Julia Cameron on The Artist’s Way at 30

Julia Cameron advises writers to keep the intended reader in mind, so I’m taking that to heart. Which means not presuming that you’ve ever heard of her, or her most famous book, The Artist’s Way, despite the fact that it has sold more than five million copies and continues to appear, almost without fail, on the weekly Los Angeles Times indie bookstore bestsellers list, even though it debuted the year Bill Clinton was first elected president.

When Cameron published The Artist’s Way in 1992, the readers on her mind were her own friends, many of whom were suffering from creative malaise. Cameron, too, had weathered the malady, along with alcoholism and anxiety. What helped her break through, she discovered and explained to readers, was sobriety (more on that later) and adopting a simple (on the surface, at least) ritual of writing three pages, first thing upon waking, ideally before coffee and most certainly before reading the news, about anything and everything that came to mind. Call it a brain dump, a mental cleanse, a stream of consciousness. What the writing did was unlock her block and, in the process, reveal creativity as a spiritual practice, one that confronts your inner critic, unleashes your inner child, and reflects to you your authentic self.

This article appears in Issue 35 of Alta Journal.
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Which likely explains why Cameron’s practice, now known around the planet as “morning pages,” continues to gain acolytes who freely pick up a bullhorn to commend the writer’s impact on their creative lives, from Elizabeth Gilbert (“Without The Artist’s Way there would have been no Eat, Pray, Love”) to Tim Ferriss (“the most cost-effective therapy I’ve ever found”) to legions of exuberant young adherents on TikTok who capture their own transformative experiences with #morningpages.

At 77, Cameron has lived long enough now for The Artist’s Way to function less like a book than like a presence. It has followed her through sobriety, geography, faith, and aging, even as she has continued to write, restlessly and prolifically, in its shadow.

Before publishing the book, Cameron had never thought of her practice as a tool. “I realized that I was afraid of being considered too woo-woo,” she says. “And then I talked to a girlfriend of mine, who’s a Jungian analyst, and she said, ‘Julia, woo is where it’s at.’ ”

I’ve called Cameron at her home in Santa Fe because I am fascinated by the endurance of her most famous work and the way it continues to circulate and regenerate in a culture that rarely stays interested in anything for long. What began as a handwritten, spiritual practice in a predigital era has been absorbed into productivity systems, therapy sessions, and creative workflows—often stripped of its mysticism but not of its power. I’m equally gobsmacked by Cameron’s oeuvre: She has published more than 40 books since The Artist’s Way—which came out when she was 44 years old—including The Daily Artist’s Way: 366 Meditations for Creative Living, which was released last fall, followed this March by an updated version of The Prosperous Heart: Creating a Life of Enough.

While there are inarguably many artists roaming the world, The Artist’s Way couldn’t have sold five million copies if it wasn’t reaching an audience outside the artistic discipline. I tell Cameron about my dear friend Mariana, a professor and cancer researcher at the University of Southern California who lost her home last year in the Eaton Fire. She started writing morning pages after she realized she was doing a similar practice to process her grief, but it lacked structure. What she found when she committed to the 12-week course prescribed in the book was that it also enriched her work as a scientist, encouraging her to see creativity as a foundation for research ideas.

“People yearn for creativity,” Cameron responds, her words precise and thought-out. “They intuitively sense that they may have an inner spark of creativity. And I think that that’s what moves people into the book. It gives them a launching pad, if you will. I’ve had lawyers tell me that they think better on their feet. Ballerinas tell me that their balance has improved. I’ve had judges tell me that they’re more judicious. People read the book with a sense of optimism and hope, and they soon discover writing morning pages to be an interesting discipline.”

And a soul-revealing one. “Ours is a secular time, and we often fail to realize the power and potency of the written word as prayer,” Cameron says in Write for Life: Creative Tools for Every Writer, published in 2023. The Artist’s Way and its many siblings are unapologetically spiritual. Cameron uses the word “God” throughout her books, while repeatedly inviting readers to redefine the term for themselves. (She also advises them to tap into “creative force,” “higher power,” and “the universe.”)

Acting with spiritual purpose is a theme that continues to permeate her works, including The Prosperous Heart. I’m curious about the timing of the book’s reissue. In the new introduction, Cameron writes:

In order to be creative, we must have a sense of abundance. The flow of ideas is grounded in having what I call a prosperous heart. When we reach for a creative idea, we tap into a current of “more.” We reach for more creativity, and that “more” flows to us from a benevolent source. It is an energy flow that likes to extend itself—a higher power, which some of us call God.

