Review of Source by Janine Burke

This handsome-looking book, with the Ansel Adams photograph on the dustjacket, attracted me, although I paused at the ‘healing’ in the subtitle. It sounded a little flaky, and I didn’t acquaint nature with the healing of any of the artists and writers listed. Some of them did not seem to be very ‘healed’ by anything, such as Jackson Pollock, Ernest Hemingway, and Virginia Woolf. But I was prepared to be convinced that I was wrong.



I was already reasonably acquainted, as most readers would be, with some of these artists and writers, who have been researched and written about by many people before Burke. So I thought that this might be a synthesis of Burke’s own observations from her travels to the territory of each of these great creators, and in a way it is. The imprecise tone in the Introduction and the first chapter, with its decidely banal feel, took me aback, though. ‘Creativity is a place’? ‘The artistic process itself is a journey’? Was it really going to be flaky all the way through?

Review continued at M/C Reviews 'words'.