This is Artist Soapbox.

Through interviews and original scripted audio fiction.

We deliver stories that speak to your hearts and your minds.

Hello, soap boxers.

What an honor to be part of this new season and for the opportunity to

bring these discussions and ideas to the Artist Soapbox community, as ever.

We really appreciate your comments and feedback and invite you to send us an

email or interact with us on social media.

We're really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on today's

episode, I'm talking with artist and educator Luan Joy Sherman.

I connected with Luan through the School of the Alternative, an immersive

non-hierarchical learning environment that seeks to, and I'm quoting

here, create conditions necessary for a present day community of

pioneering artists and critical thinkers throughout our conversation.

You may hear Luan and I refer to the school of the alternative by its acronym.

more During this year's SOTA session Luan facilitated a class titled Fertile Fear.

As soon as I read the description, I knew I needed to be part of the class.

Starting at the location of our fear to identify fertile creative possibilities,

a class focused on making friends with fear and avoidance and using these

instructive feelings as a door, into our true desires, compassion, vulnerability,

emotional safety, and community support are the ideal ingredients for accessing.

We'll discuss dimensions of fear, the power of vulnerability and

create guidelines for how we can cultivate bravery together.

The class will culminate in each participant, identifying a fear,

naming what you need to transform it and practicing, leaning into

that fear with our support.

As you may imagine, fertile fear was a rich topic to dive

into in a group of creatives.

Each with their unique sensitivity and lived experience that they

brought with them into the room that we may not have addressed this

explicitly in the conversation.

You're about to hear Luan and I both wanted to make sure that we

acknowledged that many people in our communities experience fear due to

external systems of oppression and control that impact them directly.

And even within our trusted.

Each individual has points of identity that positioned them

differently, depending on the scope of the conversation, the individuals

involved, and many other factors, it's all incredibly personal.

And yet we also all seem to have our own fear narratives, especially with

regard to our creative practices.

One of the tools Luan shares in this episode is what he calls his daily

practice, identifying things that he needs to connect with on a daily

basis to help him feel emotionally, physically, and creatively healthy.

We'll talk about how his daily practice came to be, how it

was received in creative.

And the tendency that can creep in around using tools like this as a form of self

judgment, we'll link to a few images of the daily practice that both loon

and I have engaged in over the years.

If you're feeling inspired to try this for yourself.

And now a bit about my guest, Luan Joy Sherman.

He is a white queer trans masculine neurodivergent.

Writer performer teacher and energy worker.

He works with school of the alternative and experimental art school.

World-building project located in black mountain, North Carolina, as a

community facilitator and board member.

He's taught four classes at soda, fertile fear, physical education,

the joy of having a body, how to not know and queering masculinity.

Luan earned an MFA in sculpture from the school of the art Institute of

first aid, and as a trauma support specialist on behalf of the Artist

Soapbox team, I am pleased to bring you my conversation with Luan Joy Sherman.

Please enjoy.

Luan.

I am so excited to talk with you today and to bring all of your amazing thinking

processes and just amazing human that you are to our listeners at Artist Soapbox.

So thank you so much for being

here.

Thank you so much for having me.

It's a real honor to like share the space and in the thought and the energy and

all that, it's just it's life giving.

Well, and

on that note, I'm just want to jump right in to this amazing

class that you taught at school of the alternative called fertile fear.

And you know, when I read this course description, I was like,

well, that's where I need to be.

And that was even before I had met you.

And once we met.

Was so clear to me that like this, this was a really valuable place to

be and a process to, to be among.

So, um, I'd love to hear you share a little bit about how you were inspired

to create this course and, and talk about your experiences with fear.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah, this class was really terrifying for me.

Of course, really appropriate to the.

It was a scary thing to bring into the space of now and started.

I think the idea for me started with like a kernel back in February, where I got

invited by a friend of mine in Chicago who runs this like really incredible

art collective slash gallery slash project called Holly and the neighbors,

or it might just be the neighbors.

They invited me to do this performance could do anything I want virtually.

And I've been working through for the past couple of months.

I mean, and many years, honestly, my extreme fear of

singing in front of people.

