Creating in Community
A page from my art journal from March 2008
In my last post I wrote about finding joy in moving in community and today I want to offer another practice: creating in community.
Growing up, I was an art kid. I’ve spent hours drawing, crafting, and creating in every phase of my life, even today. For much of that time I was by myself in my room, with my feelings and art supplies. Feelings would well up and then, as if by magic, move themselves into the ink barrels of my markers. Pen to paper, they would discharge, absorbed by the fibers of each page I filled with words and shapes.
But I wasn’t always alone. I also went to art classes and arts camps, where I could make stuff in the company of other crafting adolescents. I learned to bead weave, loom weave, batik, tie-dye, silkscreen, dip candles, create stop motion animation, and process and print photos from film. I also learned that I was not alone in grappling with the big feelings that got translated through our art: my peers and I could feel misunderstood, and yearn to connect with others, together in those spaces. Learning those skills was great, but what I remember the most about art camp are the moments in between classes and projects. We weren’t making anything, tangible but we were making memories. Sometimes we were just hanging out in the darkness of our bunks, trying to find relief from the heat of the sun. But more often than not we sat on picnic tables, or in the grass, our teenage chatter piercing otherwise quiet summer evenings. We were falling in and out of love, making lifelong friends, or oftentimes just bullshitting the hours away.
In college I became obsessed with collage. Filling my walls and journals with someone else’s images and words, I was somehow giving them a meaning of my own. I made books of collages for loved ones. I decoupaged boxes and small pieces of furniture. I built a shrine to Xena Warrior Princess. Glue and glitter, scissors and magazines, ephemera and time were my most precious tools and resources. Although I usually did this on my own, sometimes a group of us would gather to collage together. I remember five of us in my friend’s dorm room. Each of us in pajamas with our hair piled lazily up on top of our heads. Some of us sat with our legs folded under them, and others with legs akimbo, each holding a spiral bound blank book. Scraps of paper, ephemera, scissors, markers, and glue sticks scattered among us. Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, and Delia’s catalogs in various states of chopped up were passed around. The hours spent making books and zines on the dorm room floor are my fondest memories of creating collage.
As an adult I still long for the feeling of crafting in community. It is a little harder now but if I extend your idea of community it can be a little easier to find.
In February 2008 joined a collective project known as Thing-A-Day * an act of self-care, even before I even knew what self-care was.
Thing-A-Day was a collective project that ran for eight years. Anyone could join as long as you signed up before February. By joining, you committed to spending twenty-minutes per day doing something creative and then posting what you did to the collective blog, for the month of February. People posted their visual art, crafts, baked goods, and writing. Some people worked on one large project all month or several small projects. Some people spent twenty minutes per day making things and some spent hours. Nothing happened if you missed a day or two, or never posted at all—the practice was entirely self-directed. From what I can tell by digging around artifacts online, there were nearly 250 participants involved with the project by the time it ended after its eighth run in February 2014. I believe I participated in 2008, 2009, and 2010.
When I joined, my daughter was about seven months old. I was exhausted and I had Postpartum Anxiety (PPA) but didn’t know it. I was terrified of loss and one manifestation of my fear was the unyielding belief that my daughter would be snatched up by a stranger in a flash from the park, daycare, or even her nursery. I was grieving for my grandmother, whose death left a large hole in our family’s fabric. And I was even grieving for a life unfettered by nursing and spit up.
I was so happy to be a mother, but you can be simultaneously happy and sad about a thing. I was sad about how often I was distressed and how tired I was. PPA left me in a state of near-constant worry because of the rough combination of the deepest love I had ever known combined with an enormous fear of loss. And if that was not enough loss, I was also terrified of losing my own sense of self to motherhood as opposed to having motherhood simply be another facet in who I was. My thinking was that one day, theoretically, if everything went according to plan, my daughter would leave home to create a fulfilling life for herself and I wanted to have more than motherhood in my pocket to support me.
Thirteen years later, and I cannot recall how I learned about Thing-A-Day. What I can recall was that I signed up to feel into my own sense of self and because it sounded fun. And I did it. I successfully engaged in a creative practice for twenty minutes a day for twenty-eight days and blogged about it. While creative work with my hands helped me both on a cognitive level and emotional level, creating a daily ritual to use my thinking brain to stay present with the process while giving space for my feeling brain to process, there was something about blogging about it and reading other people’s blog posts about it that I found so rewarding. I felt seen and heard. I felt a connection. People generally posted at the same time each day and you got to know the people who posted around the same time as you. It was different than the experience I have of posting to social media, perhaps because we all had the same intention: to create things and support other creators. While each of us had carved out our own space online we also made the effort to check-in on each other’s work and progress. We were encouraged to comment on each other’s posts and to engage with each other about the process. And we did. And I don’t remember what I made—at all—but I do remember feeling proud of my work, safe to fail, supported in my process, and connected to other people who like to make stuff.
In fact, as my first Thing-a-Day in February 2008 came to an end, I started my own crafty blog. On February 27, I wrote my first post:
Although I had a blog a long, long, time ago, in a year called 2001, I have not been much of blog aficionado. But, through a series of twists and turns, I found myself successfully blogging as part of Thing-A-Day 2. TAD2 is ending, but I just cannot leave the blogging behind. Each day, for the past month, I have worked on a creative project and then composed an entry for the TAD blog. Crafting and blogging helps recharge my brain (which was starting to go to mush with my pregnancy and new-parent exhaustion.) I have made a promise to myself that I need to keep this up. I deserve it after all.
I maintained the spirit of Thing-A-Day not just by continuing to create and reflect on the process publicly, but also by maintaining friendships with some of the artists I came to know online and by branching out and finding other online communities for artists. As we got to know one another, we would also send each other materials to use, or small works of art using snail mail. This exchange was reminiscent of camp and college. One artist, Julie Prichard who I met through one of these online communities, and I are still in touch today. She even went down the stamping-internet rabbit hole to help me track my crafting renaissance for this post.
To this day I am still a maker and, as you know, a blogger. And although I make stuff and write stuff because I enjoy wrestling with the process, I also do it to find community. Nearly each blog post results in feedback from you, dear readers, messages that you felt seen, heard, or understood. Reading those feels nice.
February—the shortest-yet-longest month of the year—begins tomorrow. I invite you to contemplate this: What will you do for yourself this month? What did you do as a kid when time allowed, and how can you do it in community now? Were you, are you, an art -kid or a jock? Or what do you love to do now? Do you do it in community? Can you?
*As an aside, I while I did research for this post I came across a Thing-A-Day reboot, but I cannot vouch for it, and have elected not to sign up. It is not from the original creators and the site features ads that I find really off-putting. Part of finding a community is feeling good joining it - online or in person.