Keynote Speaker Discovers Creativity in Conflict

Julie Burstein was the personality chosen to make the keynote speech for the Nicholas R. Clifford Symposium last Thursday Sept. 27 in the Kevin P. Mahaney ’84 Center of the Arts. This year the symposium was dedicated to creativity, a topic that Burstein has studied extensively. In her latest book, Spark: How Creativity Works, she defined and developed key points of creativity with intelligence and humor.

Burstein is an acclaimed radio producer and a Peabody Award-winning, bestselling author. She incorporated many anecdotes to talk about how collaboration and creativity can appear in everyday life.  To warm up the audience, she first explained a Spanish term called duende, which has its origins in flamenco dancing.  Duende is inspiration, magic — the moment that makes you feel happy either in your work, your family life or just being by yourself.

The Campus spoke with Burnstein about her most recent book and how she finds duende in her career and life.


What is your idea of creativity? Well, creativity is the creation of something that didn’t exist before, and that could be dinner or could be something hanging on a museum’s wall. But it is not a word that belongs to art’s world, but something we experience everyday.

How do you connect creativity and collaboration? I think what happens when you create alone is similar to what happens when you create with other people: either you fight with yourself or fight with them. But some couples that I used as examples in my speech expressed very well the idea that disturbance is part of the creative process.

So there’s no creativity without conflict? I think that the conflicts can be just two different points of view or can be within yourself, like those voices that go on in your own head telling you what’s […] good and what is not.

Paralleling the problematic job market in today’s world, is creativity also struggling? No, I think there’s more space for creativity. What I see going on right now is that things people felt they were certain about are falling apart, because now nothing is certain. I think this is a wonderful time to be creative, and I actually think it is going to be essential because the paths are not there anymore and you have to figure out your own.

When was the first time you found your duende? I think it was through pottery. I still remember how I loved to have a bowl of clay in my hand to punch, going round and round. This was when I was in college; I did pottery to relieve my stress, and I found it so meditative. It’s like what one of the professors said in the conference: when you’re doing well after struggling with something, and suddenly two hours pass by and you didn’t realize it ... Pottery is that for me.

And did you stop doing pottery? Well, I did. But when I started writing the book, I needed it back in my life, and the first thing I did was make a set of mugs for my Studio 316 team because I was leaving them. Now that I come back and I see people drinking from the mugs I made them, that could be a little shot of duende.

What do you think is the role of radio now in the Internet era? I think it is more important than ever because it is something that anybody can access. You don’t need a cellphone, don’t need to text ... It’s also an opportunity to not feel like you have to respond. I see it in my kids, they are teenagers and they turn on the radio when they need to just let go and stop making any decisions. That’s more clear if we refer to music radio. Anyway I’m biased, because I just love radio. I think is the most intimate media and it also allows us to use our imaginations in ways that TV and film, while I think they’re also wonderful, don’t allow that much.

What do you think about Middlebury? It’s such a wonderful place. It was just so beautiful to come.