I sing all the time.

It's like one of my favorite things to do.

It's life-giving in love with it, but it's not something that I bring.

Really to anyone else.

So I spent some time in February before the show, like really sitting

with myself and feeling so clearly pulled to take the opportunity to sing.

And I was terrified, but I heard this really incredible talk

from this woman Barbara Sher.

I think share or sure, but she does all this research on like isolation and.

You know, our true passions and our love and what our actual gifts are.

And one of the things she says is that like the antidote to fear

is love and connection, even just naming it, even just telling people

I'm, I'm terrified of X, Y, or Z.

So took this opportunity to really face that fear.

And I just, it was so deeply transformative.

And what I brought into that performance for the first time was.

A full admission that I was terrified and that fear would be a part of

the performance like that people were gonna see it in my body.

Hear it in my voice.

Like I'm telling you right now how afraid I am, you know?

And it, it like undercut all of the, well, most of the anxiety of doing the thing.

Because I wasn't trying to perform, like, I wasn't afraid.

I love that so much.

You know, this I'm I'm terrified everyone.

I just want to go ahead and say that and not try to overcome or

overcompensate, I guess for, I can't let anybody know that I'm scared.

I can't like what if my voice cracks it's like, it's going to, so I'm just

going to embrace that and ask you all to just be here with me in that.

Yeah.

And it kind of.

One of my least favorite things, maybe as an Aquarius is like too,

for other people to witness things.

About me that I can't see.

And I'm, I'm convinced they can't see it.

Right.

Or this kind of like certainty that it feels like kind of unreasonable to think

that people wouldn't pick up on the fact that I'm afraid and somehow absorb that

in their experience of the performance.

And so if I don't name it, it's there, no matter what, it's

just now a huge distraction.

Yeah.

Yep.

And so how did it feel once you've said that out loud and then presumably

stepped into the performance zone, how did it change things for you?

Yeah, I mean, I feel like it's important to frame this as like

I did step into the performance zone in a new way that was terrifying, but also.

Not without like a ton of flotation device and like support to do it.

So the setting itself being really supportive, it was virtual the way

that I brought myself into it and the way that I set up the performance.

So I made sure that it was like with material that I had sung a thousand

times, this was not going to be like a growth edge upon a growth edge upon it.

You know, like sometimes we, like, when we think about fear, we think about having to

go to the ultimate and resolve the whole.

You know, like if it needs to be like, okay, I've conquered it, which

yeah, really just kind of, I felt myself retreating from, from the

risk, the more pressure I put on it.

So just step into it and then to find myself supported by the stuff that

I had been doing this whole time.

I was like in the moment reminded that I had earned this with

my hard work and remind me.

In my sharing of the fear that like, it was okay to begin

to just be at the beginning.

Yes.

And it also felt tremendous.

Like the performance itself went really well.

And like people responded to.

This part of myself that I hadn't been sharing with anyone.

And they responded with like open arms and love.

And I think it helped me just like, you know, the whole purpose of that.

For me, it was both a performance and a fair exercise because it was about

breaking the seal, which is something that we talked about in my class around.

How we approach fear in a reasonable

way.

Thank you for setting that up.

So perfectly to sort of segue into the class.

So, you know, coming off of this experience where you openly shared your

fear, allowed fear to be present, and part of the experience now take us through.

How you started to think about putting this class together and what elements

were important to, to include?

Yeah.

Well, because it's such a potent thing for all of us.

Like even the title itself is kind of like, can stimulate fear, you

know, it's like curiosity, but also like, Ooh, a little stress.

It's a shared energy.

So part of what I try to do going into this class was like recognized that, you

know, my limitations include not being a mental health professional, not being

equipped in the time and setting that we had to like provide, you know, this isn't

an outpatient program, you know, and the topic that we're dealing with is really

shared, it's really collective.

And so it means we can really affect each other easily with just talking

about it in ways that we are unaware of.

So going into this, I like started, I think with my fear of going too deep

and my fear of bringing people too deep into the woods and not being equipped.

So I started with like really solid ground rules.