“I think we live in what feels increasingly like perilous times,” Cameron explains. “There is a place for faith. Many people have felt very threatened by the hijinks of the current administration, and I think that they needed to be reminded that Donald Trump was not God, that there is a higher source. So it seemed like an opportune time to republish The Prosperous Heart, with its emphasis on simplicity and finding fulfillment as a spiritual bottom line, not a physical bottom line.”

In the mid-1970s, Playboy magazine commissioned Cameron, then an East Coast journalist, to interview a young director named Martin Scorsese. They met, married, had a daughter, and divorced a year later—a tumultuous period in Cameron’s life, when her drinking and drug use spiraled. Living on Hollywood Boulevard, near Laurel Canyon, with her daughter, she settled into life as a screenwriter.

“I got sober in California,” Cameron tells me. “I went to California as an ambitious young person, and I found myself believing that scotch was a necessary ink. And then I found people in California who were saying to me, ‘Let a higher force write through you,’ and I said, ‘What if it doesn’t want to?’ They said, ‘Well, just try it.’ ”

“Just try it,” Cameron repeats. “I think of it as a very California
expression.”

Before her sobriety, she says, “it was important to me to be considered brilliant. And then, when I got sober, it was important to me to be considered useful. I found when I was putting the focus on being useful, the Artist’s Way was the outcome.”

Back when her book was just a manual for friends, Cameron made photocopies of it and sold them at Transitions, a now-closed bookstore in Chicago. “It got snatched up, so I was aware that it had a contagious quality,” she says. “I don’t think I thought in terms of broad-reaching, bestselling, life-enhancing strokes.” Neither did the publisher Tarcher, which picked up the title, telling Cameron that it was “a small California book” and giving it a print run of 7,000 copies.

Decades after its humble beginnings, The Artist’s Way has a particular resonance now, Cameron believes, as society has been rethinking its relationship to work, identity, and creative practice in the wake of COVID—to say nothing of Gen Z’s embrace of analog journaling.

“I’m not sure that I can speak to young people, but I can say to older people that what happened when we had the threat of COVID was that many of us were asked to stop defining ourselves by our works,” she says. “A great spiritual awakening has happened among people who went through the necessary isolation and found themselves saying, ‘Well, there must be something more, and, for me, something more has included morning pages.’ ”

Cameron has been called a “High Priestess of Creativity,” which satisfies those who see the Artist’s Way as a spiritual practice, and “the Godmother of Creativity,” which speaks to her influence on self-help bookshelves. I ask her if she thinks of herself first, however, as a writer. (She does.) She says, “I have poems, songs, music, plays, movies. And if you look at my website, you’re struck by my productivity.” I clarify to her: I’m not struck; I’m awestruck. I wonder how central a role sobriety has played in fueling her creativity and output. “I just think the proof was in the pudding,” she says. I ask her for words of advice for those among us who may struggle with discipline (thinking of you here, dear reader, but it is also a self-serving question: I have regularly stalled out on the practice of morning pages).

She mentions The Daily Artist’s Way, a collection of brief prompts that she hopes “gives people a sense of structure and encouragement.” (Consider: “What is a lesson I’ve learned from what I perceived as failure?”) But ultimately, she encourages morning pages. By trying to write every day, she says, people “find themselves becoming, gently, what you might say, hooked. They open an inner door which we find ourselves eager to open further. To be blunt, they open a spiritual pathway.”

Cameron followed her own spiritual path to New Mexico. After leaving California, she lived for a spell in Taos, “a tiny little artist community” that at the time was “beset by a prowler, and they couldn’t catch the prowler, and so I moved to New York to a doorman building where I felt safe.” She lived there for 10 years, until one of her own exercises sketched a map out. The assignment: Write about things you love. There she was, waxing on about mountains and mesas and green chile. “Nowhere is there a picture of the Empire State Building,” she realized. “I thought, well, intellectually, I may feel I belong in New York, but emotionally, my heart was in the Southwest. I’ve got to make a home for myself somewhere, and I need to make a home for myself where my heart is happy.”

Her next book is a collection of poems, “which is a risk for me,” she says, “and I was excited by taking that risk.” The singer-songwriter Judy Collins, a friend of hers, published a book of poetry, which led to Cameron thinking, “If she’s brave enough, maybe I can be brave enough.” Collins, she says, uses the Artist’s Way tools.

Cameron started her writer’s life as a journalist. I ask what she wishes people like me would ask people like her.

“Are you having a good time?” she responds. I take the bait: Is she?

“Yes, it’s wonderful,” she says. “Yes, I am.” It’s a simple answer, the answer of someone who shows up, does the work, and reaps the rewards.•