PODCAST:

The talk will take place at Milkweed Clay Studio Friday the 22nd from 8:30 to 10:00 AM 

TRANSCRIPT:

Ben Larsen:
Your listing to WTJU Charlottesville. CreativeMornings Charlottesville is hosting a talk with artist Emma Terry Friday the 22nd from 8:30 to 10:00 AM at Milkweed Clay Studio. For Arts This Week we spoke with Jeremy Stern, the host of CreativeMornings Charlottesville.

Jeremy Stern:
So Creative Mornings is an international organization, and the general idea is that all these different chapters across the world, one Friday a month, find a speaker from the community, someone with a creative practice, and you come and you get free breakfast, you get free coffee, you hear what someone in your community is doing, and then it’s done by 10:00 AM and you go off to your day, hopefully inspired to make that last push through the work week to get to the weekend.

So I have been going to Creative Morning Charlottesville since it started as just an attendee, and then around, 2020, I joined as a volunteer. And then in 2024, the previous host actually wanted more time to work on her own creative practices and writing and photography, and so I stepped in to be the full-time host then.

Ben Larsen:
You mentioned this was an international organization, just how international is it?

Jeremy Stern:
So Creative Morning started in New York in 2008 and grew from there. Now there’s over 238 cities worldwide with chapters, over 65 countries, over 1,500 volunteers. I think Charlottesville was the 180th chapter back in 2018, and at the time, we were the smallest town to get approved to have a Creative Mornings chapter.

Ben Larsen:
What can people expect from these talks?

Jeremy Stern:
So we try to have a pretty broad array of speakers. One thing that is part of the Creative Mornings manifesto is that everyone is creative, so it’s not just visual artists. My first event was with Chris Martin, who ran what used to be called Baker No Bakery and is now called Florosa Bakery, and she talked about the journey that led her to Charlottesville, how she went from working in restaurants to doing her own bakery and went from doing traditional French pastries to more, Hispanic, Latin, international pastries, but still with local ingredients.

So, we had Chris as a baker. Erin O’Hare, who is a local journalist, talked on the theme of vibrant and talked about how she juggles as a local journalist covering some of the issues in our community, trying to raise awareness of those, while also still wanting to share everything that she thinks is great and amazing and vibrant about Charlottesville. We’ve had fiber artists and weavers. We’ve had photographers. We’ve had puppeteers. We’ve had, owners of a local comic book shop. So really going for breadth.

So this Friday is going to be Emma Terry. I’m really excited. I’ve been trying to get her to speak for a while. Emma was one of the original organizers for CreativeMornings Charlottesville. She helped make the case to CreativeMornings HQ that Charlottesville has the sort of creative community to justify a chapter here. Emma has had a lot of different creative practices over her life. Her mother was an artist. But in 2023, she started working in ceramics and clay, and that, I think unlocked something for her. She had not really engaged in that medium before, and she took to it like a fish to water and just started churning out the most amazing, beautiful, varied, interesting pieces. And so, she is going to be talking about her creative practice. The name of her talk is Serious Play, and- She said it’s about how she approaches her work with a spirit of curiosity and joy, and sees play not as frivolity, but as a pathway to discovery. So it’s not, you know, just play. Play is serious, and it’s how she leads to this work.

Ben Larsen:
Where can people find out more if they’re interested in attending?

Jeremy Stern:
Our events normally doors open at 8:30. So between 8:30 and 9:00, you can come in, you can mingle, get coffee. This week Emma’s going to lead some creative exercise during the mingling part with the breakfast, and then 9:00 to 10:00 will be Emma’s talk. There’ll be an opportunity for Q&A and, maybe some updates from local community partners, and then folks are free to go do the rest of their Fridays.

So all of our events are free, but we ask people to RSVP ahead of time so we know number of chairs, amount of coffee to buy. So the place to sign up is creativemornings.com/cvl for Charlottesville. You can also find us on Instagram at cm_cvl, Creative Morning Charlottesville. So, you can sign up for our newsletter on the website, or you can follow us on Instagram, and that’s where we’ll announce each month’s speakers, when you can RSVP, and how to sign up. So if you come and you’re excited and you wanna help out with events, reach out, let us know. And if you can think of someone who should be a speaker, definitely reach out, suggest them, even if it’s yourself and you wanna self-promote. We’re open to it. And if this all sounds great and you just feel FOMO that you’ve missed out on years of these amazing talks, most of them are recorded on our website. So at creativemornings.com/cvl, you can log in and see, a lot of our old events.

Ben Larsen:
The talk will take place at Milkweed Clay StudioFriday the 22 from 8:30 to 10:00 AM. Arts this week is supported by the UVA arts Council and Piedmont, Virginia, community college. PVCC arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater and visual arts programming. For WTJU I’m Ben Larsen.