By the third store, I was crying. Standing next to my mother, I heard her ask yet another store clerk for “elbow grease.” I watched the clerk’s face go from bemused to bored as my mother explained, pointing to me, that her little girl was told to bring elbow grease to school tomorrow. The clerk paused, considering the remote possibility that such a product existed, but concluding that, in any case, they didn’t carry it in this store. Try across the street. Try the next town over.
My teacher, Sister Mary Colletta, had asked all the first graders to come to the final day of school armed with “an old rag and elbow grease” so we could thoroughly scrub our desks before celebrating the onset of summer vacation with a picnic at the park. I’d explained this to my mother when I got off the bus, and what followed was a desperate search of store after store only to come up empty. The night ended when I finally cried myself to sleep.
I was an anxious little girl, and I was completely convinced I’d be the only student to show up the next day without the required stain remover. My mom, completely beside herself that she’d not been able to help, gave me one last worried look as I dragged myself down the driveway to the bus that morning. My dad stayed out of it, as was his way. My mom had stuffed a scrap from one of his old white T-shirts into my backpack, so at least I’d have the cleaning rag.
You can imagine my elated surprise when not one of my classmates came to school with elbow grease, at least not in any visible (canned or bottled) form. I remember Sister Colletta laughing and patting me on the head as I recounted the frantic store-to-store search. I remember feeling an incredible sense of relief that I wasn’t in trouble, but also feeling stupid, and ashamed.
It was maybe my first realization that parents couldn’t always be trusted to have the answers. It would be many years more before I realized the problem with my mother, with my whole family in fact, went much further than a misunderstanding of common idioms. My family suffered from a disease I’ll simply classify as a lack of imagination. Was it contagious? If it was, then I seemed to have some sort of immunity.
I was considered the lone “creative” one in my family. They looked to me when anything needed to be creatively written, say in a greeting card, or even on the answering machine’s outgoing message. “Help me,” my mom would say, “you’re good at this stuff.” I was the one who claimed the empty boxes, the bigger the better, whenever something was delivered to our house. One box became a library where my family could check out books, a few of which I’d written myself. One was a post office where I could write letters and pretend to mail them to my older siblings and parents. One was a television, featuring my original programs, their titles and start times printed neatly in the TV guide I wrote. I remember performing the shows, usually to an empty room, at the scheduled hour listed on the guide. I remember my brother calling in from the kitchen, “Where’s the ‘Off’ button on that thing?”
The off button on my cardboard TV was just a circle drawn in crayon. There was no off button on me; I was always thinking of the next thing to make. Teachers started to write “very creative” on any written assignments where I was allowed to use my imagination. Those were rare, however. Mostly we looked up answers and regurgitated facts. Even in art class, we were expected to color inside the lines. As I said, I was anxious, eager to please, so I’m sure I tried my best, but I still got a B in art while getting A’s in everything else.
The more my creativity started to show itself, the more my family became confused. “I don’t know where you get it,” my mother would often say. Neither did I. Yet, new research on creativity has found that it’s more inherited than previously thought. We all have a bundle of fibers, called the corpus callosum, that connects the two halves of our brains. Researchers have found that creative types have a smaller corpus callosum, which allows the two sides of the brain to develop their own specializations. This leads to “divergent thinking,” which manifests as something we call “creativity.” Our genes play a significant role in the way all the areas of our brain connect.
But, if DNA is significantly responsible for a person’s creativity, then where on earth did I come from? (I might wonder whether I’m adopted, but the family resemblance is just too strong.) Could the “creativity genes” have skipped a generation? Not likely. My parents couldn’t recall any relatives — most of them Midwestern dairy farmers — doing anything but hard work. When my father says he walked miles to school, uphill, and through the snow, he is not speaking metaphorically.
Yet I had an easier childhood, one in which I wasn’t worried about basic needs, one that allowed me to poke around the house on a rainy Saturday, gathering items for my latest creation. Around the same time as the elbow grease incident, I found some cardboard, scraps of rope, crayons, and a couple Popsicle sticks and, with them, I fashioned a marionette flamingo. It took me all day, and it wasn’t the prettiest thing in the world, but it actually worked. I was very proud of it. However, when I showed it to my mom, she acted suspicious.
