Generative Scribing

Today's great challenges call us to (re)arrange our interior dimensions to more adequately meet current, external realities. Working from the inside out, by unpacking her own professional experience over thirty years, Kelvy Bird serves up "generative scribing" as one practice to aid with this larger cultural and personal transition.

Scribing is a visual practice where an artist maps out ideas while people talk and can see the drawing unfold in front of their eyes. The drawing establishes connections within content, aids with insight, and supports decision-making. It's essentially a language that weaves words and pictures to facilitate group learning and cultural memory.

Generative scribing advances this practice by extending the range of the practitioner to an entire ecosystem and drawing with an attunement to energy. A generative scribe calls particular attention to an emerging reality that is brought to life by, and for, the social field in which it's created.

This book is intended for current and future scribes, with an aim to expand the possibility and impact of their efforts. It is also intended for a broader audience, for those concerned with our social condition whose "pens" take shape as kitchen utensils, gardening rakes, community leagues, city planning, national policy-making--you name it.

This is a book for anyone who cares about how we exist together as human beings, for anyone who wants to explore their interior functioning, for anyone who seeks to approach the world anew.