Unleash your creativity and create an artful, soulful life.

ALCHEMICAL TRANSFORMATION FOR ARTISTS AND DREAMERS OF ALL KINDS. AND DEEP SOUL NOURISHMENT FOR LOVERS OF BEAUTY AND TRUTH.

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Welcome home.

You are an artist. Your life can be a work of art.

I am Maxima Kahn

And this is the Brilliant Playground I created for you.

Are you…

  • Feeling stuck, blocked, or uninspired in your art or life?
  • Coming up against frustrating patterns that keep you from living the life you imagine?
  • Struggling to make time for what you most love?
  • Longing for more—creativity, wonder, passion, and joy?
Through my Creative Sparks newsletter & blog, books, programs, and our Brilliant Playmates community,

Ill show you how to…

  • Unleash your inspired creativity and powerful authentic expression
  • Uncover your unique gifts and your path to deep fulfillment
  • Discover and realize your heart’s true dreams
  • Create an inspired life of passion, purpose, and deep play
  • And live from your radiant aliveness, freedom, and joy
Isn’t that what we are here for?
“Don’t ask what the world needs.
Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

– Howard Thurman
Philosopher, educator, and civil rights leader

Brilliant Playground is a space of inclusion and honoring for people of all colors, races, paths, genders, and sexual preferences. You are welcome here!

Featured Offerings

Brilliant Playground Creative Community

Be a part of a supportive, remarkable creative community. Give yourself structure, support, inspiration, encouragement, and feedback for your creative life. Receive guidance, find collaborators and friends, and realize your creative dreams.

Creative Life Coaching

Individual, heart-centered support to help you get unstuck, whether in art or life. Learn powerful tools to create what you desire and transform what’s been holding you back. Gain clarity, focus, and receive compassionate guidance to navigate transitions and create a rich, meaningful life.

Freedom to Write

Dissolve writer’s block, hone your authentic voice and develop tools of the writer’s craft to make your writing shine. Excellent for writers of all kinds and all levels. You’ll get inspired, generate new writing and grow, while enjoying the camaraderie of other creative souls. Next course in June.

“I am stunned. ….so much is flowing and changing in my life in ways that are huge and powerful and empowering, and it’s happening with a grace and generosity and goodness and harmony that I could never have predicted. I feel like I have everything that I need for a rich and full and satisfying life and I thank you with all my heart.”

– Kathy McKeough

“There have been umpteen shifts, realizations, manifestations and synchronicities. I’ve been able to step away from old patterns of thought and action that were no longer useful….I have embraced my authentic self and its evolution. I am painting. I am actively pursuing joy, opening myself to deeper relationships to my husband and friends.”

– Sara Brownwood

“You are a master facilitator, Max, and one of the most compassionate, intelligent, and creative teachers I’ve ever encountered. I feel so fortunate to not only have had this opportunity, but to have had the dumb luck or intuitive presence of heart to seize it with both hands. I feel like the course brought me back from a long sojourn in the desert – I was dry and parched and now I’m fully hydrated with creative ideas, tips and tools, and even a Dreamcatcher. Thank you!”

– Eleanor Vincent, award-winning author

My Art

“I am swimming and drowning at once, head barely above water, then not above. Life nearly wiping me out. Yet here in these waves I believe I can hear fragments of luminous song.”

– Maxima Kahn
“Where Everything Is Music”

Hi. Im Maxima Kahn, poet and writer, musician and dancer, soul guide, firekeeper, and Empress of Play.

As a passionate lover of Beauty, Wonder, and Imagination, I have gotten messy, noisy, or outlandish in countless acts of creative abandon.

My writing has been featured in numerous literary journals and on popular blogs, twice been nominated for Best of the Net, chosen as a finalist for the Atlanta Review Poetry Prize, and been anthologized in The Meridian Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and California Fire & Water. I’ve been awarded fellowships and scholarships to the Vermont Studio Center and the Community of Writers. Before creating Brilliant Playground, I taught creative writing and poetry at the University of California, Davis extension.

My first full-length collection of poems, Fierce Aria, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020 and was a finalist for an Eric Hoffer Book Award.

I am an award-winning composer, and avant-garde violinist, a teacher and avid practitioner of the dance of Contact Improvisation, and a long-time member of the dance-music-theater troupe Shadow Cabinet.

The challenges and losses in my life led me to discover profound transformational tools, my spiritual calling, and a life-giving relationship with my creativity. Since 2004, I have shared these extraordinary practices and perspectives with hundreds of artists and dreamers with life-changing results.

As an initiated firekeeper, I have studied indigenous wisdom for decades, and I have been an avid devotee of the Divine Feminine for even longer. I am dedicated to co-creating a world in which all of life is cherished and each of us shines in the fullness of who we are.
To your passionate creative life,
“Distinctive, honed, vulnerable, musical, courageous, honest, Maxima Kahn’s poems are fully ripened, fully considered—each one ready to drop richly into the hand like a subtly contoured fruit. Taste them.”

– Annie Finch, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems

You can purchase Fierce Aria here. I also invite you to explore my other selected works, upcoming events, and recent press.

Creative Sparks

9 Excellent Reasons to Make Art

9 Excellent Reasons to Make Art

Making art is a profoundly good thing to do with your time. It makes our world a better place. Yet almost all artists struggle with doubt about whether what they are doing is worthwhile. Many of us have also been told that when we are making art, we're doing something...

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On Generosity: Sacred Key to Abundance and Joy

On Generosity: Sacred Key to Abundance and Joy

At the start of 2020, I chose generosity as my word of the year, not knowing consciously what we were in for globally that year. Or rather, the word chose me. I started this essay back then, exploring how generosity can enlarge me as an artist and human being, and I...

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Make Your Art in Ten Minutes a Day

Make Your Art in Ten Minutes a Day

In January, I decided to take on the challenge of writing every day for ten minutes for a month. My creative schedule for years has been four days a week for two or more hours at a time. I keep this schedule religiously, and it works well for me. So, why did I take on...

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