Art and Mental Health Interview with June Girvin
Art and Mental Health Interview with June Girvin
How knitting, writing, gardening, and reading are the same and different as creative tasks ...
Welcome to Create Me Free where I share all of my deep research into and musings about the complex relationship between art and mental health. When I use the term “mental health” I sometimes mean things with a diagnosis and symptoms but more often I just mean something akin to “how the challenges of life are affecting our thoughts and experiences.” And that, in turn, affects our creativity. I’m creating a body of work researching all aspects of this, which you can stay informed about by subscribing here:
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What does the person introducing you say by way of introduction to who you are?
Please welcome June Girvin, a woman of high integrity and low tolerance of fools, with a penchant for sarcasm and a love of writing of all types. After two successful careers, one in nursing and one in academia, she is living her best life in blissful retirement. (There would, of course, be thunderous applause.)
What does "art" or "creativity" mean for you?
You know the old Pestalozzi saying - Learn with your head, heart and hands? I think in the context of art and creativity, it’s a perfect description. All art and creativity is a combination of intellect, meaning, and performance.
What does mental health or wellness mean for you?
Mostly it means feeling OK. I still see it as absence of mental distress, rather than the more positive notion of health. I’ve spent quite a lot of time in various degrees of mental ill health, so I am always acutely conscious of the absence of those distressing feelings. And I’m grateful for their absence every day.
Your piece on knitting seemed to get a good response.
You were a bit hesitant to share that post. What would you like to share about your hesitation to write that piece and then how you felt after publishing?
I was hesitant because knitting still gets quite a bad rap. I don’t know if it’s the same in the States but here in the UK there are annoying stereotypes that appear all the time – it’s unskilled, it’s something that grannies do, it’s about unwanted gifts, it’s kind of old-fashioned. I suppose I was nervous that outing my knitting habit would result in people judging me along those lines. Silly really, and I thought it might affect how people responded to my other writing, which is even sillier.
It’s the usual stuff – how will other people judge me? I like to think that I don’t do this anymore, but, of course, I do. The good thing is that those thoughts rarely prevent me from doing things now. I got nervous but I thought, ‘what the hell’ and published anyway. This is me guys, knitting and all. After I published and everyone was loving it, then there was a double benefit:
1. I was right to just go for it and
2. People loved it anyway.
Hearing those old feelings but not listening to them is the way forward!
I am sorry that you felt that way at all. Having worked in craft as therapy for over a decade and written across a diverse array of craft magazines and sites, I have a huge community of crafters around me, and I forget sometimes that those judgments and stereotypes are still there!
In that piece, you mentioned lots of things that you like about knitting … For example:
“I like the slow progression to the finished item, the feel of the yarn, the weight of a part-knitted project.”
and said that sometimes it’s soothing/relaxing but not always. You also added that you don't necessarily do it for your mental health.
You explained why in your post, but I wondered if you could elaborate on that because I think it's an interesting tension ...
why do the things we enjoy doing also sometimes affect our brains in weird "negative" ways?
It is quite interesting isn’t it? A lot of people talk about knitting as an aid to relaxation or mindfulness or whatever, but if I’m feeling stressed or worse, then the last thing I want to do are things that require concentration. I just can’t. In fact, one of the ways I know I’m well is that I can knit and I can write and I can read for long periods. When I’m unwell my brain is so full of the ghastly stuff that nothing else meaningful can get in there. So I would say that it’s my brain that affects my creativity in negative ways, rather than the other way around. Maybe if I were better at knitting it would be more relaxing. As it is, I have to be totally engaged with every row, very focused, or I get it wrong! I can’t knit and watch TV for instance, or knit and hold a conversation. I suppose some people might see that level of concentration as a distraction from a messy head, but it doesn’t seem to work like that for me.
That makes sense to me. I’m not very good at knitting at all, so that requirement to focus is true for me as well. Sometimes that focus is good for me because it stops the ruminations of my mind without being toooo challenging. But if it is too challenging then it’s frustrating and then the negative self-talk comes in for me. Crochet is different because I’ve done it for so long, and I like to use super simple repetitive stitch patterns, that it really doesn’t require me to actively pay attention to it. I can count, I can enjoy the texture and repetition, so my mind slows down from the wild thoughts but doesn’t require deep attention from me.
Building on that, what's your relationship with writing?
(Because mine and most writers I know have some kind of fraught relationship with it but love it so it's an area rife for conversation about creativity and wellness.)
I don’t have a fraught relationship with it in general. I mean, I get the same frustrations as others do, the technical issues – How to start a piece? How to finish? Nothing to write about? I can’t find something weekly! Is this long enough? Too long? Etc etc. But I don’t really angst about content. Usually, if I sit down in front of the laptop, I can write – it might not be anything very special, but I can get something down. And that’s why I love it. I don’t ever have to talk myself into it. If I had nothing else to do I could easily and happily sit and write all day long. Sometimes when I go to bed I can’t sleep because stuff is writing itself in my head!
