Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture
Ep. 286 Carey Wallace - Inspiration from Beyond: Encountering God in Creativity
Today, we're diving into something profound: how creativity connects us to the divine. I'm talking with Carey Wallace about inspiration—not just as an artistic concept, but as a spiritual practice. What if art isn't something we manufacture, but something we receive? What if creativity is actually a way of following God, even when we don't realize it? Wallace argues that inspiration comes from outside ourselves—that it's a gesture of surrender, a way of opening ourselves to something greater. We're going to explore how every act of creation can be an encounter with the divine. Whether you're a painter, a writer, someone working a nine-to-five job, or just someone trying to live creatively—this conversation is about discovering that we're all makers, created in the image of a creative God. We'll talk about how inspiration works, why art can be worship, and how surrendering to something beyond ourselves might be the most powerful creative act we can make. If you've ever felt stuck, wondered about your creative potential, or sensed there's something more to making art than just skill, lean in. This is a conversation about seeing the world—and yourself—differently.
Carey Wallace is the author of The Discipline of Inspiration: The Mysterious Encounter With God At The Heart of Creativity (Eerdmans), The Blind Contessa’s New Machine (Penguin), and The Ghost In The Glass House (Clarion). She works to help people from all walks of life find inspiration and build strong creative habits to sustain a lifetime of creation. She performs as a songwriter, exhibits her own fine art, and has spoken on art, faith, and justice with students at Princeton, Julliard, Emory, Pratt, and Yale. Her articles and poems have appeared in Time, Detroit’s Metro Times, and America. She is the founder of a retreat for artists in Michigan, and the Creative Discipline Class to form strong creative habits, which has been in operation for over a decade across the US and internationally. She grew up in small towns in Michigan, and lives and works in Brooklyn.
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I think that art actually is, it actually is a gesture of following God, even by people who don't recognize that it's God that they're following. And I think it can train us to follow God in many other contexts, and it can shape us for Faith even before we have faith. Oh, music.
Joshua Johnson:Hello and welcome to the shifting culture podcast in which we have conversations about the culture we create and the impact we can make. We long to see the body of Christ looked like Jesus. I'm your host. Joshua Johnson, today we're diving into something profound. How creativity connects us to the divine. I'm talking with Carrie Wallace about inspiration, not just as an artistic concept, but as a spiritual practice. What if art isn't something we manufacture, but something we receive? What if creativity is actually a way of following God, even when we don't realize it? Wallace argues that inspiration comes from outside of ourselves, that it's a gesture of surrender, a way of opening ourselves to something greater. We're going to explore how every act of creation can be an encounter with the divine, whether you're a painter, a writer, someone working a nine to five job, or just someone trying to live creatively. This conversation is about discovering that we're all makers, created in the image of a creative God. We'll talk about how inspiration works, why art can be worship, and how surrendering to something beyond ourselves might be the most powerful creative act we can make. If you've ever felt stuck wondered about your creative potential or sense, there's something more to making art than just skill lean in. This is a conversation about seeing the world and yourself differently. Here is my conversation with Carrie Wallace, Carrie, welcome to shifting culture. Really, really excited to have you on. Thanks for
Carey Wallace:joining me. Joshua. I'm delighted to be here. Thanks for having me. I'm going to
Joshua Johnson:start big, because you start big in your book The discipline of inspiration, and you claim that all art comes from God. And that's a that's a pretty big statement. So tell me, where does art come from, and what is what is it? I know art is hard to define, but does all art really come from? God?
Carey Wallace:Well, you to some degree, you need to read the book to find out, but that is the position I have taken in the book, and it's the, actually the very first line in the book. And it's not just my own position. If you read on, you'll discover that I came to this idea when I was doing a massive survey of speech by artists on art. And I was doing that to create a program for the for to help artists create strong creative habits in their daily lives. And I wanted to have, you know, as a curriculum around that speech by artists on art. And a lot of times when you get, like, a big book on art, and I may be in danger of being this person myself, but a lot of times, those books were not made by people who made your favorite art, right? Like Rembrandt. Most of Rembrandt's letters were about money. They weren't about like his art. And the same thing is true for many other sort of major figures. So I was working through anything I could find that was just direct speech by what I could think of as some of the great artists in the world about art. So I was looking at Paris Review interviews, Rolling Stone interviews, you know, books by on songwriting by songwriters, and on dance by dancers and and I was, I was, I actually did not start out thinking about inspiration. I was looking at all these different categories. I was looking at the artist life. Do you have to be unhappy the artist character? Do you have to be a jerk? Right? The the purpose of art, the definition of art, the I was really interested in religious experiences in the lives of artists, and what I found was just a massive amount of disagreement between everybody, right? So people who, who and when Tolstoy or Toni Morrison says something about art, like, Who of us has the ability to argue with them, right? And if they contradict each other, who's the referee, right? So, but what I found was in that, like giant schoolyard argument about all those topics, there was one topic on which there was this very eerie amount of agreement, and it was the moment of inspiration, which I define as it's in some ways easy to bracket it as part of three things that go into art. One is talent. Just how easy is it to sing in tune? How easy is it to draw a human face right? And then there's technique, which is the amount of time that you spend practicing right, what you earn by your own behavior. But anybody who's spent much time in the art world knows. That those things, even in great measure, like a lot