We recently connected with Chelan Harkin and have shared our conversation below.
Chelan, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.
Greetings! Great question. For me, my connection with the creative flow is an intimate, somatic journey. Rather than having a disciplined writing practice where I go to the desk from 9-5 every day, I bring my awareness into contact with feelings of tension or resistance in my body. I say a prayer asking to understand what’s going on inside of me that’s leading me to contract around or contain life force within me. I ask to be brave enough to give those areas love and acceptance and eventually they open and reveal wisdom, inspiration, forgiveness and guidance that cannot help but flow through my pen. .
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I am a professional poet! I have three books so far, Susceptible to Light, Let Us Dance, The Stumble and Whirl with The Beloved and Wild Grace. In September my book, The Prophetess, The Return of The Prophet from The Voice of The Divine Feminine will be released. In 2020 I decided to self-publish a collection of poetry I’d been sitting on for 12 years. With no connections in the marketing or publishing world but with a powerful desire for my poetry to reach people, I decided to try a prayer experiment, praying to my favorite dead poets for marketing support, Hafiz and Kahlil Gibran. As soon as this experiment began I shared a poem on FB that went viral and brought me a global audience. A couple weeks after that, I received an email from my primary poetic inspiration, Daniel Ladinsky, renderer of Hafiz poetry and author of the foreword to the extended edition of The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. He had the closest literary connection with the two beings I’d been praying to. He told me he was a reclusive poet who rarely reached out to anyone but that he had a strange nudge to reach out to me. He asked me if I would co-author a book with him. He then introduced me to the major publishing houses of the world and I now have a contract with Penguin Random House. What most excites me about this journey is how led by surrender and grace it’s been.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I would encourage people to take risks to move toward what they love. I have been willing to open and share my heart and move toward powerful emotional discomfort in the name of what I most love. I have been willing to test that the things I was most afraid to share might be valuable to others and that my fearful assumptions might not be truths and to test them and see. I would encourage people to experiment with possibility.
Awesome, really appreciate you opening up with us today and before we close maybe you can share a book recommendation with us. Has there been a book that’s been impactful in your growth and development?
I Heard God Laughing, renderings of Hafiz by Daniel Ladinsky. He did so much to redefine the ways we relate to God. The way we relate to God can be the transformational kingpin of our paradigm. His poetry exemplified God as an unconditional lover of our authentic being that celebrates our entirety. This poetry opened, inspired and disarmed me in ways that are beyond description.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.chelanharkin.com
- Instagram: @chelan-harkin
- Facebook: Chelan Harkin
