On this evening’s BlogTalkRadio show my WriteSpa guest is the artist Carli Castellani. I first met Carli several years ago when she asked me to write a piece for her magazine – the celebrated Status Hat.
Over the past five years, Carli’s arts collaborative, which included Status Hat and its sister publication, Trigger, were major community outreach endeavors. The collaborative was a way to demonstrate how the creative impulse find expression in daily life in a broad spectrum of art, music, and writing. Carli also established an internship program to help produce the magazines and other arts projects, which offered university level artists and writers the opportunity for hands-on experience of a working arts lab.
She says, “I really wanted to give these creative individuals the opportunity to help build their resumes while staying in touch with the organic nature of the creative process and its importance to individuals and society, when they were at a juncture in school studies where they could be making some pivotal decisions about their future creative life, and how it may play out. Most got university credit for their internship and we showcased a lot of artists, writers and musicians with our digital ‘zine… a real range of them… we would put out calls for submissions all around the world, and get just tons of responses, and we would use digital networks, too, to put out feelers and make connections so that the folks we were showcasing we very unique and interesting. We had a very broad readership — classically trained artists and musicians, and those with advanced degrees of various sorts, to people just trying to figure out how to give form to their creative pulse. Some of our other projects included staging a rock opera with puppets and turning the same story into a series of digital comics; we also did some consulting work for SUNY, on creating arts-influenced media to help encourage young women to pursue STEM careers — i.e., the natural creativity found in science, tech, engineering and math careers.”
Come hear Carli and me chat about a topic dear to both of us: the intelligence of the heart. Tonight, Friday 14, 2013, on BlogTalkRadio, 6 pm EST.