Author and musician Orenda Fink on exploring the unconscious to recover your true self

Is your creative practice mostly writing now?

Yes, writing and revising. I haven’t written a song in over a year. I feel semi-retired from music. I love writing—it soothes my soul and makes me feel like I have a purpose, or the closest thing to understanding my purpose. Jungian depth coaching is taking a very close second to that. Working with people makes me happy, and it helps me understand myself.

How did you feel called to write a memoir?

It’s important for people to know the memoir didn’t just come out of the blue. It takes decades to decide or figure out what you’re doing. I started writing and going to therapy after my dog died. But probably 10 years before that, I was playing bass for a friend’s band in Europe and started having terrible nightmares. I didn’t know if it was from jet lag or what was going on with my mother at the time, but all these memories from my childhood came flooding back. At one point, he just said, “I think you should get a journal and write this down.” And I did. I could tell my traumatic stories were taxing him, so I wrote them all down in a little notebook. I just put it away and never really looked at it again until a decade later.

I was writing about the grief over my dog, and I gave my friend, the wonderful writer Timothy Schaffert, about 40 pages. He read them and said, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but this book is not about your dog. It’s about your mother.” And I was like, Nooooooh, I don’t want to do that, so again, I put it down for many years.

What caused you to pick it back up again?

In 2015, I had heart surgery and started thinking about telling my story in a more earnest way, including family stories.

What is your process when you are starting a new project?

I guess you could say I kind of trick myself. When starting a new project, I tend to gather an immense amount of energy by being completely delusional about the amount of time and energy it will require, and what the results will ultimately be. I do a lot of daydreaming about the finished product before I start—you could also call that manifesting. By the time I realize the magnitude of the project, it’s too late to back out, so I push through. As long as I’m not emotionally attached to the outcome and just enjoy the process, it serves me pretty well.

Do you think of creativity itself as a form of magic?

I do. In the sense that creativity comes from the unconscious, that big energetic soup that we all share. Some people would call it a divine space, universal, god-like in nature. When you’re really tapped in, you can access things beyond your personal scope. Art follows the zeitgeist; it can even be prophetic. It can express the inexpressible. And it can heal. That’s magic to me. It’s uncommon to tap-in to that rarified space, but when I write or make music, I try to create the conditions that could facilitate it. I write alone, with no distractions, and put myself in a meditative state. Sometimes I will put on music in the style I am trying to capture. I listened to a lot of William Basinski when writing my memoir.

What’s your relationship to fear and uncertainty in the creative process?

Fear is the number one killer of creation. It is the number one killer of joy. It used to cripple me, but I’ve developed a new relationship with it after doing years of shadow work. When fear takes hold, I ask myself two questions: “Is this true? And so what?” If I answer those honestly, I can usually break free from it. Also, I have learned to surround myself with people who love and want the best for me. If someone consistently inspires fear or doubt in me, they’re out. As a survivor of narcissistic abuse, this simple boundary has changed my life.

How do you push through the moments when doubt starts to creep in?

In the past, I had a really intense desire and drive—not only for validation, but for someone to understand my story and to hear me. I think childhood trauma survivors spend their whole lives desperately trying to be heard and to make sense of what they’re even trying to tell anybody. That was a drive for many years of my life. I had immense self-doubt and anxiety in almost every step of my career.

What helped me was Jungian shadow work. Whenever I start feeling anxious, down, or triggered, it’s always related to the business or the critical side of making art. I love making art—I don’t get triggered when I’m creating. It’s all those other things—human ego-related—that cause suffering and keep you out of the flow. Jung calls it the animus in women and the anima in men. It’s your contrasexual soul image, and it’s the seat of your emotions, creativity, spirit, will, and drive. When it’s in its purest form, you can find self-confidence and love for yourself from within, and it’s not shaken by anything that happens in the external world. That’s something I now turn to, being familiar with these archetypal energies within us. I really look for them when I feel down or scared, or when it feels like this is futile or what I’m doing is terrible—all those things we, as artists, feel. I check in with myself and ask, where is this voice coming from? What’s causing this? Is any of this true, or is it an illusion of the ego? And generally, it is.

I mean, we all want to take criticism as artists. We want to be able to take our editor’s advice. You don’t want to be narcissistic, with such strong confidence that you lack self-awareness. You don’t want to be defensive. This is something on a deep soul level, so that you can take constructive criticism and say, let me move forward. Let me take this gift that I’ve been given and make my art even better.

How do you define shadow work?

It’s that which is in the unconscious, which we reject in ourselves and other people. Generally, we’re triggered by things in our waking life, and that’s what kind of causes our problems. It causes stagnation, emotional overactivity, and leads us to become involved in negative patterns. In shadow work, we start looking into those details to uncover what’s in the unconscious. Dreams mirror waking life when you know how to navigate and interpret them. So, they’re a great resource.

