Category Archives: Creativity

This Is Just to Say Whatever Comes to Mind

Posted on April 28, 2012 | 10 comments

Small-town newspapers, where they still exist, are a precious treat. In Spring Green, Wisconsin, we get The Home News, “the only newspaper in the whole, wide world that cares about the River Valley area” every Wednesday. Of course, The Voice of the River Valley, a free monthly, also implicitly cares (though that’s not on its masthead). This past month The Voice had poems (in honor of National Poetry Month) and has regularly carried poems in the past. One of the things I enjoyed about the Home News’ former editor, in addition to his progressive politics and weekly editorials featuring his dog, was his willingness to publish poetry on the editorial page. He was following a long tradition. According to Mike Chasar (whose blog I like and whose book I want),

“through most of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth…amateur poets hotly debated issues of abolition and women’s suffrage in verse form, writing their poems quickly in response not only to the day’s current events but also to the specific ideas and claims put forth in the previous day’s poems. As recently as the mid-1950s, in fact, the New York Times was in the habit of printing poems alongside letters to the editor on its opinion pages, making little or no distinction between the two.”

The fact that I am able to quote at length from Chasar’s article, entitled “Writing Good Bad Poetry,” which appeared in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers magazine in 2008, is the result of an argument I lost (am losing). “We do NOT need to keep all these,” I’ve insisted repeatedly to my husband over the years about the boxes and boxes of magazines. But my school library doesn’t subscribe to Poets & Writers, and there aren’t very many articles archived online, so when I remembered the article & looked it up in the database at school, I could have ordered a copy of the article on interlibrary loan. Or I could do what I did, come home and find it.

The willingness to wait a few more days
To get what I wanted from interlibrary loan
Would free up so much square footage in my home
That I could house a family of refugees.
But I’m married to a pack rat. I am one, too.
It’s just I used to purge more often. He won’t.
Or rather, he seldom does. We never do
Much of anything until we absolutely must.
In preparing for a visit from the appraiser this spring
We both set to work cleaning and organizing
And yes, purging. The appraiser was the amiable dad
Of a former student of mine. He and my husband had
A rambling talk. Appraised well, we locked in three percent.
We’re not an episode of “Hoarders.” At least not yet.

Chasar recounts writing poetry for Iowa City’s Press-Citizen in response to an editor’s request. The editor was wanting something “akin to what George Orwell called ‘good bad novels,’ which the author defined as fiction that doesn’t aspire to official literary greatness but that is nonetheless skillfully and admirably written for the purposes or entertainment or political effect.” He analyzes some of the poems that got printed there and discusses what they did and didn’t accomplish, what “good bad poetry” in the newspaper can and can’t accomplish in general, and concludes the article by pretty much bragging that if nothing else, publishing poems in the paper got him a free beer.

When I include poems in my blog, my pay scale is even lower than Chasar’s (he wrote them for free), because no one’s bought me a beer as yet.

(Consider this a bald plea for a Furthermore or Lake Louie.)

So why do it?

Some of it’s inexplicable: I don’t really know why I write. I don’t really know why I’m compelled to share what I write (although every other memoirist and confessional poet understands why I feel copacetic about sharing my life with strangers).

I do know why I love sonnets, through which I record the world and process the world fairly often. Bob Wrigley once called sonnets the most anal-retentive form in the English language. In one way, you might think sonnets are the anti-clutter form, since you’re limited to a certain number of beats and lines (Song of Myself or Howl being the ultimate hoarder poems). But I think of a sonnet more as a phenomenally well-designed closet. You can pack an awful lot in there. And given the existence of sonnet series, and crowns of sonnets, and George Meredith’s 15-line sonnets, it’s an ever-expandable closet.

I could say I like posting poems in blogs because they encapsulate and elevate my everyday existence.

And if that’s true, it also explains why I don’t mind that the poems I post there aren’t even trying to be my best poems. Not art, necessarily. To chronicle the everyday, I have to write every day. And post every day. (Or as close to it as I can get—can I substitute everyfewdays as a synonym? My everyfewdays existence?) Other than minor tinkering, there’s not a whole of revision that can happen in that scenario.

