CREATIVITY COMES FROM THE HEART
A Creative Perspective by Francesca Dedin
*Editor's Note: This post was submitted in Italian and translated into English.
My name is Francesca, I am Italian, and creativity has always been part of my life.
In addition to writing the books I will talk about later, I recently contributed to the creation of a blog that I enthusiastically collaborate with because it encompasses everything I love.
Oasi dell'Arte (Oasis of Art) is a dive into music, entertainment, books, paintings, and everything that is part of this boundless world. It is like a bar that is always open for those looking for something interesting to read (registration is free, and articles are published weekly).
I grew up in a family of builders and spent my childhood playing with sand and cement, using plaster as play dough and wooden planks as Lego. My cousins and I built tree houses and hideouts in all sorts of places. We discovered, at our own expense, that bee nests should not be touched and that nettles sting.
My dad used to paint after a long day at work. He started working at the age of eleven, giving up his studies, and managed to transform his struggles and fears into works of art.
I would spend hours watching him. I loved the smell of oil paints and the solvent used to clean them, and I admired his determination and desire to learn.
My mother made up bedtime stories for me, and during the day I did the same: I created worlds in my head, parallel universes where I could have a thousand adventures.
After learning to read, I explored ever wider worlds, and books became my traveling companions, my companions in life.
But it was through writing that I established my love affair. I have always been a closed, shy person, unable to express my emotions in words, and so diaries and notebooks came to my aid. My stories found a place where they could remain indelible, unaffected by the passage of time and the fading of memory.
The scent of ink took the place of oil paints, and the pen became my personal brush, the paper my canvas. With increasingly longer stories and increasingly elaborate plots, my head emptied at the same speed with which the pages filled up.
And then there it was: my first self-published novel. A love story, redemption from a difficult past, important themes such as suicide and emotional dependence. The struggle of being a mother, the weight of unachieved goals and shattered dreams. The desire to be understood and the discovery of self-worth.
The title of the book was “Era una brutta giornata” (It was a bad day). A strange title that came about by chance, by coincidence. It is the sentence with which I begin the story and, with a different meaning, it is the same one that concludes it.
Entering the world of publishing shook up my life, opened my eyes to the world of books, which I had always loved from afar, introduced me to new people, and gave me new inspiration for new stories.
This was followed by “Dentro la mente folle di Liù” (Inside Liù's Crazy Mind), a short novel. Nightmares, schizophrenia, love, fear, and the desire to fight are the backdrop that accompanies the protagonist and her husband on their journey through life.
The latest addition is Il Re delle Vigne (The King of the Vineyards), another short but unusual novel. Once again, madness returns in the protagonist Luna, who finds herself in a psychiatric ward, and the reader witnesses her psychotherapy session. A story made up solely of dialogue, of back and forth exchanges. Writing it was a challenging experiment, but one that taught me a lot.
If you have enjoyed what you have read so far, then please feel free to follow me and the other artists on my blog Oasi dell'Arte and here, on Feeling Creative?.
Oasi dell'Arte (Oasis of Art)
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