Creativity & Constraint

We often think of true creativity as unfettered liberty—but is creativity something that only takes root, flourishes, within bounds? What happens to our ideas if they must work their way through the material world—often being materially changed in the process? Why is it that we often feel more empowered, more intimately related within the artifice of a story, a song, a painting than we do in the world at large? What do we learn when we try to take that expansiveness back out into world? What, if anything, do experiences of creativity and constraint have to do with real world challenges, where our desires and drives are checked daily, where our playing fields are far from level, where hard work isn't always rewarded? Join forty writers of poetry, fiction and memoir as they muse on the various permutations of creativity and constraint in their own lives and in their artistic process.