“Where did you get this?” she asked.
“I made it.”
“Who taught you?”
“Nobody.”
She shook her head. She simply could not believe it. How could I come up with something like this, with no blueprint, no teacher? After that, I hid the flamingo in my dresser drawer and only played with it when no one was around. I felt like an oddball, and I’m sure my mom thought I was one, an alien child somehow mixed up with her solid, staid family. Creativity, especially in children, often looks like oddness from the outside, or, even worse for the child, like disobedience.
Art class has thankfully changed since I was a kid. My two children bring home all sorts of wild creations, which aren’t even graded like mine were. But my 9-year-old daughter had a substitute art teacher recently, an older woman who clearly had outdated ideas about art instruction. She told the kids they would get a bad grade if they didn’t draw just the way she told them to. She asked them to draw a hamburger, for some strange reason, but my daughter rebelled. She drew a hamburger all right, but a very strange one.
There were two poppy seed buns, but the pickles were pirates. There were no tomatoes, but there were potatoes, lounging on banana chairs. From the center of the burger’s strange fillings, there was a tiny cat rappelling down the side. The teacher was not pleased. “That is not what a hamburger is supposed to look like,” she said angrily. Thankfully, my daughter let the comment roll off her back. “Normal is boring,” my daughter told me when she recounted the incident. I wish I’d had her confidence as a kid.
For many years, I would display hints of creativity only when I thought it was safe, when no one who disapproved might notice, and question, or scold, me. If a teacher asked me to write a poem as an assignment, that was safe. But when I wrote and illustrated stories about my classmates during free time, I hid them in my desk.
At home, I buried myself in books, but was limited to the ones I checked out of my school’s tiny library. I’d never been taken to the public library. We didn’t have any books at home except for an extravagant set of leather-bound encyclopedias. On many a lazy winter Sunday, I’d pick a letter -- for example, “H” -- and lie on my belly in front of the fireplace learning all I could about Hawaii, helicopters, hummingbirds.
To my parents, reading an encyclopedia was a totally acceptable pastime. Reading was considered a means to an end, and so people could consult a book if they needed a specific bit of information. Reading fiction was okay, for preschoolers, but once a child was proficient at reading alone, reading fiction was considered a waste of time, something for layabouts, not the hard-working folks we were.
And so, when I wanted to read the tattered copy, found in an older sibling’s things, of Dr. Seuss’ “The Sleep Book,” I did so under the covers with a flashlight. The book was missing half its pages and had escaped my dad’s notice. (He hadn’t wanted any Dr. Seuss in the house because he didn’t like the fact that so many of the words were entirely a product of Theodor Geisel’s imagination.) I thrilled to read news of The Collapsible Frink or the Curious Crandalls, “Who sleepwalk on hills with assorted-sized candles.”
In time, I mostly abandoned the type of creative engineering that formed the flamingo, and stuck with my love of storytelling. Sometimes, we’d be allowed to write fiction in high school English class, and I savored those moments. I remember being asked to read my work out loud on several occasions and how my voice shook, but also how proud I felt when classmates enjoyed my stories. I was asked to write a script for a junior high Christmas skit about holiday traditions around the world. I remember something about a yule log. I remember that my parents came to the play, but I don’t remember if they knew I had written it, or if I’d kept that fact hidden. When I wrote at home, I did so in the privacy of my own room.
Although I may have read about creative geniuses in school, attempting to be one was a very different thing. Studies have shown that no matter how much a teacher might say she values student creativity, she will still choose, as her favorite students, the ones who most closely follow the rules. We humans are risk-averse, in general. We reward conformity, distrust ideas that fall outside the box. Typically, it’s only after the fact, after some of those ideas slip through and are deemed successful, that we can claim we recognized their validity all along.
One of my favorite Gary Larson “Far Side” cartoons is the one titled, “How nature says, ‘Do not touch.’” It features a rattlesnake in full rattle-shaking mode, a ballooned-out puffer fish, a hissing, arched-back cat, and a man in a trench coat with a shoe on his head and wearing a blow-up swim ring with a smiling horse’s head. Granted, he’s also holding a gun, but take out the gun, and I think the point is still there. Stay away from the weirdo. I’ve often found myself in a roomful of people, thinking I’m the one with the shoe on my head. I’d venture to guess there are other creative types who’ve felt the same way.
