A Horoscope in Perfect Harmony with My Task List
Focus on creativity, be inventive, and keep moving until you finish what you started.
February 3, 2021 (Writing Day for this Post)
Creativity and its Squishers
The banner image above represents a person whose mind is exploding with creativity.
If this image makes you worry about the neurological health of this man, you can put that worry to rest. When creativity bursts from a person’s mind, this is actually a manifestation of robust neurological health.
Whatever profession or occupation you are in, you have very good reason to see this fellow as an inspirational role model. Long before the pandemic, disorienting change had rattled nearly every line of work. While some customs, traditions, and conventional practices needed only tinkering to adapt to a rapidly shifting world, many other enterprises called out for the searching transformations that only creativity can bring into being.
But here’s the problem: while there is every good reason for a massive unleashing of creativity, the training program for many professions and occupation comes with a creativity-squishing step in the chain of production.
Imagine an apprentice in a training program working away, following instructions, accepting guidance and acquiring the required skills, many of which will prove to be quite useful. And then, in an unguarded moment, the apprentice comes to a halt and thinks, “I wonder if there is another way—maybe even a better way—to do this?”
At this moment, the apprentice is starting to resemble the man in the banner above, with an explosion of creativity just beginning to ignite.
But the training process grinds on, the moment of incipient creativity passes, and without quite realizing what has happened, the apprentice has absorbed the lesson: “Maybe there is another way—and maybe even a better way—to do this. But I had better get back to work.”
Maybe creativity will try to make a post-squishing return visit sometime in the future.
But maybe not.
Italicizing as Event Promotion
Why, the font-sensitive will have begun to wonder, am I italicizing the word creativity every time I use it?
Because I want you to have a good time at noon, Mountain Time, on Wednesday February 10, when the Center of the American West will exalt, sanctify, lionize, glorify, and generally liberate creativity from the restraints imposed by the creativity-squishing process lamented above.
Here’s the origin story that brought this opportunity for a good time into being.
In 1998, Matthew Frye Jacobson published a book called Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race. Anyone who reads this book can never again be a complacent and casual user of the word “white.” Speaking for many of my fellow American historians, I will say that reading Matt Jacobson’s book forced us to surrender anything we had left in the way of a simple understanding of race as a definer of human identity. This liberation occurred for us because the author of Whiteness of a Different Color took nothing for granted in the conventional intellectual apparatus that had confined many other studies of American history to the domain of the familiar, predictable, and routine.
Plus, the author of Whiteness of a Different Color wrote so that we could understand him, and he just said ‘No’ to any and every temptation to adopt the ponderous and pompous form of academic prose.
A few years later, the “small world” theme came into play.
I had gotten to know Dr. Jerry Jacobson, a longtime practitioner of psychiatry in Boulder. (Full disclosure: I got to know Jerry through a mutual friend, and not through his professional services, though I’m sure that I—and my second marriage!—would have benefited from them.) After we got acquainted, it occurred to Jerry that I would probably like to visit with his son Matt, who was by then the William Robertson Coe Professor at Yale University, when he was in town.
Jerry had that right.
And then, a few years later, Matt started on a book about creativity in the writing of history. As he pointed out, the training of aspiring historians cultivates many valuable skills: how to search for, select, and define a research topic; how to locate relevant primary sources; how to design a set of questions that will make the most of those sources; how to appraise the credibility of evidence and how to deal with the conflicting perspectives that shaped that evidence; how to situate this research in the bigger picture of related studies written by other historians; how to arrange the research findings into a coherent whole; and how to frame an argument or assertion to convey the contribution that the study has made to the understanding of history.
And the word creativity never got invited into the discussion. So Matt spent quality time with his bookcases, scouting for the history books that stood out for their vitality, originality, and innovation—that is to say, the books that were sent into the world with a distinctive quality of creativity. And then he started in, interviewing the authors of those books.
Since Matt has a very busy life, you will have to hold off on your plan to buy the book in which he harvests the stories and insights that the interviews brought forth. But you can, in the meantime, join Matt Jacobson and me as we launch into our Zoom interview series: Historians Imagine: Celebrating Creativity in The Craft
For our first program, we’ll be joined by Ari Kelman, Professor of History at the University of California at Davis, who also taught for years at the University of Denver. Here are the books that made Ari Kelman a “must-have” participant in our series:
- A River and Its City: The Nature of Landscape in New Orleans (originally published in 2003, and then reissued in 2006 with a valuable preface reckoning with the devastation of Hurricane Katrina)
- A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek (published in 2013, and winner of the prestigious Bancroft Award)
- Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War (published in 2015, and presenting this very serious history in the format of “a novel graphic,” in collaboration with the illustrator Jonathan Fetter-Vorm)
Ari Kelman, along with all the historians who will be joining Matt Jacobson and me for the once-a-month sessions of Historians Imagine, mastered all the essential skills of the historian’s craft, and then gracefully integrated creativity into each one of those skills.
