Planting flowers in Hell: poetry, other arts, and the gift and dedication of creativity

My favorite bands are mostly punk bands, the music I listen to most often, are bands like Social Distortion, The Descendents, and Face to Face, and several others.  But when I'm in a creative mood, actually working on creative projects, I listen to this entire concert of the Lilith Fair in 1997.  I've watched and listened to this dozens and dozens of times.  This is one of the best documentaries on creativity I know.  

"Writing's so bizarre.  I think that's why it's so fulfilling.  It's like you're... you're making something out of nothing."

-Shawn Colvin, Lillith Fair, 1997 documentary (above)

To be able to reach into the void, to literally stretch your soul out into that other dimension, and bring out something new, something you think the world needs, to breathe life into it, and set that creative piece on its journey into the physical world, that is the work of an artist.  And that work requires every bit as much dedication as that of a doctor, or a soldier, to do it well, and do it consistently.  An artist, a poet of life, may not fight battles with guns, but we are always fighting battles. 

While in North Carolina, three years ago, living in a tent in the woods, and drawing my Sharpie art day after day, fighting the darkness of the deep shadows of the worst aspects of Old Southern Culture, it seemed like I was planting flowers in Hell.  I wondered if it was all worthwhile many times, like when I was hunkered down, under a tarp, inside my tent, as a Carolina thunderstorm raged around me, thinking about drawing at the library the next day.  One day I realized, if you plant enough flowers in Hell, it doesn't feel like Hell anymore.  That is our work as artists. 

To keep trying, keep creating, to build our technical skills, and learn our own creative process, to bring new things, new creative works, new ideas, into the world.  That is our job.  If you dedicate yourself to that over the long term, you eventually build up the drive to keep going no matter what forces of the evil parts of the everyday human world throw at you, or our own fears and personal demons we may be wrestling with. 

 That is our job.  We light matches in the darkness and create new lights to share and pass around and light new paths.  To do that, we must be sensitive to the creative sparks and the nuances, but also build a toughness to break past the doubters and haters.  At this point, if you put me in front of a firing squad, condemned to die a moment later by the executioners' guns, I'd write a haiku on the spot and recite it, as my last work in this world.  

You pull the trigger

Sending lead death to end me

A poem comes, I win

Sometimes it takes that level of dogged dedication to be an artist.  History would forget the names of the firing squad members, and the leader who told them to shoot.  But that poem, that haiku would be written down and remembered, I guarantee it.  

Yes, sometimes it takes that level of dedication to your creative work to be an artist.  Most of the time it does not, thankfully.  But there is a dedication to being a poet, a painter, a sculptor, a songwriter, a musician, a dancer, a content creator, a director, a producer, an inventor, a graphic designer, whatever.  You may not face the firing squad for your creative work, but you face days of creating crap, you face your insecurities, your personal bad habits, your doubts, your mom's doubts, your dad's doubts, everybody's doubts.  You face moments, even days, where it doesn't seem to be working.  

And then... that spark comes, from somewhere.  That next right idea that you need to create.  But the spark is the just that, the spark, it is not the poem, the song, the play, the finished work.  Then comes the dedication that you've built over time, the work to take that creative spark and form it with your technical skills, into the piece of art to share with others.  

Some pieces of art may be instant hits, going viral in your genre' to be admired and to inspire many people in a short amount of time.  Other pieces may not receive much initial excitement at all.  They may sit out there in the world, seemingly unnoticed, for months or years.  But in that time, in their place, those pieces inspire one person here, and another there.  And years later someone thanks you for creating that piece or work you'd long forgotten about.  It did have a purpose, it was needed in the world at the time you created it.  Maybe that "failure" ultimately inspired entire new people and new ideas while you went on, busy elsewhere.  You never know.  

There is a reason we are driven to create something.  Sometimes it's just for our own survival.  Sometimes we just need to get out of our everyday mindset and goof around, and make something to keep our own spirits up.  Sometimes we create a gift for someone dear to us, to help them through a dark time.  Sometimes we create a piece of art that speaks to many, many people.  Sometimes we may create something that seems like no big deal at the time, but it sparks a whole new genre' of creativity in other people.  Sometimes we may create a work that speaks to our times, and helps drive a major, needed,  a change in society itself.  