Cultivating creativity over a lifetime means becoming comfortable with that feeling. It means learning resilience in the face of professional or personal rejection. It means knowing there are going to be people who just don’t get you. I learned this lesson late. I went back and forth with my family all the way through my college years, wanting them to be proud of my work, but also fearing their rejection.
I once brought home some short stories I’d written in my Introduction to Fiction Writing class. I wanted my mom to love them, still needed that validation. Unfortunately, every mother in my stories, in my mom’s mind, was her, and so she puzzled over inconsistencies, over matriarchs who didn’t seem like her at all. Once, she even asked me about a house where the characters in a story lived, a blue ranch house with black shutters.
“I know the neighbors have a white ranch, but whose house is this blue one? Whose house are you talking about?” she asked, frustration in her voice.
If she couldn’t understand how I could summon a simple blue house from my imagination, how could I ever explain my invention of an entire world, an entire family, and friends, in an imaginary town, with their imaginary problems? When I began writing my first novel, how could I hope to answer the question “What’s it about?” without being asked to take the witness stand and defend every element, explaining at length where all the ideas came from. Who knows where they came from? That’s part of the mysterious, messy joy of writing.
Eventually, I made the decision to quit talking about my work with family members. I wasn’t very open with my friends either. I wrote that first novel in a figurative, and also quite literal, closet. It’s a 6- by 3-foot closet in my bedroom, with a small window overlooking the front yard. I took all my husband’s shirts off the metal rod and set up a TV tray for my laptop, wheeled in a small chair. Here, I could close the door for the brief moments I’d snatch when my husband was caring for our young kids. I could be alone to write about all the things you weren’t supposed to discuss in polite company. That first novel was about religion, and abortion, and gay rights. The irony that I was writing a book that had much to do with homosexuality from inside an actual closet did not escape me.
Outside my closest circle of friends, no one knew what I was doing. They assumed I was a stay-at-home mom dabbling occasionally in writing or, another of my creative pursuits, rescuing furniture from people’s trash and painting it. I was a DIY-er, in all things; I was a writing community of one.
Though I often enjoyed the difficult process of writing my first book, though I knew it was one of the most challenging, and rewarding, things I’ve ever done, I could still at times hear my parents’ voices telling me to get serious, to quit spending time dreaming and get a real job, or at least be a proper homemaker and bake a pie. Years ago, when I told my mom on the phone that I was quitting my well-paying marketing job to go to grad school for creative writing, she said, “Oh good, this will help you earn a lot more money.” I didn’t have the heart to correct her.
She and my father, born at the tail end of the Depression, grew up with very little. Both lost a parent at a young age. Both were forced into the responsibilities of adulthood too early. I’ve started to think that maybe imagination, to them, is a concept that’s just too risky. Perhaps they only wanted their children to be safe in a world that is familiar. For them, creative work would seem like an indulgence, something for people who have too much time on their hands. And I can hardly blame them.
But for me and all the creative people I know, our work is a necessary element to living. There have been times when I’ve tried to give it up, when I’ve just had it with the difficulty of the process itself or the capriciousness of the industry. I try to stop, but like an addiction, it creeps back in, and soon I find myself scribbling phrases of dialogue on scraps of paper, and the next thing I know I’m a half dozen pages into a new short story. And there I am, tumbling off the wagon, but happy again.
I’m finally at a place where I’ve accepted that I’m happiest when I’m writing and that no matter what else is going on in my life, I must make the time for it if I hope to stay sane. I can’t hide in my closet. I need a writing community, even if, through the circumstances of geography, that community is mostly online.
Scientists have indeed found much evidence that creativity is formed via nature, via our genes, but they remind us that nurture will always play a role in how those genes are expressed. We may not be able to control our DNA, but if we find ourselves with creative urges, we shouldn’t hide them. We should nurture each other, forming a creative community that allows us to feel comfortable pushing boundaries, that allows us to exclaim, when approached by naysayers as my daughter was, that “Normal is boring.”
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