of talent and a lot of technique, don't add up to very much without this third element, which nobody really knows much or talks rigorously about, which is inspiration. And it's what tells you how to sing. It tells you what to write in your song. If you're a songwriter, you know, so it's active, both in performance and in sort of composition, which I think are the two really big categories of art making. And everybody who talked about it talked about it as being something that came from beyond them. And they relentlessly used, even if they did not have religious background, they relentlessly used religious language to describe it, even if what they needed to say it was, it feels like a divine visitation, but it can't possibly be, right. So, but then you got a lot of very surprising people you know talking about this, this sense that it comes from beyond them. So like hoagie Carmichael, who wrote Georgia on my Mind, says great melodies aren't written, they're discovered. And Hemingway said that when he would read his own writing, he couldn't believe he had written it, that he must have read it somewhere, probably in the Saturday Evening Post. And my favorite story around this is actually Michael Jackson, when he was right before he died, he was feverishly recording and telling his entourage that his higher power was giving him these songs. And his entourage was like, Michael, could your higher power give you these songs after the tour that you're preparing for because you're exhausting yourself? And Michael Jackson said, I can't, then he might give them to Prince. So there's also this sense that it goes beyond you, that it has a force that is moving through the world, and it's going to come in through the world, and it is, it is a blessing or a responsibility, or maybe even a threat, if it comes to you, but that it you, you aren't necessarily the only person that could come through. So I got very interested in this idea, and I got very interested in the idea of just believing the testimony of these artists, that it felt divine that it was coming from something beyond them, that many of them were actually naming that as God. In fact, Jerry Goffin and Carole King, who are songwriting partners. Carole King is like, it comes from God. All of this comes from God. And Jerry Goffin says, Well, I'm not, you know, pretentious enough to say that all my work comes from God. So you get, you get disagreement on it, but he doesn't have another explanation, right? It's like, where do we land if we believe this explanation? I think we land some very interesting places, which is why I start out the book with that sort of idea.
Joshua Johnson:We do land in a lot of interesting places. Because I think if something is received, that means that we actually we have a different posture in in our life, we're receivers, and there's a difference, I think, you know, oftentimes we have come to believe, in Western culture, that we are what we produce, like we have to muster up the energy and the effort to be able to produce something, And that we're never enough. Because, yeah, we could never get to the place of like, we're finished with this thing. So what? What does that look like, if inspiration actually, then comes from the outside, something beyond us? Well, how do we just enter into life as a posture of like, Hey, I'm here? Well, I
Carey Wallace:think it does several things. First of all, I really resonate with the idea that Western culture is all about like thinking harder and controlling more and and when I started thinking about this, I was like, Oh, well, if this is true, then the fundamental gesture of art, as you have very intelligently laid your finger right on, is surrender. And nothing in modern Western life teaches us to do that. So I started to get curious about what are, what can teach me how to do this. And what I realized was that my practices, my spiritual practices, I'm a Christian believer, but these, these practices, the fundamental spiritual practices, proliferate through all the major world religions, right and and I believe that they actually hold the sum of human wisdom on how to get out of the way and let another spirit greater than yours become active in your life. So I for and for me, the idea that that we are able to do, that the gestures surrender and not accomplishment, or that the accomplishment is surrender, and not anything else is really powerful. And it also, I think one of the things that, you know, artists have this anxiety and art, I think everybody else has it in other parts of their life. And one of my big contingents here is that art is for everybody, and that all of your life can become an art form if you welcome the Spirit of God into it. And we already have that in our language, right? Like, if somebody's really good at making barbecue. We're like, he's an artist, right? So we have this this sense, but we also have this anxiety that we're not enough. Like, is this coming from us? We know how small we are, we know how limited we are. We know that when we get tired, we can't even be nice. The people we love most, you know, like so. So and we actually know that, like, the best things we do don't come from us. Like one of my good friends just read the book and she said, You know, it's even true in parenting, like my best moments of a pair as a parent have been these inspired moments when, like, I took an idea that came to me and I didn't grit through it, and I didn't think think it up, and I didn't reason to it, I just did the thing that came to me. So I think many people have this sense of inspiration. And to me, it's very hopeful, because it doesn't come from us. And if we believe that it comes from God, then it is inexhaustible. And not only is it inexhaustible, but if you believe in a God who is a loving God, it is a spirit that cares about you as more than a vessel for this inspiration. So if the believing in the Muse sort of gives us, you know, there have been people have written really beautifully about the muse. Elizabeth Gilbert wrote a huge book about it about 10 years ago, and talked about how that can, you know, there are advantages of believing in the muse. But there's a major question that's not answered there, which is, does this thing care about you, right? Does this unmoored muse, like, is it willing to kill you in the service of the art it wants you to produce? And sometimes it feels like that. It's artists, right? So, and does it, you know? And you see a lot of people. I mean, you see this in people just working regular jobs, too, but you see a lot of people really leaning into one part of their life, leaning into their work as an artist, or their work as anything else, to the detriment of everything else in their life, their spiritual life, their relationships, and rooting this idea in a God rather than a muse. I think really can help us balance those things and help us make and do better things, ultimately.
