Creative Longings

By Shelley Burbank

I was chatting with an artist friend of mine, Sharon, about creativity.* Sharon once wrote a novel. She always wanted to be a writer, or thought she did. She’s very talented. She can write a beautiful sentence, build a story, and conjure characters from thin air.  

Writing, however, made her unhappy. By her own account, writing took her to dark places, made her miserable. Dealing with the publishing landscape multiplied that misery by a hundred-fold. After much soul searching, Sharon realized she and writing needed to break up. Instead, she turned back to her first love, art. It is as if the sun burst forth from the clouds.

Since taking up sketching, painting, and other visual art again (plus interior design, to boot), she’s light, happy, fulfilled, and practically blazing with joy. It’s been wondrous to behold. 

Here’s a not-so-secret secret: I wish I could draw. Draw, paint, all kinds of visual art. I’ve practiced. I can sometimes do a passable facsimile of the thing, but drawing doesn’t come naturally. The urge to create something in visual media comes naturally. The act–the muscle memory and the eye–not so much. (Collage is satisfying, and I’ll do that for myself when the mood strikes. For my own enjoyment.) 

I love illustrated books and stories. I envision these illustrations and want them for my stories and think I want to make them. If I’m being totally honest, though, I think what I really want is the finished product. I’m not that interested in the process, and we all know that process is the good part when the art’s real inside. When the art’s part of you. 

An illustration by me

Today I told Sharon, “I’m jealous of artists. But I remind myself I can enjoy it without having to DO it.”

“That’s where I’ve gotten to with writing!”

“Why do I think I have to DO everything????”

“Girl, if I had that answer for myself, I’d share. We both have the ‘I bet I could do that’ gene.”

“Right,” I said. “I bet creative people just get urges to create. Maybe it’s that simple. So do the one you’re best at. Support the rest.”

That last bit hit me, even as I typed it. Creative people are often drawn to multiple disciplines, hobbies, arts. Piano lessons in grades 1-5 taught me I’d never be a musician, even though I enjoyed playing my favorite songs well into my college years. Sometimes I suspect I’d be good at sculpture. Or pottery. Or weaving. But I’m old and wise enough now to know that’s ridiculous. 

I learned to knit and tried spinning yarn for a while, loving the idea of fiber art. I had fun playing around with the spinning wheel and drop spindle, looking at fiber art magazines, day-dreaming about natural dye processes. I carded, rolled, spun yarn, and knit a scarf from mohair roving…

Reader, it didn’t stick. 

My one true passion has always been books and writing. Writing is where I’ve put my energy and my ten-thousand hours. Writing is my art form. 

I can appreciate all the arts. I can listen to Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria and sing it at the top of my lungs in the car all alone, but I’ll never sing opera in public. I love theater, but find me in the audience on opening night clapping my hands off. I’ll pick out beautiful handspun yarn at the Fryeburg Fair and admire the woman spinning directly from her angora bunny in the corner. I’ll follow visual artists on social media and sigh with admiration over the designs, but my collages and art journals will be for myself and for sharing on social media as amateur-at-best pieces, not for professional purposes. I’ll buy hand-thrown pottery, art prints, handmade quilts, and fabulously concocted desserts. Yes, my heart will ache a little to do all these things, but I can resist.   

I don’t have to do it all. Writing is my medium. I can support the rest.

_________

* Names of people in my essays are changed and sometimes the characters are amalgams. The conversations are real. 

Middle Age & The Madness of Art

At the Bangor Pubic Library in Bangor, Maine 

It’s the first of November, and I’m in Maine watching orange and bronze leaves carpet the scraggly grass of the front lawn. Maine’s seasons come in distinct palettes. Cold, white winters. Mud-brown and tender green springs. Blue skies and lakes and florals of summer. And the warm reds, bronzes, and yellows of fall. 

As I head into the middle-aged, downward slope of my fifties, I’m all too aware of the changing seasons of life, as well. The writing goals of young to mid-adulthood, once seeming so achievable, have either mellowed or have become greatly tempered by reality. Time, which used to stretch so deliciously into the future, shortens. I realize that since I haven’t hit those big goals by now, it’s more than likely I never will. Yikes. 

Fortunately, with age also comes perspective. Wisdom, even. Things change. Life gives you opportunities you never expected but also throws up roadblocks couldn’t anticipate. You learn to take things as they come. 

I’ve decided to approach this time of life as an opportunity not only to take stock of my accomplishments but also come to terms with my youthful goal of being a professional writer. 

I mean, I AM a professional. I’ve been published and paid as a short story writer, a journalist, a memoir ghostwriter, and a novelist. However, I have not achieved my goal of “making a living” by the pen. It’s harder to do so since the advent of the ebook and Amazon/KDP, and if you don’t believe me, check out the recent Write-Minded podcast with Brooke Warner and Grant Faulkner interviewing Michael Castleman whose new book, The Untold Story of Books: A Writer’s History of Book Publishing, gives all the stats (plus wonderful historical perspective on the industry.) https://podcast.shewrites.com/optimism-and-pessimism-in-book-publishing/

My dream of being a financially-successful author probably would have come to fruition by now if it was going to, so now I’m forced to contemplate what, if anything, I can hope to accomplish, writing-wise, in the second half of my life. 

As often happens, a book I happened upon addressed this issue exactly when I needed it. While visiting my parents in the central part of the state, I went to the cellar to look at some old books stored down there and rediscovered a first edition of May Sarton’s Plant Dreaming Deep I’d picked up somewhere and forgot about. What a treasure! I devoured it over the course of two days and came away feeling refreshed.

Sarton wrote the book in 1968 (the year I was born!) when she was 55 years old and was going through a similar mid-life shift in perspective. She’d just upped and bought an old farmhouse in New Hampshire. Reading her musings on middle age and writing was like reading my own thoughts only in a 1950’s poetic syntax. 

She writes, “The crisis of middle age has to do as much as anything with a catastrophic anxiety about time itself. How has one managed to come to the meridian and still be so far from the real achievement one had dreamed possible at twenty?” She goes on to say, “One does not give up if one is a writing animal, and if one has, over the years, created the channel of routine.”

Aha! I think. I, too, am a writing animal! Perhaps with a little dredging of the routine channel (which to be honest is a little clogged these days), I can continue, like Sarton, to be “happy while I’m writing.” The poet, essayist, and novelist then muses about how her writing falls somewhere in between the critically-acclaimed literary and the popular fiction of her day, which she thinks hampers her success, and concludes that she’ll just hold out hope that her entire body of work will one day be seen and esteemed as a whole. 

Sarton also quotes Henry James: “We work in the dark–we do what we can–we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.” [from The Middle Years]

Oh, May Sarton! Oh, Henry James! Thank you for writing, for sharing your gifts with those of us who came to this writing life behind you. I’ll take comfort in your words and dig my channel of routine and stop worrying about financial success. I’ll build my small body of work. I’ll be that writing animal, burrowing along, doing what comes natural to me as breathing. I’ll revel in the madness of art, and that will have to be reward enough.

Read more of Shelley’s thoughts on art, writing, and life in her author newsletter, Pink Dandelions, on Substack. https://shelleyburbank.substack.com/about