Sick of Your Career? Launch a New One!

PART ONE: How I reinvented myself, and you can too. WRITTEN & ILLUSTRATED by PETER MOORE

LAST WEEK, BATES COLLEGE invited me in as a guest speaker, to explain to my fellow alumni how to make a fresh start at any time in their lives. Does that sound like a life option you’d like to choose? Go for it! Read on!

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Title: HOW TO SCRATCH YOUR CREATIVE ITCH

The speech: Greetings everyone, and thanks for joining today’s itch-scratching session. It feels good to scratch an itch, right?

Just to help me gauge the room, enter into the chat what sort of creative urges you’re thinking of indulging, or you wouldn’t be here. 

Now, I know it isn’t easy to confess your artistic or creative dream in a public space. I apologized for mine for several decades, before I realized that a) Nobody will believe you, anyway. b) Nobody gives a damn what you intend to do, and c) they’ll forget after you tell them. 

Which wonderfully, beautifully, leaves it all up to you. So, what do you dream of doing, that you can’t believe anybody will actually let you do? 

News bulletin: You don’t need their permission! You can just dream it and do it!

But if you have a free half-hour to spare, I’ll try to add some perspective and inspiration to your creative quests. My leap from editing to writing into cartooning followed an arc that was specific to me, but the lessons here are generalizable to any pursuit you might dream up. It’s not that I think I’m all that with my creative endeavors. Rather, I’m an example of how, if I can do it, anybody can do it. 

My three basic points are these. 

First: Tell your inner critic to Eff’off: 

That voice in your head, telling you you’re not worthy, won’t amount to anything, and don’t have the right to chase something you’ve never done before? It can go to hell. Your inner critic never accomplished anything, so it doesn’t get a seat at your drawing table.  

Second: Big or small, focus is all. 

The bad news is that you can’t do everything everywhere all at once. But that movie just showed how confusing it can be to try. So don’t. Do your one small thing you’re passionate about—drawing, short stories, guitar, TikTok—and invest yourself in it. 

That, with the addition of time, is how anything worthwhile is accomplished. 

Third: Remember why you’re launched on this creative pursuit. 

It’s not to make the big bucks, or to impress strangers, or to gather a million followers on Substack. At least, it shouldn’t be. It should be about letting something out that feels caged up right now, and needs to be released. 

We had a raccoon stuck in our attic for two weeks, and it made an unholy racket every night, until we cut a hole the soffit outdoors, and it sprinted out of there like its life depended on it. 

That’s what you’re looking for in your creative pursuit: Sounds of gnawing, howling, and complaint from a trapped area of your life. Cut a hole in your psychic soffit, and let it run!

Here’s the short version of how I released my personal raccoon. 

I spent a long career as a magazine editor and writer confining myself to one part of the business. But I always had an interest in what the art directors and designers and illustrators did, to augment my work on the word side. Instead of doing that art magic, I grounded myself in words, and spent my entire adult life writing them, editing them, and generally being everybody’s Inner Pain in the Ass, including my own. I terrified generations of interns on split infinitives and over-use of the word “get.” 

But all that was never about my work, my ideas, my voice. I ghost wrote books for all sorts of people who couldn’t write their own. I envied my Bates classmate Liz Strout–our very own Pulitzer Prize winning novelist!— from afar, but didn’t dare to make the leap she did. 

Instead I fulfilled others’ needs before my own. Does that sound familiar? 

To hell with that! I was the editor of Men’s Health magazine when I began my art quest, but that just meant that I spent all day every day talking. I needed to shut up for a change! So I scratched an itch that went back to my Bates days, when my dad advised me to take a drawing course, but I never made time for it. Sorry dad! Thanks for those tuition checks! 

Three decades later it was long past time to scratch the itch: I took an “introduction to studio art” class through an adult ed program in Emmaus, Pennsylvania.  

My initial sketches and paintings…were lousy and awkward, actually. As the old joke goes: If at first you don’t succeed, don’t try skydiving.

But creative endeavors are not skydiving! A pencil is inherently low risk! Take a fall, and only your ego is bruised. 