Joshua Johnson:So if all of your life can be art, and like this, your life is art. One of the things that reminds me of Ephesians, 210 that says, you know that you are God's workmanship, but the really it can be translated. You're God's poem. And I love that translation as as he is actually writing you as a beautiful poem, and it's created you. And so that makes me go, Okay, we're all someone that has been created. And if we're made in the image of God and a loving God, we can lovingly create as well, and that. So we have this, this thing that we get to create. One of the things I know is that evil can't create. What can evil do and why? Why is it juxtaposed with with God and a God that cares for us, a God that loves us, and inspiration comes from that, but not just an evil that wants to try and kill us for this, this form, whatever it is, what can evil do, not do, and what can love do and not do? Yeah,
Carey Wallace:well, so this is a major question, and it's been a major question not just in religious circles that have, like, a very doctrinaire definition of evil, but, like, it's been a very potent question in the public, probably for the last 10 years, where people have been finding out horrific things about their favorite artists. You know, I just read the New York Magazine article Emile gaemon, which is one of the darkest stories that I've read in that genre, and just came out this week, you know, and people who have been like healed and helped, and who've been given a reason to live by the work that these people have made, and there are no artists who are, you know, who have there's no humans with hand, with clean hands, right? If you know the whole story, there's never anybody with clean hands. But the the degree to which very dark, and I would say, evil things are done and perpetuated by artists appears alongside the extraordinary works of beauty and wisdom and things that have genuinely helped people is is just a it's a very, very vexing question. And it's not simply like, how did this terrible person make this art? There are also ways in which art has been used. Like the Nazis loved art. The Nazis looted all this art, like some of the worst Nazis had, like, vast collections like and good taste, right? So they weren't all velvet paintings, so which I actually have a kind of a deep love for the velvet paintings, because I was a child when they were, like, popular. But I agree with you that that the evil cannot create, and I actually think that, I think everybody needs to make their own decisions about what they can tolerate, right? And we're all different in that we all fall off the horse in different directions, right? And we all need to draw the circles of different widths around things that might make us less than who we could be if we engage with them, right? But I do think that the strongest position is not to so if you're somebody who's the victim of the kind of abuse that a particular author has perpetuated, then I do not think that you need to like man or woman up and like find a way to like that author, right? But if you have somebody who you are horrified by what they have. Done. But you also see the good in what they have done, believing that the good comes from God, believing that the best part of art is actually inspired by someone, something beyond the human can give us a way to praise God for those things, rather than, rather than run away from them. And it also can give us a place to stand on where we can then full throatedly Condemn the behavior of the person. Because we don't have to condemn we don't have to lose the art in condemning the behavior. So
Joshua Johnson:if God is not just concerned with morality and making sure that we are moral beings, just first and foremost, which I don't know if he is. He wants that, because I think we get changed the closer that we get to love, we're gonna change. Love will change us. We will be better, because then we will reflect that love to the world. But God seems to be close to those which we think are far away, because they may not have a a moral compass right now in their life, and we think that maybe they're far away from God, but God is near, and God can still work through how do we, how do we interact with that in life? Yeah,
Carey Wallace:well, I think with humility, right? Like if, we are people who believe we see God in the world and we see God someplace, we wouldn't expect God maybe our moral compasses off, right? That's one of the things I would suggest. And I also think that the sort of morality people of religious backgrounds have imposed on themselves and imposed on others is often not the most difficult morality to follow, right? It's often a do this, don't do that morality, rather than a be a different person in your heart, morality and and I think that, you know, you started out talking about love, and I think that God is always very interested in love. And I think that that may be why people who seem distant from sort of programmatic morality seem closer to God? Because they may actually, I think people who understand that they have missed the marks that other people are saying are important can't hide out in their self righteousness, right? They actually, they actually need to find God in the form of love and not present that they have, like done so many good things that God would, of course, be interested in paying attention to that. And
Joshua Johnson:so I think part of it is I see then Christian art, not not art made by Christians, but Christian arts can move into a place of like propaganda, of trying to come up with, like, I want to move people's opinion towards something and not let the the art actually and truth emerge from whatever is being created. How do we start to recognize what is what is art, what is propaganda? And you also talk about entertainment and pornography that we try to get at, but it's not really art
Carey Wallace:so well. So this goes all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, when you were saying, Does all art come from God? And one of the moves I make shortly after saying yes, is but not all, not all cultural production is art, right? And I think it's useful to think of it in terms of these other categories. I think the biggest other categories are propaganda, which seeks to convince rather than to reveal, pornography, which gives us a simulacrum of something that keeps us from ever having the real thing, whatever that is, and entertainment, which is essentially a drug that can heal or kill depending on what dose we're taking it. And then I think there's actually another vast category of cultural protection, which is simply failure. It like actually doesn't work well as anything. And I don't think there are very many pure examples of any of these things. I think they are often very closely alloyed, and they appear alongside each other, and they appear in all kinds of different combinations. You know, I hesitate to get too far into like. I think it's useful to have those conversations. I don't think it's very useful to be like. Is this particular thing this or that? I think it's useful to be like, That's propaganda. Just recognize it when you see it, right? But trying to pull apart. Is there art alongside of it, or is there entertain? You know, it's like, let's just recognize the things we know when we see them. Let's have names for them. But there's been so much conversation in the art world about like, is this good, or is this not? Is this art? Is this not? It just doesn't. It's like, it doesn't help us be changed by art. It doesn't help us be healed by art. It doesn't help us make more art. So I'm not saying it's not good to study. You know what has come before us, but I think that those like the temptation to like, deal with art by putting it in boxes is, is never a good temptation.
