Interviews

Two interviews appear on this site. The first is an audio interview in mp3 format. It can be accessed by clicking on the link below.

• CBC Tapestry

The second interview, below, is from the journal of the BC Association of Clinical Counsellors.

The Editor's Interview

Ross Laird's book Grain of Truth made the short-list, in the non-fiction category, for the Canada Council's Governor General's Award, the highest literary prize in Canada. This year, 755 titles were submitted in the English language categories. The nomination was particularly significant as this is Ross Laird's first book! Ross was born and raised in Vancouver; he holds an MA in Counselling Psychology from Antioch University in Seattle and a PhD in Creative Process from the Union Institute in Cincinnati. A poet and craftsman, he currently teaches creativity, counselling, and psychology. Ross is also clinical supervisor to various social service agencies in the field of addiction.

What does it mean to you to be nominated for the Canada Council's Governor General's Award?

It was a wonderful, unexpected honour and a great short-list to be invited to join. I was interested to see that two of the books -- Grain of Truth and Thomas Homer-Dixon's The Ingenuity Gap (the winner) are concerned, in different ways, with creativity and cultural change. This award is frequently won by a biography; the fact that it was not this year is, I think, a signal that people are reflecting more deeply on matters of culture and society.

What is your first love, counselling, teaching or woodworking?

Well, my first love is undoubtedly my family life. My wife and I have two small children. As I mention in Grain of Truth, raising them is the most creatively demanding and rewarding devotion I've ever undertaken. Parenting roots me in the soil of life. But I think your question is about professional work. In that arena, I do various things, all of which nurture me in specific ways. I don't practice individual counselling any longer, but prefer to use the creativity of groups as a forum for people to be guided toward their own imperatives. In the path of creativity, the subtle indications and guiding messages of the work form the essence of a dialogue with the self, and with the spirit. In this sense, creativity is the therapy of the unfathomable. I enjoy teaching a great deal. There's a tremendous sense of discovery, both for me and for the students. Ironically, those discoveries often involve recapturing a sense of how to learn, how to engage in a romance with knowledge. In the educational system, we tend to focus on the products of learning-- facts, techniques, dialects of a given industry. My approach is to focus on the process, on learning as a profound meditation.

And craft work?

Craftwork -- whether in wood, stone, or words -- is my devotional or spiritual path. I'm always taken, whether or not I want to go, to the places inside myself I most need to visit. Everyday experience is the gateway into those places, and my craftwork always builds on the everyday.

You mentioned that you prefer to use the creativity groups over individual counselling. How do you work with participants in those Creative Process groups?

These are collaborative and experimental communities in which participants follow their own creative impulses. Typically, participants choose a particular creative path for the duration, working between and during sessions, and using the context of the group to deepen their work. Many people are simply trying to recapture the spontaneity and expressiveness they once possessed but have lost in the rush and tumble of adult life. We've had a wide range of participants, from professional artists to those with no creative experience whatsoever. I bring creative exercises, I assist participants in finding a creative path, and sometimes I suggest various directions for the process. Actually, I spend quite a bit of time figuring out how to stay out of the way. In these groups, the definition of what constitutes creative work is very broad: it can be washing dishes, writing, running, oil painting, or working on conflict resolution with kids. Anything can be a creative path.

What prompted you to write a book about craft?

Many people today follow a craft of one kind or another-- gardening, cooking, woodworking-- whatever nurtures the spirit. My wife is a gifted gardener. A guy up the street from me is rebuilding a car in his garage. His neighbour is building an airplane. They work quietly, without fanfare, without much discussion of the process. At the same time, most people involved in craft have profound experiences through the simple work of their hands. There's not much written about this, though it's a social movement of tremendous importance. As a society, we're trying to find again what it means to be grounded in the world of the body. Grain of Truth derives from my own sense of wanting to make a contribution, to open a dialogue about the purpose and meaning of creative work. Craft as devotion, as revelation, as a rough opening polished by the shapes of beauty, is an essential aspect of personal and cultural development. We should talk about it.

But craft and art can be seen as luxuries in turbulent times. What is the significance of creativity when resolvin conflicts?

