We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Craig Buchner a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Craig, so excited to have you with us today. So much we can chat about, but one of the questions we are most interested in is how you have managed to keep your creativity alive.
Creativity is always alive. That is my belief. It is ever-present and universal. For me, it’s more accurate to understand when creativity is awake and when it is asleep. There’s this notion that creativity seems like a superpower that is only accessible to poets and writers and artists and makers. But the truth is, everyone possesses the ability to be creative, although, it is not harnessed by everyone. We are all capable of accessing extraordinary ways of viewing the world and responding to the world. I often wonder why this is not a basic truth.
Throughout my life I’ve sought out “conscious creativity,” and that’s this mystical, mysterious muse that I might not be entirely aware of, but it’s there, slightly hidden, waiting, if I can only tap into the right frequency.
If I were to describe “conscious creativity” like the child’s game Memory, I might flip one card, which happens to be writing poetry, and the second card I flip — on behalf of “conscious creativity” — unfortunately might not be a card for writing poetry, but one for writing fiction. If these cards do not match, I could say to myself, “Well, I guess I have a creative block, and I should come back tomorrow and hope for the poetry card.” But instead of doing this, I don’t work on poetry that day because I’m not getting anywhere, so I pivot and work on a novel. Lo and behold, my creativity is bursting from the seams. I find this to be true time and time again.
Creativity is awake somewhere, but maybe it’s not the first place I look. This is why I write novels and short stories and poetry and record music, and it’s why I started a line of organic skincare called Natural Kind, which for me, feels like another work of art. Call it tangible poetry. Instead of the words being on a page, this poem is textured and fragrant and nourishing. It’s where my creativity happened to be when I found it.
There’s a part of me that’s always looking to explore where my creativity is awake, and if I widen my aperture, I will see it and I will harness it and together we will go.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
At my core, I think I’m a simple explorer. I wake up and seek new experiences, feelings, words, music, light, and people. But where I’m most comfortable expressing myself is through writing. I’ve published two well-received books of fiction — a novel called Fish Cough and a collection of short stories, Brutal Beasts that Kirkus Reviews called one of the best indie books of the year in 2022. I’ve also published some poetry, and I teach writing, too.
Right now, though, I’m at a unique juncture in my life where I’m exploring what it means to be an entrepreneur. I’m currently living in Charlotte, NC, but for the better part of the last two decades I’ve called Portland, OR, home, and most of my friend-group there were entrepreneurs. I was fascinated by these people who learned somewhere in their past that it was okay to create a product or offer a service, and off they went. I remember asking one friend how he got started, and he told me that his parents had always encouraged it — it was as if being an entrepreneur was his only option. My parents on other had, a union welder and a nurse, did not show me this alternate path. It’s just now that I’m attempting to extract myself from the norm that says, “Get a job; work for someone else; spend 40 hours doing something you don’t really care about.” That approach seems so absurd, which is a big reason my wife Alexis and I started Natural Kind.
While I’ll continue to teach and write, it was important that we explored this other avenue of growth. With Natural Kind, we can create face, hair, and body oils that are not only healthy and clean, but we can treat them like works of art. I liken the Natural Kind experience to encountering a painting in a museum. The context is simple — there’s a person and an artifact. But it’s so much more than that. It’s a moment filled with emotion and transcendence. We want Natural Kind to be that moment, which is why the fragrance inspires joy and why each bottle and box has an original poem. We encourage you to take time back during your day, particularly during your skin care routine, to retreat from the busyness of your mind and to be present and at peace. It all sounds so hippy-dippy, but it can be really freaking hard to find satisfaction in being. Being present, being content, being calm. For years I had forgotten what it felt like, and it’s taken a bit of work to get back here. But it’s worth it.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
I’d say “confidence to try” is essential. To do, you must begin; that should be a bumper sticker. Most people can talk themselves out of anything, but no one can tell the future. There’s no sense coming up with excuses why something won’t work until you actually do the thing. And maybe it works, and maybe it doesn’t. But even if the latter is true, “you have to persist,” which is the second quality.
No one ever gets it right one hundred percent of the time. And it’s wholly unreasonable to think any of us are any different. As a writer, I receive countless rejections. If I stopped after the first rejection, I’d never get my novel published. Heck, if I stopped after the 99th, I’d never get my novel published. It only takes one time to get it right.
Lastly, everyone needs to understand that “a mistake or failure is not the end;” it’s actually an irreplaceable opportunity to develop something new. You might compare a mistake to a bud growing from a young tree branch. That singular bud has the power to grow into something extraordinary if given the chance. Every mistake I make I treat like a tree bud. It forces you to think differently, to look at something from a new angle. I talk about this with my writing students all the time in the context of generating ideas and fixing mistakes. Most of us get an idea, and we act upon it — but for me, I might pause and ask myself, “Is this initial idea a good idea or is it just an easy solution?” Easy solutions are those things we think of that virtually everyone else can think of, too. These are ultimately not interesting; they’re derivative. If that’s the case, I will work on the idea a little longer to move beyond what is expected to something ultimately more original. What you end up with will always be better than the easy solution. Guaranteed.
What has been your biggest area of growth or improvement in the past 12 months?
Being present is something I desperately needed to relearn. For nearly all of my adult life, I’ve been moving toward a goal, and once I accomplished that goal I immediately set another one. I was trapped within this never-ending quest for two decades. And do you know where that got me? On paper, I had a list of achievements, but I never had time or patience to appreciate any of it because I was too busy planning for the next goal. I was voraciously unsatisfied.
Last year, my mother suddenly passed. Completely out of the blue. Knocked me sideways. That’s probably an understatement. I struggled through a complicated form of grief. But luckily I had the awareness that I needed help. Therapy. Friends. Genuine openness to the world. I sought help wherever I could find it, and I listened. For the first time in a long time I listened to others. I wasn’t the one calling the shots. I took a step back, and I listened.
At first, it was a struggle because I was so accustomed to taking control and forging ahead. But as I listened I began to realize what years of hustle had done to me. To put it simply, I wasn’t being present. I had forgotten how to be present. Like almost everything else I wanted to race through my grief, too. I guess what I didn’t understand was how much you learn from grief. It’s another lesson that life offers you. Now I can say that to understand the full capacity of being human, breaking in half is part of it because you learn how to rebuild yourself.
When I was listening to everyone around me, I wasn’t thinking about anything else except that moment. There was a deepness in being present that I couldn’t grasp in my past because I was distracted by some future goal. For instance, I started to recognize that happiness could come in the form of looking at the evening sunlight glowing on treetops or sitting quietly in a room with a shadow cast on the wall. I have a ridiculous anecdote — I’m a writer who had no time to read because I was too busy. So when I sat down with a book, I was too distracted. Isn’t that absurd?
To slow down, I began to meditate on a regular basis and this allowed me to find my love of reading again. More than that it retrained me how to concentrate, and how to hear the real voice inside my head — not the external blathering that compels us all to hustle. “Busy is better,” the imp repeats. It takes real effort to slow down, and I’m not perfect — I get pulled back into a chaotic mind every day, but at least I have the awareness now to know what’s happening. I guess what I learned this year is that underneath decades of external influences, I’ve finally found what I’ve been looking for — I found myself.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://naturalkind.co
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/natural.kind.co/
