Ammi Midstokke: Maybe we’re all creatives at heart

In case you missed it, I got to sit on stage for an hour last week with Patrick Hutchison, who is my carpentry spirit animal. Along with words and rudimentary craftsmanship, we have a similar love of cashmere and Carhartts – because we’re a sophisticated, writerly kind of wood worker.

Hutchison was a writer who became a carpenter, which is funny because I was raised as a carpenter and became a writer. Well, technically, I was raised as free homesteading labor and home-schooler. Between those things and all the sentences I was assigned for breaking the rules, I became a writer. Sentence writing does not allow for a lot of creativity, unless maybe you write verses for the Rolling Stones. My criminal life of petty theft and extravagant lies, however, seemed to be based on a solid foundation of creativity and wishful thinking.

Sometimes, I meet a person who says, “I’m a creative,” which I have always equated with “unemployed” or “my house is really messy” or “I’ll be late to whatever we schedule.” It appears to be an acknowledgment that a person has some original and imaginative ideas, the first being that they believe in themselves. This is typically taught in kindergarten right alongside basic creativity, while my recollections of that year involved pressing carrot juice and learning basic reproductive anatomy (the best text book in the house being a “Grey’s Anatomy” coloring book).

Once, my husband said he was not a creative person, which we all know is a lie. You have to be real imaginative to think it’s a good idea to pledge in sickness or in health to me. The problem is not the sickness or the health, it’s the creative bits. I realized this when some brilliant kid in the audience asked Hutchison something to the effect of, “Has the creative expression of carpentry replaced the creative expression of writing?”

This bothered me, but only because I’m certain I was close to getting him to promise writing another book (I need more building ideas), and someone just gave him an excuse to whittle wood instead of words. At the same time, I wondered if creative expression, in all its forms, ought to take a larger portion of Maslow’s hierarchy. And perhaps it does, we just mistake our creative expressions for other things, like … making dinner or building a shelter.

The problem comes when we wrap up our identity in one thing or another, when we’re perhaps really talking about a quality of ourselves rather than a label of self. I wondered if the writer turned carpenter or carpenter turned writer feels a little like a charlatan of one or the other. Is there a rule that we must maintain a kind of dogged fidelity to something?

What I realize is that creative expression occurs in even the most pragmatic and declared anti-creative of us.

I see it in the trails my husband carves into our property. It shows up in my running when I run a heart shape in my route. I see it in the clothing choices of adolescents and their daily exploration of expression. It is in countless gardens that I pass and interior trim jobs and in surgical innovation and solutions to software problems. It is in how we choose to communicate with others or the photographs we take of our children or any imaginative experience we have.

I’m not sure my hierarchy aligns with Maslow’s. I did not see “getting lost in the woods” anywhere, though it seems to be high on my needs list and getting un-lost requires a fair amount of creativity. It’s the self-actualization part that matters and in how we embrace the reality that each of us, in one way or another, is creative.

Sometimes it is just expressed in how we slap a piece of trim on a window, other times, in what we make for dinner.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at [email protected]