A Historian’s Tale, Unrestrained by Privacy Considerations, of Liberation through Creativity
And now, at the risk—well, actually, with the certainty—of immodesty, I will disclose a flattering fact: I am one of the historians who Matt Jacobson has interviewed for his book on creativity in the writing of history. And, since I am free to violate my own privacy and to disclose anything I want to reveal about my own history, I can dodge all the forms to secure permission to ask questions of a human subject, and just volunteer myself as a case study.
I start with a full affirmation of Matt Jacobson’s observation that people in our profession rarely refer to creativity when we talk about our practices. Until Matt interviewed me, I had never used the word creativity in any discussion of my conduct in the writing of history.
Why have we shunned the very word?
Here’s my best guess: we fear that if historians said we were creative, we would be instantly misunderstood as having said that we make things up, even if then we pretend that we are writing nonfiction and conveying the truth.
To put this in stark terms, we could not call ourselves creative because that could lead to being mistaken for writers of fiction, conjuring up our stories with license and abandon.
Why did this prospect for being misunderstood scare us out of using the word creativity?
Because we rest our credibility and our achievement on truth. We are moored to truth. We are anchored to truth. We are tethered to truth.
We are the stewards of truth.
And yet, however hard we work, we can only approximate truth.
The reasons for this incomplete arrival at certainty are unending.
Records of the past are patchy and incomplete, and historians are often left adrift with our questions and honest guesses, when the records go silent. Moreover, people of the past did not take oaths to “tell the truth, and nothing but the truth” when they wrote diaries, journals, letters or, for that matter, official reports or legal briefs. Most important, when we try to figure out exactly who they were and how their minds worked, the people of the past elude us just as successfully as the people of the present, who mystify us on a daily basis.
And yet, even though we can rarely make a claim of having penetrated the mysteries and uncertainties that run like fault lines through our historical legacy, historians are still obligated—actually, privileged—to stick with our always-a-little-rattled relationship to the truth.
(And, at this point, some readers are sure to be saying, “Didn’t you folks have a bout with post-modernism and the assertion that truth was purely a social and cultural construction?” Well, yes, a number of our comrades had quite a heyday of casting truth as lost in relativism. But most of us just kept plodding along, steering by the necessity of distinguishing accurate statements from inaccurate statements, and trying to push our approximation of the truth just an inch or two closer to glimpses of the reality of the past.)
But here’s where I make a shift to my own story.
Long before I went to college, I dreamed of becoming a writer. Though they obsessed me, these dreams did not even hint at what I would write about.
And so a writing instructor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, had to cope with a misfortune in enrollment, and I appeared in this poor soul’s fiction-writing class.
Fiction? Well, OK, why wouldn’t the 19-year-old Patty Nelson give fiction-writing a try?
Because the 19-year-old Patty Nelson was absolutely terrible at it.
When I made up a character, that character was in for a very rough ride. If this character was my creation, then he was stuck doing whatever I wanted. If he was happy walking down a sidewalk on his feet, and he had absolutely no desire to surprise the other characters by walking on his hands, he was my character and I was his author and he would just turn upside down and walk on his hands, whether this was his idea of a good time or not.
This produced some perfectly dreadful fiction.
My fiction-writing instructor could not encourage his terrible student without entirely compromising his integrity.
So there I was, only 19 years old, and fully aware that my days as a writer of fiction were numbered, starting at zero and heading into the minuses. But it took a while for me to realize what had gone wrong with me and the creativity of fiction.
With fiction, I was completely untethered. I owed nothing to the characters I created, and they had no defense against my impulses and whims.
If my dreams of becoming a writer were going to go anywhere, I needed to be tethered to truth. I needed to know that I held an inescapable responsibility to my relationship to human beings who once lived. I had to be, in some almost theological way, accountable to those people.
If I were writing about historical figures, and an impulse came over me and I wanted one of them to walk down the street on her hands, I would drop that impulse. I would feel that all the planet’s departed were about to rise in solidarity with the individual I had tried to target with this indignity, and they would unite in saying to me, “Just cut that out.”
