Finding Cozy: Author's Note

Click on image to enlarge © 2020

"Cozy is sometimes hard to find

for it's more than a place to be--

more than a bed or a roof overhead

for a few or a you and me.

Cozy's a snuggled-in state of mind

that wraps from the inside out

like a rabbit's fur 'neath a juniper

somewhere between dreams and doubt."

Click on image to enlarge © 2020

"Finding Cozy" is available on Amazon. Click Here. For more about the newly published story see below:

Michigan is home to many quaint summer cottage rows along lakes and rivers. Many of these houses are passed down through families and are now lived in year-round.  To me, such places still hold the charm of their original purpose, and that element of fantasy is part of this tale.

 "Finding Cozy" is about an imaginative eight-year-old girl who stumbles into the world of a rabbit wintering beneath a snow-covered juniper. The accidental encounter forges a friendship as the pair searches for the meaning of a profoundly important word. 

Toward the end of their search , the little girl whispers to the rabbit: “Do you know what else? My mother says cozy is a feeling that we learn before we are even born.” The rabbit's eyes widen, “Before we were even born?” he asks, and the little girls says: "That’s what my mother says. Way before I ever breathed my first breath or saw my first sight or spoke my first word, she says I knew what cozy was.”

As the preface page above explains, this was an evolving bedtime story I told my daughters back in the late 1990's. I put it to paper in 2014 when I also mapped illustration ideas for the written pages. At that time, my daughters and sister Kathy helped proofread the story, and we "kid-tested" it by reading it to our grandchildren, but the daunting task of finding an illustrator stalled the project for six years. Sometimes it takes a few years for a plant to blossom. 

So it was when this past October my wife Julie began to change her fall decor to her winter decorations. This is a thorough process involving the entire house, and she loves it. Julie loves making things cozy--especially around Christmas. This year, at one of her favorite shops,  she bought a new decorative piece that seemed to jump from this story. She brought it home, set it up, and said, "What do you see?"

I had not thought about the "Finding Cozy" story for many years, but I said, "I see Cozy Rabbit under the juniper." 

 

"Yes! You remember..." she said. "Tom, you've got to publish that story. This is the year. Maybe you can team up with Colton and Natalie and get it printed by Christmas." I knew my son-in-law could draw, but illustrating a 44-page book is a huge project. It was October 8. I shook my head and told Julie something about how impossible that would be. In any other year that would have been true. 

Two months is not a lot of time when measured in sixty evenings, ten weekends, and many wee hours of the morning. As my daughter and son-in-law (Natalie and Colton Wilson) began storyboarding and drawing each spread, it was amazing to see the imagery of thoughts and words coming to life. The process was new to all three of us.

Between writing and re-writing drafts through the years, Colton's weeks of drawing, and Natalie's editorial oversight as motivational "captain" (no small task), the three of us have logged hundreds of hours in this collaborative project. 

This beautifully illustrated full-color book  is a blend of poetry and prose meant to be read aloud by parents who enjoy reminiscing to children who love fond memories passed from age to age.With Colton's permission, I'm sharing just three samples from the 44 illustrated pages (pages that don't give away the storyline).

Click on image to enlarge © 2020

Click on image to enlarge © 2020

Watch the short video below to see how it all started Once Upon a Snow Day:

[Added February 5, 2021] The above home video footage was found on a tape in a box nearly two months AFTER "Finding Cozy" was published. I shot the video with my daughters nearly thirty years before, but none of us ever recalled watching seeing before January 26, 2021. (It was on old videotapes that we sent off to be digitized.) As we watched the images for the first time, I half expected to actually see the rabbit run from under the snow-covered limbs because it was on this snow day at "the little blue house" that the stories began. The story's plot-lines changed through the years, and when we moved to West Michigan, there several overgrown juniper bushes that wrapped around the front corner of our house. They were like an igloo when covered by heavy snow. They also provided shelter for a cottontail rabbit who had a burrow by the trunk of one of the bushes. One day Natalie and I startled hiding in that "fort" on a snow day. Can you imagine how it felt to watch these forgotten video clips months after publishing the book? We were overjoyed to see that the spirit of the story and illustrations were true to images that inspired them (and that we thought lived only in our memory). 

