Introducing Radical Acts of Creation
Welcome to the launch of Radical Acts of Creation, inspiring stories of diverse creators making something new to overcome loss. Stories will typically appear twice a month around the 5th and 20th, with occasional bonus posts. As a subscriber you’ll automatically receive each new story. Please let your contacts know about this newsletter and by all means jump into the conversation—creativity depends upon an engaged community.
Let’s Dance: An Introduction
It is one thing to dance as though nothing has happened; it is another to acknowledge that something singularly awful has happened—the collapse of happenings—and then decide to dance.
—Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation
How do human beings move forward when their worlds collapse? That question has returned time and again over the past decade as COVID-19, senseless war, climate change, political cruelty, income inequality, gun violence, and more agents of ill disfigured the world. Despair can call our names, compelling us to give up, drop out, surrender.
Yet time and again people have refused to answer that siren song. Somehow individuals and whole cultures defy the destruction and build something new and durable in the midst of rubble.
These are acts of radical creation, moments of making in the face of destruction. “Radical” means overcoming harm at its root and generating a profound, innovative alternative.
For a long time I’ve been drawn to what I call “pragmatic comedies,” stories of survival fueled by a tough-minded response to concrete difficulties. That concept emerged from my reading of Montana literature during the rise of right-wing extremists in the 90s. Our time calls for an even more urgent kind of making, a form of building that must often begin from ground zero. How do you imagine and create in the shadow of utter devastation?
The Apsaalooke leader Plenty Coups offered a moving example. When his tribal nation’s world was all but destroyed by invading Americans during the nineteenth century, he provided his people a vision that accounted for the losses and cleared the ground for a new beginning: “Young Plenty Coups’s dream was an act of radical anticipation in this sense: it did not merely try to predict future events; it gave the tribe imaginative tools with which to endure a conceptual onslaught” (Lear, Radical Hope). That creative act allowed his nation to move forward into the future despite a world-shattering event.
Looking back on such acts of radical creation can give hope and practical courage. It can insulate us from despair and lift up our hearts. It can also remind us of the real challenges to completing such hopeful acts.
This newsletter will be dedicated to sharing instances of diverse creators making something new to overcome loss. Many of these essays, memoirs, poems, and fictional works will emerge from my personal obsessions, but I’ve invited friends and family to contribute their own writings so that we can experience the breadth and variety of radical creation. While my essays will focus on artists and writers, some contributors will treat creation in science and other domains. And since this is an interactive social media site, you can share your examples, your questions, your possibilities. My hope is that this newsletter will become a deeply collaborative act of creation.
Creativity has inspired an astonishing variety of books and articles about how and why human beings make something new. Many of those readings are themselves inspiring, and I’ve listed many after this entry (with thanks to the many friends who recommended them). Yet these guides often rely on different assumptions about human beings and the universe and so can risk becoming a congeries of conflicting voices. I will at times summon these artists and thinkers, but you should know my assumptions about creativity before we join this quest together. Let me emphasize that other contributors to this newsletter will not necessarily share these premises:
· While many writers assume a theistic world in which creation emerges from divine sources, I write as an existentialist who believes there are no supernatural agents who can save us from ourselves. There is no deus ex machina. We humans bear the responsibility for making a meaningful, just world. Creativity is the human tool for building a sustainable home. It’s all up to us.
· Wallace Stevens wrote, “Death is the mother of beauty.” That line still startles me and it guides my understanding of why human beings create. We are finite beings living in a fragile world. The fact of death calls out our creativity as an act of defiance and affirmation. On many occasions artists, writers, engineers, tribal leaders, and others create with the fierce urgency of those facing the end.
· While individual talent is necessary for creation, it is not sufficient. Brian Eno has famously argued for a concept of collective creation: “. . . I came up with this word ‘scenius’ – the intelligence of a whole operation or group of people. I think that’s a more useful way to think about culture. Let’s forget the idea of ‘genius’ for a little while, let’s think about the whole ecology of ideas that give rise to good new thoughts and good new work.” Even as I narrate stirring instances of individual creativity I will highlight the “scene” and context and other human beings that made that moment possible. We are in this together.
· Creators are often truth tellers. Human beings rise up in the face of lies big and small to assert, “This really happened. Attention must be paid.” In our hyper-saturated social media world falsehoods propagate more easily than ever. Makers can serve as witnesses to defy and shame the fabulists. Even when they cannot proffer a meaningful move forward they can at least acknowledge what happened and disable those who would cover up and rationalize atrocities.
