Episode 08: A Map Maker for Wild, Creative Hearts

Andrea Hannah

Andrea Hannah is an award-winning author, essayist, and workshop leader. She teaches on living a healthy creative life at her Wild Heart Retreats and writes about making art on Twitter and Instagram (@andeehannah). You can also find her at www.andreahannah.com

Andrea is also a young adult author and creative writing teacher who has spent the past twelve years helping kids, teens, and adults transform their ideas into art.

As Andrea worked through the education system, she noticed that even her most creative and willing students sometimes sabotaged their own work with their emotions and behavior. She went back to school and finished her Master’s degree in Autism Spectrum Disorders with an emphasis on Applied Behavior Therapy. Using boatloads of research again (because that’s how she rolls) on cognition and changing human behavior, she began to teach a wide variety of people not only the structure of writing, but how to deal with the emotional arc of making art. She has since branched out to teaching creativity workshops and retreats. To date, Andrea has taught about creativity to adults and teens all over the world.

She believes so strongly in teaching about creativity in a structured—but fun and relatable—way because she’s witnessed it work, not only with students of all ability levels and backgrounds, but with her own brother, Zack. When her mom died and she took custody of him, he was a depressed thirteen-year-old with a talent for playing music by ear. As he grew older, she slowly helped him through the process of learning to create again. She’s happy to report that Zack is now a sound engineer who records musicians of all genres in New York City. And he still plays his own music by ear.

The most effective mentors are the ones who use their own methods. Andrea is no exception. She used her own methodology to swing back into her creativity and write her critically-acclaimed YA novel, Of Scars and Stardust (Flux, 2014). She still uses these tools and techniques daily, whether she’s working on her novels, nonfiction, or freelance work. And she used them, of course, to write her new creativity guidebook, A Map for Wild Hearts.