Joshua Johnson:So I have a second question there that I think will help us out. Yeah, I'll just give you an example. So I'm, I'm working on a on a one man show that I would love it to be, be art. Arts and not propaganda, not entertainment, not pornography. I want it to be art and I want something true to come out. But it is that it is all about encounters with Jesus, and so I know that like encounters with like Divine Love, which is and Jesus, which can easily move into propaganda. So I don't want it to so yeah, if we have, if you're doing a work, or if I'm doing whoever it is, doesn't matter what it is, how do I position this surrender, get some inspiration and not veer towards propaganda in the creation of something? It's an
Carey Wallace:absolutely great question, and one of the things that makes me think of is all of the art with Christian themes that is of such high quality, that is so unquestionably art, that it has remained encased in our culture, even as the culture has become extremely secular, right? So I actually remember hearing stories when I was in college, which was shortly after the fall of the the Iron Curtain, where there was a whole cadre of Russian intellectuals who became Christians, because Russia could not erase Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy from their canon, and because the gospel was so deeply embedded in those stories, you could become a Christian just from reading those stories, right? And I think, you know, you've also got Bach played by cultures that have no long history of Christianity in them, but the story travels with his his work. So I do think that there is room for work that is deeply Christian, to truly be art and to resonate far beyond, you know, sort of traditional uses, like a lot of what Bach did was made for churches. Ironically, it's almost never done in churches anymore. Stood far beyond the walls of churches. So I hope that that is the direction that what you're doing will take. But as far as as far as how to do this, one of the things I would say is, I bet you already know. So I bet you already know. I bet it came with the original idea. I don't think you have a it didn't come with a full Roman road map, right? But like it came with a feeling that you will recognize if you have it again, as you're writing like and it can come every day. And I also think that you know when you don't do it right, like you, you might, you might not know as you're like as you are not creating art, you might not know it, but maybe you do, it doesn't feel the same. And you can also edit, right like you can also take out the stuff that that isn't true, that isn't working, that feels like propaganda or any other form to you. So I think going ahead and know, knowing what you know, even if you can't put words to why you know it going in directions you didn't expect to go, if you feel leading in that direction, just exploring. And you don't have to be like, Oh, I'm up. I'm up ending this whole plan I had. It can just be like, what's in this little room over here? And maybe it's like a doorway to a whole country you've never been to before, right? But you don't have to go in with that big of a you can just take steps, just take little steps in each direction and see where they take you, and be honest with yourself and be courageous in what you're willing to do. And I think that that none of this is perfect, right, and even really great people, right, even, I mean, it's so fun to, like, look at everything an artist did, and not especially with really great artists, because they every now and then they write, like, really bad books, you know, a really terrible album, and you're like, Oh, well, you you can do that, and then your next one can also be amazing. And maybe actually, you know, I think the failures are never they're never useless. They always teach us something, right? Like, I think as long as you are trying, you will be learning and you'll be getting stronger. I
Joshua Johnson:know you work on your craft of writing consistently. You're, yeah, consistently writing. So what is that, then, interplay between working on on craft and technique and actually doing the work and inspiration and like letting inspiration come. Because it seems, I think, for some people, it seems like I'm just going to sit with surrender and open hands and let inspiration come, and then I'm going to do something. So what's the interplay between the actual work at it and then inspiration? Well, what you're describing is
Carey Wallace:actually quite a bit like the deal that I make with myself. So I have been in most seasons of my life writing for two hours a day, every working day, so Monday through Friday. And the deal still that I have decades into this is that I don't actually have to write, and I don't have to write anything in particular. I'm just not allowed to do anything else, so I don't do any like a lot of people have different practices. I'm just telling you what works for me. But a lot of people would be like, Oh, I'll read, you know, 20 minutes of a book, and it's like, no, I just am, like, waiting. I'm waiting to want to do something right. And some of the worst stuff that I've done has been when I haven't followed that practice, when I've been like, oh, with these two hours, I'm going to finish this plan. I had months ago. You know, it's like and, and some of the worst work I've done has has been time when I have persisted with that habit, even when I was too exhausted to actually make anything right. So, and I wasted the time I could have spent resting, and I wasted the time, you know, that I spent on these stories when I insisted on writing them sort of with my own talent technique, and without any inspiration. And the way I describe those stories is that I didn't write them like the like the best part of me did not write them, by which I mean the part of me that can welcome inspiration, right? So, yeah. So I think some of it is just showing up and waiting for the inspiration and really making that part of the daily process. But I also think that inspiration then demands technique, and it requires your talent to respond to it. So if the if the general idea is, I'm I'm going to listen to and respond to inspiration, you will exercise your talent, you will exercise your technique in that process. I think that's how they hold together. At least in my experience,
Joshua Johnson:that's really helpful. That's really good. I love that the process that you do. But if I'm talking to a general audience of people that I mean, they have craft, they have things that they work on, everybody does this whole posturing feels to me like, if I wake up in the morning, I open up my hands and I say, God, what do you want to do today? Yeah, like, yeah. And that's a that's a huge different posture than most people take most if yes, most Christians would take a posture of, I'm gonna do my work and maybe slap on a prayer to call it, yep, good. That is a totally different thing. When I'm opening my hand say, hey, what do you want to do? Like, yeah, while I'm I have to do this job, or I have to, I'm having to cook a meal for my family. What do you want to do with me? Yeah, that is totally different. And sounds absolutely like opening up my life into something like fantastic and beautiful, and it's not just a rote rhythm of life anymore. Well, I'm
