Cindy La Ferle’s Home Officea window on the writing life

Creative name calling

Cindy on June 26th, 2008

Shopping at my local craft store, I was paying for an armload of supplies when a chatty customer behind me asked what I was planning to make.

“You must be an artist,” she said, after I briefly explained that I was getting started on a new collage.

Me, an artist?  I’d been fooling around with altered books and other paper arts for several months, but never used the word “artist” to describe myself. Art was my diversion — something I did for pure pleasure when I wasn’t writing essays and newspaper columns. “Artist” was a term I usually reserved for the seriously gifted creator. It evoked poetic images of men and women cloistered in light-filled studios, producing museum-quality masterpieces. Most artists I knew had fine arts degrees, and their work was displayed in galleries. Like Benedictine monks, artists occupied sacred space in another world.

So I blushed when I told the other customer that, no, I’m not really an artist — just a person who dabbles. A crafter.

Labels of any kind, social or political, make me nervous. Driving home with my new art supplies that afternoon, I remembered how long it had taken me to call myself a “writer.”  I’d worked six years for a reference book publisher before I sold my first review to a local newspaper. Several freelance assignments followed, and soon after I published the first of several essays in a national magazine. Even then, I felt like a fraud whenever I used the word writer to describe myself in social situations. Real writers and authors wrote critically acclaimed bestsellers. They had New York agents and made guest appearances on “Oprah.”  Journalists like me wrote pieces that ended up as birdcage liner (or scraps in a collage).

At some point, every writer struggles with the same identity crisis.  As Anne Lamott notes in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Pantheon Books), there is “something noble and mysterious about writing, about the people who could do it well, who could create a world as if they were little gods or sorcerers.” But whether we write or paint, sew or sketch, what we call ourselves is far less important than honoring – and believing in — our own creativity.

In his landmark bestseller, Care of the Soul (HarperCollins Publishers), Thomas Moore says that art is our birthright. He urges all of us to pull “the arts” down from the pedestal that makes them seem too precious or out of reach. He reminds us that everyone is an artist when his or her work is crafted with soul and passion.

“Art is not found only in the painter’s studio or in the halls of a museum,” Moore writes. “In fact, when art is reserved as the province of professional artists, a dangerous gulf develops between the fine arts and the everyday arts.”

I often remind students in my writing workshops that every art or craft is as much about process as it is about product. It’s not about marketing or publishing or making a name for yourself.  When you’re totally engaged in the act of creating something you love -– whether you’re searching for the perfect word for a sentence or a luminous shade of blue for a watercolor background — you know you’re on the right path.  Meanwhile, removing the pressure to produce a “masterpiece” makes the process even more fun.

These days I head for my art studio whenever I’m blocked or need a creative nudge. And when my life feels like a series of disparate parts that don’t make sense, the paper arts are wonderfully therapeutic. Crafting a collage, like writing an essay, requires that I look at my world in new ways. I hunt for beauty in places I’ve overlooked before: tool boxes; hardware stores; recycle bins. I delve for possibilities in thrift shops and my own junk drawers. Every object is sacred, and even my junk mail is worthy of a second look. Everything has a story waiting to be told – not necessarily in words, but in shape, form, texture, and color.

Am I an artist? Maybe that’s not for me to say. Today, when people ask what I do, I tell them I love making art — and encourage them to do the same. — Cindy La Ferle

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This essay was originally published in Strut for Women, and was a third place winner in Detroit Working Writers 2008 Spring Readings Competition

Tags: Anne Lamott, art, arts and crafts, Bird by Bird, Care of the Soul, creativity, inspiration, soulwork, spirituality, Thomas Moore, writers, writing, writing life
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