"Finding Cozy" is available on Amazon. Click Here. 

and at The Bookman in Grand Haven

"Finding Cozy": Theme and Tone

We'd like to thank the many people who have purchased "Finding Cozy" on Amazon. At last count More than 100 copies sold in the first five days. If you enjoy the book, please leave a comment and lots of stars as those two features at Amazon help advance the book. Thank you for the many kind words in social media, that's also very encouraging.

Based on the texts, etc. from purchasers across the country (and the globe—japan, so far), there are lots of parents and teachers enjoying this book. In the "Author's Note" in the above post, I explained the events that brought the book together just days before Christmas 2020. For those who may want to know a bit more about the writing itself, I'm adding this post about "theme" and "tone." This might help you maximize "teachable moments" as you share the book with others. There is another post after this one about  importance of fostering imagination in childhood (and adulthood for that matter). That's so important. After that there is a post full of "details" in the book. Colton calls them "Easter eggs." That one's just for fun.

Many years ago, when I told various versions of "Finding Cozy" to my girls at bedtime, the room was dark, and the purpose of the story was to lull them to sleep. In fact, most of my ad lib tales ended as soon as that was achieved. I kept that in mind as I put the story in writing in 2014. It was written to be read aloud. It is a risk to create a tone that takes the reader and listener to the brink of believing a dream-like state we sometimes associate with being "cozy."  A risk because younger children may be lulled to sleep before the final page. I can live with that.

I don’t mind sleepy heads as long as the reader occasionally keeps reading and thinking to the end... because--guess what?--"Finding Cozy" is also a story for the "grown ups." It's perhaps most meaningful to those old enough to recall when each childhood day was a book instead of a turning page.

It is older readers who will be able to read between the lines like looking through the blinds at night to watch the falling snow. Older readers will see the hints of  the rhythms (ticking clocks, fleating days and nights, changing seasons, and passing generations). Lost on younger readers are the contrasts within these pages: near / far, dim / bright, inside / outside, warm / cold, animals / humans, dreams / doubts, etc. You'll see them. The most important contrast of all in "Finding Cozy" is that of the vast expanse of space to the tiny specks we call home on the dot we call Earth (and more importantly to the perfect enclosure where each of us spent the first nine months of our lives). This contrast is first shown in the starry moonscape over the little blue house (pp 9-10). It's later replicated as Kenzie stares at the starry image of her mitten under the shelter of the juniper which happens just after the theme is said aloud.

A theme is an underlying truth that runs through a story. In this case, "Finding Cozy" refers to both an accidental encounter between a girl and a rabbit and to the theme of the story which is the notion that "finding cozy" is a subconscious reconnection to the most perfect shelter humans ever know. The feeling we call "cozy" is to well-being what food is to hunger, what love is to loneliness.  It is hinted at in hundreds of songs from "My Blue Heaven" to "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands." 

Some embrace the word cozy and use it freely while others pretend to be too tough to say the word aloud. In truth, however, it's a need whether the word is uttered or not. It may be found in the quiet nursery of a cottage or a foxhole in a battlefield. It may be enjoyed by a couple on a snowy sleighride or a hermit in a snowbound cabin. We may apply the term to many things, but its deepest meaning is nestled in the basic need that chicks find under the wings of a hen. Much of life is quite the opposite of cozy, and that's why we are drawn to the people and places that help us find it.

SIDE NOTE: A theme is sometimes confused with the "moral of the story" often tagged on to the end (as in Easop's Fables, which are fanciful tales of personified animals, that teach a truth [like "The Tortoise and the Hare."] Though "Finding Cozy" shares some elements of fable, it deliberately stops short of anthropomorphism choosing instead to provide only the ability to communicate in order to contrast human and animal as distinctly different in that animals lack Imago Dei.. The distinction goes beyond physical differences [e.g. the fact that rabbits lack the ability to cry tears as humans do] to highlight the ability to "create" from concepts (as seen in art, music, literature, and Kenzie's vivid use of simile.) This innate distinction between these two new friends is what prompts the search for the meaning of cozy.. 

