Encountering the wisdom of Marc Zegans

“When artists and professionals regularly accept responsibility for their actions, they shape deep, rich, and evolving pictures of who they are, pictures that permit them to act consistently with emerging notions of their authentic selves.”  Intentional Practice & The Art of Finding Natural Audience: A Framework for Artists and Professionals.

Marc Zegans is a poet in Santa Cruz, California who provides creative development advice to artists, musicians, actors, directors, and other creatively minded professionals such as therapists. He wrote a brilliant, very slender e-book a few years ago and put it on Amazon at such a ridiculously low price that it should already rest in the toolbox of every artist and professional.

I recently re-read it and was reminded of how I want to function as an active, authentic, ethical artist and minister, and where my natural audiences might be. Based on my working session with his book and his penetrating questions, I now know exactly how I will overhaul my website and blog in the next few weeks so that they more accurately reflect who I am.

If you want to know more about Marc and the many creatives and professionals he’s helped, trot on over to www.mycreativedevelopment.com. Or you can catch him live, reading his poetry, at Nomadic Press in Oakland on Saturday, January 24 at 7 p.m.

Meanwhile, here are three of many, many gems from his book:

“Your natural audience isn’t everyone you can pull into the room; it’s the group of people who have a good reason to be there.”

 “Intentional practitioners are fiercely committed to being present in their pursuit of socially responsible purposes.”

“Often, we claim that authenticity and integrity demand distance as a rationale to cover our fear of engagement. When such claims are based in fear, there is nothing authentic about them. We are using a ploy to protect ourselves from finding out how good we really are, what we can do when we have resources, and what we will do when we don’t.”

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