Carey Wallace:also curious if so you're talking about you specifically, not the abstract you, but like this is a way that you live your life, I
Joshua Johnson:would say maybe the abstract. You I like to talk but Okay, so let's talk about the abstract live my life. Yes,
Carey Wallace:yeah. So one of the things I was going to ask is, how does that go for you? Because I have, I have had, I would say a couple things about that. One is the reason most people don't do this, at least in America today, which is what I can speak to, because it's where I'm living, is that modern society is like built to make that behavior impossible, right? So, like, people aren't doing that because they have a boss breathing down their neck and because they can't, they don't, they won't have a place to live unless they behave in a very different way. And I'm not saying that God can't break into that, but I am saying that the the ability to even experiment with that kind of behavior is a privilege, right? Is a blessing, and not everybody has it. I would also say that I have had, you know, times when I was as a writer, you sometimes have a lot of freedom, and you sometimes have, like, a lot of scarcity. And I've had both. So I've had times when I really was desperately asking, God, you know, what is the next thing for me? What do I do today? I have so many problems. What? What like beautiful, fantastical steps are you going to give me to lead me through this? And I've had times when that just simply did not emerge, right? And I had to make decisions with rationality, with the community around me, with what I knew from the stories that I had heard about God and what I believed about them, and I did not have like I was not let alone, this unbroken stream of inspiration, even in places where I desperately wanted it and wanted to be open to it. But I would also say that I have had really profound experiences when something felt recognizably like inspiration to me, including a very insistent call to write this book at a time when I knew it was crazy to write it, where the outcomes have been really beautiful. So I do believe that inspiration is actually always speaking. It's us who sometimes can't hear it. And I also think that, you know, I think it's a little dangerous to go back, and I think it's both beautiful go back into your life and see where you believe you saw God moving. But I also think it's a little bit dangerous to be like I have answers for why God did or didn't do everything that I wanted done in my life, right? But I can see that those seasons in which I wanted a really great Hallmark story of inspiration to lead me out of a difficult period. The fact that that didn't happen has made me a better person and has made me more able to love and understand other people than that, sort of than what I thought I wanted to happen. So I think that's in the vein of God writing our. Stories for us in ways that we don't expect. But I do think that the responses, even to crazy onsets of of inspiration, even if what we're doing are just those little steps into the next room, right, can have really powerful results. I think it's really important not to ignore it when we hear it,
Joshua Johnson:it is God writing the story of our lives. If we see it as transactional of like, I'm gonna be there, it's never gonna work, right? That's what you saw. If you're doing all this research and you're hearing the great artists talk about inspiration, it's coming from outside of them, and it's totally unexpected. It's like, I couldn't have written this, like, this is exactly and I could. This is not my song. It's somebody else's song that it just flows through me, and so it's consistently being open to something coming from the outside, which I think, instead of saying, Hey, God, I want you to do what I want you to do, which doesn't always work out very well, you talk a lot about incarnation, and the role of Incarnation in Art, and what that is. So can you speak to why incarnation is important, and what is incarnation, and the role of that within art? So
Carey Wallace:I think one of the things that, when I came to this idea that, okay, so, so let's go ahead and believe that art comes from God. Why doesn't it all come into the world in whatever language God actually speaks? Right? If God speaks a language, why doesn't it all come in the world in a single language that indicates this is the language God speaks in, right? Why does it come in all of our different languages? We're almost always using the elements of our world, whatever our world is, to build our paintings, to build our songs, to build our stories, even when we're creating fantasies, right? They, they are created in reference to the worlds we're coming out of. They're like deeply inflected by the worlds that we come from. And to me, what it looks like is, is incarnation, right? Like in it looks like the Spirit coming alive in human flesh, in human culture, in human life, over and over again. As a Christian who believes that that's what happened in the person of Jesus, that's what it looked like to me. And then when I started thinking about it, you know, I work at this over and over again. I worked at it from a theological perspective, but also from the testimony of artists. So the other way that I got at this idea was people describing what the balance between them and inspiration was, right? So there's lots of these metaphors. So Martha Graham says she's a Martha Graham who, one of the great choreographers and dancers of the 20th century, says that she is just a lovely golden retriever who, like, goes off into the collective memory and brings things back, you know, for the rest of the world. And and Hemingway, again, who I, I am ambivalent about, but keep quoting. He talks about it being a well that that you use up and then you have to fill up. You have to wait for the well to fill up again. I think that he might actually be describing the well as human energy, because, as I've said, it's like an inexhaustible I believe the source itself is inexhaustible. But all of these metaphors, you know, are we gardeners? Right? Where God plants the seed, and then we nurture it like none of them get to the fact that it's in our flesh that is planted. So I actually think that the best metaphor for creation is a woman who gives birth. And I think it's interesting. It has some resonances, if you're like a, you know, a Christian theology nerd. It has ideas with the idea that everybody, male or female or anything else, becomes the Bride of Christ in relationship to God, right? And and that has that same idea that the spirit would be planted in us and like bring forth some kind of new life. And I do believe that that's what's happening, and that's the best description for the interaction between what we bring and and what the Spirit brings, and how thoroughly they're fused, and the fact that the thing that's created has a life of its own looks like us both and but goes off in a direction that is not controlled totally by either of us. You could argue whether God is controlling everything or not. Nobody has really come to a solid conclusion on that. I don't think