Ron Wallace published a terrific book with the best sonnets from his project of writing a sonnet a day for a year–but he revised a lot to get to the book, The Uses of Adversity.

In general, I think art takes revision.

This is not all merely to say that when I look back at “Metaphors: A Semester” I pretty much go “meh,” although that is pretty much what I go. I suppose in that sense the five stanzas were art imitating life because “meh” was how I was feeling about the semester at that point, but we don’t really want art imitating life in those moments, now do we.

This is just to say–wait! Where have I heard that before?

And thus the most compelling question I can think of at the moment (other than the whole “What’s cooler? Mod Squad or Starsky & Hutch?” conversation we had at supper) is this:

If all our favorite poets had blogged, what would they have posted?

For better or worse, I feel certain Robert Lowell would have posted EVERYTHING. With him in mind, let me just say that I hope some of my blog poems, eventually, could end up in my own Life Studies. Until then, you know where to find them.

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Posted in Creativity, Poetry, Spring Green, Uncategorized

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Playing with Fire, Opdyke-Style

Posted on April 18, 2012 | 9 comments

Two innocent-looking girls take the shade off a bedroom lamp, up-end a coffee can on it, and melt crayons in the shallow tray they’d created. It’s difficult work. The balance is precarious. It’s way too easy for the waxy mess to slop onto the carpet where it will stay, a clump one girl tries to cover with furniture or dirty clothes the rest of her childhood. Neither of them got burned.

But they did catch fire, having their own little moment of alchemy when the gold crayon swirled itself into the other colors.

They will graduate to ruining plastic pitchers with their experiments. What happens when you mix nail polish remover with nail polish? This cleaner with that one?

Both of them owned Easy Bake Ovens. Neither of them owned a chemistry set.

What happens when one of the girls pours just a little nail polish remover in a shower stall and lights it on fire? She had the hand sprayer ready and the water already running, and she watched the wall of blue flame for a count of two, maybe three, before she doused it.

Don’t believe in miracles? How about dumb luck? The fact that I escaped my childhood alive, without massive burn scars, the fact that my childhood home didn’t burn to the ground—-I have to believe in one or the other. Though I will say, in our own pre-adolescent way, my friend and I were methodical in our experiments. The hand sprayer was good to go, after all.

I never set off firecrackers or wired a birdhouse to explode, the way my brother did (birds never moved in, fortunately, smart birds). But my brother and I were both dangerously creative.

We particularly enjoyed burning trash. Out in the country where we grew up, on the edge of a tiny town called Opdyke, there was no trash pickup, so you burned what you could and dumped or buried the rest. Any other chore, we’d fight to weasel out of. Burning trash, we fought to see who got to do it. Our special favorite was finding anything labeled CAUTION, FLAMMABLE, or especially, DO NOT INCINERATE. At least we had the good sense to stand back. Sometimes there was a whoosh of flame or an interesting shade of smoke or if we were really lucky, BAM! An explosion when an aerosol can slammed against the side of the burning barrel.

One of my brother’s friends was badly burned when he used gasoline to burn his family’s trash faster. All we learned from that, apparently, was DON’T USE ACCELERANTS. (Which is actually a really good thing to learn.)

An analysis of this could reveal boredom, misdirected intellectual curiosity, some variety of pathology, or a combination of all three. But we also were being true to our Opdyke heritage and our family heritage, whether we knew it or not.

On our father’s side of the family, we were only one, maybe two generations removed from people who had stills in the hills. My father’s childhood home burned to the ground, twice I think. I have a vague memory that it was my grandfather’s fault, but I’m not sure about that.

On our mother’s side, we had our solidly creative Gran’daddy, who could solve pretty much any intractable problem by sleeping on it. He regularly dreamed the solution. He could also find water by dowsing—I’ve always been afraid to try. I don’t want to know if I have that particular gift.

When it came to fire, Gran’daddy worked as a volunteer firefighter and I remember being part of a crowd watching them set the old one-room schoolhouse on fire so the volunteers had something to practice on. (I also remember one odd little boy flashing his penis to everyone that day. At least we didn’t have that pathology in my family.)

