Today I am delighted to welcome the lovely Victoria Bantock from What The Dickens? Magazine to guest on my blog.
Thanks Nettie for inviting me onto your lovely blog so I can rant away like mad about the things I do. As my other half will confirm, I do go on quite a bit when I get going. But I can’t help it, if it is something I am enthusiastic about, then rant I do, and creativity and the arts enthuses me like nothing else.
Having been to Chichester University and swiped away a degree in English & Creative Writing in the dead of night, I started up a magazine called What the Dickens? Magazine on a total whim one day. With the help and contributions of lots of terribly good creative folk, we made 8 issues in digital format, and crowd funded one of those into a brilliant shiny printed edition. It was a lot of fun and massively inspiring but, I felt the need to get out there a bit more and connect with others which is difficult when you’re running a magazine as there is so much to do with deadlines and content and editing and e-mailing and so on. So, I moved it all onto a website that people can contribute to directly which left me time to create my next big thing: The Creative Life Project.
I started this project to get me out there, meeting others following a creative path and also to hopefully inspire and encourage people along the way. I have lots of useful tips and knowledge to pass on and am driven to support people any way I can to live creatively. The way I have planned to do this is through workshops and courses, talks, inspired film nights, an online community forum, creative networking events, meet ups, writing spaces and one to one support.
I decided to initially do this in the South East kicking off in Brighton as that is where I am based and so seemed like a good place to start and test the waters. I have so far organised a summer programme of events: a creative networking event, inspired film night and some writing spaces for writers to come along and work on their individual projects. I am hugely excited, especially as I have had bookings (woo!), and I really think we will all get something great from it. I am currently planning to roll out these events to different parts of the South East and see how it goes from there.
My advice to anyone out there who wants to follow a creative pathway whether as an artist, writer, musician, dancer, actor, film maker and so on is that anything is truly possible. If you really want to do something and the desire and will to do it are there, then it can be done. It probably won’t be easy and they’ll be times when you feel like giving up and walking away, but if you can push past that moment and keep going anyway, then things can but start to happen. I’ve realised too how important it is to get yourself out there and connect with people away from the computer. Your ideas really do shine when you tell them to others in person and you give them energy that way. Opportunities are out there and all around, you just need to look out for them and say YES as much as possible!
Victoria lives in Lewes, East Sussex where she concocts lots of crazy ideas and somehow convinces others to come along for the ride. She aspires to help herself and others to live creative lives.
You can connect with other creative people at The Creative Life Project and enjoy What The Dickens? Magazine.
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