Joshua Johnson:that's true. Can you give me an example so that I could try to wrap my head around it? I mean, I get it, but I want, I want to any practical example of any work of art where there's inspiration all of the talents and and technique and ability and stuff of the human melds together to create something, and then that has a life of its own after that creation. Yeah, so
Carey Wallace:one of the things I would think about is is just a painter who, let's, let's even say it's in the realm of religious art, right, like as a painter who wants to paint the Madonna and chooses their maid to be the Madonna, maybe even their maid who they are sleeping with. But when they but the picture itself is like, fully, you know, it comes from, it comes fully out of their world. It's like deeply entwined with their experiences. But it can go off and mean so many things to so. Any other people, it can give life to that story which otherwise doesn't have a face to it, to that person of Mary, who otherwise doesn't seem like just a person, and in fact, that very humaneness of the maid like the more she seems like one of us, the more Mary is brought down to earth, and the more we are brought up to heaven, in in that connection between the spirit and the flesh, and then
Joshua Johnson:also, then we have a different relationship between the art that we created, I don't know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, then, and then, now. And it speaks to us in a different way. And we go, oh yeah, that was interesting. I'm not that same person anymore. Like the art has been on a journey with others. And yes, I've been on a journey, and we are now coming at it from different ways. So yeah, I know you've had some some books come out a while ago. What is your then relationship to some of the art that you've created in the past, and now, after they've had a life of their own,
Carey Wallace:it's a good question. I was just talking with a friend of mine who was saying that she had a she got a letter recently from somebody who's reading a book that, like, nobody bought and she published 10 years ago, and they're like, it's changing my life. So that's, I think, one of the sort of wonderful things is that even if you, you as the author, cease to have relationship with it, these things are moving out through the world, and people find them. And it's always super interesting to see what things gain traction like nobody saw. It's a Wonderful Life when it came out right and now it's something that like, I'm guessing well over half of Americans have seen at least part of that movie at this point repeatedly. You know, I don't spend a lot of time going back and looking at my own work, because I just don't have much time, but also because I'm not somebody who goes back and tinkers. There are writers who will, like famous writers, who will be like, you know, making notes in the marches for published book on how they would have made it better. And I've never read one of my published books, other than to, like read it to somebody who I was hoping might get something out of it, right? I sometimes I'm, like, had that sense of, I can't believe that I got to write that I don't know who wrote this, right? Like, I don't know where it came from and but I also think that, like, time is a great leveler in terms of, like, our confusion about what of this works and what doesn't. Like, you just give it some time. I'm actually fighting all the time for more time between when I draft something and when I have to go back to it in the publication process. Because you just, when you get some distance from it, you can see, like you can really see what is working and what is not that's
Joshua Johnson:helpful. I mean, your book is titled The discipline of inspiration. Discipline. What? What is the role then, of discipline in all of this?
Carey Wallace:Yeah, well, so I'm somebody who has worked a lot on the question discipline, and I come from a family of musicians, so when I said that I wanted to be a writer, oftentimes, like your family has no idea what that means. And actually, I also have, my parents had written a book. They wrote a sociology textbook when I was a kid. So, um, but
Joshua Johnson:sociology textbook?
Carey Wallace:There is a broad my dad has started in music and wound up in sociology. You know, a lot of times when somebody's like, I want to be a writer, there's no clear path, right? There's just no like. What are you supposed to do like? You don't go to like. There's a clear path for musicians like you, you know, and I was lucky enough to be born into your feelings like, well, then of course you will practice, right? So, of course you will have a daily rhythm of practice. So, and that has been such a powerful thing for me, and and it has been something that I see is an element of anybody else I know who has made it, even the people who are like working only on passion burn out very quickly, right? Or Or if it does manage to last a lifetime, it eats everything it can eat everything else in their life. So it's been a fundamental thing. And the program that I was talking about at the beginning of this conversation is is designed Jim just simply, to help people create that kind of habit in their daily life, not exactly the habit that I have, but a habit that works for them, that they can carry through life, that will allow them to make things even if nobody else wants to see what they're making, but will also allow them to make enough stuff and maybe get good enough that somebody else might actually want to see it, right. But But I don't think that the command to make, I don't think it's just for us, like, I don't think it's like, make this pretty thing to stay in your room, maybe sometimes, but not most of the time, right? So I do think it's meant to be shared, even on a very personal level, is meant to be shared. I don't think it needs to be shared with the whole world necessarily. But I do think that that practice is good for us, regardless of whether there's ever any attention or any audience. And we're very celebrity and audience obsessed right now, and I think we could stand to move back off of that quite a bit. So discipline has been really important to me. But what it's a deliberately Open title, right? Like, are we trying to discipline? Inspiration? What are the first things I'm trying. Trying to tell you is no inspiration is actually like, it's the extent that there's training going on. Inspiration is training us like inspiration is taming us. But I'm also very interested in the spiritual disciplines as a way to get more inspiration. And when I started thinking about that, I realized that I actually believe that art, and when I say art, I mean a practice of listening to and responding to inspiration is actually its own spiritual discipline. So I'm both making it an argument that you know you can't discipline inspiration, and that inspiration is a discipline in that title,
Joshua Johnson:and you do argue in your book that art is worship. And so what's that role? Then? How is art worship? What does that look like to actually make it into a place of worship to God? Yeah?
