Studio News:
I’m honored to share that my work is included in City in a Garden: Queer Art and Activism in Chicago, now on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. It’s humbling to be part of a show that amplifies queer histories and creative resistance—especially while continuing to navigate the quieter, internal work of staying connected to my own practice.
Below is a reflection—part dream, part meditation—on how we keep riding when the path disappears.
How do you keep creatively riding when the path has been destroyed?
They say showing up is half the battle.
But what happens when even showing up feels like a fight?
Lately, I’ve been contemplating what lives beneath the surface—what keeps us moving forward, even when we’re at our lowest. Some would call it the will to live. But I think it’s something deeper: resilience. A quiet, almost invisible thread running through what it means to be human.
From that place of will—or even just the attempt to keep going—we begin to engage with the world. And any form of engagement, I believe, is a kind of creative expression. A practice. It’s a matter of recognizing how we edit ourselves, how we decide what “counts” as creative practice versus what is simply the act of navigating the complexity of our lives.
And now, more than ever, navigating the complexity of the world feels like its own kind of work.
For those of us who are artists—or simply reflective people—part of the practice is about seeing. And if we have the time and space, we can begin to articulate, express, and refine what we notice in the form of a “work of art.”
There is truth in this: making work is subjective.
We can create from nothing. If my laptop fails, I can still write on scraps of paper.
So while the obstacles often feel insurmountable, there is movement around them. That’s why I keep returning to the idea of the brain creating new pathways when others go dead.
You can look at death, or grief, or loss as permanent—and part of grieving is standing with the broken pieces. But I also believe there’s a deeper story in all of us about brokenness. About fragmentation. The path toward healing is in the wreckage. The pieces are clues, scattered and unfinished. But they point the way.
Still, humans love the presentation of a perfect egg—or the polished creative bio.
We prefer to see couples, families, relationships—connection—as whole.
Sure, the news shows us images of tragedy, but in our homes, we seek the positive. Maybe that’s a testament to our continued resilience. It’s human to want to gravitate toward the good.
Within my own creative practice, I often want a neat, perfect box to talk about pain.
To name the parts of my life that hurt.
But healing requires support. And without support or a felt sense of safety, we cannot truly heal.
We’re living in a constant state of grief and loss.
As I write this, an ambulance siren wails in the distance.
So maybe—hopefully—there’s still a path toward healing, even in chaos.
Even amidst destruction, we can create new lines and pathways to heal ourselves.
The hard part is looking.
Last night, I had a terrible dream.
I was bitten by a cat.
At first, I thought it was a snake.
I had approached the cat assuming it was safe—familiar, even comforting. But it pounced, scratched, and bit me.
The dream became a frantic search to find someone who could help me stay alive—to stop the infection, the venom.
The emotional tone was anxiety, but the core was fear.
Fear of letting my guard down.
And yet, it was that same survival instinct—this internal navigation system—that kept guiding me in the dream.
To a hospital.
To stay alive.
To survive.
So much of the creative self is about learning the right kind of vulnerability—so that when feedback or rejection comes, it doesn’t fester or stop us from making work.
That’s the question I keep returning to in my own practice:
What does it mean to create new pathways that help us heal from pain?
Or even grow from it?
Often, the thing that makes us begin creating in the first place is the thing we’re trying to survive.
For some, creativity is an innate gift, and they move toward it naturally.
But for many of us, it begins in desperation.
It’s a way out.
A way to release what feels stuck inside.
Art is a relationship with intimacy—our own.
It’s a form of movement.
Even if we’re not conscious of it, it becomes a path.
In the dream, my search for a hospital might have been about trying to heal within the chaotic state of the world.
Or maybe it was about trying to find or build some protected zone—a safe place to recover, to begin again.
I rarely feel safe enough to let my guard down.
But I’ve learned that healing happens in the fractured moments.
There’s no one right way.
But maybe the direction is this:
To stay open and receptive to new or rediscovered creative pathways.
To try anyway.
And that healing can happen in the broadest sense of the word “creativity.”
Any act of forging a new path is creative.
Maybe it’s walking a different route to work.
Or driving down a new street on the way home from the grocery store.
Our habits serve us—they keep us balanced in an unbalanced world.
But when pain becomes stagnation, even the smallest shift can matter.
In some ways, this writing practice is that for me:
An experiment.
A new path.
For those of us who make work both publicly and privately, there’s often a tension:
How do we articulate pain without performing it?
How do we speak honestly in a world that asks us to commodify our story?
We don’t need a clean, neat story.
We don’t need an elevator pitch to talk about how we found our voice.
Small attempts at new creative pathways make a big difference over time—especially when it comes to healing.
For me, today, it’s sitting down—after another night of nightmares—and waking up to another day of figuring out how to pay the bills, how to stay rooted in a fractured world.
There’s a story one of my Buddhist teachers used to tell about learning to ride a horse.
The metaphor goes like this:
If you train properly—if you build a trusting relationship with the horse (your intuition, your creative self)—then when the weather turns, or the path gets rocky, the horse won’t freeze.
It won’t buck you off.
You won’t fall.
Because the trust is there.
Even in bad weather, you can keep riding.
You don’t abandon yourself.
You stay.
So the horse, the rocky road, the storm—they become metaphors.
For stress.
For fear.
For fragmentation.
But if we stay in relationship with ourselves—if we trust that intimate voice—we can keep going.
Even when the road disappears beneath us.
Even when there’s no path left to follow.
We can keep riding, even when the way ahead looks terrifying.
And maybe—just maybe—that’s how we find the next valley.
Or catch the next breathtaking sunset.
Maybe that’s how we get there.
Maybe showing up really is the way.
Thanks for this Bill