In terms of creativity and fire, I have to think of Gran’daddy’s work with Sparky, a welder and inventor in our little town.

On the main street, which now has a name but didn’t when I lived there, Opdyke had a post office, ½ of a building that also housed an old-fashioned store with a wood-burning stove. We waited for the bus inside on cold days. (At this point my memory blurs with an episode of the Waltons–I can’t believe I was so lucky and that this was the early 70s, not the 30s.) Next building down was a two-story, red-brick garage where Sparky had his shop. That was pretty much all there was, business-wise.

I know Sparky and Gran’daddy worked together to make parts for various farm machines, but I also remember fabulous inventions, like the rotation hot-dog roaster for camp fires.

It never once occurred to me to ask to visit that shop, and no one ever offered.

Had my son’s school existed at that time, in that place, there probably would have been a field trip there, or we’d have had Sparky come to class to demonstrate.

At least I like to think so, and I like to think River Valley Elementary Studio School is in the process of living up to part of its initial purpose, to give kids space to be creative as part of their education.

It’s not just that I want my son to also escape his childhood without burn scars. It’s not just that I want him not to burn our house down.

I want him to be able to play with fire and learn even more from it than I did.

On reflection, I am utterly baffled that I took Chemistry I in high school but not Chemistry II, where the students regularly made explosives behind the teacher’s back. (Well, other than being completely burned out by my senior year and also hitting a very solid three-dimensional brick wall when I tried to imagine molecules in 3-D.)

In my creativity research, I am trying to learn how to encourage and assess students’ creativity. I’m struck by these quotes from Arthur Cropley, in his book, Creativity in Education and Learning: A Guide for Teachers and Educators. He points out that

“Surveys have shown that in theory at least teachers overwhelmingly support creativity as something that should be fostered in the classroom….However, in actual classroom practice they often frown upon traits associated with creativity or even actively dislike characteristics such as boldness, desire for novelty or originality.” I don’t know how much I exhibited those traits in the classroom, but I can definitely see my obsession with fire as a bold “desire for novelty” (something other than another rerun of Gilligan’s Island) and I don’t know of any other children who set their shower stalls on fire, though a lot of people may be like I was until this moment, sensibly keeping things like that a secret. Cropley has a list of things to do to make creativity possible in the classroom, and it’s striking to me how most of those apply to my brother’s and my trash burning processes. Cropley says we should

• “encourage students to learn independently
• have a co-operative, socially integrative style of teaching
• do not neglect mastery of factual knowledge
• tolerate sensible or bold errors
• promote self-evaluation
• take questions seriously
• offer opportunities to work with varied materials under different conditions
• help students learn to cope with frustration and failure
• reward courage as much as being right.”

We did “neglect factual knowledge” for the most part, and I don’t remember much self-evaluation. I don’t remember frustration or failure, but I think the wall of flame in the shower stall scared me enough I went back to burning trash as my main experimental mode, where you could “reward courage” with an occasional but deeply satisfying explosion. We were hell-bent on making our own “opportunities to work with varied materials under different conditions.” My 8th grade demonstration speech involved dripping candle wax into a pie-pan of water. “What’s it for?” the teacher asked when I was done. It hadn’t occurred to me I needed a purpose–it was just really fun to do. But what I said was, “If you use scented candles, these can be put anywhere to make things smell nice.” I don’t remember being punished or rewarded for that project.

I want to officially and publicly and sincerely apologize to my parents who are learning about most of this for the first time along with everyone else reading right now. (I explained and apologized long ago for the mouse bones the repairman found in the dishwasher when it broke down.)

“Sin boldly,” Martin Luther said, which is what I think of when I read “bold errors.” I wonder, as a teacher, if I make any room at all for that in my students.

It scares me to death to imagine what kind of experiments my already creative son will think up. I mostly hope it’s in a classroom with safety goggles and fire extinguishers available, but I think it’s part of my job to let him experiment at home as well.

Because playing with fire? Having a sweet face that will mislead some people into thinking he doesn’t have a dark side? He comes by that naturally. So did I.