An author's own disposition toward a story's theme sets the story's tone and style of presentation. Because I wanted the story to be read aloud,  rhythms and  rhymes of verse sometimes slipped into the narrative prose.  When I noticed this happening, I stopped and tried to rewrite the whole story with no hint of poetic device. The result read like an instruction manual. So I attempted writing the entire story in verse, but that became labored and threatened to trivialize the theme. It was this struggle that eventually shelved the project in 2014. When I came back to it six years later, I reverted to the original completed draft and let some verse slip in an out of narrative prose naturally (often keeping poetic lines in paragraph form).  This tends to happen while describing the extraordinary nature of otherwise ordinary things: falling leaves, snow-covered moonscapes, being carried to bed, returning a mitten, etc.  My hope is that the blend of poetry and prose helps contrast childlike WONDER and "grown up" certitude.

Minutia in "Finding Cozy"

For Those Who Like finding "Easter eggs"

Film and video-game buffs tell me that an "Easter Egg" is a message, image, or feature hidden in a video game, film, or book that becomes "inside information" known only by those who are know to look for them. Alfred Hitchcock used to include a cameo of himself in each film, just for fun. That is a form of "Easter egg."

These elements are typically incidental and non-essential to understanding the story itself, but If you are reading here about the book "Finding Cozy"  you might enjoy finding these "Easter eggs" in the book. It was Natalie and Colton's idea to include them, and I'm so glad they did. I'll share them below in order of appearance (page order) 

(pp 1-2) I made the tire swing in the willow in 1986 from a motorcycle tire which looks more like the car tires from the 1930's. My goal was replicating the swing that hung outside The Waltons house. I have always enjoyed Earl Hamner's vocal narrative style. (He wrote and narrated the TV show.) So while the tires wing is a little detail on the page, it's a significant easter egg. That tire swing hung behind "the little blue house, then in the willow on Lovejoy Avenue, and now at our current home in Michigan. My grandkids still swing on it....The little blue house is based on the first home we owned at 104 Berkshire Road in Waterloo, Iowa. We moved into that Cape Cod when our first-born was barely crawling. Her two sisters joined her there over the next 13 years. In this house is where "Cozy Rabbit" stories began.

(pp 3-4) The flower pot on the porch step is my wife's. She has a green thumb for flowers and plants that pot and many others around the yard each year. The blue house had a matching dog-eared fence, but Julie always wanted a white picket fence. It never happened. (Thirty-some years later, the new owners removed the fence and the trees and painted the house yellow. It's still charming.) ....The house we've called home for over 20 years, has a limestone walk made of random-shaped flat pavers that I brought back from Julie's parents small farm in Kansas. (Each time I went I brought back about a dozen until the path was complete.) Colton had a similar flatstone path in his childhood yard.... The dog is modeled after Natalie and Colton's labradoodle, "Rooney," 

(pp 5-6) The flower pot is replaced by an uncarved pumpkin which, upon turning the page, is carved, suggesting that the month of October has passed. The opening four "spreads" of the book move from summer to fall to winter. Because spring is missing, we include that season in a brief dream later on. The mention of spring also plants a seed for a sequel to the story. The actual juniper that "housed" a wintering rabbit was outside a bedroom window of our house (it has since been removed), but we chose to change the layout of the fictional house to facilitate the interior scenes. 

(pp 7-8) This moonscape spread is one of my favorites. The brief lines in verse help transition from "back story" to all the magic that comes with a lake effect snow-day in West Michigan. (Safety Note: The candles in the window are electric. We used to put them in our windows each year, but now they adorn my daughter Emily's house.) The other purpose of this spread is to contrast the vastness of space to the tiny specks we call home on the dot we call Earth (a contrast that is essential to the story's theme). Less essential is the inclusion of the constellation "Lepus" (the rabbit) found to the left of the moon.

Fridgid air blows across state of Michigan making "lake effect" snow. 

