Why am I here?

Writing, I mean…let’s not get too existential…

Yep, that’s me, the man in the mirror. Does the frame around the mirror look like a circle from a Venn diagram? Maybe it’s just me. (Photo: Author)

(Note: This article was originally published on my Substack, Gone Creative. You can visit and subscribe there if it's more convenient for you. Otherwise, happy to have you here!)

I don’t want to brag, but last week I hit a major milestone: a dozen subscribers on Substack.

That might be the pinnacle of my success on Substack, so I should probably introduce myself and explain why I started Gone Creative.

The introduction part is simple: I’m Paul. I live in a village in the Rocky Mountains in Canada with my artist wife, Diana. From our 20-foot-high picture windows I see rushing streams, high, snow-capped peaks and sunsets that last for hours. Elves and fairies dance with hobbits in the village square and all is peace, love and harmony.

OK, that’s not true. Except for the part about living in a village in the mountains. That is true. And it might sound romantic, but it just means we have to drive 150 kilometres to find a big-box store. We have bad cellular reception. We have slow Internet service and no natural gas lines. We have no traffic lights and no police station.

What we do have is beautiful scenery, deep quiet (most of the time) and wild animals walking on our streets. We know some of the wild animals by name, but they don’t seem to know our names. At least they never say our names out loud.

Veteran of the psychic wars

Before I moved to our idyllic village I worked in journalism and corporate roles, such as communications, governance and strategy. I apologize if the last few words put you to sleep. But I had to earn a living and that’s what I did.

I don’t do any of those things anymore. A few years ago I washed out of the corporate world and have spent most of my time since then trying to overcome the trauma. Some nights I wake up screaming when I dream about my life in the corporate world. I’m grateful those episodes are becoming less frequent.

The corporate world wasn’t all bad, I suppose. In some positions I had the opportunity to exercise my creative muscles through imagining, designing and creating publications. When people ask me what my favourite job was, I always tell them about the time I worked for a major construction project and was charged with writing and voicing a weekly FM radio show. That was pure creativity — starting with a blank page and then, a few days later, hearing my voice and the voice of my co-host over the airwaves.

Mostly, though, the corporate world was a creative buzz-kill. I’ve heard stories about teachers in the old days beating students with leather straps for writing left-handed. That’s pretty much what the corporate world did to my creative impulses, particularly as I climbed the thorny ladder to more senior roles. My corporate bosses talked a good game about “bringing my whole self to work,” but when it came down to it, rigid conformity was the norm. Creativity rode in the corporate train’s caboose.

That’s not an exit — it’s a trapdoor!

When the right opportunity came, I left the corporate world. Not all at once. I flirted with finding a different job or becoming a consultant. Oddly, no one seemed interested in hiring me. It must have been my aftershave.

Cast adrift, I thought I might put my creative side to work. It wouldn’t pay well, but it had to be more fulfilling than corporate work. And it was. It just paid really, really badly. Which may or may not be why I live in a tiny village in the mountains instead of in some bustling metropolis.

Secret origins of the super heroes

Today I try to keep my identity small, à la Paul Graham. When I’m asked to pigeonhole myself, most of the time I just say I’m a photographer and writer.

My career as a writer started inauspiciously. I was four or five years old and fascinated by my family’s big, manual Underwood typewriter. One day I rolled a piece of white paper into the typewriter and spent a few minutes banging on the keys and watching letters form on the paper. When I had filled about half the page, I pulled the paper out and presented it proudly to my father. My dad took the paper, looked at it and said “but what does it mean?” before handing it back to me.

That episode has informed most of my writing ever since. “But what does it mean?” I ask myself when I look at something I’ve written. Often the answer is “not a hell of a lot…but look at the cool pattern the paragraphs make!”

I started photography early as well. For reasons I don’t recall, I saved up my paper route money for a few months in my early teens and bought a Minolta point and shoot film camera. I loved that camera and took all sorts of photos on colour film, slide film and black and white film. Most of the photos I took were meaningless, obscure and forgettable — not unlike the photos I take today, when I think about it. When I joined the photo club in junior high school my dad traded me his Pentax ME Super SLR for my Minolta and I was into the big leagues.

That early background in writing and photography led me to my eventual career in journalism (including a memorable stint as assistant editor of a weekly newspaper in the Caribbean…I’m sure you’ll hear more about that, so stay tuned) and then into corporate communications. My glory days, as it were. And the seeds of my downfall as we’ve already discussed.

A finger in every creative pie

The terrible thing about identifying as a writer and photographer is deciding what to do with those skills.

Taking pretty pictures doesn’t seem to do it. Lots of people take pretty pictures. What do they mean? What are they worth? Is there any point in trying to make pretty pictures when AI can produce them upon request?

Writing snarky little articles or social media posts doesn’t seem to do the job either. That sort of writing is insignificant and ephemeral. It’s like the list of ingredients on the side of a candy wrapper: rarely read and quickly discarded.

But I’m consumed with thinking there must be a way to combine those skills to create something meaningful and valued.

In pursuit of this idea, I’ve spent more time than I’d like to admit drawing Venn diagrams¹ (a left-brained weakness) and poking at the intersection of writing and photography. Which never works, because writing and photography are not my only interests. I’m also interested in video, graphic design, publishing, documentaries, monographs, ebooks, travel…the list goes on and on. My Venn diagrams end up looking less like Ikigai² and more like a swimming pool full of hula hoops, disconnected circles floating and colliding randomly.

Why is creative work so tidy for everyone else? Why is everyone else so sure about what they’re doing?

Enough! What about Gone Creative?

Which brings us to Gone Creative. A place for me to explore and express my creativity. A place for me to share my creativity with the world, whether or not the world is interested in what I have to offer. (And based on my subscriber count here and my follower count on Instagram, the world really isn’t too interested.)

You won’t find a lot of hot takes here. I’m not political. I don’t like conflict. I have no specific axes to grind. I’m not a culture critic. If you want someone to tell you which camera to buy, you’re barking up the wrong dog.³

But if you’re interested in reading about the creative pursuits I’m interested in (see long list above), often with a bit of sarcasm and more questions than answers, Gone Creative might be for you. If you want to see articles illustrated with photos I have taken rather than ripped from Unsplash or created using AI, Gone Creative might be your thing.

No doubt Gone Creative will evolve over time (can evolution take place any other way?). I’m assured by many sources, including the clever young people who run Famous Writers School™, that it’s best to just start writing and see what develops. So that’s what I’m doing. With an emphasis on writing articles I would want to read myself.

Are you in? I hope so, because I’m going to keep doing this, and like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, it would be nice to feel like someone was listening.

Notes:

1. I don’t restrict myself to Venn diagrams. I’ve also experimented with grids, spectra, equations…it’s exhausting. If I spent as much time on photography and writing as I did on analysis I’d be Stephanie Vermillion by now.

2. Ikigai is your “reason for being.” It’s the intersection of what you love to do, what you’re good at, what the world needs and what you can be paid for. (And the fact it’s a Japanese word makes it sound so much better, doesn’t it?)

3. A phrase attributed to Roald Dahl, author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, though I can’t find the exact reference.