Kurt Vonnegut told high school students to write a six-line rhyming poem then tear it up, saying "there's no fair tennis without a net." Constraints expand the soul. Camp Spartel, a six-day creative retreat in Tangier for twelve people, applies this idea by letting you get lost in the city and find freedom within limits.
There's a reason that you think you do your best creative work when you're under deadline, and it's not just because you're undiagnosed ADHD. In 2006, a group of high school students asked the author Kurt Vonnegut if he'd come speak at their school. He declined, but he gave them this advice in his now famous letter. First, he told them to go make art of any kind. Go make a face in your mashed potatoes, pretend that you're Count Dracula for the day, dance on your way home from school. And then he said to go home that day and to write a 6-line rhyming poem. Rhyming because, in his words, "There's no fair tennis without a net." Lastly, he told them to take that poem, to rip it up up into tiny little pieces and to scatter it this way and that, not to even share it with anyone, because the point wasn't even to make the art. The art is a mechanism to make the soul expand. The doing becomes the becoming. This idea of no fair tennis without a net is the basis for what we're building at Camp Spartel this September in Tangier, Morocco. We're 12 creatives coming together for 6 days to explore the city, explore what it means to get lost on purpose. This trip is about finding freedom within constraints. No fair tennis without a net. If this sounds like something you might be into, comment tennis, I'll give you the lowdown.