And this gives me the pretext to quote the great Benjamin Elijah Mays, Bates College Class of 1920:

That puts some starch in your shorts, right? 

Art was a whole new constellation of stars for me to reach for. I took a figure-drawing class, unfortunately without actual naked people in the classroom. Instead I copied the work of the classical French painter Charles Bargue, who did his art thing in the 1800s. 

As long as I was comfortable with plagiarism, I was making progress. By now I was in year three of my art pursuit, just in case you think any of this happens instantly. For two decades I made my way through a kaleidoscope of media—from pencils to charcoals to watercolors to acrylics to pastels to iPad and stylus, all the while chasing something or other I couldn’t quite identify.

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” 

Winston Churchill said that. And he didn’t graduate from Bates or anyplace else for that matter. He just went out and did stuff, like winning World War 2. But here’s the good news for all of us who were busy accomplishing other things for the last four decades: Churchill was also an artist. 

Here’s another quote of his that I love, talking about his first attempts at painting: 

"I seized the largest brush and fell upon my victim with berserk fury. I have never felt any awe of a canvas since."

This was one of Churchill’s early paintings. Depending on your taste in art, you could consider this canvas a victim, indeed. No matter, it made Churchill happy to concentrate on his art, and gave him a break from Hitler, and the siege of London, and his tedious workmates. 

You can see why he wanted to get away, right? 

I was similarly motivated. My office life was a blur of meetings and interviews and editing, which brought to mind Hamlet’s retort, when Polonius asked him what he was reading. “Words, words, words,” was the exhausted reply. I was right there with Hamlet…up to but not including killing my uncle, that is.

You probably have annoying stuff you want to escape, too. A watercolor kit, a guitar, a writing project, learning a new language, are the perfect places to find refuge, because they require your full concentration. Just the refuge you may need when election season heats up this fall. 

When I took that studio art course, it was as if a guardian angel had whispered in my ear: “Shut up and paint!”

And so I registered for an acrylics painting course at the Allentown Pennsylvania Museum of Art, with an instructor who drove me batty doing weird still-lives with parrots, and spending super-embarrassing hours staring at her best friend to paint her portrait. 

But pain is part of art! So is failure! Remember what our art buddy Winston said, over at the next easel! “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

My acrylics teacher stoked my enthusiasm with an assignment to execute an original work in the style of a painter we admire.

Magritte called this “The Human Condition,” and I love how it mixes a window view with a deeper look into what artists do. 

At the time I was taking this course, my wife and I were about to pull up stakes from Pennsylvania and move to Colorado and I was already missing my favorite view from our house.

Rene Magritte helped preserve it for me. 

My goal was to paint the four seasons I’d been watching from my kitchen windows for twenty years. Each window panel is a specific memory of the seasons as they passed, and to me it captured the many years we’d lived in that house, watching our garden grow and change, watching our kids grow up and leave. So as it turned out, my teacher taught me a very important lesson. Art isn’t about recording a perfect image of your subject. Rather, it’s about capturing an image that’s true to your unique vision of the world. 

That’s true whatever your medium. For your short story, or romance novel, or song to succeed, it first must be an expression of who you are, what you believe, how you see the world. That’s kind of scary, but also a relief as well. You don’t need to be Rene Magritte or Brandi Carlile or Elizabeth Strout, but do you need to reach as deeply as they do, and hear your voice loudly enough to amplify it in your artwork. That requires commitment, lots of trial and error, and putting a lot of yourself into your work. Is there a better time in our lives for knowing what’s inside, than for people who graduated from college in the 1970s?

My wife and I made it to Colorado, and I enrolled in another acrylics painting class. There were more windows…

And then a landscape I’d seen on a visit to Point Reyes National Seashore. I finished this painting as a more-or-less realistic depiction of the beautiful hills I’d seen near the coast of California, and I thought the painting was finished. 

But it was also boring. 

I was wrestling what to do with the image, when the answer bubbled up from my subconscious, in a dream. 

The next time I went into class, I painted in the foxes and rabbits, commuting in opposite directions on that country lane.

I identify with that fox in the middle of the road, who has suddenly realized: Why am I running past dinner? 