(pp 9-14) The  glare of sunshine on snow is almost blinding, and thus begins the subtle contrast of glaring "reality" what occurs under the juniper, which those reading the story will understand.... Lake effect snow is different than a regular snow storm in that those  down-wind and closest to the "source" lake may see a foot or more of snow while inland areas get only a few inches.... The original event happened on a snow day with my daughters and me, and thus the story does the same. My wife and I have worked together in two different schools for 40 years. I confess that we've never out-grows the joy of a snow day. (The anticipation has been dampened by the extended pandemic closures of 2020. Even as schools across the north are in "virutual mode," however, some leaders still understand the  magic of a snow day.)

(pp 15-30) To avoid "spoiler alerts," I'll not share much from these pages, but did you know that healthy rabbits cannot shed tears as we know them. This is not to say they cannot whimper but that such responses do not produce tears.... The mention of "tents" was essential to these pages and the story's theme. Kids make tents. Drape some blankets over some tables and chairs, and you've got an afternoon of play (and maybe even a special sleep-over with friends). My siblings and I used to do it. Beyond being blanket Bedouins, the author, editor, and illustrator grew up camping in real tents all across the state. Granted, we "glamp" in trailers these days, but the coziest camping memories of my childhood took place when seven sleeping bags filled the floor of a six-man tent. It was then my own mother say, "Isn't this cozy!" as she turned off the big flashlight. (Mom was always last to get in her sleeping bag.)... The beach scene in the book is at Grand Haven State Park with the landmark pier and lighthouse in the background.... I've seen snow-crumbs attached to the fibers of a mitten many times. For that reason, as a kid I hated wearing knit mittens during a snow fight. I've actually packed a snowball that meshed so tightly with the yarn fibers that the mitten flew off my hand with the thrown snowball. In this case, the snow-crusted mitten becomes a symbol of the starry sky and "tiny spaces" mentioned earlier on the moonscape spread and more significantly during this scene in the book.... There is a related detail on page 31 that I'll not discuss here. It becomes clear in the book itself.

(pp 33-36) The bright / dim contrast now transitions from outside to inside:  The story mentions that Kenzie's mother is a teacher who is therefore home on this snowday, but her focus is on domestic things, making cocoa, doing laundry, and fine-tuning her seasonal decorating. This is not meant to "stereotype" the role of mothers but to merely reflect the autobiographical realities behind this story and be true to the real people who have merged into these fictional characters. In these pages hide some true "easter eggs."... Notice the pictures on the far wall beyond the dining room table.... You'll also see a pfalzgraff  bowl of M&Ms which is a trademark staple in our home. Our family has eaten off those dishes (and that very dining room table) for over 30 years.

(pp 37-38) On the back of the book there is a short poem that ends "...somewhere between dreams and doubt" which echo my thoughts from another poem called "Wonder Is" , a poem that contrasts the difference between "knowing" and "not knowing."... While writing "Finding Cozy" it was not my intent to blur the lines between the animal world and human beings but rather to create a tone of wonder. (My reasons are explained in paragraph 8 here.) .... Page 37 in the book describes a window view like a snow globe freshly shaken. It also include the words "a dizzied, dancing feeling..." that makes Kenzie lose her balance. Those two words dizzied, dancing may or may not ring a bell, but they are similar to a line in Joni Mitchell's song "Both Sides Now" from her album called Clouds (1969). To fully understand the mood of that "looking out the window" page, listen to that song while looking at Colton's beautiful illustration. I hope it makes you ponder that time in your life when "reality" clashed with the imaginative yearnings you had as a child. In the movie "You've Got Mail," that same Joni Mitchell song sums up the conflicting personalities of the two main characters. My use of "dizzied, dancing" was meant to subliminally trigger that sense of bewilderment as Kenzie looks out the window.

Click to enlarge.

(pp 39-40) While living at the little blue house in Waterloo, Iowa, a dear friend gave us a  Department 57 piece called Berkshire House. It actually looked like a slightly bigger version of our home. For the next several Christmases, I bought another house from that collection until our village populated the broad mantle of our fireplace. An abrieviated version is seen on the mantle in the book If you look closely in this picture, you'll see a rabbit in the juniper in-front-of the Berkshire House.