I have a very strong dream recall—which is why I’m called to do this work. It’s basically my inner therapist. I look to my dreams to tell me what I did right or wrong during the day, and they’ll tell me.

After finishing your memoir, I revisited the music you made during that time, along with the other bands you mentioned. It felt like a complete journey.

I’m working on a playlist now. It will go up on Apple Music. I’m pulling specific songs that are mentioned in the book and writing a little paragraph about them, or about things that weren’t mentioned but specifically reference events in the book. It’s surreal to go back and listen to some of the songs that are directly tied to instances in the book.

Did music come to you naturally?

That’s a really good question, because, I mean, I’m going to say yes and no. Yes, in some ways, I think the writing of the songs came very easily, but singing did not come easily for me, and I really had to focus and work on that. The singing and performing never did. I was not born with perfect pitch, or even really a good voice, so I kind of created a sound with my throat, with my vocal cords, that I thought sounded good, and that ultimately ended up being that kind of whispery tone that Azure Ray had. I was kind of matching Maria’s natural voice, which got me into some trouble with my vocal nodules pretty early on because I wasn’t trained. I was singing in a place that wasn’t natural for my voice. So, I had trouble with my voice for the whole 25 years that I sang, and I had vocal surgery in 2017 that was unsuccessful.

In your memoir, you write about the duality of having success on the road as a musician, but then returning home where that part of you wasn’t acknowledged. Was it your intention to explore identity?

It’s a step toward me trying to either claim or reclaim my identity—or what is, in Jungian terms, not the persona, but my true self. Which I’m not sure I ever actually knew. I think that also speaks to the idea of me thinking about getting out of music 15 years ago, but being so attached to that identity that I stayed in something that maybe wasn’t the most fulfilling path artistically.

What instruments do you play?

I can play some percussion and a little bit of keyboard, but minimally. I play guitar, bass guitar, and trumpet.

Would you consider songwriting a form of writing? In that sense, you’ve been writing for over 30 years?

Songwriting is akin to poetry. It’s not nearly as difficult or as well-crafted as poetry. Or it can be, but I wouldn’t put my lyrics in that category. Sometimes I would try to go that route—study poems and make sure my language was efficient and economical. Not all my songs are like that, though. So, you know, I feel like when you’re a poet, it’s all poetry.

You’re one of the most humble accomplished artists that I’ve ever met.

It’s probably part of my trauma [laughs] It’s always been hard for me to accept. You know, there’s never anything that’s good enough. It can really push you to do great things and move your life forward in ways you might not have thought possible. But, on the other side of that, you can be incredibly hard on yourself. The failures are tied to such high stakes that they can be devastating. I’ve been on this emotional roller coaster my whole life. I don’t know what would have ever been enough. I mean, maybe money? I still don’t have a lot of money. Living that artist’s life is a kind of feast or famine.

In music, you’ve done a lot of collaborative work. How has it influenced your process?

Well, it’s very different to collaborate in music than in writing. I love collaborating with music. I find that comes very easily. I’ve written collaboratively in Azure Ray, O+S, The Casket Girls… I prefer collaboration. I get a lot out of it because I generally collaborate with my very close friends, so I get to have work and play. It’s a reason to spend quality, dedicated, long time with someone you care about. You’re creating something out of it. It’s just a miracle. I’m super grateful for my musical collaborations.

In writing, I’m very curious. I’m collaborating with a friend on a script right now, and I haven’t quite gotten into the flow of how collaborating in writing works yet, but I want to because I know a lot of people who do it. I like that idea, too, when you collaborate, you can kind of get a couple of irons in the fire at once. So, it’s not all on you.

As a fan of your music, would anything bring you out of retirement?

I always say, never say never. I’m just really most excited about starting another book. After the memoir, I’ve written a sci-fi novel, and now I have to go back and revise it. I was recently defeated by some notes that I received and was like, maybe I’ll just start a new book. But recently, I had a breakthrough, and now I’m like, I will give this one more good college try before I switch gears.

What advice would you give to an artist looking to dive deeper into their own subconscious for creative inspiration?

Everyone is so different. Let’s say my husband, Todd (Fink). He’s very much a show-up-at-the-desk-every-day kind of person. I was not that way in music. I had to be inspired. Sometimes I would go six months without writing a song, and then in one week, I’d write a whole record. Todd would be like, fuck you. But I was kind of doing the same work, just in my head. The process is so different from writing. It’s more of a show-up-as-much-as-you-can.

Orenda Fink recommends:

Shadow work

Dreams by C.G. Jung

Dogs

The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene

Anywhere you can see the stars

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Jennifer Lewis.

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