Acropolis Museum, 2025

“I don’t have a creative bone in my body,” a friend declared recently.

Really? Not one? I thought, but didn’t say. Or believe. This was a person who had founded an educational nonprofit because she saw a need and could imagine a way to fill it. To me, that’s pretty creative. But she is also the sister of two musicians. And so she thinks of herself as the one who was born without creative bones.

Are musicians, dancers, painters, poets, sculptors, singers, filmmakers, fashion designers, animators, actors, artists and writers of any and every medium the only true creatives?

And must their commitment to creativity last from cradle to grave?

What about the late bloomers?

 It is February, and there is exactly one neon-pink bloom on the Christmas cactus plant in my office. All the other blooms on this decades-old plant got together and put on a tightly choreographed show two months ago: their best in years, right on cue, in mid-December. But not this February outlier. She waited until she had the stage all to herself.

Every morning, for the first six weeks of 2026, as I drank coffee, read, wrote and watched the sun rise one minute earlier each day, I kept my eye on the maverick cactus blossom as she grew from a tiny speck at the end of a leaf to a full-throated, hot-pink prima donna.

Why did she wait? Why wasn’t she part of the prime-time holiday show?

Why do any of us wait?

There are a thousand reasons. Earning a living. Raising children. Caring for aging parents. Shaky confidence. Stage fright. Fear of failure. Fear of success.

 I’ve been teaching memoir writing classes for nearly fourteen years, and it never ceases to thrill me that people sign up at all, at any age. It takes a lot of courage. It’s a creative thing to do. For younger students, it means shoehorning writing into the rest of their busy lives.

For older students, finding time might be easier, but they face the challenge of having honed, over the decades, all kinds of self-sabotaging inner scripts. It’s too late. I’m too old. Whatever chance I ever had at writing compelling prose has been ruined by a lifetime of writing proposals and memos and invoices and academic papers and endless emails.

Or: Why am I doing this? What makes me think I have anything interesting to say? Who on earth will want to read what I write?

 Or: Doing something that does not make money or in some other way materially benefit me and my family is a waste of time.

 And yet they sign up. And come to class. And write. And nothing makes me happier than to see those daring, tentative first scribbles turn into sentences and paragraphs and pages.

 What I want for my students is to feel like they are allowed to be creative. Because they are creative. And I want them to believe that it’s not too late. Because it’s never too late. And I want them to believe that there are no rules about who is creative and who is not, or what “counts” as creativity and what doesn’t.

No Kings March, Seattle, October 2025

What I want for everyone, writers or not, is to see and feel the joy of creativity. In the past year, I’ve seen it everywhere: in the No Kings protest signs and costumes and themes and chants. In gardens and kitchens and shops and studios. Creative bones abounding.

You could argue that, in these troublesome times, we should stay focused on protests and postcards and calls to Congress. Yes, we need to do all of those things, and yes, we can find creative ways to do them.

But sometimes, the call to creativity comes unexpectedly. You think you can’t sing, let alone write songs, and you find yourself, during the Covid lockdowns, doing both. You sign up for a memoir class and realize that what you want to write is poetry. You move to a house with a lawn and find yourself turning the turf into a garden of native plants, as Camille Dungy writes about in her memoir, Soil.

 “Plants go into soil at different times and come up in their own time,” Dungy writes. “Sometimes they seem to exist all at once. Sometimes not at all. This, too, is the reality of the speed, the slowness, the wildness of time as it passes in the garden.”

The speed, the slowness, the wildness of time. Some days, our creative bones are primed to sprint. Other weeks or months or years, they crave a slow ramble. Like a gardener, plotting what to plant and where and when. Like the Christmas cactus bloom that waits it out until February.

Seattle-area readers: I will be teaching Memoir Writing Workshop at Seattle Central College Continuing Education in-person, beginning April 15. Six Wednesday mornings. Registration is now open.

Interested in screen-writing? Nick Thompson will be teaching a six-week course at Seattle Central this spring. Register here.