This was probably my most productive decade for creative stuff because it’s the last decade I wasn’t in academia (well, half the decade). It is a sad truth that there is only so much Creativity Juice in any one person, and even though it doesn’t seem like it, teaching freshmen how to write, reading theory, doing archival research, and writing academic books all tap the Juice. So, as much as you’d like to think you’re going to write that novel when the workday is over as an academic, you’re much more likely to end up watching something stupid from Blockbuster because you’re just out of Juice.
It’s not that I stopped doing creative stuff after I entered grad school, but it increasingly shifted toward hands-on activities like climbing, fishing, cooking, sewing, crafting, and home remodeling–things that didn’t use the analytical part of my brain that was tapped out by work. Interestingly, I did almost none of those activities before grad school: I spent all my free time writing, pretty much. It’s interesting to observe how creative impulses shift around and bubble up differently over time–like groundwater or oil. At any rate, without further ado, The Roaring Twenties:
Music
I wrote a lot of music in the early part of my 20s because I (a) took a couple of music theory courses in college to try to figure out what the heck I had been doing the last 15 years; and (b) I dated a pop songwriter. The sad part is I recorded almost none of what I wrote this decade. I’m going to try and find my final project for Music Theory II and post a recording of it: it was a setting of part of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and it garnered me the only compliment I got from my theory teacher that semester (he generally wrote things like “BORING SOPRANO LINE” on my weekly counterpoint homework). But in the meantime, I recorded part of another song I wrote this decade using my new little Tascam recorder. It’s called “Desert Town,” and it’s the only country song I ever wrote. I didn’t sing for this snippet, but the lyrics are as melodramatic as you would expect for the genre.
The postcard that you sent me was of a burning sandstone mesa
With the sky behind it all up in flame
But the line, “Wish you were here” was just a lie to steer me clear
I could read it in the way you signed your nameI have wandered in the streets of this desert town looking for you
I have found nothing but moonlight
The neon glow says there’s no way to go but down
On the streets of this desert town
Once I learn to use GarageBand better, I might try to upload the whole song with guitar parts and everything. I still like it; it’s the song I play most often when I sit down at the piano.
Story
Hoo, boy, there’s a lot to choose from here because I wrote my magnum opus, The Unbranded, this decade as well as a half dozen shorter novels and novellas. Plus, my senior undergrad thesis was a collection of short stories. But, I think if I have to choose one piece to represent the decade, it has to be “The Gargoyle.” I wrote it after my first year in college, and it won the Ebey Novella Prize for my school and then the 1992 Nick Adams Story Prize for the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (even though honestly a lot of it makes me cringe when I go back and read it now, but isn’t that always the case?). It’s about a writer who finds out she has a growth in one of the language centers of her brain and grapples with whether or not to get surgery given that the outcome could be aphasia. I wrote it after a friend of mine got a benign tumor removed, and I started thinking about what would happen if cancer took not your life but the most important thing about yourself. The eerie thing is–the night I called my parents to tell them I’d won the Ebey prize, they told me my father had just been diagnosed with the brain tumor that would end his life six months later. I’ve always been amazed at how God foreshadows things that are coming my way: He doesn’t just drop hints, He actually prepares me for things before they happen. I don’t know if it makes things easier or not, but it’s what He does.
Art/Poetry
I didn’t do a lot of visual art this decade. I did start teaching myself watercolors, and I started doing poetry more seriously. This is an illustrated volume of Psalms I put together for my friends the Delaneys in 2001 from poems I had been writing over the course of the decade. NB: the file is kind of massive (13MB) b/c it’s a color scan of the original book.
The Rookery 