You know, we talked about like this depth, right.

Of like standing in a shallow pool where intentionally in the shallow end together.

So we can practice a little bit of vulnerability together, a little bit

of fear, like all these things in moderation and get out of this sense

of like, in order to address my fear, I have to be at one extreme or the other.

Right.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we, I mean, going through like these shared agreements with.

What we can, what we can do.

And one of the other things I said was like to practice trust in this space

and like to expose yourself with a need, with a fear, with an anxiety,

whatever is a lot of trust in the group and trust that it'll be received.

I remember two part of the ground rules that you put

forth for the group, or even just a suggestion around that was around

boundaries and how boundaries.

Like maybe there's safety in boundaries.

Maybe there's a little safety in distance.

And I feel like that kind of gets to this being in intentionally, in the shallow

end together that, you know, we have a limited amount of time and limited

availability to dig into these topics.

So, you know, how can we also take care of ourselves and each other?

Yeah.

I just remember that being a potent moment for me during

this.

Yeah.

I think just naming the fact that we all need boundaries in this space and that

like every time we talk about boundaries, not as a buzz word, but as a practice, I

know there's a thing that we actually do.

It helps us figure out what our boundaries are and what the

boundaries are in a new space and a new group and whatnot like that.

We can constantly create.

Safety through communication.

And we do that through knowing ourselves and knowing what, what a setting is

about, or, you know, in the ways that we're able to in this little container

of the class, which is its own boundary to saying like we have three hours, you

know, we're going to do X, Y, and Z.

And boundaries are what keep us safe here, right?

To the best of our ability, because you know, the other thing that felt really

important going into this like topic with a group of people who are just

meeting for the first time and soda is such a like open container that brings

people from, I mean, it feels very serendipitous the way that we all kind of

like end up in this place together and.

You know, we're not going to be able to understand each other's

needs, limits boundaries, blah, blah, blah, in this amount of time.

And this is just an exercise in like creating a shallow

area for us to sort that out.

I remember too, some folks were having a difficult time

tapping into the shallow part of it.

You know, the, the, you know, if you imagine things on a one to 10 scale,

like one is maybe a minor annoyance at the grocery store and 10 is.

Super deep trauma.

You know, folks were really connected to the depth of it.

And I really appreciated that element of making folks think about how can we

take maybe some of these smaller scale things that happen to us and start this.

Instead of jumping way into the deep end with, you know, without this safety net.

Yeah.

Cause that's the accessible way to think through and work with fear.

At least for me has been through like the daily experience of reactivity or.

Like having something affect you in a way that's like, kinda

does not make any logical sense.

Like a moment when you get sort of extremely rigid about a plan and

it's out of character or someone forgets to text you back and it

affects you in an unreasonable way.

Like, you know, these sort of like daily ways that we experienced stress.

There they're so abundant.

And for me, I have like a lot, I mean, I've been in therapy for such a long time.

I've been in dialogue with myself, my patterns, my behaviors, whatever, to try

to create healthier responses, you know, as someone with complex trauma and ADHD.

And even though that's difficult, it's also given me a ton of emotional tools.

You know this way of just saying, like, let's just do a little bit,

let's just do a, a bite size.

Let's let you know.

This is like a thing that has been given to me as a tool over and

over again, working through hard feelings and working through yeah.

You know, self-regulation learning how to celebrate.

Which itself is its own form of practice.

Right.

You know, I remember some quote and I will find this quote for the show notes

and I will also offer to our listeners, anything we mentioned in here that

we can find a resource for it online.

It's going to be included in the show notes, but I remember.

Quote, that was to the effect of happiness is no less of a skill than

learning how to play the violin.

You know, it's sort of like, it's a practice.

It's something that you show up for and, you know, learn these skills around

emotion regulation, and you know how to diffuse that moment when you don't

get that text back and you start to spiral out and we've all been there.

And it just makes me think too, even kind of going back to your.

Your fear around singing.

You know, I think that fear and creativity, you know, these

things are so just, I'm kind of smashing my hands together.

They're just so smushed together in our minds about, you know, the, the, you

know, whether it's receiving critical.

