The Call to Create

(and the magic of libraries)

Ten years ago, I wrote a book about creativity for graduate students. I was fresh out of my PhD program, and I knew I wanted to go in a different direction, for lots of reasons. Russian literature jobs were wildly scarce and required relinquishment of control over geography; you had to go where the job was, and it was almost surely a one-year position without the possibility of renewal. Several months in, you’d be back on the job market, throwing the geographical dice again. I’m also not a competitive person, nor a striver, and, rather hilariously for a Russian lit PhD, really turned off by abstract literary theory (give me close reading any day, though!). Eric and I were also newly married, and we wanted to be together and start a family.

During that unsettling time of resetting my internal compass, my therapist told me about the value of honoring your temperament, and that is advice that was so vital to me then and still is now.

So, I did the reinventing yourself thing. I read What Color Is Your Parachute? I brainstormed my ideal work situation. I mined down deep to excavate what was most important to me, what made me feel most alive, as Howard Thurman so wisely suggested we all do.

And the answer was creativity.

Because I knew absolutely nothing about the publishing industry, I did the whole thing backwards. I interviewed people. I wrote the book. Then I realized I needed to write a proposal, so I did that. Then I realized I needed to write a query to agents, so I did that. I worked on all of this until I was very pregnant with our first child, and then after he was born, I was very…tired for several years. The book gathered (digital) dust.

Since then, new dreams and new books have come into being, and I couldn’t be happier to be where I am, doing what I am doing. It is a dream, all of it.

But I’m still so grateful for that unpublished book and all the things it shook loose in me. Creativity still is, and always will be, so vitally important to me, to my career, to my spiritual life.

It is, I think, at the very core of what it is to be human.

It made me think of something I learned about all those millions of years ago in grad school—the trial of the poet Joseph Brodsky. In the 1960s, his work was denounced, and he was sent to a mental institution and then put on trial for social parasitism by the Soviet state.

When the judge asked Brodsky what his profession was, he answered that he was a poet. “And who recognized you as a poet?” the judge asked, “Who enrolled you in the ranks of poets?”

Brodsky’s answer was simple and brilliant. “No one,” he said, “And who enrolled me in the ranks of human beings?”

The judge pressed Brodsky further—what kind of education did he have that qualified him to be a poet? “I do not think that it is given by education,” he replied.

The judge demanded to know, then, who or what exactly qualified Brodsky to be a poet. “I think it is…” he said, bewilderedly, the transcript of the trial tells us, “from God.”

From God. The stakes are immeasurably lower for me than they were for Brodsky. But I like to think the same call to create that hummed within him also hums within me.

Yesterday was my 41st birthday, and to celebrate, I spent the morning at the overwhelmingly gorgeous UW library. It’s been years since I was in a research library, and it was like paying a visit to my younger self. I know exactly where the authoritative editions of Russian literature and criticism are (PG3000s), and I spent a long time sitting on the floor, paging through the books that built my life for the better part of a decade.

It wasn’t quite like going home, but more like walking past the building where you once lived and seeing that the bird feeder you hung all those years ago is still there, swaying under a sycamore tree.

I saw it, and I was grateful.

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A Few Hopeful Things:

-It’s the Season of Creation! I am loving this series from Earthbeat NCR, featuring the beautiful art of Ryan McQuade. (Also, just confirmed with our priest that our animal blessing is stuffie-inclusive, and my kids are gonna be so pumped!)

-The Collegeville Institute has a new virtual workshop coming up in early 2024 on writing toward God with Mary Lane Potter. Collegeville is amazing and offers these workshops free of charge to participants. You can apply here!

Happy creating, happy humaning,
Cameron