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Posted in Creativity, Family, Opdyke, Teaching, Uncategorized

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Pearl Onion Sets in the Pig Pen

Posted on April 5, 2012 | 9 comments

Matthew 13: 1-9

“That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the lake. 2Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. 3And he told them many things in parables, saying: ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow. 4And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. 5Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. 6But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. 7Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. 8Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty. 9Let anyone with ears* listen!’”

“We’ve been travelin’ on the rocky ground, rocky ground,” Springsteen’s background singers croon out sweetly on his latest album. Even though I’ve been listening to that album over and over during my commute and other times (grading papers, writing, now), there are other reasons I’m thinking about rocky ground.

I’m still spending time this week thinking “what if  my life never changed,” and I’m enjoying that focus–I have so many blessings. Here’s one thing that thrills me–I’ve made a life where I get to spend a lot of time reading,  much of it work related, but not all. Where do I get time to do reading for fun? As I confessed on Monday, I average about 40 hours of work a week. But we also don’t have cable, so there’s not a whole lot of TV viewing in my schedule. Lots and lots and lots of book time.

But one of the reasons I was motivated to take a hard, blessing-laser-look at my life is that it seems to me the universe has been telling me no a fair bit lately. Lots of yes, sure, but NO sometimes when I was really hoping for yes. Everything from applying for a UW System position that would’ve meant a chance to work with some amazing people AND get a course release to do it,  to getting published, to getting a course approved for a particular degree designation for students. No. No. No.  A few others as well–no, no, no.

Yesterday it wasn’t “no,” but it was furrowed brows and pursed lips and blank looks and “go through another layer of protocol to get approval.” Also possibly some conversations through pursed lips when I wasn’t in the room.  Fine–that’s the world of work, right? You can’t always get what you want. Not every idea pans out. There is no “I” in “shared governance.” I get it. I’m not taking it personally, but I’m taking it.  I’m taking it and processing it.

It’s not like I lack for ideas. If the universe says no this time, I’m ready with another launch. Seeds aplenty. Enough to scatter.

My question is this:  where’s my fertile soil?

I know that later in Matthew 13 the disciples ask Jesus to explain the parable, but I’m suspicious of that–it seems more likely to me that Jesus ended with  “Who hath ears to hear, let him hear” (from the King James Version, the poetry of which can’t be beat, especially not by “let anyone with ears listen,” ironic, since apparently the translators of the New Revised Standard Version, which I like for other reasons, had no ears to hear music).  It seems likely to me that the disciples ended up going home and saying, “Well, what do you think he meant this time?” And came up with the word of God idea and told that to others so that eventually the cartoon bubbles got mixed up and people remembered Jesus saying all those words. In any case, in my head this story is merging with Jesus saying “Don’t cast your pearls before swine,” and I’m left wondering if I’m sowing my seeds in the right place.

Where’s the line between giving it the old college try and beating your head against a dead horse?

In looking to Jesus (as I often, often do), I can’t help but remember two contradictory stories–there’s the shepherd who searches relentlessly for the one lost sheep (not practical!), which would indicate diligence and patience are called for.  Then there’s the “brush the dust of that town off your feet” if people won’t listen to you. Again and again–Mary or Martha? Should I stay or should I go? (No, wait–that’s the Clash.)

And then when it  comes to “don’t cast your pearls before swine,” I have to think of Rodney Jones calling pigs “the dolphins of the barnyard,” and I also remember Dorothy Parker’s response when someone moved to let her go through a doorway first, saying, “age before beauty.” Her response was “pearls before swine.”

Clearly, what I’m saying is, I’m addle-pated. I guess for the moment I’ll trust in the gospel of the Boss who sings, towards the end of “Rocky Ground,” that “there’s a new day comin’.” Maybe in that new day there will be some more yes and slightly less no. Of course the song ends with the same sweet-sounding chorus of hard times, “We’ve been travelin’ on the rocky ground, rocky ground.”

At least I’m looking down now and then and noticing, “Oh. That’s rocky ground.”