So that’s how I ended up in the field of history, where creativity was tempered by the demands of fact.
We’ll return later to my first book, but we’ll start with my second book, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West, since that is the book that bought me my ticket for inclusion in Matt Jacobson’s interviews on creativity.
In 1979, when I went for my interviews for academic jobs, I learned that Western American history was recognized as a “backwater” of a field. And yet recognizing that I had chosen a field that was in low repute was as stimulating as it was depressing.
The more that I was told that I had chosen a dying field, the more I wanted to say to those doomsayers: “Cut that out.”
To stand up to the multitude of American historians who were holding memorial services and writing obituaries for the field of Western American history, I took an action that I would now call creative, though I did not call it that until Matt Jacobson brought that term into my reach.
I wrote a book proposal, and I had the good fortune to present that proposal to Ed Barber, an editor at the New York trade publishing house, W. W. Norton (and I am as grateful today to Ed Barber as I was in 1981, when he said “yes” to my plan).
I wanted to write this to demonstrate the importance and the vitality of the field of Western American history and to invite Westerners into a deeper, more realistic understanding of their region’s past. I felt that this book was so urgently needed that the utter wackiness—of a historian who had just gotten a PhD, leaping in to write a book intended to reorient a whole field of study—doesn’t seem to have occurred to me.
This brings us back to the role of creativity in the writing of history.
Here is an under-recognized reality: anyone who writes a book proposal for a book that has not been written has become a creative writer. You haven’t written the darned thing, but you are creating for yourself and the proposal’s reviewers a fictional future that you can only hope will exist. And, in a pattern that I think may be true for most books that turn out to be worth reading, the book that actually gets written will bear only a remote relationship to the plan created for the proposal. Thus, the book proposal I presented to Ed Barber was a venture in extremely creative writing!
Then, for a year or two, creativity was put on hold. I read and read and read, absorbing as much as I could from an abundance of books and articles that offered specialized studies of the American West. Compiled in my notes, the research presented in these books and articles formed a critical mass that I could use to prove that, contrary to the many obituaries for the field, Western American history was actually thriving.
But there was also a big problem on my horizon: the findings recorded in these books and articles were disparate, splintered, and fragmented.
To make the case for the revitalization of the field of Western American history, someone had to make those fragments into a whole.
In July of 1984, sitting on the floor of an empty room in my rented first home in Boulder, I turned out to be the “someone” who had to persuade those fragments to become a whole.
This demanded creativity, and it also demanded a resistance to despair.
I started that July day with the sensation that the weight of the West, if not of the world, had landed on me.
I confronted a vast number of slips of paper on which I had written ideas, insights, and themes. Other slips of paper had a few words that referred to stories that were yearning to be recognized as parables, or a few words to trigger the memory of quotations that deserved to be pondered.
So this was the second stage of creativity: I had created utter chaos with innumerable pieces of paper distributed across the floor of a pretty big room.
Thank heavens, the third stage of creativity arrived fast.
I spent the day crawling around on the floor, putting pieces of paper into stacks and christening those stacks as “chapters.” I created the order that became a book out of what a stiff breeze from an open window would have reconstituted as a swirl of scrap paper ready for recycling.
On that day, creativity drove a process of juxtaposing and connecting, taking this concatenation of ideas, insights, themes, stories, and quotations, harvested from several years of intense reading. By the end of the day, they had agreed to come together into a plan for telling the world that Western American history was a field of such significance and vitality that anyone who tried to dismiss or disparage it would just look silly.
I have no idea where I got the confidence that I could put all those pieces together. But because Matt Jacobson has now installed the word “creativity” into my understanding of the historian’s craft, I know how I made it through that day: I found creative joy in introducing those fragments from the Western American past to each other.
And then, alas, came writing the darned thing, turning the connections and juxtapositions I had assembled into a written product.
Multiple, smaller episodes of creativity kept saving me. Here is the three-step process that kept coming to my rescue:
Step One: An unorthodox way of writing what I hoped to convey to readers would zoom (in the old sense!) into my mind.
Step Two: I would say to myself, “I don’t think I’m supposed to do that.”
Step Three: I would think a little longer, and then I would reach one of two conclusions: a) the unorthodox approach I was contemplating would actually violate the historians’ rules for the careful use of evidence and for maintaining credibility, OR b) the innovation complied with those rules, and I could use it with exuberance.