Criticism, whether it's somebody told us something once and we then therefore

thought we couldn't do that thing.

You know, just how intertwined the fear can be.

You know, with Tamara the co-host of this podcast, I've helped facilitate

creative accountability groups.

And one of the things we realized kind of to your point was, whoa,

we're going to immediately be getting into like meant the mental health.

And at that time, like was not qualified to do that.

And so I just, I think it's so fascinating.

Maybe we could talk a little bit about these things that take root in our minds,

whether it's perfectionism or something harsh that we internalized and how, how

these things impede our creative process.

Yeah.

That's like a really good way to tie into that and also

summarize some of like the, yeah.

The roots really.

How something that happened however long ago, an offhand comment, like

something insensitive, whatever.

Yeah.

Like our greatest love and our deepest fears are right next to each other.

And I think a lot of that that's been my own experience and I think that's

like some of the magic and amazing release that I've noticed from people

when we talk through this stuff.

And even in some moments of this class, That when you can sit

with a fear, it's usually, yeah.

It's usually neighbors with this thing that you are really deeply in love

with, or that really matters to you or is like extremely precious, you know?

And so for me, like this fear of.

The fear of being heard, singing is a complex one, but it has to do with

my anxiety, that my voice is a burden to other people, which I think like

if, if we like simplify it further, it's like fear of being too much.

And then there's like making sound.

So being.

And someone looking at you.

And so when I'm working with like, okay, it's a fear of singing, but is it though,

right, exactly.

You know,

like I love to sing.

So I can't even say that it's a fear.

I'm absolutely not afraid to sing.

I'm afraid to be witnessed.

Right.

And that's something else, but I can use singing to work through.

My fear being witnessed at the same time.

I just love that my brain is going in 55 directions,

especially with this creative thing.

I mean, yeah, the pathways into a new, like, like the forms of expression

that, that are just deeply tied to our heart, whatever that is.

I think we have to be able to, to release fear in order to get

into that room with that feeling.

Yes.

Release fear or maybe even like you did acknowledge it, say it's present.

It's that whole, like having a cup of tea with it here, come, come sit down.

I see you.

And here, here you are again.

And I'm not going to pretend that you're not here because here you are.

Um, well, I'm wondering if you could share with us, if there have been times in

your creative past, you know, that you've bumped up against, you know, this idea.

Not being witnessed or, you know, maybe being witnessed and then

having that witnessing kind of go sideways or not really feeling that

the people that you were with were understanding how you were showing up.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

I mean the freshest wound definitely grad school and I.

Yeah, not totally a wound, you know, but definitely like an eye-opener for

that kind of how I want to be witnessed, how I'm not being witnessed, what I

have to say, what I want to do all that through my creative practice came through

getting an MFA in sculpture and I still really deeply identify with sculpture.

Like I think it's the core of my practice.

And especially in the energy work I do.

And the writing and the performance using sound, all of it.

Right?

Like, especially writing.

I mean, it's just so constructive and building, but when I was in the,

in the MFA program that I was in, it was much more, I'll say parts of

it were antithetical to who I am.

And I didn't know that going in.

Parts of the community were antithetical or homogenous where

having a different class experience.

There were so many ways that I felt misaligned with that environment while

also trying to access, like, you know, this deeply powerful creative channel.

And I found that it so much harder to meet fear without emotional, physical

or mental safety, almost impossible.

And I think it's also, it makes it really hard to create work that feels, at least

from my own practices is in alignment with me because I need safety in order to yeah.

Be able to be in full self-acceptance.

And I think that's what I'm trying to do with my creative practice, usually.

So in that, in that sense, it was like, yeah.

My experience of grad school was I had a really intense series of life events

happen halfway through and everything kind of fell apart all at once.

So into, yeah, my in the summer before my second year of grad

school was a two year program.

I went into an intensive outpatient program and my focus shifted.

Into the mechanics of care for myself, I'm like a daily level kind of this

like learning how to drive, stick shift with, you know, my emotions,

my reactions, all this stuff.

And so what I did at that point in my, in my experience with grad school

and my creative practice turned into a blending of that with care practices and.

