Creativity Connections

Bringing art into one's life brings a sense of joy and contemplation. Art can bring even more: it can bring a sense of tranquility, empowerment, and emotional release, and it help you orient yourself within the world around you. The CREATIVITY CONNECTIONS book is designed to help you connect through artistic expression in order to promote wellness by bringing more beauty, and more appreciation for beauty, into everyday living. The creativity connections method explains how, regardless of your perceived skill or prior work in art, you can tap into your own creativity, and how you can encourage others, to explore emotions and experience. Engaging in a creative enterprise allows us to connect with our thoughts and our feelings as we contemplate not just the pictures we produce, but also our inner selves. And it enables us to connect with others as we each work on a project in a group or as we collaborate with others on a collective work. Ultimately, there is value in both the process and the product. The creativity connections approach offers a series of ideas and themes to inspire creativity. Art making can be deliberative or subliminal, with industry or without effort, with concentration or without focus. You'll learn how to interpret the work that you create, without judgment or presumption. And throughout, you'll gain insight into how the process and the product afford opportunities for self-growth. Art nurtures and sustains. It provides inspiration and solace. And it is a catalyst for connection with oneself and with others.

Discover the ten things highly creative people do differently. Is it possible to make sense of something as elusive as creativity? Based on psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman’s groundbreaking research and Carolyn Gregoire’s popular article in the Huffington Post, Wired to Create offers a glimpse inside the “messy minds” of highly creative people. Revealing the latest findings in neuroscience and psychology, along with engaging examples of artists and innovators throughout history, the book shines a light on the practices and habits of mind that promote creative thinking. Kaufman and Gregoire untangle a series of paradoxes— like mindfulness and daydreaming, seriousness and play, openness and sensitivity, and solitude and collaboration – to show that it is by embracing our own contradictions that we are able to tap into our deepest creativity. Each chapter explores one of the ten attributes and habits of highly creative people: Imaginative Play * Passion * Daydreaming * Solitude * Intuition * Openness to Experience * Mindfulness * Sensitivity * Turning Adversity into Advantage * Thinking Differently With insights from the work and lives of Pablo Picasso, Frida Kahlo, Marcel Proust, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Edison, Josephine Baker, John Lennon, Michael Jackson, musician Thom Yorke, chess champion Josh Waitzkin, video-game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, and many other creative luminaries, Wired to Create helps us better understand creativity – and shows us how to enrich this essential aspect of our lives.

In Making is Connecting, David Gauntlett argues that, through making things, people engage with the world and create connections with each other. Both online and offline, we see that people want to make their mark on the world, and to make connections. During the previous century, the production of culture became dominated by professional elite producers. But today, a vast array of people are making and sharing their own ideas, videos and other creative material online, as well as engaging in real-world crafts, art projects and hands-on experiences. Gauntlett argues that we are seeing a shift from a ‘sit-back-and-be-told culture' to a ‘making-and-doing culture'. People are rejecting traditional teaching and television, and making their own learning and entertainment instead. Drawing on evidence from psychology, politics, philosophy and economics, he shows how this shift is necessary and essential for the happiness and survival of modern societies.

Connecting Creativity and Spirituality is a personal journal that explores a single issue, the connections between creativity and spirituality, as seen from a feminine perspective. Using a variety of journal techniques the book seeks to bring its readers to greater conscious awareness that creativity and spirituality are co-extensive and synonymous with a life flowing toward integrity; to mirror and embody the feminine/masculine dialectic; to provide a model for using a personal journal as an effective means of exploring any issue of profound concern to a person.

By building on existing elements at your library and filling in the gaps with community-driven additions, your library can be a space that cultivates creativity in both its users and staff.

Collates and presents creativity and motivation research findings to benefit teachers, corporate trainers, and students.

“A portrait of growing up in America, and a portrait of family, that pulls off the feat of being both intimately specific and deeply universal at the same time. I adored this book.”—Jonny Sun “[A] high-spirited graphical memoir . . . Gharib’s wisdom about the power and limits of racial identity is evident in the way she draws.”—NPR WINNER OF THE ARAB AMERICAN BOOK AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews I Was Their American Dream is at once a coming-of-age story and a reminder of the thousands of immigrants who come to America in search for a better life for themselves and their children. The daughter of parents with unfulfilled dreams themselves, Malaka navigated her childhood chasing her parents' ideals, learning to code-switch between her family's Filipino and Egyptian customs, adapting to white culture to fit in, crushing on skater boys, and trying to understand the tension between holding onto cultural values and trying to be an all-American kid. Malaka Gharib's triumphant graphic memoir brings to life her teenage antics and illuminates earnest questions about identity and culture, while providing thoughtful insight into the lives of modern immigrants and the generation of millennial children they raised. Malaka's story is a heartfelt tribute to the American immigrants who have invested their future in the promise of the American dream. Praise for I Was Their American Dream “In this time when immigration is such a hot topic, Malaka Gharib puts an engaging human face on the issue. . . . The push and pull first-generation kids feel is portrayed with humor and love, especially humor. . . . Gharib pokes fun at all of the cultures she lives in, able to see each of them with an outsider’s wry eye, while appreciating them with an insider’s close experience. . . . The question of ‘What are you?’ has never been answered with so much charm.”—Marissa Moss, New York Journal of Books “Forthright and funny, Gharib fiercely claims her own American dream.”—Booklist “Thoughtful and relatable, this touching account should be shared across generations.”– Library Journal “This charming graphic memoir riffs on the joys and challenges of developing a unique ethnic identity.”– Publishers Weekly

Presenting a neuroscientifically aware approach to art therapy. Art Therapy and the Neuroscience of Relationships, Creativity, and Resiliency offers a comprehensive integration of art therapy and interpersonal neurobiology. It showcases the Art Therapy Relational Neuroscience (ATR-N) theoretical and clinical approach, and demonstrates how it can be used to help clients with autobiographical memory, reflecting and creating, touch and space, meaning-making, emotions, and dealing with long-term stress and trauma. The ATR-N approach, first developed by Noah Hass-Cohen, is comprised of six principles: Creative Embodiment, Relational Resonating, Expressive Communicating, Adaptive Responding, Transformative Integrating, and Empathizing and Compassion (CREATE). The chapters in this book are organized around these CREATE principles, demonstrating the dynamic interplay of brain and bodily systems during art therapy. Each chapter begins with an overview of one CREATE principle, which is then richly illustrated with therapeutic artwork and intrapersonal reflections. The subsequent discussion of the related relational neuroscience elucidates how the ATR-N work is grounded in research and evidence-based theory. The last section of each chapter, which is devoted to clinical skills and applications, integrates practices and approaches across all six of the CREATE principles, demonstrating how therapeutic art making can help people decipher the functional mystery of their relational nervous system, enhance their emotive and cognitive abilities, and increase the motivation to learn novel concepts and participate in a meaningful social discourse.