence and Creativity

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There's something that you say right at the beginning of the book that struck me so hard which i've been thinking about a lot because like as you might know i've written about my autism diagnosis five years ago now. You write so beautifully at the beginning about how like white religious thinking has often told you that silence and retreat and isolation are where you enter into spiritual communion but that actually your creative life doesn't exist in a vacuum. I'm learning that sometimes the most sacred thing to do is to shout that that spirituality exists within community and i think we can use that interchangeably with creativity there may beYes yeah i think that's beautiful and to allow that for yourself to oh i

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May.

This week Katherine chats to writer and poet Cole Arthur Riley, author of This Here Flesh and creator of Black Liturgies.

Unable to speak up as a child, Cole talks about how she learned to find her voice amid a family of gifted talkers and storytellers. Cole describes her father and grandmother as inspirational figures who nevertheless were marked by the generational trauma experienced by so many African Americans. But from this emerges Cole’s own, unique spiritual account of the world, overseen by a God who lives in our hurting, imperfect bodies, and who sees us as we are.

Cole is one of the most lyrical, perceptive and moving writers of her generation, at once cerebral and earthly, and always rooted in the body. We talk about Cole’s hair turning grey as a child, her wise grandmother and inspirational father, and the moments when she came to realise that both of them needed her care.

COLE LINKS

Online

This Here Flesh

Black Liturgies

All other Cole links HERE

KATHERINE LINKS

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