Our Creative Powers

Even in our busy lives, we can find deeper, more meaningful creativity that is connected to and nourished by all that we do.

When we finally had some days of sun that didn’t require a winter coat to stay warm, I brought my tiny tomato seedlings outside under the bright blue sky and the scant shade of leafless mid April. The grass is growing greener and I wander through my yard greeting my plant friends who are reemerging. It is always a delightful surprise when the perennials start to push up their new green shoots and it reminds me to trust that growth will come.

I set up trays and soil, filled a watering can and unfolded a little phone tripod. I enjoy taking photos of moments in my day, a reminder to pause and appreciate, even if I can do that without the photo. And I’ve been playing with making some reels to share on instagram, filming myself doing what I was going to do anyway and adding some words, often from this newsletter. Unintentionally, they capture the mix of my days taking care of family, home, and garden, writing, and making. The creative work I do, and all the other daily tasks are mixed together, sometimes forming the right balance of thinking, processing, expressing, moving. Other times they push against each other jostling for space and priority, I ponder how to fit everything in and usually let something go.

Some days, both my kids are working on projects at complete opposite ends of our house and they want my help. A couple of weeks ago, I zipped and trudged back and forth between the sewing table upstairs and the computer desk in the basement. I consulted on pocket placement, pinned fabric, and sewed seams upstairs and spelled words downstairs, all the while wondering when I could sit down for the writing I had hoped to fit in.

I recently watched Amanda Diekman share her perspective on working while at home with her three kids who need her a lot. She talked about trying to work, create, or take care of tasks with frequent interruptions and challenges. For many parents, this feels impossible and so dysregulating but she explained that for her, “The interruptions are a sign that I’ve created enough space in my life for the things I love.” Enough space to share a story, write an email, run a masterclass, and enough space to meet her kids’ needs and her own. Not everyone can work with frequent interruptions, but it is helpful to remember that life is full and messy and sometimes feels chaotic because I am spending time and energy on things that really matter to me.

As I write about this, I worry that I am veering into something too trite. It is such a cliché to say that we are lucky that we have kids to interrupt us. Suggesting that we should be grateful for interruptions can be belittling to women who work hard and guard their creative time and who typically spend twice as much time on care work at home than men. Neither Amanda nor I are suggesting that mothers should just take whatever scraps they can get. But I’m not sure, either, if the competitive, individualistic, masculine approach to creativity is what we should aspire to.

In The Creative Doer, Anna Lovind disagrees with the idea of “that the path of the Male Genius is about becoming great or nothing.” This idea is reinforced by our culture’s obsession with money, fame, followers, and big success that doesn’t recognize value of every day creativity. Lovind points out that “for most of us, the everyday is where we begin to experience and exercise our creative powers.” Balancing care work and creative work, or not balancing it but making it all fit together somehow, rarely looks like the male genius working alone, uninterrupted, on his Magnum Opus. But I wonder if the determination to become great or nothing misses the lessons, thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the rest of life.

I recently read Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden by Camille Dungy, a memoir about creating a garden around her home in Colorado interwoven with her experience of the pandemic in 2020, being a Black woman writer poet, and caring deeply about the environment and her community. Early in the book she laments that scarcity of mothers who are writing about nature and the environment. She points out that John Muir, Edward Abbey, Mary Oliver, and Annie Dillard are seemingly all alone in wild places with unlimited time to observe, contemplate, and write.

These seminal writers have contributed to the idea that writing about nature means you never have to leave the woods or fields to do the dishes or take your child to school. But Dungy pushes back against this solitary creative path and explores her own experiences of nature in the garden around her house and how her work as a writer and mother intertwine and interrupt each other. She shows how nature is not pristine and separate from humanity and human needs but is connected to her lived experience, history, and current events.

Women deserve the time and space to create, build, and innovate in solitude, in offices, in writers cottages, art studios, gardens, and forests. But if that is not a possibility, that doesn’t mean we should give up or diminish the creative work we do between loads of laundry, packing lunches, reading aloud, or googling how to find diamonds in Minecraft. Care work is interconnected, messy, loud, and exhausting and might bring about entirely different and wonderful ways of creating, that the male genius, all alone, could easily miss. The work we are doing to care for our homes, our families, and others can hold possibilities for deeper, more meaningful creativity that is not separate from life but that is connected to and nourished by all that we do.

When I think about the ways that many of us are fitting in creativity and work we love among all the other pieces of life, its like the way sand or seawater fills the space between a handful of pebbles or rocks. Creativity can flow around the bumpy, sharp, and smooth stones of our day and seep into all the cracks. It can be there when you find a bit of space, it can smooth down the rough edges, or hold everything together. Letting the seawater and sand wash around all the pebbles can change the color and shape of the rocks. The pebbles create space for the sand and water to settle.

Tragically, the world at large places little value in our creative work or our care work. But what you make doesn’t have to become a best seller, or a career, or pay your grocery bill. If it does, that might feel amazing, but even if it feels tiny, this work still matters. Planting seeds, making videos, helping kids with projects, grocery shopping, taking care of home and family, and all the other things that keep us connected, caring, and creating. When I make space for things I love, I remember how worthwhile my creative work is to me.

If you’d like to share the work, creativity, small things that you are working on or squeezing in here and there, I’d love to hear. Reply to this email or leave a comment.

Warmly,

Anna

This is an example of the tiny zine with seasonal thoughts and drawings. Become a paid subscriber and I’ll send them to you as a thanks for supporting my work.

P.S. Before you go, I wanted to let you know that I’m sending out my spring tiny zine to paid subscribers next week. If you’d like to receive a tiny zine, once a season, with thoughts and drawings, you can become paid subscriber. I don’t currently paywall any of my content on substack, but I really appreciate your supporting my work. You can do this by becoming a paid subscriber (and you’ll get my zine as a thank you) or by liking, commenting, and sharing this post. I really appreciate you reading and supporting my work.