I bet an example would help.
Early in the book, I made a big deal about Narcissa Whitman, the Presbyterian missionary who traveled to the Pacific Northwest in the 1830s with her husband Marcus Whitman. I believed (and still believe) that Narcissa Whitman’s thoughts and actions encapsulated a vision, common among white settlers in the West, of their own innocence. The lives of the Whitmans ended in the uprising of the Cayuse Indians in 1847, who had never asked for missionaries and who had understandable reasons to reject their presence (yes, that is my 2021 evasive euphemism for “understandable reasons to kill them”).
So how to convey that Narcissa Whitman had once been fully alive, as alive as we are today, and that she once stood—unable to know the future—on the cliff-edge of the present, just as we do today?
Well, I could talk to her.
That was Step One in the mobilization of creativity.
Step Two followed fast after Step One: “No, I am not supposed to do that, and I will get in trouble if I persist with this. None of my professors ever said I could speak to dead people when I was writing a serious history book. I had better drop this idea, and drop it fast.”
But Step Three produced a reversal.
In college and graduate school, no one had ever told me that I could not write passages where I tried to speak directly to the dead. Of course, no one had ever told me this because no one had ever imagined I would do such a thing!
Still, I was not defying any prohibition, and I was not engaging in a spiritual séance where I thought I was going to be in Narcissa Whitman’s company. I was just trying to convey that she had once been fully alive, and unable to know her future.
Here is the passage, forever on public record on page 41 of Legacy of Conquest. I would have called this weird but, thanks to Matt Jacobson, I would now call it creative:
“Watch out, Narcissa,” one finds oneself thinking, 140 years too late, “you think you are doing good works, but you are getting yourself—and others—into deep trouble.” Given the inability of Cayuses to understand Presbyterians, and the inability of Presbyterians to understand Cayuses, the trouble could only escalate. Narcissa Whitman would not have imagined that there was anything to understand: where the Cayuse had religion, social networks, a thriving trade in horses, and a full culture, Whitman would have seen vacancy or, worse, heathenism.
To the best of my knowledge, I remain the only historian who has taken up this custom of striking up a one-way conversation with the dead (and yes, I am incorrigible, and I have used it a time or two since 1987).
But now I am forced to call attention to the injury I inflicted on my relationship to truth on page 236. This example gives me the opportunity to make the clearest possible distinction between the practice of creativity, and the practice of pure error and carelessness.
I do know how this misfortune happened. Throughout The Legacy of Conquest, I was trying to make the case for recognizing the significance of the trans-Mississippi West, and this case had to rest on truth. So it was very important to me to note, forcefully, that it was essential to correct the way conventional histories of the colonization of North America focused on the Atlantic Coast. We had to pay attention to the fact that Spanish colonization in the southwestern part of North America deserved a great deal more attention than it was getting in the 1980s.
That led to the misfortune on page 236.
A photograph of Santa Fe in the late 19th century appears on that page, and it needed a caption. My writing of captions occurred very late in the game, and apparently in a witless rush.
So here it is, my major flub: “Santa Fe in the late nineteenth century, center of the longest-lasting Hispanic settlement in the United States.”
This statement is very weird. What could I have meant by saying that Santa Fe, when it was settled in 1609, was “in the United States”? Moreover, given that the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 drove the Spanish out of New Mexico, what could I have meant by “longest-lasting Hispanic settlement”?
And then there’s the really big problem presented by the founding of St. Augustine in 1565.
If you ever run into anyone who has written a history book and thinks it would be a good idea to get my help in writing captions for that book, tell that person to drop that idea instantly.
Oops.
Sorry, St. Augustine. If you’d like an apology in person, once I return to traveling in a post-pandemic world, tell me when I should show up, and I’ll finally present that apology.
And here’s the point: creativity is a world apart from just stupid inaccuracy.
But this brings us to one more zone where creativity comes into its own as a feature of the historical craft.
When a book comes out, its deficiencies are on display. When the author’s failings are pointed out, that author has one more chance at an exhilarating form of creativity: welcoming the critics, recognizing the accuracy of their commentary, and refusing even a twitch or twinge of defensiveness or denial.
The late David Weber, eminent historian of the Spanish borderlands, was the first to earn my gratitude by pointing out my misstep with St. Augustine.
