Manifesto of a Miscellaneous Creative
I was 4 when I wrote my first story.
It was 8 pages long, and it was about a herd of unicorns who were chased by a hunter, so they ran away to Canada.
I was 5 when I got my first camera.
It was red, with handles on the sides so I could hold onto it, and it came in a box wrapped in shiny purple paper.
I was 7 when I wrote my first poem, and I was 8 when I started to keep my first “official” journal.
When I was 9, my family was living on a sailboat in Central America, where we visited several Maya ruins. I was inspired, and built a cardboard model of the capital-I-shaped ball courts we saw at many of the ruins.
When I was 10, we spent the winter in Norfolk, VA. I spent days measuring the size and angle of everything inside our boat to draw a to-scale plan of the whole interior.
My life has been marked by the things I make. As an adult, my apartment is decorated with photos I’ve taken, a slumped-glass bowl I made at a glass studio in Nova Scotia, a glazed ceramic vase I threw on a pottery wheel, a small mola I made after visiting the San Blas Islands in Panama, a pillow and blanket I sewed and quilted by hand in middle school, abstract pen-and-ink drawings that I made as a way to keep my hands busy during meetings, and various hand lettering pieces that fall somewhere between “medieval monk” and “art deco.” I’ve never wanted to confine myself to one medium, and I hoard art supplies and notebooks like my life depends on it (open the office/studio closet at your own peril…).
This isn’t meant to be a boast about my own creativity or skills. I can do a lot of things, but I often struggle to feel like I’m actually “good enough” at them (my experience with the Gifted Kid Burnout stereotype is a whole other rabbit hole to go down).
In this age of side hustles and social media, “Find your niche” has become a common refrain. People sing the virtues of establishing oneself as the ruling expert over increasingly specific domains: styling and photographing espresso martinis, creating video roundups of the best spice blends found only at Trader Joe’s, hand carving wooden spoons for babies. The idea is that by “niching down,” there’s less competition and therefore more chance to stand out and gather a devoted if not massive audience.
This has never sat particularly well with me. My interests are varied and often eclectic, embodying the classic “jack of all trades, master of none” archetype. I don’t think this is a characteristic unique to me at all.
I don’t remember when or how I landed on “miscellaneous creative” as my descriptor of choice for myself, but evidently I did and it’s stuck around. The other one I occasionally semi-joke about is “Renaissance Man who is neither Renaissance nor a man.” That one is a) a mouthful and b) excessively self-aggrandizing, but does at least allude to the mindset of perpetual, wide-ranging curiosity and experimentation to which I aspire.
Whether we call ourselves jacks-of-all-trades, Renaissance Men (in varying degrees of Renaissance-ness and man-ness), miscellaneous creatives, or something else entirely, I know we’re out there, and I encourage us all to embrace our descriptor of choice and all that brings!
