Art & Crafts

Plus: Scrivener for Writers is back, baby!

We buy my kid too much stuff. This is an ongoing anxiety of mine. (He’s also been in a weird flux of play style since kindergarten started, abandoning for months the matchbox cars that he’s loved since he was a year and a half old. They’ve sort of made a comeback lately, but still.) But this weekend, we went in search of craft kits of some sort. He’d seen the results of me finally, finally playing around with the resin jewelry kit I got from Target months ago, and he wanted something like that of his own.

There’s a difference between art and crafts, of course, though the line between them is so blurry. Something more like a hobby is part of it, but even more, for me, crafts don’t really require skill. Or the ones I like don’t. Some of the best hours I’ve spent in the last six months were the hours completing the elegant paint-by-numbers portrait of my dog that my in-laws gave me for my birthday last year. It took precision, it took focus, it gave me great satisfaction - but, at least for the paint by numbers, no creativity.

It’s tricky finding a creative hobby or outlet when your in a creative professional field. Woe is me, I know. But to find the play, the looseness, the absolute lack of stakes. I believe people who say all humans are creative creatures, that creativity is a vital force to nurture, food for the soul along with connection, sunshine, movement. And in some ways, of course, my writing fills that need. But in other ways, it never can, because it matters too much in totally un-creative ways - for money, for status, for my sense of self. (It’s a whole nother thing to have your professional work too tied up in your sense of self, but that’ll be for another newsletter. Or therapy, or something.)

Which brings us to the Target aisle last weekend (yes it’s only Tuesday), my kid unable to decide, the groceries from Trader Joe’s slowly thawing in the trunk of our car. Fine, air-dry clay. Fine. It had some fluffy, stylized pets on the box. Great. (I bought myself a four-pack of paint-by-numbers canvasses, sure to sit in a corner of my office for eight months until I take one out and have an absolutely lovely few hours.)

And then that brings us to today, four days later, and the menagerie of clay creatures accumulating on the kitchen table. Reader, I’m in love. The brand is Hey Clay, and at first I was skeptical of the required app-integration - no instructions, just a QR code - and extremely skeptical of all the other packs of designs the app showed, to be unlocked for just $4.99! But the instructions are great, the designs are adorable, the clay is this incredibly pleasing fluffy marshmallow texture, which dries like meringue. (The tactile aspect of all these crafts is clearly important, the complete lack of language involved.) Last night I crossed the threshold, making two more figurines after my kid had gone to bed: an alien and an elegant little cat (when it’s just me, not to brag, I can do it from the finished image, without paying to unlock the step-by-step). This morning I woke up in a bad mood, and our post-breakfast clay-time was fraught. So once I was alone, I made a little rocket ship. I felt better.

In other news: I’m offering my Scrivener for Creative Writers class again, Saturday Feb 15 at 1pm ET. It’s aimed at writers who work with research, and/or want more resources for revision and wrangling multiple drafts. Here’s what one writer said about the class:

This is the class I recommend to all my writer friends, no matter where they are in their writing careers (or whether they’re pursuing writing just for the joy of it!). Jaime helps make it clear how Scrivener can best support the creative process. You will leave with a practical sense of how to start using Scrivener to support your researching and writing processes, and eager to dive in.

More info and registration are at jaimegreen.net/classes

I also want to tell you about an upcoming workshop that I think some of you would love: The wonderful Ana Marie Cox hosts a workshop every winter focused on writing as a tool for recovery. It’s for writers and non-writers alike and for anyone who has a story of recovery from anything, not just drugs and alcohol. It starts January 21st, and you can find out more about it here: anamariecox.com/workshop.

That’s it! Go make some cute nonsense with some clay! Or whatever your equivalent is.