Yeah, it was deeply antithetical to the, what most of my peers were interested

in.

I'd love if we could dive into this a little bit more, because I definitely

want to hear more about the daily care practice that you established for yourself

and how you tried to integrate that.

Well, it sounds like, you know, you perhaps were able to integrate that with

what you were trying to do creatively and then the kind of factors around you.

We're not really understanding of what, how this would facilitate or have

anything to do with the creative process.

So I'm just, I'd love if you could share a little more about that.

Yeah.

One of the things that came out of my outpatient program that was like truly

transformative was the therapist I was working with helps me create while we kind

of, we co-designed, it was pretty much.

This thing that I call daily practice, that's basically like seven to

10 categories of things that are like essential for daily function.

That over time, if you neglect them, when I neglected them, everything fell

apart over and over and over again.

So the daily practice was a way for me to deal with a deep resistance

to structure that was imposed outside of me, form one for myself.

And established self-trust.

And I think that a couple of those things were not shared problems by my peers.

Like at least not in the same way.

So yeah, I was coming out of like a period of housing instability, and that also

influenced this daily practice chart to be basically, it was like, okay, food wise.

Sleep interact with friends, exercise or move your body, take

your vitamins and your medication, and, you know, play with your cat.

Like those were the categories.

And so when I brought, when I brought that stuff into.

Uh, critique setting and mind you, like, I mean, they were kind of participating

in the language of art school in the sense that like I had made these huge

charts on these large pieces of paper with colors and it was just a drawing

practice for me at the same time.

Like it just, it naturally.

This drawing and this care chart and whatever.

And I brought these pages, I've been working on this.

I've been doing this practice every single day for like, I think

almost three months at this point.

And so I brought all of this data to them in these huge drawings.

And I had this one critique where like, literally the response was,

why should we care about this?

And.

That this work is profoundly boring and it gets a combo of words.

So funny to me, because there is something profoundly boring about how

much labor it takes to support ourselves.

It's truly exhausting.

It's really tedious, you know?

And so I guess they weren't wrong in that sense, but it was also

just an inability to connect with.

People were not able to connect with why those daily needs would

be so hard to meet without a chart.

Right.

And for those of us who, you know, I've, I've had my own version of this

and I'm really looking forward to sharing sort of a template for this,

with our listeners, because I think a lot of us can benefit from this.

You know, I I've had mine was born out of this like yoga group that I was in.

And when I was on it, when I was meditating, when I was, you know,

listening to music or, you know, moving my body in kind of a celebratory way,

all these things that I had identified as being important, I felt really great.

And then isn't it funny how, in the course of just living life one by one,

these resources tend to fall away if we're not like on top of it, because

there's always other things to do.

There's always other things that we feel we should prioritize over,

resting over, playing over, you know, being with being in community.

So I just.

You know, I, I actually I'm, I'm also like I'm loving that profoundly boring things.

Like part of it, like actually, yeah, that's a feature, not a bug, right?

Exactly.

No, I'm aware.

I'm tired of it too.

Yeah, no, this, this point about, you know, to just be crystal clear about

it, like the oppressive systems that we live in, you know, white supremacists,

capitalist, CIS patriarchy it's deeply supports the deprivation that yeah,

it supports deprivation personally and, and produces it and expects it.

And so this system, one of my only rules for it, when I share this tool with

people is that, well, there's two rules.

One is that you cannot use this tool for self.

You cannot use it for self abuse and into the best of your ability.

You cannot use it for judgment because that's where it's going to go immediately.

That's what we do with systems naturally.

It's like, it's like how we were conditioned, right?

Yeah.

It's the, oh, here's one more thing I'm not doing

exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's ways to feel bad.

You know, you could do, you can just reproduce that, but the point is to

cultivate play, cultivate, rest, cultivate forgiveness, self-trust all this stuff.

The chart isn't meant to become a rigid thing.

I also recommend that it's hand drawn people who use this, wherever that is,

if it's on the wall or if it's, you know, in a book or whatever it just

doing it by hand and allowing that.

