On Community and Creativity

After a series of losses in recent years – moving for two failing parents, letting go of a friend I loved, closed doors on jobs that excited me, a badly broken wrist, covid isolation, and more – grieving these accumulated losses seemed a fair explanation for the funk I was in. It was hard to get up in the morning. Writing became a struggle. Even reading became near-impossible. I know grieving matters, and lack of motivation and depression-like symptoms are normal in grief, so I took it in stride, but my lack of joy in things I loved was tough.

At the turn of the year, I was back in Vermont for a few weeks. Vermont’s irregular hills, its lakes and streams, its town greens and white-steepled churches, its winding roads and down-to-earth flannel shirts, immediately felt like home. But something else happened. As I shared meals with friends, labored at my daughter’s fix-it-list, chatted with pastors about the importance of the arts, tackled world problems and cribbage with one of my sons, I felt like writing again. Wanted to read. To make music. And then, back in PA, lethargy crept back.

Something surfaced that I knew, yet need to be reminded of: creativity is grounded in community. My struggle with creativity turns out to be in part rooted in a lack of community.

We picture the tormented solitary artist, bastioned in his barren garret, pursuing his art. But this image of the solitary artist is largely myth. Through history, we instead see “schools” and “guilds” of writers and artists and craftsmen who worked together, learning with and from each other, and influencing each other’s work.

Glyer, in Bandersnatch and The Company They Keep, reflects on the Inklings – which included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others. They “got together once or twice a week for about 17 years…. They read their works-in-progress to one another, and… stayed up late into the night giving each other critiques.” They wrote in community.

And the Inklings weren’t unique. Hemmingway in Paris, for example, had the community of expatriate artists and writers of the Montparnasse Quarter and connections to other writers and artists. Musician Michael Card created his Scribbling in the Sand album to demonstrate that music comes out of community. A whole section of his book, Scribbling in the Sand: Christ and Creativity, explores how community enriches our creative efforts, and he notes that community with a fellow artist helps him “play better and be better.”

Communities are why we find clusters of music and art: the jazz and blues of New Orleans, the blues of Chicago, country music in Nashville, groups of artists in Ashville, NC and Austin, TX and elsewhere. Communities are why those in MFA programs creatively thrive while in school but then struggle to produce when they get out.

Being with a community of artists enriches us creatively and personally. Author and creativity coach Jeff Goins suggests that creativity is the result of collaboration, intentional or not. He argues that we need places with concentration of artistic people because these become “hotbeds for… creative output.” We need networks of informal connections because each influences the success of the group. And we need deliberate and tight-knit communities, people who affirm when we're on the right track and guide us back when we're not. Perhaps this last is most important.

Anne Lamott, in her Bird by Bird, tells of this group:

…four people, three women and one man… met in one of my classes and… have been meeting as a group for four years. I see them in bookstores or cafés, where they sit at tables with wine or coffee and go over each other’s work, offer criticism and encouragement, ask questions, and figure out where to go next. They… listen to each other’s work and help each other to keep at it.
            Sometimes they’ll drop in on one of my classes, like seniors dropping by freshman basketball practice. They end up giving the new students rousing pep talks about how great it is to be part of a writing group, how much they’ve come to care for each other, how it helps them get their work done. They’ve gone from being four tense, slightly conceited, lonely people who wanted to write to one of those weird little families we fashion out of whoever’s around us. They’re very tender with each other. They all look a lot less slick and cool than they did when they were in my class, because helping each other has made their hearts get bigger.

The faith-based might notice how in Genesis, after God’s explosion of creativity and finding that creation good, God finds it not-good that man is alone. Or how Acts presents the community and shared life of the believers as central, or how for the first three centuries the church fathers were preoccupied with unity and community of the church.

What we find on all fronts, is that community is foundational, that it’s at the core of creativity. Without community, our best work stays stuck inside us. And so, I see my current disconnectedness and how it’s hurting my creativity. How I can build better community? I’m not sure right now. At least I’m aware I have a problem to fix. Perhaps some of you face the same.

Sources

Card, Michael, Scribbling in the Sand: Christ and Creativity. InterVarsity Press, 2002.

Goins, Jeff. “The Three Types Of Relationship Every Creative Person Needs.” Fast Company. 14 Sept. 2016.

*Glyer, Diana Pavlac. Bandersnatch: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and the Creative Collaboration of the Inklings. Black Squirrel Books, 2016.

*Glyer, Diana Pavlac. The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent State University Press, 2008.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Anchor/Random House, 1994.

* Bandersnatch is written more for a popular audience; The Company They Keep is more academic/scholarly.