Product Description

This book is about the inner sources of spontaneous creation. It is about where art in the widest sense comes from. It is about why we create and what we learn when we do. It is about the flow of unhindered creative energy: the joy of making art in all its varied forms.

Free Play is directed toward people in any field who want to contact, honor, and strengthen their own creative powers. It integrates material from a wide variety of sources among the arts, sciences, and spiritual traditions of humanity. Filled with unusual quotes, amusing and illuminating anecdotes, and original metaphors, it reveals how inspiration arises within us, how that inspiration may be blocked, derailed or obscured by certain unavoidable facts of life, and how finally it can be liberated - how we can be liberated - to speak or sing, write or paint, dance or play, with our own authentic voice.

The whole enterprise of improvisation in life and art, of recovering free play and awakening creativity, is about being true to ourselves and our visions. It brings us into direct, active contact with boundless creative energies that we may not even know we had.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #10243 in Books
• Published on: 1991-05-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

Robert Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
This is an unusually intense, packed, thought-through book on the most difficult subject in the world: mystic creativity.

Yehudi Menuhin, violinist
Would that Free Play found its way into every school, office, hospital, and factory. It is a most exciting book and a most important one.

Norman Cousins, author of The Anatomy of an Illness
Stephen Nachmanovitch has produced a celebration of human uniqueness.

Customer Reviews

This helped me hugely as a writer
This book helped me understand that I needed to make new room for play in creative life. Some writers seem to be born with playfulness built in, and it helps them hugely. My most successful writing has always come out of short playful moments, which is what got me going as a writer of children's books early in my working life, and what draws me back to it in the last few years. In the meanwhile it's taken me embarrassingly long to grok that the best "serious," "adult" fiction often comes from deep playfulness, improvising wildly, and frankly, just making stuff up! That's not all there is to creative writing, but there's nothing without it, seems to me. The chapter in Free Play about Limits is especially useful. It's about how boundaries generate and enrich creative work. Every great game draws its power and excitement from that basic paradox. Nachmanovitch discusses these kinds of things mainly from an improvisational musician's point of view, but it turns out to be the most useful book I've found on the real creative stages of writing--and given me more of them than I used to have! Nutty to Meet You! Dr. Peanut Book #1

Great support for anyone in the arts!
I found myself saying YESYES!!!! many times in reading this book. I would highly recommend anyone involved in the act of creating, where it be music, acting, painting,cooking, writing,etc to buy this gem of a book. The writer obviously has walked in the shoes he speaks of. It is a great support for those times you are feeling blocked or like you want to forget even trying to create anymore.

Got me thinkin'
THis publication is a descriptive diatribe on the "cosmic" nature of improvisation. It is not a manual that "teaches", but rather a collection of bits & pieces of information that are collaged together. There are good points in the book and it is extremely well written by a PHD holder who obviously is an expert in the field.

I was hoping the book would be more of a manual of "how to" but it was still very useful as a "mind opener"