Generative Creativity and Collaborating with Other Humans
What happens when you share a dream
A quick internet search of the word “generative” brings a host of returns about artificial intelligence, but that’s a sad use of such a green and lively word! Generative means “having the power or function of generating, originating, producing, or reproducing.” Forget for a minute any paltry associations with AI, and consider the term in the context of human creativity.
Have you ever had a big, exciting, scary, delightful idea? An idea bigger—much bigger—than you are? One that sparked more ideas in you and other people? Generative ideas are exactly these: the ones that grow, multiply, and catch like a current of electricity lighting up a house, a street, a whole neighborhood.
What do you do with such an idea?
You daydream and worry and fret about it. You tell God it’s too big, that someone else should do it (knowing full well how it went when Moses said this). You daydream some more, and pray, and pluck up the courage to finally tell someone else about it. And you keep daydreaming and telling people until someone else starts daydreaming about it with you.
Isn’t it a wonderful feeling to have someone enter into an idea with you, to imagine together what it might be? It gives you hope that maybe one day this big idea that’s been living in your head just might make it out into the world somehow.
But letting out an idea can be a scary prospect. It can quickly grow beyond your capacity and your control. Humans have limitations, and big ideas can’t come to life through a single person. It would take a whole team of people…
And here, right here, is where you have to take a huge step of faith and set things in motion that cannot be reversed.
Friends, we are at the point of no return.
Makoto Fujimura, in this interview with the Trinity Forum, says that generative ideas are born out of love, reflecting the generative creativity of God, who is Love. I’d like to take a moment to testify to the truth of this, as we unveil the next big project for Bandersnatch Books.
A couple years ago, my children and I were participating in a weekly poetry tea time with other families over Zoom (inspired by the poetry tea during Hutchmoot Homebound!) where our children would read poems to each other from beloved names like Robert Louis Stevenson and Shel Silverstein. I loved watching our children delight in rhymes, puns, and other wordplay.
In that same season, I was actively participating in multiple online groups of poets (namely The Habit and The Poetry Pub) where I was hearing and seeing delightful poems workshopped by talented writers. I loved getting to see other poets’ strengths in an internal rhyme or the turn of a line.
It was the marriage of these two loves that birthed a new idea: I could introduce these two groups of people to one another through a new, fully illustrated anthology of poetry for children written by my many talented poet friends.
My Bandersnatch Books colleagues were immediately on board with the idea, but the question remained: how on earth to begin executing a project of such magnitude?
I shared my dream with Emily J. Person and Théa Rosenburg over breakfast at the Square Halo conference in 2023, and that opened the door. Emily had just received her B.F.A. in illustration, and Théa was a fellow writer and a lover of books. Their combined enthusiasm for my idea breathed life into it. I began to hope that it just might come to pass.
For more than a year, Emily and I would check in periodically and daydream about what this project could be. It grew a name—I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry—and a structure: six broad categories of poems, including Flora & Fauna, Unexplorable Depths, Cautionary Tales, Dreams & Whimsy, Edibles, and Humans.
When I told my poet friends about the idea, they got excited, too. They started playing with words and inviting other friends to play with them. I’m still astonished at the way one little idea sparked such contagious joy and creativity. If I ever feared that we might not have enough poems to fill a book, I was a fool.
Turns out, these poets love wordplay and childlikeness as much as I do. They each brought the powers of the adult into the playfulness of the child and crafted wonderful, delightful, beautiful things. Sixty-something poets submitted more than two hundred poems for consideration. You should have seen the piles of words as I began to sort them all!
An actual book is now beginning to take shape, and I’m astonished again at how wonderfully the pieces are fitting together. This project is going to be so much bigger than I had originally imagined. The generous, generative, creative overflow keeps spreading—all from the seed of an idea!
Soon we’ll have samples of art and poetry to show you as we look ahead to the next step: Kickstarting this book so we can make it big and beautiful and chock full of colorful illustrations from beginning to end. It’s going to be something special, entirely made by humans, and I can’t wait for you to see it.
This idea hasn’t ceased to be exciting, delightful, and scary to me, but the farther we get into this project, the more I’m learning to lean back and trust the Love that has generated such creativity. People are making good, true, and beautiful things to the glory of the One who made them. We just get to spread the love.
September 20–21: Bandersnatch Books at the Embodied Faith Symposium at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Charlotte.
October 10: Bandersnatch authors and illustrators at Landmark Booksellers in Franklin, Tennessee (11:00 am to noon). More info soon!
November: Above, Not Up release (preorders open in September)
Red Rex released into the world this week, and we’d love to hear what you think of it! If you’ve gotten your copy, be sure to review it on Amazon or Goodreads (or your favorite internet place for reviews)! If you haven’t gotten your copy, what are you waiting for?
We had to share this reel from Matthew Mellema’s Instagram in which he opens his author copies of Red Rex—mostly because his daughter’s excitement over the bubble wrap is the best thing ever. Some people have their priorities straight.
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"[Writing is] like singing on a boat during a terrible storm at sea.
You can't stop the raging storm, but singing can change the hearts and spirits
of the people who are together on that ship."
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird
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Oh hooray!! I love that this is on its way from being an idea to being a book--with Emily's illustrations, no less! Such beautiful news :)
I needed all of these good words today (the day it showed up in my feed). And oh my word BUBBLES!