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Posted in Creativity, God Stuff, Uncategorized, Work Life

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I Can’t Get No Satisficing

Posted on January 30, 2012 | 3 comments

 

What would you do if I gave you a handful of dry lentils?

 

Ping them at me from across the room? Hm. Well. Not very nice, but relatively creative, I have to admit.

 

Here’s what most of my creative writing students tend to do: use them to spell words and use them to make pictures.

 

Of the more surprising uses of lentils: Motoya put them in a cool plastic pencil box and used them as a music-maker. Ji Hyun stuck them to a brick wall using hand sanitizer as a very temporary adhesive. Jesse brushed one lentil off a desk. Then he brushed a whole pile off and said, “Lemmings.”

 

No one’s made soup—there isn’t time when we use them in class. I give each student a handful and say, “Do something with these and then we’ll come around and you can show us what you’ve done.”

 

There are a ton of divergent thinking tests available online, and some of them may seem familiar—they’re often used to illustrate problem solving. The one you’re most likely to have seen before involves connecting nine dots (in three rows of three) using four straight lines. This web page shows how to do it, using ladybugs! This page from University of Indiana professor Curtis Bonk has a great summary of different types of tests as well as some background and larger issues to consider.

 

My interest in divergent thinking can be traced to a workshop with the California writer Al Young, who was a guest writer at the University of Montana when I was there. At some point, expressing disgust with the efforts of those of us in the workshop, he said something to the effect of, “Typical creative writing grad students. All about writing and not about creative.”

 

The prevailing attitude at the time (and this was twenty years ago, mind you) was that issues related to craft could be taught, but we were on our own for creativity and if we didn’t have it, there wasn’t anything anyone could do to teach it.

 

I don’t think that’s true. I think we can learn to be more creative, and I think we can teach our students to be more creative.

 

This is important particularly where I teach—the University of Wisconsin Richland, a very small two-year campus in the very large University of Wisconsin System. I don’t get many English majors, let alone creative writing majors. In a class of 20, I might have five who plan to take more creative writing classes, who want to be published writers. Twenty years of teaching creative writing at this campus to these students have convinced me that teaching students to be more creative is as ever bit as valuable as teaching them to craft better stories, poems, essays, and plays.

 

And ultimately, if the writers learn to be more creative, they might actually stand a chance of writing something huge—something that is polished as far as craft goes, but does something new, something no one has seen before.

 

I’ve been asking my students to work on creativity exercises for several years now. The lentil fun is aimed at lowering what are called our “associative borders.” In a book called The Medici Effect: What Elephants & Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation, Frans Johansson talks about how creative thinkers are more flexible about their associations—that someone with rigid associative borders is more likely to see a problem in a fixed way, and a small range of possible solutions. Someone with lower associative borders tends to see problems and solutions from many different angles.

 

If you look back at an earlier post of mine (“Creativity: A Pumpkin Saga”), for example, my associative borders were lower when it came to pumpkin—I was willing to see more than jack-o’-lantern or pie (o.k., so pumpkin lasagna didn’t turn out to be a genius idea, but Johansson quotes Linus Pauling who said “The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas”).

 

This past week, I started a new semester of creative writing with a group of mostly new students (two have taken other creative writing classes with me). We started on the first day with a classic divergent thinking test. I told them to list everything they could think of that was blue.  I gave them about four minutes.

 

When they were done, I talked about how a creativity researcher would score their results. First, there’s the matter of fluency—how long is your list? How many blue things did you come up with? About a third of the class had more than fifteen, but one student had more than 20.  The next thing to consider is flexibility—how many different categories of things did you think of that are blue? If you had 15 things that are just items around the house, that’s not as creative as five household items, five plants, and five puns (blew, bleu, blue as in sad, blue as in balls, blue as in music). Then there’s elaboration—did you go into detail on any of them?  And finally originality—did you come up with one that no one else came up with?