We never know, as artists what effect a certain piece will have.  Our job is to actually live life, and to learn and grow as artists, to dedicate ourselves to doing the best work we can, as we journey through life.  Our job is to learn our own creative process, to follow our our weird path, to build our technical skills, and to drop everything and create that next piece of work when the spark hits us.  

The world of humans needs our work, even if it may not seem like it at the time.  The world needs us, as artists, no many how many mean and seemingly evil people (most of whom are blocked artists themselves) may try to destroy us.  The world needs new creative pieces of work, new ideas, of all kinds, constantly.  The world needs you to create.  Do your best to hold up your end of the bargain.  Keep creating.

Become

You must risk

If you're to succeed

From when we grow

Sometimes we bleed

Each must climb

Over the fence

For the only cage

Is ignorance

Each Jedi Knight

And Shaolin monk

Evolved from

A lowly punk

Don't get caught

In the world's throws

We must become

Our own heroes

 

-The White Bear 

(aka me, Steve Emig)

A couple of memes I made a while back, on the idea of creativity...

 

Writing life: Weddington Park- the place where I found the flow in prose writing

 A jogger on the path in South Weddington Park, right below Universal Studios in Studio City, CA.  In 1991, nearly every morning for a few months, I would sit below the trees on the left and write whatever came to mind. That's when I really got going in the writing life.

When I got hired at BMX Action and FREESTYLIN' magazines in 1986, I didn't think of myself as a writer, as weird as that sounds.  Many writers struggle for years, desperately wanting to "be a writer," usually meaning getting paid by a "real" publication to write something.  I got the magazine job, working at Wizard Publications, thanks to a BMX freestyle zine I self-published for a year in San Jose.  I started the zine as an excuse to meet the pro riders of the Bay Area in 1985, guys like Dave Vanderspek, Maurice Meyer*, and Robert Peterson, and kept doing it because I liked shooting photos.  I didn't think of publishing a zine as "writing," and a writer wasn't a cool thing to be when I grew up.  I was more into being a "rider," trying to become a pro freestyler at the time.  

But shooting photos of the NorCal crew was fun, so I kept publishing my zine.  I started with a Kodak 110 Instamatic camera, and a 1940's era, Royal, manual typewriter.  I may have lived five miles from the then young Apple Computers HQ then, but I was light years away in publishing tech.  I did move up to a 35 mm camera during that year of zine publishing, though, getting a Pentax ME Super.  Just enough so I never had to learn to work a light meter.

Out of nowhere came an offer to write a freelance article for FREESTYLIN', and a month after that first article was published, I was on staff there.  I was an editorial assistant, running errands for everyone, putting together BMX bikes to be tested, driving Windy, the photographer, to photo shoots, and proofreading both magazines.  Yes, at 20 years old, with only a diploma from Boise High School, and no college experience whatsoever, I was responsible for checking every word in two national magazines.  I stepped up my game, and did a pretty good job.  I even wrote a few articles.  But I didn't totally click with the other guys, and got laid off a few months later.  A couple months later they hired some BMX/skater kid from the east coast to replace me, a 17 or 18-year-old named Spike Jonze.  Whatever happened to him? Hheh, heh, heh, we had no idea then he'd become a media superhero.

I went on to edit and shoot photos for the American Freestyle Association newsletter for a year, got into video work, and landed at Unreel Productions.  Unreel was the video company owned by Vision skateboards and Vision Street Wear in the late 1980's, one of the "Big 5" skateboard companies then.  But the skating and BMX boom dropped off in 1989, and I stumbled into TV production, and wound up in North Hollywood, working second shift at a video duplicator, in 1991.  

I worked alone, making dozens of copies of random videos, like promo videos for automatic bowling lane sweepers, 4-hour videos explaining the different strains of corn to farmers, and boating navigation videos.  After leaving work at 1:30 am, I'd ride my bike back to the flop house where I rented a bed (not a room, the lower bunk bed) for $40 a week.  The place was cheap, close to work, and had about 12 roommates at any given time, several with prison records.  It was a decent place to sleep, but not so great a place to hang out all day.  

By that time, I was thinking of myself as a writer.  I just wasn't sure what I wanted to write, or how to get back to making money writing again.  The trick, it seemed, was trying to find out a way to get paid to write what I wanted to write.  So five years after being a paid magazine writer, then a newsletter writer, I was working on trying to "be a writer."  I did things backwards.