· Creating emerges from sources deep in a haunted mind. Making is often a contest with the self, an effort to overcome the cruelty and despair that rive all our lives. Many creators are traumatized, transgressive, and abusive toward themselves and others. They write, paint, compose, and perform with shame about those destructive acts. Since we are all destroyers we know the beast we battle.
· Perhaps it goes without saying, but creating is really hard. To make something new in the face of gutting loss challenges us at every level of our being. Radical creativity often involves radical doubt. “As a creativity consultant, psychotherapist, and college teacher,” Eric Maisel observes, “I’ve learned that virtually everyone finds it hard to nurture and unleash his or her creativity. Inner noise, doubts, fears, old traumas, practical problems, and a long list of other obstacles keep most people from creating and living creatively.” Radical acts of creation are heroic moments of resistance not only to a suppressive world but to a fearful self. Rollo May puts it best: “Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage . . . is the discovering of new forms, new symbols, new patterns on which a new society can be built.” That’s one reason scenius or a community of makers is so important—the collective can lift us up out of our own insecurities.
I’ll share stories of Nagasaki’s rebirth, Picasso’s creation of Guernica, and Joy Harjo’s resistance to abuse. This newsletter will also welcome commentaries and stories from other writers and offer reviews of compelling texts on creativity in all its forms. It will occasionally feature interviews with scholars and creators. Please share your responses to these acts of creation—and by all means feel free to offer your own and to suggest other stories we can explore together.
Let’s dance.
A brief portrait of this writer: After teaching American literature for thirty years at six colleges and universities in the United States and abroad, I led a public humanities nonprofit in Montana. I’ve published five books and written a few more. I’m passionate about family, Montana’s natural beauty, reading, education, the arts and humanities, public dialogue on pressing issues, and supporting teachers, librarians, and museum professionals who face threats of censorship. In our heavily mediated age I lean into writing that requires careful deliberation. While this newsletter will on occasion feature photographs and web content, the emphasis will fall on carefully made texts that ask the reader to slow down and take time. We can all use more still points in the turning world.
Selected Reading on Creativity
(feel free to recommend your own favorites)
Jerome S. Bruner. On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Cambridge: Belknap, 1962.
“To be dominated by an object of one’s own creation . . . is to be free of the defenses that keep us hidden from ourselves.”
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.
“. . . a genuinely creative accomplishment is almost never the result of a sudden insight, a lightbulb flashing on in the dark, but comes after years of hard work.”
Mason Currey. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013.
“My underlying concerns in the book are issues that I struggle with in my own life: How do you do meaningful creative work while also earning a living? Is it better to devote yourself wholly to a project or to set aside a small portion of each day? And when there doesn’t seem to be enough time for all you hope to accomplish, must you give things up. . . .”
Elizabeth Gilbert. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. New York: Riverhead, 2015.
Creative living is “a life driven more strongly by curiosity than fear.”
Malcolm Gladwell. Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown, 2008.
“We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. . . . These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.”
Austin Kleon. Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative. New York: Workman, 2012.
“What a good artist understands is that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original.”
Jonathan Lear. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006.
“What makes this hope radical is that it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is. Radical hope anticipates a good for which those who have the hope as yet lack the appropriate concepts with which to understand it.”
Eric Maisel. The Creativity Book: A Year's Worth of Inspiration and Guidance. New York: TarcherPerigee, 2000.
“. . . any job can be done more creatively and any life can be lived more creatively. What’s required are certain changes: that you begin to think of yourself as creative, that you use your imagination and your mind more, that you become freer but also more disciplined, that you approach the world with greater passion and curiosity.”
Rollo May. The Courage to Create. New York: Norton, 1994.
“. . . the creative artist and poet and saint must fight the actual (as contrasted to the ideal) gods of our society—the god of conformism as a well as the gods of apathy, material success, and exploitive power.”
Tiya Miles. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake. New York: Random House, 2021.
“In our moment of bleak extremity, Black women of the past can be our teachers. Who better to show us how to act when hope for the future is under threat than a mother like Rose—or an entire caste of enslaved, brave women who were nothing and had nothing by the dominant standards of their time yet managed to save whom and what they loved.”
Jeff Tweedy. How to Write One Song. New York: Dutton, 2020.
“At the core of any creative act is an impulse to make manifest our powerful desire to connect—with others, with ourselves, with the sacred, with God? We all want to feel less alone, and I believe that a song being sung is one of the clearest views we ever have to witness how humans reach out for warmth with our art.”