The noted historian of the urban West, John Findlay, called attention to the fact that I said barely a word, in The Legacy of Conquest, about the importance of cities in the region. In a habit of thought I never noticed until John pointed it out, I slid into an endorsement of the notion that the rural West was the real West, and the cities were just spores of Easternness, plunked down in a disconnected way on the Western landscape. (Yes, this notion still holds currency in some Western communities, but it does not hold up well as a historical proposition.)
I would be happy to continue with more statements of gratitude to historians who noted where I stumbled in writing Legacy. But it is time to re-emphasize the point: the publication of a history book inaugurates a lasting phase of creativity, as other scholars—best of all, younger scholars—read the book and say to themselves, “I wonder why she never brought up the important subject of x or y?”
In very recent times, I have received the gift of one of the most enjoyable experiences ever in this line of creativity.
My first book, Desert Passages: Encounters with the American Deserts, came out in 1985. Thirty-five years later, a gifted young historian, C. J. Alvarez at the University of Texas at Austin, got in touch with me. C. J. is working on a book on the Chihuahuan Desert, an area he has known well since childhood. Reading my now venerable book, he noticed that I had written exclusively about people who came from elsewhere, who had strong responses to the Western deserts they encountered, and who therefore wrote about deserts as places that seemed comparatively empty and even hostile to human presence.
C. J.’s study of the residents of the Chihuahuan Desert led him to tell a very different set of stories than ones I told in Desert Passages.
People who have lived in the Chihuanhuan Desert over the long haul, C. J. has noted, have rarely used the word “desert” because they have been more likely to use the word “home.” The arid landscapes that seemed alien and strange to the people I had written about in 1985 had come to feel familiar and normal to the people who saw them every day. The thought, “What strange places deserts are!” works a lot better in the minds of people who inhabited greener, wetter places in their formative years.
Hearing from C. J. and following his work thus represents one of the most enjoyable encounters with creativity in the historian’s craft. My role is simply to accept and celebrate the challenge that the young scholar has made to what I wrote in 1985. And then, in this next round of creativity, C. J. does all the work!
The pursuit of truth, with the unavoidable limits of approximation, goes on.
Why does this matter?
Truth in Trouble:
Using Creativity to Restore Trust in Truth, Fact, and Accuracy
And now we move on to why this series matters—certainly to historians and to anyone who likes reading about history, but also to the millions of Americans who are doing their best to navigate through a very confusing era.
In 2021, there is little agreement on what constitutes truth, accuracy, and fact.
In making that statement, I join a vast chorus of writers who have called attention to the precarious standing of truth and then hit a wall in answering the question: what can anyone do to rescue truth?
Do we have anything that could provide a treatment that might improve the prognosis for truth, accuracy, and fact?
Actually, we do.
We have creativity.
Current customs of fact-checking do not work to persuade dissenters to agree on truth. Earnestly debunking deeply held misapprehensions does not work to convince people to reconfigure their beliefs. Debunking and fact-checking do a lot more to produce self-esteem in the debunkers and fact-checkers than to increase the civic standing of accuracy.
Unleash creativity on our stale and ineffective practices of fact-checking and debunking, and the result might well be better ways to perform those practices. Or the result could be entirely new methods and techniques for inviting people to reconsider assumptions and beliefs that are now at odds with fact and accuracy.
To deal with all of our current dilemmas, the nation needs an abundance of creative ways to give new power to truth, while honestly noting uncertainty and keeping a firm grip on humility.
Historians are well-positioned to contribute to this cause. We live and work under the terms of a negotiated contract: we can never cut our ties to truth, but we can vary the ways we present it. Creativity gives historians a long leash, even as our loyalty to truth rightly and necessarily restrains us. Every time that my fellow historians unleash their creativity in order to convey the full vitality and complexity of the people of the past, they act on a commitment that reduces the forces of despair and fatalism.
And if that statement struck you as over-optimistic, get braced for this next one.
Unleash and apply creativity, and every profession and occupation will be revealed as capable of contributing to this cause.
So how about a friendly competition?
Why not have everyone ponder the question, “How could people in my line of work unleash creativity in the cause of mobilizing our skills to create a foundation for a shared understanding of and respect for truth?”
Come on board, everyone!
Don’t let the historians get ahead of you!
The harder we compete against each other, the more likely it becomes that we will all emerge winners!
Ready, set, go!
And for a chance to contemplate creativity in action in the world of historians, please join Ari Kelman, Matt Jacobson, and me at noon on Wednesday, February 10, for the first event in the series, Historians Imagine: Celebrating Creativity in The Craft.
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