Dan Rubinstein /
It’s hard to be creative on deadline. Especially on a Monday morning. The holiday Monday of a long weekend. You’re in the office – alone – ensnared in a staring contest against a blank screen. The screen is winning. You’ve got a lot of work to do, but that triple Americano is long gone and the inspiration isn’t flowing. You check your email again (both accounts); you check the Environment Canada weather site again (forecast hasn’t changed); you check your coffee mug (still empty). You begin to type, tentatively. Then you erase everything. You get up. Get a glass of water. Go to the bathroom. Stretch. Sit down. Adjust your chair. Then you check the forecast again.
We urban Canadians – statistically, that’s what most of us are – live on the cusp of something called the “creative economy.” Writer Sophie Lees defines the term in her essay (“Arrested Development”) about what Alberta needs to do to give its economy a much needed evolutionary shove. She describes the creative economy as a section of the information economy wherein “the exchange of information from one pattern to another,” information that’s “derived from arts and culture,” holds value. One of the best examples of a creative industry is advertising, which “shifts the production of wealth from manufacturing to creativity through brand creation and management.” The ability of creative industries to generate economic growth, diversity, innovation and job creation is now accepted as fact. There’s even a whopping 357-page United Nations report on the subject. This is big-picture economic thinking. It’s a little too heady for a Monday morning.
Yet in a sense, the creative economy boils down to you – or me – sitting in front of our computers, staring at blank screens, attempting to develop ideas that can grow and intermingle into something significant, something tangible, something of value to someone, somewhere. Yes, it can be a very painstaking process. But it’s also kinda simple: that kernel, that seed of beauty, exists within each of us. And fret not: moments of divine inspiration are the exception, not the rule. In the mass majority of cases, for the vast majority of us, creative thought – and the resulting flow of ideas – stems from countless hours of plain old unsung hard work.
Ruth DyckFehderau took a week-long creative leadership course at the Banff Centre on our behalf. The story she wrote (“It’s Loony At The Top”) reads as a how-to guide. DyckFehderau discovered how to encourage innovative thinking both in individuals and within organizations. Among her many observations lies the conclusion that the more often you fail, the sooner you’re likely to succeed. “Spend as much time as possible in the discomfort zone where you’re not the expert, where the experiences are new and where you have to take intelligent risks,” she writes. “Embrace rut-defying wide-spectrum and cross-disciplinary thought. And, since creativity is seldom spontaneous and is usually the result of a ton of effort, practise, practise, practise.”
This issue of unlimited is essentially about creative approaches to work. It’s about the fact that one needn’t do things the same way they’ve always been done, because that leads to stagnation and disengagement and, ultimately, to a lack of passion and productivity. We’ve also tried to raise the bar in this, our first anniversary issue. We’re launching our first reader submission photo contest and are publishing our first mini graphic novel. The subject of this illustrated story, award-winning experimental poet Christian Bök, shows us the limitless possibilities of his work. And after going to the beyond and coming back, he tells us – with astounding clarity – what creativity means to him. “I do not think that creativity arises from any transcendent, metaphysical desire to be expressive or to be liberating,” Bök says in Unlisted, page 80. “Instead, I think that any act of creativity responds to a vexatious, aesthetic shortcoming in the world – a shortcoming that no one else seems to be redressing on our behalf, and consequently we must redress this shortcoming for ourselves.”
Staring at that blank screen today might not lead anywhere, but do it often enough and who knows what secrets you’ll unlock.
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issue7
Category: Articles