Fundamental part of it to be imperfect.

Yes.

Yes.

And you know, just like you, did you using different colors using just different?

How do you check, you know, proverbially check that box.

Do you draw a little picture in there?

Like all these different things you can do?

Yeah.

To just, again, like make it fun and make it something that is for

you for your health and wellbeing and no other reason really.

Yeah, and it's armor.

And in a sense, because I think this was the part that felt most.

Disappointing.

So circling back to like the reception of this tool.

When I first like shared it with people, it was really deeply disappointing to

feel like I had failed to deliver the value, because I think there was a

part of me that knew deeply that this was something that, that most people

could find a way to benefit from.

Or the many people needed just looking around me and this, in this community

of like extreme exhaustion, overwork, you know, and MFA is just like, it's

so much, it pulls so much from you.

And so that critique, that bad experience really, it motivated me frustrated me.

Toward finding ways to communicate this and in, in multiples and

through other mediums and other ways to make this work illegible.

I'm wondering if, as we think about that, you know, in this piece

of, you know, bringing it to a group of people, ostensibly for feedback, you

know, I'm just wondering if you could share a little bit, some of your thoughts

around ways that we could actually.

Start to humanize the feedback process so that it can be, you know, we've talked,

you and I have talked about sometimes these, you know, you get this harsh

critique or something that can actually really fuel a block inside of you.

So how can we.

Rather than fueling creative blocks among one another use critique and

feedback to help lift up the person

who's creating.

That's a really good point.

Like I think a really powerful tool for this is modeling in groups

actually, because what I've noticed.

Is in some of these, these like toxic group critique settings

what's being modeled and what's, it becomes a competition between

the people who are critiquing.

Like it all gets ahead.

It gets away from itself like a runaway train or something.

And we can actually just go in the opposite direction when

we're modeling for each other.

Ways to engage with work or a problem or someone's fear or someone's

vulnerability that are like rooted in compassion, in a desire to build an,

a desire to help this person grow.

Like really just like love in action.

'cause like someone sharing their work with me.

Like it's not really about me.

And so it's kind of cruel to then make it about myself and leave

that person with nothing but doubt,

because I can think of few things that feel more vulnerable

than taking some piece of your creativity, whether that's a sculpture,

whether it's a piece of writing and giving it to other people and asking.

Tell you what they think of.

It it's that that part alone has kept me from either doing or sharing work

for so much of my life, because it's like, I don't, I'm not equipped to

withstand the judgment and the criticism.

So it's, I wish that we had so many more hours to talk about that topic because

I really feel like that, you know, there are pockets of, you know, creative.

The zones where people are starting to make these shifts around how

feedback is delivered and metabolized.

And like, I'm just so here for it yesterday.

Like the more we can humanize this process, because that talk about fear.

Right.

You know, that's just such a, what will people think?

What if they really saw this?

What would they say?

Will I

be correct?

Yeah, and it really just cuts off all potential for the work

to breathe and have a life.

And one of the other things that like really that drove me to bring this class

into this space was like this feeling of.

I forget where I heard this quote, but it was like basically that like our

expression of our most authentic self and our gifts are what other people rely on

to do the same, in some sense, because it's this web of actualizing, like me

bringing my gifts into the world is likely going to enable something else.

And so putting faith in.

That connectivity beyond our own awareness.

And that, that can be the purpose of expression.

It's just the trust that like, well, this came to me, I guess I have to

release it because somebody else needs to see this or hear it or be with it,

or, you know, like that is the most profound, those instances, the most

profound experiences I've had with art.

And so it's like, Rather than arguing about what is, or is not art, or if it's

good or bad is like talking about what's the purpose, you know, what are you

doing with this in a compassionate way?

You know, what do you wish for this?

Yeah.

Lewin.

I could talk to you all day, every day for 65 years

and it would never be enough.

So I just so appreciate your willingness to join us today and for

all these beautiful insights that you've shared with our listeners.

Thank you so much for taking the time to dive in

that just, yeah, it's so valuable.

studio based in North Carolina.

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The Artist Soapbox theme song is ashes by Juliana Finch.