Carey Wallace:Well, I think the simplest definition of worship, which is another one of these, like vast words, right? But it feels to me like the simplest definition of worship is a response to God, and you might have to bracket that, a response to God that is not running away, right? And a response of, it's a response towards God, maybe is a good way to put it right. And I actually think by that definition, much of what passes for worship in many churches is not actually worship, right? It's like a Vegas floor show, so, or it's like a high end concert, right? But whatever it is is not necessarily like by anybody involved. Really a gesture towards God. I think that art actually is, it actually is a gesture of following God, even by people who don't recognize that it's God that they're following. And I think it can train us to follow God in many other contexts, and it can shape us for Faith, even before we have faith,
Joshua Johnson:some of these spiritual disciplines help bring about inspiration. Can you give us a practice or two besides making art that would help bring some inspiration in
Carey Wallace:our lives? Sure. I mean, well, so I actually think there's. I actually don't know. I should probably count before I do too many with these podcasts, there's like 12 or 13 practices. So it's like silence and solitude, community, poverty, fasting. One of the ones that I think is really important is community. It's really obvious how you're looking for inspiration in silence, right? Like you're sitting around. You're being quiet because you hope someone's going to talk to you. And the reason that we don't do it is because we're afraid someone's going to talk to us, right? So, like, that's why we're not doing silence, that's why we're not doing solitude, because there's too much silence and solitude, right? And but, but in community, we might actually think that we're defended from that. We're defended from that danger like because there's so many voices around like this, this like spooky voice of God that might want us to do things that are very different than what we expect or want to do. You know, we might be defended from it, but I actually think that the community can hold us so that we can bear to hear that voice. This isn't like, I know you're actually asking for practices, and I know she probably give you something like, well, you can do this tonight, and you can, like, you can sit still for 10 minutes tonight and like, just see what happens. Right? Are you? And I've done exercises where, you know, I, I where the job in a kind of like, art, art and faith retreat is, is just to do whatever comes next. And my brother did one of them, and he's a very talented musician, and what he wound up doing was drawing with his coffee on a piece of paper and made these really beautiful, like almost ink drawings, right? You know? So you never, and he did that in the space of 15 minutes, just doing what, what sort of came to him. So it might be very interesting to just work that muscle you know this evening or tomorrow morning, or where you know, whatever, whenever you get out of the car that you're driving in while you're listening to this podcast, but, but I also think that many of these practices are really their scope is epic in our lives, right? And and community is something that that takes years to cultivate, but also many of us have more of it than we recognize, right? And if we can lean into the community and help them remind us, when we have been our best, what we have made that has been the best. And you don't have to be like a fellow artist, you know, or a fellow whatever we are like, sometimes the painter is much more able to tell you what's wrong with your story. Your story than the other writers are right, and sometimes your grandma is more able to tell you what's wrong with your story than the painter. So like being vulnerable within community, I think can help us. You know, it's practice for being vulnerable with inspiration. It's practice for being vulnerable with God, and it's also practice for taking strength from it's not just about although I think vulnerability does take strength, but then we also want the strength to act and to move and to have courage, and I think our communities can give us that as well. I
Joshua Johnson:think in all of this, one of the things that I think is going to be helpful for people, I. Know it's helpful for me is change the way that I view myself, even to my vocation, my job, the my nine to five that I have to do of moving from being a producer into a maker, like I'm, yeah, I am a creative being This is, yeah, who I am. And how do we, how do we move into a space of of not just grinding it out, but actually being in a like, knowing we are creative, that we're we're a maker, and we can be creative people all the time, in, yeah, even when we're stuck in like, a menial nine to five job, which we don't even enjoy.
