CREATIVITY RISING

When I was in grade school, I studied hard. Memorized vocabulary and facts. Turned in assignments on time. Raised my hand in class. Pleased my teachers and my parents. Never missed a day. Colored between the lines. This is what they seemed to want. In their comments in the margins of my report cards, my teachers often wrote, “It is a pleasure to have Barrie in the classroom.”

My cousin Marlynne drew such clever fashion illustrations. My neighbors on either side played piano at impressively advanced levels. I learned my lines for the audition but my third grade classmate Arlene with the shiny hair in tootsie roll curls got the part in the class play. The girl in my ballet class could spin and twirl so gracefully as I watched in awe. My mom was in the temple choir but that did not translate into a voice for me good enough to join the Glee Club.

I could never do any of these things. My peers had talent. In fact, they had superpowers.

But I did keep a little blue notebook and wrote poetry. Rhyming poems, about how the seasons looked when I walked to school. Autumn leaves and spring flowers. Sun, rainbows, and butterflies. Wind, snow, and rain.

As a young girl, I read poetry too, mostly female poets like Emily Dickinson, Sara Teasdale, and Edna St.Vincent Millay. They inspired me with their images of nature and depth of feeling.

One day, in fourth grade, I was asked to bring my little blue notebook to the guidance counselor next to the principal’s office. I have no idea who found out about my book — my teacher, my parents?

She leafed through my book, then instructed me, “Barrie, I’m going to show you some pictures, and you tell me what they look like, okay?” Little nine-year old me was happy to comply. It was another test, and I was good at tests.

The blotches in colorful ink were not especially interesting. I looked for small details and eagerly pointed out arrowheads, nails, jagged rocks, leaves, bugs. Should I have seen rainbows? Clouds? Trees? Animals? Scary masks? 

No one ever mentioned the test to me again. No one said anything good or bad about the results. No one said anything about my poems either. No one asked if I liked poetry, even though I loved the poems of the women writers.  I didn’t fill the notebook and never got another one.

When I was about to celebrate my Bat Mitzvah at age thirteen, the Rabbi gave me a prepared speech to read. I did not think to ask if I could write my own. And why would I? I had no clue that I could be creative in my own right. That was for the artists, the musicians, the actors, the dancers, the gods.

School became more of a serious endeavor as I moved through the grades. I excelled in academics, my refuge. Eventually, I moved on to law school, then into my adult life and a law career, leaving my imagination behind in exchange for the beautiful reality that came together for me.

 📘               📘                📘               📘               📘               📘               

Years later, in 2012, I started to keep a journal at the request of my husband’s neurologist. He asked me to bring it to all appointments to document Paul’s dementia symptoms.

The Written Road to Hell, I called it. I filled up a pile of composition books over the two years of his illness. No stories, no poems, just notes to be helpful to the doctor, as he had insisted. I fulfilled the request with the understanding that it was critically important for medical reasons. 

After two years of my endless record-keeping, my husband died. I ceased to write in the hated journal. My next step in that year like no other — I joined a bereavement group for loss of life partners. The leader asked us to bring a pen and notebook to each session. She gave us a prompt each time — do you have dreams? can you Imagine a conversation with them? how did it happen, the death? did you see anything beautiful today?

I found that I could recreate the uplifting as well as the painful moments — and cry out in words as well as tears. I shared my anguished words with an audience that took them to heart, just as I did for them in return. All of us were transformed in the sharing.

I started my healing journey — mourning my husband, then losing my mother ten months later — in the pages of a loose leaf notebook.

I clutched my book — not the poems for school, the speech for the Rabbi, the journal for the doctor — but the telling of the grief that defined me in the aftermath of my husband’s death. I tore into the pages with everything I had, and created, over time, the voice of the person that I was destined to become.

Van Gogh splashed paint across the blank canvas to build a vivid world in sunlight or starlight. The sculptor sees through to the soul of the stone. The violinist fills a concert hall with rich chords of joy. The actor brings the pain of a broken character into the hearts of the audience. The dancer leaps to great heights to bring alive the force of his emotion for his beloved. 

The poet, surrounded by ordinary contents in a room or a garden, elevates the world, as does the Israeli poet Zelda (1914-1984) in an excerpt from her untitled poem:

Suddenly in my house, the sun 

is a living thing,

and the table with its bread—

gold.

And the flower and the cups—

gold.

And the sadness?

Even there—

radiance.

🔆               🔆               🔆               🔆               🔆               🔆

Yesterday, I attended a gallery event in Boston in which the artists described the creative process that led to the pieces chosen for the exhibit.

The photographers spoke of reframing the scene and choosing their perspective, the vision ultimately determined by their inner eye, not the camera lens.

The digital artist, starting with documentary images of objects in nature, enlarged the moon-like spheres and brought them to the forefront, conforming the “reality” on the screen to the magical vision in her mind’s eye. 

The painter in oils began with her plein air scene, then “edited” in her studio over time to transcend the momentary sighting and transport us to something else, somewhere else, universal.

I felt completely at home with the creative process as explained by these artists. As a creative writer, I begin with a memory, an image: the “shot” — reframing it from the point of view of my character: the “crop” — enlarging the story to encompass a span of time or confining it tightly within an intense hour or in the mind of the narrator: exercising my choice of “perspective.”

I am part of this. I am one of them, seeing, mixing, applying, reframing, hoping to place the light or dark exactly where it belongs.

My dad Julius did something like this too when he ventured as a young man into Warinanco Park with his Rolleiflex camera, changing the glorious or mundane world-at-large into a vision entirely of his own making in the darkroom. Now I look at myself with new eyes too, a beneficiary of the creative outlook my father passed on to me.

I still honor the little girl who tried timidly to express herself but could not sustain it. And I forgive the dutiful thirteen year old who recited the Rabbi’s boring speech and the obedient wife who followed doctor’s orders, keeping her beholden to their authority.

Instead, I claim what was meant to be mine and eventually came true, finding the voice later in life that could just as easily have stayed hidden from the light, forever unknown to me.