And this was when I finally realized what I most enjoyed in my artwork. Not just landscapes, though I still enjoy doing those. My greatest pleasure is in modifying the world for my own amusement. I’m a visual jokester, and I find the world to be a very funny place. 

Actually, the world is a terrifying place, but in my paintings and drawings, I can cope by pointing a finger and laughing. Even at Claude Monet, who missed an opportunity by painting grainstacks, rather than cupcakes. With sprinkles!

That instinct to joke made it into my watercolors as well. Here’s an elk with bananas growing from his antlers.

Why? I don’t know! But it made me laugh, so I painted it. The bull elk wasn’t happy, though. 

And here I am on my post-graduation visit to Paris, to attend language school and dreamily float around. 

I imagined umbrellas falling with the rain over Paris. Reality is overrated, in fact. 

On the strength of that realization, I entered the mask fundraiser at the Fort Collins Museum of Art, and came up with these images. 

Thanks again, Rene Magritte!

And this guy, who’s headed out of the ballpark in a hurry.

And here’s this year’s mask. 

You could own this, you know. Then it would be staring back at you full-time.

I called this piece “Ten Thousand Years of Bad Luck” in reference to my cavalier destruction of mirrors in its creation. It is actually based on an experience I had about two hours after my graduation from Bates, when I drove off into the oblivion of adult life. When I pulled onto the Maine Turnpike with my BA in English and no idea what was next, I heard Mick Jagger singing: “I've been shattered…shadoobeh…” 

Exactly. 

Forty-three years later, I was in a similar state after the pandemic, with all of my freelance work drying up. I met a friend for lunch in Boulder, and he reviewed all I was up to with my art and my personal writing, and said: “You ought to be on Substack.” It’s a blogging platform that’s friendly to artists, and I dove in with both feet, combining my drawings with excerpts of a travel memoir I wrote when the publishing industry went dark, in 2020. 

Suddenly, all of those drawings and memories and funny bits had a home, and I began publishing The Road2Elsewhere three times weekly. 

My readership grew painfully slowly at first, but it didn’t matter. I was combining words and images in a way I never had before, and I loved doing it. Finally I had found my voice in a completely unexpected way. Which is how all the best discoveries come: When you surprise yourself. I now have 4,200 subscribers here, which is big fun. 

Based on a burgeoning portfolio of work at petermoore.substack.com, I was able to sell an idea to the Colorado Sun, a much-decorated daily news platform with twenty million page views every year. 

My first cartoon idea: It’s indefensible how people routinely invade the privacy of elk, in Rocky Mountain National Park each fall, to watch and photograph their mating practices. 

Hence this. 

Give them some space, people!

Now I do a monthly panel cartoon for the Sun, which is kind of unbelievable for a guy who didn’t realize he was a cartoonist until two years ago. I still suspect that cartooning may be a rare symptom of Long Covid. 

Here’s an image from a cartoon I published in the Colorado Sun, after imagining that Bluecifer, a haunted statue at Denver International Airport, might take over routine functions at the airport.

Like, you know, hauling Santa’s sleigh. 

Next, Front Range NPR noticed my column in the Sun, and invited me to be the David Sedaris of the Rocky Mountains. Soon I was producing funny commentaries and animations for them, including this one about the recent reintroduction of wolves into Colorado.

Suddenly I was a double threat with my words and my animations! 

Fill ‘er up with another tankload of extinction!

And this is me, skiing toward the apocalypse, with my favorite sport. 

Let’s be clear: It doesn’t make sense that I’m doing this. It wasn’t any kind of logical next step in my career. But if we lose the ability to surprise ourselves, what is there to look forward to in the years ahead?

And no, this isn’t just worthwhile for me, because of the paying gigs and reactions of friends. Note that it came out of work I did ONLY to please and entertain myself. The paying gigs are a byproduct of my commitment to art, but the commitment came first. 

What gold nuggets are buried in the rubble of your lifetime, waiting to be unearthed through your creative processes? 

COMING ON SATURDAY 5/11/24: I DID IT. YOU CAN TOO.

“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, If This Isn't Nice, What Is?: Advice for the Young

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