Creativity is anything that evokes our full attention. It's a state of mind that signals our deepest presence. In this sense, dealing with turbulent times is a creative process. The day before the September 11 attacks, I was in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, a couple of miles from the World Trade Center, looking at stone sculptures from ancient Egypt. There was a face of yellow jasper, made for an unknown queen, to which I was particularly drawn. All that's left is a portion of the face; the rest has been shattered, strewn across the debris field of history. This statue was crafted in turbulent times, much like our own, and it's precisely during such times that the symbols and rituals of the creative become touchstones for what's real, what's most true. Creativity is the soul's prayer. Such prayers are most necessary in times of turmoil. But creative work is not always about healing and clarity. In Grain of Truth, I spend a great deal of time on the shadow of creativity, the way in which it leads, inevitably and implacably, into the labyrinth, or the dark waters. In this sense, creativity can generate, rather than resolve, conflict and difficulty. Creative work is about opening to the unfathomable-- to the soul, or the spirit, if you will-- and this opening is often ragged, filled with unresolved and unexamined shapes. One of the interesting things about creative work is that if you persevere, if you trust the process, the work itself leads out of the dark waters. This, you might say, is the light side; the sparkling, joyful waters.

In your doctoral work, you focused on narratives of craft and craftsmanship as distinct literary forms and carriers of wisdom. What does "carrier of wisdom" mean?

If creativity is the soul's prayer, myth is the soul's history. In every cultural tradition, myths and dreams and collective wisdom are passed on by means of creative artifacts-- stories, images, icons. These are representations of the communal wisdom of any people, of all peoples. These representations are crafted by human hands, working in sacred space and time. This is the subject of my new book: how we come to create and to know the past. The voice of the past-- accented with such clarity-- speaks only in the language of myth, of story, of ritual, of creative endeavour.

How does understanding creativity inform the individual therapeutic process?

The therapeutic process is a creative process. The difficult thing is for people to understand that creative work is much broader than what we traditionally think of as art. The idea of needing to possess technique and skill as an artist is actually an impediment to most people's creativity. Knowledge can make the process more difficult. This parallels my own development as a counsellor. I found that I had to unlearn a number of things in order to deepen my therapeutic work. I had to give up the notion of myself as guide. I had to forego the conviction that I actually knew something. I had to acknowledge that a counsellor or therapist really is powerless to effect change. I had to learn what not to know, to start fresh and new every time. This is the beginning of creativity.

What specific significance do you find in the symbolism of ancient Taoism?

As a philosophy, Taoism is about fluidity, about finding ways to let go into the moments of simple experience. Through these moments, the essential vitality of life manifests. Taoism has no rules, no codes, no credo. It says: follow nature, follow your own experience, trust that your life is hiding gifts under every pebble along your path. I found the eight archetypal symbols of Taoism (wind, earth, thunder, mountain, deep water, shallows, fire, the unfathomable) to be useful in thinking about the diverse flavours of creative work. Wind, for example, embodies initiation, whereas the mountain invokes stillness. Each chapter of Grain of Truth is devoted to one of those flavours.

Can you explain the connection you make in Grain of Truth between creativity and "descent to the abyss"?

The abyss is a realm of the unacknowledged, the unremembered, the unresolved. It's a symbol of necessary descent. Authentic creative work always leads to the abyss. Our deepest wisdom lies buried there. The abyss is the place of drowning, of surrendering to the forces of inertia, powerlessness and depression. Down in the deep, where no light shines, there are indeed monsters. But there are also fantastic creatures who make their own light, who can surface, bringing with them their own imperative wisdom. The trick is to learn how to surface-- a difficult trick, in fact, to which I devote quite a bit of attention in the book.

Does this mean that creative work derives from affliction?

Sometimes-- not always, but often-- the threads of creativity are woven into the fabric of personal turmoil. Actually, much of the finest creative work arises from attempts to deal with the wounds of personal history. This is the abyss, or the deep water. From a creative point of view, our wounds are always fresh, always ready to offer up the difficult and necessary medicine. In the therapeutic world, many people identify with the archetype of the wounded healer, which is essentially equivalent to what I call, in the book and in my teaching work, wisdom in the wound.

How can therapists integrate creative work into their general practice?

Everyone is different, and the creative speaks with many diverse voices. For me, it's not so much a matter of bringing creativity into something, but rather of widening our view of what the creative can be. We tend not to see creative opportunities; we get distracted, or fickle, or forgetful. I see the creative path as devotional. In this sense, it infuses everything I do. Creativity is my general practice. Whatever other names I give it-- teaching, counselling, parenting-- are merely shadows cast by something vast and luminous that I can't quite see. Others may have similar experiences, but this is a matter of preference and of temperament. Counselling can be a tremendous creative outlet or it can be a burden, a chore. Which one of these it eventually becomes depends on what one believes is possible.