[Side Note:When we lived in Waterloo, a major employer was the Rath Packing Plant (home of Black Hawk Bacon) Three of the four most common breeds of pigs raised in Iowa are Berkshire, Yorkshire, and Hampshire. All three pigs have roads in Waterloo named in their honor. The Rath plant closed in 1985, putting the fathers of some of my students out of work. Sometime later the Black Hawk Bacon trade mark was purchased as one of the last assets of the company. Do you remember it? It's still available at Wal-Mart]

The second house in our village is called Shingle Creek. It reminded us of my sister Kathy's house in Michigan. It had the center porch and shingle siding. You may recall that house was destroyed by fire one year ago, three days after Christmas 2019. I've written about that sad and happy fire. How can a fire be sad and happy? Well, I just put it in book form someday. It was Colton and Natalie's idea to include these two homes of the many on our real mantle. At the right of the mantle in the book are a school and a church, which together have shaped our family from the beginning. The village on the mantle pays homage to the "cottage rows" that provide the setting for this story. 

The nearest cottage rows to us are a short walk away at "Smith's Bridge Bayou" For decades U.S.31 was called "West Michigan Pike," From 1911 through the 1920's, the pike grew to become one of the nation's most traveled "tourist roads," stringing together 300 miles of countless beach towns from New Buffalo to Macinac Island. Resorts from that era still exist like Lakewood Club, Maranatha, Portage Point, and Bay View near Petoskey. Similar cottage rows enjoy the rivers and lakes all across the state. When I was a kid, "Water Winter Wonderland" was imprinted on every Michigan license plate for more than ten years. "Finding Cozy" attempts to wrap a deeper message in that slogan.

A century after the cottage boom of the 1920s, many of those quaint summer homes have become family residences year-round. Whenever I meander through cottage rows, they exude the charm of their original intent, which lends to the fantasy element of this story. 

Also on that "family room" page, you'll notice a tube TV with a VCR. The videotape is a well-known holiday classic. Hint: in the pictured scene, they are singing about about cozy things like "warm woolen mittens" and "snowflakes that stick to my nose and eye lashes." 

The tree is trimmed with real ornaments that span 70 years in our family history. The newest is one I made for everyone this year. You'll see this ornament near the top of the tree.... The two stockings by the fireplace bear two names that my wife and I never got to use in real life: McKenzie (which is my Grandma Kapanka's grandmother's name) and Tyler (though the name of Kenzie's brother is used nowhere in the story itself. That name, had we ever had a son, would have been Tyler Sinclair). The red-blue-green plaid plaid couch was in our home at the turn of the century. It was a common pattern of the day. It's now gone, but the "old wooden clock" still hangs on our wall.

(pp 41-42) I have written about being carried to bed as a child in one of my favorite poems "Kept." Being carried to bed is an important rite of childhood. What an amazing dream-like flight. As it happens in the story, the prose slips into verse again to pay tribute to that extraordinary moment, and the narration never really goes back to prose. A brief word about "the squeak at the top of the stair." We really have such a squeek. Houses talk to us but in such a common language that we don't often hear it. In this case, a sub-theme of this book is the patterns of life: seasons, holidays, school-days, chimiing and ticking of clocks, and yes, a chronic squeak in the floor. These are all part of the tone of the story, and by the end the tone is so set that even a squeak is "cozy." BUT... imagine if I were writing a very different tale, let's say a murder mystery. "The Squeak at the Top of the Stair" could be the title of an Alfred Hitchcock thriller (in which he would have made a cameo appearance).

To whatever extent our family colaborates on more illustrated books, there will be cameos and "Easter eggs" to blur the lines of fact and fiction. As is true of life itself, in the writing / illustrating process nothing comes from thin air and nothing truly returns to dust.

Tom Kapanka

"Imagine That..." The Role of Fantasy in Childhood

I have written about the nature of creativity before (from a theological perspective) in a post called "Imago Dei," The role of imagination is very much a part of that process. The extent to which imagination and creativity are included in parenting, education, and life varies from home to home and even child to child. This is as it should be because "balance" in homes and institutions is achieved not when every individual is the same or is perfectly "on center" but when collectively our differences (and different gifts) balance each other out. 