Several students came up with original offerings—blue things I’ve never heard mentioned (and I’ve done this particular test pretty regularly, although I alternate it with red, since red can also be read). Jeff mentioned Kelvin 10,000 headlights. (I can’t tell you how much I’m looking forward to a whole semester of automotive imagery—I anticipate much jealousy from the I’d-Be-a-Working-Stiff-if-I-Didn’t-Write-Fiction guys. Seriously.) Rain said “crab blood” and then elaborated, “Well, actually, only horseshoe crab blood.” Both of those examples seem to me to rely a great deal on those students’ personal expertise, which is a really important goal during creative writing.  It’s one of the two truisms of creative writing, right?  Write what you know.  (The other being “show—don’t tell.”) The third original offering seems to me to be a great example of a student with terrific observational skills. Joe said, “blue lines on a sheet of paper.” (Note the elaboration, as well.) Think of all the students who’ve done this exercise, all the times I’ve played along, and none of us noticed what was RIGHT THERE in front of us, not until Joe came along.

 

My hypothesis is that if students work on creative writing exercises at various points during the semester and then evaluate their writing based on the categories of fluency, originality, flexibility, and elaboration, they will become more creative in general, and more creative as writers.

 

I’ll be gathering data this semester (and many, many other semesters) to test that hypothesis, but one leading creativity researcher, Mark Runco, suggests that I’m on the right track. He describes something called “displaced practice” as being “quite effective.” This is when people “work on creative thinking exercises, but then turn to something else, and later again return to creative thinking exercises…. Eventually after gradual fading, the individuals will learn to think divergently and originally on their own, even with entirely ill-defined tasks and without explicit instructions.”

 

If I think back to the assignments I was given when I was a creative writing student, I think “entirely ill-defined tasks” without “explicit instructions” are pretty accurate descriptors. Maybe after they finish with my classes my students will do well with those kinds of assignments. But it’s obviously important outside academia because that’s what we face in our lives all the time—goals and problems and issues and situations where we know we need to do something, but we don’t know what to do or where to start, and there’s no one giving us a detailed assignment sheet or rubric.

 

One final quote from Mark Runco gives us a concrete place to start. When we’re staring at problems, we may try to solve them too quickly. Why? Runco says that “Some people may be more comfortable with closure….They are uncomfortable with the uncertainty that is a part of not having a solution ready at hand. This may lead them to satisficing, which is the tendency to take the first adequate solution that comes to mind (rather than postponing judgments and considering a wider range of options).” I hold out great hope that, if nothing else, teaching students about the basic categories of scoring a divergent thinking test will help them develop the habit of finding that wider range—of not settling for satisficing.

 

 

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Posted in Creativity, Uncategorized

Creativity: A Pumpkin Saga

Posted on November 20, 2011 | 5 comments

Thanksgiving brings back fond memories of family gatherings, football games, rampant gorging, furlough days, and procrastination (writing papers for students, grading papers for faculty). For me, though, one of the most poignant memories of Thanksgiving is a culinary failure of grand proportions (if you believe my husband).

We volunteered to host Thanksgiving one year when we were both still fisheterians (pesco-ovo-lacto vegetarians is the technical term), but we insisted, “No turkey.” None at all. We wouldn’t roast one and no one could bring one. But I promised everyone that there would be a feast—that no one would feel the least bit deprived. I considered doing what my Gran’mommy or my Mom or my aunts typically suggested as we all drooled over a holiday spread, “You could make a meal out of the side dishes and the desserts.” But they were joking—we’d have never tried Thanksgiving without a turkey or Easter without a ham or Christmas without one or the other or both.

I wanted a centerpiece, though—some dish that said, “amazing main course,” not “technically a side dish.” So I bought some cookbooks, and for once not procrastinating, began making practice meals weeks ahead of time, to see if my prep time matched the cookbook’s estimate, and to see if we actually liked the food. We had spanikopita (phyllo dough = too much work). We had several other meals I no longer recall, possibly involving tofu.

And then I found it. THE perfect recipe for a vegetarian Thanksgiving. Pumpkin lasagna! I know, right? It’s pumpkin! Like pie, but not! And lasagna! Who doesn’t love lasagna! Christopher Columbus was Italian, right? And if he hadn’t begun the deluge, the Puritans would never have washed up on Plymouth Rock and had to rely on friendly natives to survive*, right? Perfect.

