“Your Business Is To Keep The Channel Open.”

Shortly after the premiere, De Mille met legendary choreographer Martha Graham “in a Schrafft’s restaurant over a soda” for a conversation that put her gnawing grievance into perspective and offered what De Mille considered the greatest thing ever said to her. She recounts Graham’s at once remark...

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will...

“Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never ­being satisfied,” Zadie Smith counseled in her Ten Rules Of Writing. But how does one befriend this perennial dissatisfaction while continuing to unlock, to borrow Julia Cameron’s potent phrase, the “spiritual electricity” of...