8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Category: [12] Social & Community

Finding your tribe and building a community for collaboration, and to beat creative loneliness.

Chapter List

  • Nowhere Beyond 

    Is the hotspot a myth?

    Are there places in the world that are better for certain types of creativity, or is it possible to find community outside of noted centres of imagination: San Francisco, Paris, Tokyo, to name a few that come to mind when pause to I think.

    I find when evaluating spectra of a thing, it helps to look for the opposite: if we are asking if hotspots for creativity exist, what is the opposite of that?

    As I write this I am coming off of a temporary gig up in the northern parts of my province where I was even deeper into nowhere than I usually am. I was in a small rural community for a whole week and out of happenstance and curiosity I tried to figure out if I could buy some watercolour paints (I’d left mine at home.)

    “You’d probably need to get something like that off Amazon.” The hotel receptionist suggested.

    Imagine that, I thought to myself. 

    I personally got started in watercolour because I was in an art store and I impulse-purchased supplies. Then I took a local class. Then I found other people who could paint and I used them as inspiration. 

    My home city is hardly a hotspot for watercolour painting, but it is very telling to see what something looks like when it isn’t even a “spot” let alone a hotspot for a specific kind of creativity. 

  • Eight Clicks

    No one has yet asked, but it’s about time I explained: what’s in a name? What’s in my name, to be exact. 

    I started writing creative fiction under the banner of “8 Clicks from Nowhere” a few years ago. Where it emerged from is not a piece of inspiration that derives meaning or clarity from much anything tangible nor from a deliberate plan. It just is.

    An 8 looks a bit like a B, the first letter of my first name.

    Clicks are webby.

    And if I claimed to be anywhere but the middle of a creative nowhere, I’d be exaggerating.

    Nowhere, you ask?

    I have friends who might eagerly disagree with that sentiment if they thought I was exclusively referring to this physical place. Our city, as much as it would hardly qualify for a shortlist of creative hotspots of the world, is neither a slouch for creative souls. 

    But yet I have often felt a pang of regret that while I live geographically in a place that is just okay for creative collaboration, I definitely live mentally, emotionally, spiritually in a place that is an oasis in a deadly dessert of creative isolation.

    I have long struggled to find a kindred spirit of the kind who might dig deep into the fertile soils of imagination where I tend.

    It is a lonely creative space.

    It has been nothing short of a lifelong state for which I have no clear remedy.

    It is, then, a state of creative existence I have embraced in my techie, webby name, finding myself as I do 8 clicks from nowhere in particular.

  • Finding Lucky

    It’s Friday the thirteenth of February, and if you grew up anything like I did you were ingrained with the paranormal affluence of this particular date on the calendar in effecting the universe with a particular strain of misfortune and unluckiness.

    I’ve outgrown such superstition, but I can’t help but think about this idea of “luck” now and then, especially so on those random Fridays that happen to evoke a bit of triskaidekaphobia in the lingering echos of my childhood.

    I’ve been told so many times in my life that skills I’ve cultivated, talents I’ve practiced or knowledge I’ve acquired is due to some kind of lucky streak in my life. 

    And maybe there was some luck.

    Because, oh sure, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that the privilege of my life, living in a western democracy in the twenty-first century as a European-descended man has played a huge role in the type and frequency of opportunities dangled out in front of me. But any numbskull no matter their privilege—and I’ve known a few—can fumble those opportunities and wind up in a very different creative space, or even completely outside of one.

    Luck played a part, sure, but beyond luck some of that is not only what you make of the cards your have been dealt, the dice you rolled, or the coin you flipped… but what you put back into the system. 

    It’s not luck to work hard towards a goal. It’s not luck to dream big. It’s not luck to share knowledge with others. It’s not luck to build community. It’s not luck to cultivate and to elevate voices. And its not luck to embrace something bigger than yourself and beyond the creative product. It’s more than luck.

    And we should embrace more of that idea and make more of that kind of luck for everyone.