I have to explain before I continue, that my husband nath is pretty much a fantastic audience for my cooking. He’s not a picky eater, except for his insistence that beets are carcinogenic, and he is very generous with praise and gratitude, for even simple meals.

He loathed the pumpkin lasagna. If you asked him, he would tell you, first, that it looked like baby poop. Years after this catastrophe, when we had our own baby, we learned more precisely that it looked like the poop of a breastfed baby. I had to agree that the color was unpleasant. He goes further and says the taste was even worse. In any case, it wasn’t what we had on Thanksgiving. If I remember right, we just went with the whole “side dishes make a meal” theory, and the next year, we let someone else bring a turkey.

Because in general I get pretty good responses to my cooking (except from my son, who’s nearly seven so his responses fall under a different category entirely*), I remember this failure fondly.

The willingness to fail, spectacularly, is an important part of success, right? And other than my husband’s lingering horror at the memory, the reason I remember the pumpkin lasagna is that for years, I’ve used it as an example in explaining the steps of creativity.

“What’s that,” you say? “How could creativity have steps? Isn’t it hard to define? Isn’t it just entirely subjective?” Hm. Yes and no. Well, actually, no. Not if you believe close to a hundred years of scholarly research on creativity, primarily in the disciplines of psychology, business, and design. Which I do, even though, in the humanities, I think, we would prefer to think of creativity as something utterly magical and un-analyzable, like faxes.

The basic definition is—get ready for the highly technical academic jargon—ready?—doing cool, new stuff with old stuff. You can say it all fancy-pants if you want—utilizing existing materials to produce novelty in a recognized activity, field or domain—but really, it means following enough rules to make sense, but doing something new within the framework of those rules. Or modifying the framework.

People who describe the stages or steps of creativity use some variation of the following list (much of which comes from an early researcher named Wallas, though he is rarely cited):
• Immersion (where you consider all the possibilities)
• Incubation (where you set your work aside and let your subconscious stew)
• Inspiration (when, like Archimedes, you have your “eureka!” moment—and bathrooms rank high statistically as places where we report getting inspired*, btw. But I shouldn’t say “we” because I would never report that, even if it were true, which of course it’s not)
• Verification (where someone whose judgment matters, for whatever reason, says, “Yes! Tastes great!” or “I’ll publish that!”).

So, as I describe to students and others, I immersed myself by scouring cookbooks for ideas and I practiced different meals. I waited between attempts. I was utterly charmed, and I thought, INSPIRED by the idea of pumpkin lasagna. But when we got to the verification stage? Huh-uh. Hold the phone, Horatio. Just say no.

Other creative projects have met with greater acclaim, including meals. Except for those of us aiming for a show on the Food Network, creativity in cooking falls under the category of what is called “Everyday Creativity.” Beyond a stroll down memory lane to window-shop the stores of holidays past, why does all this matter?

I am gobsmackingly inspired by another early creativity researcher, Guilford, who said, “If by any approach we could lift the population’s problem solving skills by a small amount on the average, the summative effect would be incalculable.” Creativity is a huge part of problem solving, and the more we understand the creative process, the easier it will be for more of us to be more creative. I believe that, and I’m working to put that belief in action inside the classroom and out.

Meanwhile, this Thanksgiving, we’re going out to eat. This involves very little creativity on my part, other than the initial immersion which involved, “What are all the ways we could celebrate? Cancel classes on Wednesday to start cooking early? Stay up until midnight cooking after being in classes all day? Get up at 3:00 a.m. to start cooking? Or, courtesy of my husband, go out to eat at a restaurant we love?”

So we’ll be at the Old Feed Mill in Mazomanie, Wisconsin, where I am confident the only pumpkins we’ll encounter will be filling a cornucopia or a pie. Creativity is important, but sometimes you need to rely on the utterly un-novel. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

*This is the Brady Bunch historical version. Other posts may deal with the question of historicity of shows I watched after getting home from school circa 1974-1978.
*Citation will be provided at some point.
*He recently listed “Culver’s” as his favorite food on a getting-to-know-you form at school. Sigh.

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