Enter the Spark Dept.
How do creative ideas come to us? Why do some ideas come to fruition, while others fade away, even if we liked them? When I started this substack about the mindset and work of being an artist and writer a few months ago, I ran through a few names for it as I grasped for how to describe the topic.
I initially named it Person Place or Thing, then Mise En Place then Natural Habitat, all because I wanted to talk about how, as artists and writers, what surrounds us becomes us and our work. I even considered Culture Dept. for a minute. But it’s more than that, it’s about the emergence and development of ideas, not just about us. So now I finally know what I want to call it: Spark Dept. Because it all starts with the arrival of a spark.
I was uncertain of the other names I used at first when I thought of them. But I began with them anyway. Because that’s how you get something started, by doing it even when you aren’t ready yet. So there it is, lesson one for all of us, just start. Start with a spark. (Or end with a spark, in my case.)
The word spark had already arrived in my consciousness a few years ago. It’s the name I gave the Tarot deck I created: SparkTarot®. And it’s the name of the new deck I am designing: SparkRitual™. A year after I released SparkTarot®, my partner Daedalus Howell pointed out that my dad and grandfather both worked as electricians in San Francisco their entire lives, so of course it was spark. I hadn’t even realized I was tapping into a family energy (literally!) with that word, and that is how it is sometimes — a feeling instead of a thought process.
Spark Dept. is a workspace for all the things I want to write about and discuss with other artists and writers. Namely, how ideas get started, and how what surrounds us becomes us and our work, including the people we hang out with and admire, the places where we exist, the things we have around us, and the culture that we create and exist within personally and collectively.
So here at the Spark Dept. I’ll be writing regularly about how what surrounds us facilitates the emergence of the ideas that we come up with and how our surroundings can also help us carry our ideas past that first spark, as we nurture them into a controlled (and sometimes uncontrolled) burn.
It means discussions of art and writing (mine and and others), book reviews, film recommendations, how I get projects started, how to keep going, how to get things finished, and what it all might mean for who we are and who we become.
Welcome to the Spark Dept.