This article by Louis Cheslaw has been published in Vulture. It begins:
“For Matthew Quick, the author of Silver Linings Playbook, 2020 was the third year of a crippling writer’s block. Long runs near his home, in the woods of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, weren’t helping. Nor was spending eight hours glued to his office chair every day. Writer friends were generous with their support at first but eventually became nervous about catching the bug themselves. An ongoing battle with depression and anxiety only made matters worse. In desperation, Quick even hired a creativity coach. It didn’t go well.
Then, one day, his wife suggested he listen to an episode of This Jungian Life, a podcast where three Jungian psychoanalysts — Joseph Lee, Lisa Marchiano, and Deborah Stewart — playfully apply the insights of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung to modern topics: burnout, scam artists, hookup culture, the Grinch. Quick listened on his next run — and couldn’t stop listening for the next two months. “Almost immediately, the show gave me a vocabulary for things that I intuitively understood about myself but had never been able to verbalize,” he remembers. ‘I suddenly had a framework that felt really helpful — and profound.’ When he ran out of back episodes to listen to (one on A Christmas Carol’s Ebenezer Scrooge was an early favorite), Quick found himself a Jungian analyst of his own. Soon, the writing came back. And last November, We Are the Light — his first novel since the block (featuring, it just so happens, a Jungian analyst) — was published …”
You can read more from here.