I was also a hardcore BMX freestyler, not a great one, but decent.  So I woke up late, and took off on my bike every morning, and rode around North Hollywood, Burbank, Studio City, and Toluca Lake, looking for cool stuff to ride.  I'd throw my spiral pad in my backpack, and sit down and write a while at a McDonald's or Carl's Jr..  

Within a week or two of my bike exploring, I found this quiet little park, just off Lankershim, right below Universal Studios.  Officially called South Weddington Park, there was a small hill on one end, with several medium sized trees.  I began to sit under one of those trees, day after day, and just write whatever came to mind.  I was 25 years old, didn't have a girlfriend, had about $7,000 credit card debt from a BMX video I self-produced the year before, and didn't have any friends up in the valley, except one co-worker.  So I was often depressed about the debt, bummed at life in general, and wandered on my bike alone exploring and street riding. With those themes in my life, I began to write what I hoped would be a really cool novel... or something.  It turned into more of a journal.  

While working at the newsletter in 1987, I dated a woman working there who was a singer in a local rock band, and wrote her own songs.  She's the one that kept telling me I was a writer, and finally got me to sort of, kind of, believe it.  I started trying to write song lyrics for her, hoping to write her a hit song, so we could both blow up and be rich and famous.  Instead, she slept with my best friend, I eventually found out, and she dumped me.   Yeah, I was pathetic, didn't dump her.  Anyhow, I wrote a poem that night called "Journey of the White Bear," where I was the white bear, the naive young guy. She was the "black leopard," a metaphor, since she was older, much wilder, a rocker and party girl, and had been around the block more than a few times.  It was the best poem I'd written.  After she dumped me, I realized that since I wasn't a musician, my "song lyrics" were actually poems, and I'd written a couple hundred of them by then.  I didn't show then to anyone until years later, they were notebooks hidden in a box in my closet.

So after writing hundred of sappy love poems, depressed loser guy poems, and some "what is life all about?" poems, I started writing in the mornings in Weddington Park.  I wrote A TON of crap there.  But every once in a while, I'd hit some idea, and the words would just burst out of me, as fast as I could write them.  My poetry writing had already turned like that, where I'd think about an idea for a poem for a few days, maybe a few weeks, and suddenly, it just started coming.  I'd learned from my poetry that I had to sit down, right then, at that moment, and write the poem.  If I didn't, the idea was lost.  

But at Weddington Park, I was consciously trying to write some kind of story, fiction, prose.  And I'd wander off into writing about random stuff, just journaling, much of the time.  But I kept writing.  And more and more, some cool idea would pop up out of nowhere, and I'd get a page or two, maybe three, of good writing.  I didn't know it then, but I was beginning to learn my own personal creative process as a writer.  

My notebooks from Weddington Park were lost in a storage auction, or maybe in a move, at some point.  I moved around a lot in the recession years of the early 1990's.  All that writing was lost.  But a few of those cool ideas stuck with me, and made it into my zines during that era.  More than anything, at Weddington Park, I learned to just keep writing, grind it out, and roll with the good ideas, the good pieces, when they seemed to appear out of nowhere. That was where I first started putting time in as a writer.

In my first poetry zine, self-published in late 1992, I wrote a line on the inside cover that came from my Weddington writings.  "These are not my words or ideas, I'm just the faucet the water flows through."  The best ideas, the best pieces of writing, seemed to simply flow through me, from some other source.  No, not ancient fucking aliens, but either from my sub-conscience, or some deeper mystical source, the universal consciousness, or whatever.  I later learned many writers, probably most serious writers, have similar experiences.  But that was new to me in those mornings at Weddington Park, now almost 30 years ago.  

Although the Universal Red Line train and bus station is now right next to (and under) Weddington Park, the park is very much like it was in 1991.  It's a quiet neighborhood park.  A few homeless people (not me) camp by it now.  It's a bit more fixed up, and there's a walk/jog trail around it.  Although I gravitated to this same area when looking for a place to land in 2019,  I rarely go there now.  But it's still a cool place to chill a while, play fetch with your dog, or to sit under a tree and write.  

 * I'm in the Maurice Meyer clip, at 5:07.