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Free Play

By: Stephen Nachmanovitch
Narrated by: Robertson Dean
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Summary

Free Play 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 it can finally 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.

©2019 Stephen Nachmanovitch (P)2019 Blackstone Audio, Inc.
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What listeners say about Free Play

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Essential book for creatives of any kind

This book conceptualised a lot of aspects of a creative's life and it brought a lot of awareness into creative process in so many aspects.

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valuable info even for parenting

A large variaty of info that you can implement in your life, mindufness, parenting

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Fantastic book

I wish I had come across this years. It is probably the best book I have ever read regarding the artistic process and how facilitate it. What is even more staggering is that this was free on my Audible Membership. I highly recommend this book. (The choice of narrator is perfect.)

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Omg

if you are in to art this is the dealbraker, voice if narrator is amazing as well. well done guys.

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A beautiful study of the creative process.

It helps that the voice of the reader is beautiful, perfectly paced and thoughtful, oozing integrity and without a drop of pretention. With a different voice, the weaving of ideas, observations, experience, quotes, poems and scholarship might have been a struggle to follow or digest, or connect with...despite the beautiful writing. As it stands, this audiobook was an absolute joy - a work of art that reveals and explains the creativity within me despite a science-focussed life. I highly recommend this book.

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Not suitable for Atheists

This is one of those books where both the summary and the reviews fail to mention the religious / spiritual ‘elephant in the room’. I had hoped that after the first chapter the repeated references to God and spirituality would fade into the background and unveil the golden seam of creative insight that the summary had proffered but sadly not. If you are a believer in the idea of creativity being a divine gift from god or like the idea of lessons on creativity being delivered from a slightly new-age pulpit then this book is for you. However I gave up before the end of chapter two because the lashings of religiosity became deafening and my irritation made it impossible for me to extract any creative or inspiring nuggets.

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