Enjoying the functional interaction of our differences makes life more interesting. If the mix is right, with proper help, eight kids of very different weights can enjoy the ups and downs of a teeter-totter together. I digress... My point is that there is room for very different feelings about the role of  imagination and "make believe" in the stories we introduce in our homes and schools.

"Finding Cozy" includes an element of fantasy "somewhere between dreams and doubt," as the poem on the back cover suggests. At the risk of setting the bar too high,  I hope the story evokes some of wonder that prompted Kenny Loggins to begin singing songs like this after his children were born:  "Neverland Medley". Watch the children in the audience during the performance of "Return to Pooh Corner." Surely there is room for 'make believe" in childhood, and it is my belief that such WONDER nurtures our faith in things that truly matter.

Imago Dei: Creative Man and the Creator God

Originally posted 3-12-20

What does it mean to be “creative”? When discussing this topic  with young writers through the years, I always began with the obvious:

For those who believe in the Creator and in the Genesis account that says man was created Imago Dei (which is Latin for in the image of God) the ability to create and the inclination to make something from nothing* is indeed part of what it means to be made in the image of God… to be creative. For those who do not believe man was created in the image of Creator God, this is nonetheless true but much less understood. 

In this sense, creativity is unique to humans because, of all created living things, only humans were created in the image of God. This notion is offensive to those who cannot grasp the idea of Creation or the personhood of a Creator… those who have chosen to believe instead that all of what we see  just “evolved” over billions of years and that humans are mere animals themselves--slightly more evolved, perhaps, but no different in nature from a mouse or a magpie. Such people are quick to tell us that these thoughts on “creativity” are arrogant. They might argue that it is just as creative for a bird to build a nest or a beaver to build a dam or a bee to form a honeycomb than anything man has ever “created.”

[Click on images to enlarge.]

I would agree that the creative achievements of all creatures great and small in nature are indeed wondrous and they reflect a wonderful Creator. The difference between man and birds and beavers and bees, however, is that we can talk about all three of those creatures and their instinctive creations. We can discuss them in both abstract and concrete terms. We can even draw parallels between their work and our own. "Go to the ant, you sluggard."

Artistically, we can re-create the concepts of this created world in poetry as Robert Frost did, then illustrate it in a picture or a painting as Audubon did; we can bind the poetry into books and shelve them with a thousand other books that agree and disagree. We can frame  the paintings and house them in grand museums and galleries full of man’s reflective work of external observable creation—and on the same walls can also hang the more abstract works generated by more modern minds that reject the notion of a Creator and any meaning of life bestowed to those who believe it. 

We can even create entertaining stories and films that create an alternate world in which animals act and think like human beings.(Anthropomorphism is what morphed Disney from an artist to an industry: “It all started with a mouse.”) 

Gifted Creativity can reflect reality as well as an imaginary world. It is man's ability to study the variety of bird nests, and to write about them and paint them that sets the creativity of John James Audubon apart from the amazing animals in the kingdom he studied. 

In the literary world, creativity fuels the ability to better understand the human condition as seen through the writings of humans themselves since the beginning of written words.  In the fields of "creative arts" this god-like attribute can be seen in theater, fashion, jewelry, architecture, photography, cinematography, and music as beautifully blended in the last scene of The Elephant Man, a film that uses one man's grotesque deformity to show the best and worst of supposedly "normal" society. For most of the film John [Joseph] Merrick is abused as a circus freak and gawked at by a society entertained by grusome things, but in the latter part of the movie he is exposed to all things "creative" and even begins to build a model of a nearby cathedral even though he can only see the steeple from his room. "I have to imagine the rest," he tells his friend. It is a statement that speaks to the essence of creativity which is inseparably linked to the power of imagination. 

In the truest sense, I am neither a theologian nor a scientist, but the connection between man's creativity and His Creator seems plainly clear to me, and all deviations from this understanding stem from the same creative thinking man is blessed with... even when he chooses to ignore the origin of his creativity.