After a period of being unwell, one of the things that has always helped me to make sense of it, or to get it into perspective has been to write about it, once I’m well enough to do that. It has always been invaluable and often has been a component of the therapies that I’ve used – talking therapy sessions and then writing down those insights that have come so I can think about them and see how they fit into the unwellness and then the wellness. So I recognise writing as a kind of therapeutic function for me, as well as a creative one. Which is why, I think, my writing contains a lot of myself. I’m not afraid of that exposure any more, because I’ve worked through it in talk and in written word, so creating something new out of it through life writing, in memoir essays for instance, feels positive and productive.
I read that response a few times because it’s so powerful. I definitely write in a therapeutic way like that at times. But I wouldn’t say that sitting down to write always comes easily to me so it’s interesting to me that it does for you. And I think it’s wonderful. I think sometimes that can be the biggest clue that we’re doing the things we’re meant to be doing in this world.
You have a section of your site called ReadsKnitsWritesGardens. So, how about gardening? How does that improve and/or wreak havoc on your mental wellness?
How does it nourish you creatively? There are so many million garden metaphors that relate to creativity and there's got to be a reason for that (says the one with the brown thumb over here.)
Well, at this moment it’s kind of stressing me out because the garden is a mess and I’m not dealing with it. It’s been too hot to work in the garden and this time of year it gets blowsy and out of hand and I can SEE the weeds getting worse and worse and the cutting back that needs doing, and the paths are overgrown etc etc, but if the weather is nice I want to just be out and sitting and enjoying it, not working in it! So I enjoy gardening in the late autumn, winter and early spring when it’s not running away from me, and I can see what I’m doing. I like control (surprise!) and so the garden being out of control makes me start to feel out of control and that’s one of the things I have to be very aware of. So, gardening is more of the contradiction activity for me, that you mention above – the tension activity. It makes me feel good, the end effect is so worthwhile, I love the sense of wrenching control back, I love to see it, I love to be out in it, but I don’t really like DOING it. And I don’t have spare funds to get someone in to help with it. I have to make myself get out there and weed or dig or prune. I’m always glad I did, but I don’t run towards it in the same way as I do writing.
I don’t think I’ve thought about that before, so articulating that is interesting for me too – I shall probably write about this realisation of the inherent tension in gardening for me! Control versus out of control!
There’s definitely something to that aspect of control for a lot of us as it relates to creativity of any kind.
You're a reader, of course. One of the things I've been exploring lately is how creativity isn't just the act of creating but the entire cycle of taking in inspiration, letting it marinating, letting it come out in all kinds of different ways, and then perhaps there's a poem or book or painting that's kind of the end result of all of that. So for me, reading itself is an act of creativity. But others are free to disagree with me on that.
Any thoughts?
That’s interesting too. I haven’t really thought about it like that, but I can see what you mean. I think we all create our own version of the world in the pages, don’t we? Visualise the characters, make them ours? I know I dislike it when I see a dramatization of a book I’ve read and the characters don’t look the way I imagine them, I feel short-changed – the adapter’s creativity is not the same as mine. So yes, when we’re reading fiction of any genre we’re re-creating that world and those people for ourselves. Non-fiction is very different – I think that feeds our creativity all the time, it’s all research and resource for something we might put on a page later on. Whatever I’m reading, I’m learning and tucking things away that I might use later. I annotate or use a notebook and note down phrases, or sentences, or ideas that I can reinterpret in my own writing. So, actually yes – I think reading is a creative activity! It’s a fundamental building block for writing.
Thanks for sharing that. It adds to the thoughts I was having. And I’d be curious to see what other people think about non-fiction vs. fiction as creative reading.
What was the most exciting thing about doing this interview? What was the scariest?
The most exciting was knowing that someone thought I would have interesting things to say – I felt seen and validated by that. The scariest was thinking that I wouldn’t actually have anything interesting to say!
Ha, makes perfect sense. Our minds love those contradictions.
Paying it forward, who are a few writers you absolutely love here on Substack?
/ by of David Oliver
Your own writing, of course.
And there are many more but these are the ones I probably engage with most of all
Aw thank you for that. I’m in amazing company there.
Having shared all of that with us, what is something we might be surprised to learn about you?
I don’t know – maybe that I’m older than people think? I turned 68 recently – that certainly surprises me! I feel…I don’t know…what’s 68 supposed to feel like…I feel like I’m in my prime!
That’s wonderful! You recently wrote about Joni Mitchell turning 80 years old this month.
In it, you linked to a New York Times article from a few years back featuring a photo of her with David Hockney, listing reasons that so many people loved that photograph, and it included that the “combined age of the two figures depicted in it is 156” (at the time) and that “It’s this wonderful depiction of two successful people enjoying their old age.”
I love these celebrations. And you definitely seem to be in your prime. Thanks for sharing your words with us!
Be sure to check out June's Writing …
Here are a few other posts of June’s I’ve particularly enjoyed:
Housekeeping:
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Thank you so much for this! I feel seen!
Kathryn and June, thank you for sharing!