Carey Wallace:Yeah, well, I think there's two ways to do it. I think one is, you know, I've done this creative discipline class over and over, and I've seen people carve out all kinds of crazy time out of very limited lives, right? So two people come to mind. One was a, was a woman who was really insistent on joining one of my early classes. She's like a biochemist, and she wanted to write a children's book. And I was completely unenthusiastic. And, but she was so, like, she wanted it so much that was like, okay, come on, come to, come to the the workshop, you know? And, and she was like, Yeah, I'm gonna Her time was just so limited. So she was like, I have 10 minutes here. I have 20 minutes on this day. And I was like, let's be honest, you need an hour at a time, right? Like, but she that was the time she had, and she used it, and she wrote a lovely children's book. And, and then I also had a friend who was like, I really want you to talk to my wife. She wants to be a writer. And she was like, Yeah, I'm writing for like, I want to write novel, and I can write for like, an hour on Friday afternoons. And I was like, I was like, go for it. Awesome, you know, because I try not to rain on people's praise. But I was internally quite skeptical, and that woman has now published more novels than I have since we had that conversation, like over a decade ago. So and what happened with her? And actually, I think what happened with the biochemist, and I think what will happen with all of us, if we carve out some of that time that is truly just our time, is that it metastasis, right? So the woman who is like, at Starbucks for an hour on Fridays, was like, I think I could do it an hour and a half. And then she was like, I have some time on Tuesdays, you know? So it grew, and as what she was making became like entire manuscripts, and she found publishers for them, then the rest of her life started to adjust. Like her husband was like, Oh, this is a real thing. We need to support this. Her kids were like, mom's writing, you know? So, so I think part of what we need to do is like, carve out time where we're not trying to stretch within the very difficult conditions of like modern capitalistic society, right, which really just wants us to be a cog in the machine and and wants to instrumentalize anything that we do that's creative and wants to own it and wants to use it. And so protecting that space, I think, is really important, even if it's only small, small, like, even if it's like, I have a half an hour on Saturday mornings, right? I have a I have 45 minutes on Sunday night. Like, taking that space to be like, This is me Be Creative the way I want to be, and seeing what happens and seeing where that takes us. But I also think that is a really good practice to be like. I think it's a great practice to be like, God, where are you in every moment of life? But I also think it's, I think there are a lot of people, including myself, who have, like, a lot of hang ups about who God is and what God is going to do, and like, all of the weight of that voice being God. And to be clear, like the voice of God has been like a virtually, universally wonderful thing in my life, right long term. But I also think it can really be interesting to be like, instead of putting the weight of that language on it to be like in my crummy job today, what inspires me? What do I hear? What can I do? What can I make? That sort of language of like play and creativity, I think can actually be a really potent way of welcoming, of welcoming God as God and not God as all these ideas that we have of God and all these boundaries we put around God. It's like a It's a much freer way to welcome God. And I think I have one friend who's, he's actually a creative but he did, he was doing, you know, he's doing it in a corporate basis, and he would actually put breaks in his day for prayer to kind of check in. And he said that that actually, it changed the way he worked, and changed his creative work to, like, not get stuck in a, you know, in an absolute tunnel of vision, but, but to create ways. My dog does this for me, right? Like she can actually tell when I'm going under, and she'll be like, hey, it's time to pet me. It's. You've been sitting still for too long,
Joshua Johnson:that's good. So it is time to pet your dog. And so I have just a couple, a couple of quick questions here at the end. One, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice would you give? Honestly,
Carey Wallace:I might have told her to like do. I would have told her to get a real job. I didn't realize that my, my, you know, the publishing industry is really in flames. And when I started, I thought that there was going to be, you know, when I started, you could get $10,000 for a Rolling Stone article, right? And that's like, Rolling Stone is, like, maybe going to be in business next year now. So the opportunities for writers in my lifetime have really changed, and it would have been interesting to think about, you know, not how do I become a writer, but what work do I create that allows room for what I'm describing, which, again, is only a couple hours a day. And there's a lot of things you can do that, like give you that space. It's
Joshua Johnson:good. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend. I
Carey Wallace:just got married, and we are like, the only thing we're doing is, like, taking things out of boxes and putting them in the right place. So I don't have anything off the top of my head, but I would commend this new book, The discipline of inspiration to you. If you're looking for reading material, it's
Joshua Johnson:a really good book. It's fantastic. I love it. I think people go out and get it. Where can people get it? And where else would you like to point people to?
Carey Wallace:So, um, I would love to talk about hearts and minds bookstore in Pennsylvania, which stocked this on its actual shelves from the day that it came out, and is a wonderful clearinghouse for ideas in in all of the ways that it just all kinds of creativity around the church, right? And so if anybody wants to order from a wonderful Indian bookstore, they can get it to you probably as quickly as Amazon can. You can also buy it on Amazon, and you can always check out bookshop.org which will lead you to your, you know, your favorite local indie shop, and if you don't want to go all the way to Pennsylvania. So that's
Joshua Johnson:fantastic. Well, Carrie, thank you for this conversation. Thank you for diving into inspiration and arts and creativity and making and being people that are creative, that we are people that surrender and say, Hey, inspiration, come and follow that inspiration, that inspiration comes from the outside of us, that it's not something that actually comes inside. We can't muster up enough effort and force to be able to to grab a hold of it, but we actually have to, like, be open to receiving that inspiration. I really enjoyed our conversation. I love your book. Hopefully many, many people go and get it, and people would go out and be makers and their life and carve out the time that is necessary for them to make, because we are creative beings made in the image of a creative God. So thank you, Carrie, that's fantastic. Thank
Carey Wallace:you so much. It was such a lovely conversation. I wish you all the best with your upcoming projects as well. You