Jonathan Edwards was both a theologian and a scientist, but not until he became a believer did he see the wonder of creation. He was noted for his study of spiders and thunderstorms. Spider webs amaze me in both form and function, but they fit into the list mentioned earlier of things like nests and honeycombs. Instinctively gifted displays of natures but made by limited creatures unable to see the big picture of creation itself--unless through  anthropomorphic tales like Charlotte's Web--a favorite of mine. It is in the creativity of its author E.B. White, and the illustrator, Garth Williams, of his first edition, and the artists at Hanna-Barbera who put the story in animation, and Joseph Robinette who put it on stage(a production I have enjoyed directing twice in a previous life), and then the story was put beautifully on the big screen in 2006, which gave birth to the beautiful song "Ordinary Miracle."  It is in the poetry of that song and the prose of White's tale of the scrificial love of a friend (as in "no greater love than this: that a man lay down his life for his friends.") and the human gift of being able to "imagine" such meanings through "story" that set man's creativity apart from that of a spider who can actually make a web.

And that, I believe, is part of what it means to be created in the image of God. It goes beyond intellect, beyond the five senses alone, to something much deeper in the human experience, and that "something deeper" is what sets us apart from the animal world. Even the very rambling of this paragraph reflects something that sets us apart, whatever that "something" is about man that makes us wonder about things far beyond the shelter of a nest or next meal in the web.

You might be thinking: "But I'm not creative. I'm a farmer; I'm a mechanic; I'm a truck driver; I'm an administrative assitant; I'm a nurse, etc. I can't draw or write or sing..." Let's think about that for a moment. Let's not limit creativity to the arts. I cannot think of a profession that does not reflect some level of "problem solving" that demonstrates the human capacity to think beyond basic animal needs. The way a farmer can tighten a fence with a stick. (My father-in-law calls that an "Oscar Stevens" because his farmer-neighbor did it often.) There are similar creative tricks in nearly every trade.

Are all people equally creative? Clearly not. Are all people who are creative equally gifted? Clearly not. Am I a creative writer? Sometimes, and what is it about the way my mind works--especially when my thoughts are fertile for writing--that makes me feel at home in that category? It can be both a blessing and a curse, but in writing I believe creativity is dependent on one's ability to be an associative thinker. As explained in Psychology Today:

“Associative thinking occurs when all avenues are open in your brain and your mind, and you allow your mind to … automatically link up ideas, thoughts, observations, sensory input, memory of existing knowledge, and your subconscious. Rather than relying solely on what you know or have observed …you allow any and all thoughts to arise, which helps your brain’s neurons to spark and connect in unique ways….”

“….what drives the need to create is not creative ability per se, but rather a tendency toward self-reflective pondering and the ability and penchant for letting your mind wander (daydreaming, as an example), in which all thoughts are welcome…. the need to create is associated with having thoughts that interrupt one’s ordinary stream of consciousness and that are seen as welcome rather than interfering.”

As I mentioned, the penchants described above are both a blessing and a curse. The first twenty years of my career, I taught literature, writing, and participated heavily in performing arts. Yet even in those years, if you tracked down any of my students or cast-members, they would clearly remember me as a teacher who enjoyed "associative thinking" even while lecturing. To me, "rabbit trails" were not an interference from teaching but fascinating applications of any given lesson plan because letting "way lead on to way" (Frost, "The Road Not Taken") brings texture and dimension to otherwise flat information. The second twenty years of my career has been in school administration, and still this penchant plays a part in most of my writing and communication. 

Nearly everything I write is a blend of memory, faith, and familiar literature (from my teaching years). There are those who find it fascinating and those who find it frustrating. I have come to understand it as neither madness nor genious but simply the way God wired my mind.  Those wired similarly understand me better than those less so. I cannot be all things to all people, but through the years, I have been blessed by the kind words of others who enjoy my "metaphor and meaning and endless patterns of ink."

Tom Kapanka

***************

*Creating Ex Nihilo (from nothing) is a power reserved only to Creator God, but man's desire to create something concrete (tangible, literal, enduring) from something abstract (conceptual, figurative, ephemeral) is what I mean by "creating something from nothing."