Bath salts and recreational creativity in a post-industrial community. I was interested in what this might look like—in a place where the creative economy could have a cultural life of its own. With support from PEN USA and the New England Foundation for the Arts, I spent two months conducting participant-observation in the life of a small town in Massachusetts. How did you become interested in this topic? My husband is from a coal mining town, in western Massachusetts. Over the years, he’s been active in efforts to restore the local economy, which at one point depended on coal and manufacturing. He’s worked on a variety of social change campaigns. So he was already familiar with how creative endeavors can sometimes develop when people need to generate income or work together to pursue common goals. By researching for this project, I realized how few studies have been done on this. (It’s easy to find studies on creative capital and creative cities.) As social theorist Stuart A. Thompson Jr. writes, scholars tend to take for granted the idea that creative capital and creative cities are distinct and separated. You know: creative workers are going to live in San Francisco, while manufacturing will be done in China. One of the goals of my study was to see if that dichotomy is actually well grounded. What I found were several examples of people using creativity to restore their local economies and communities. How did the people in this town respond to a new creative economy? In that small town, you find people who are making a living from artistic pursuits, who are actively fighting for their place in the local economy, who don’t see themselves as competing with their neighbors for work. What’s most interesting is that many have never felt at home in this town. Their ties are mostly family or a certain network of friends, so they are not going to give up their chosen lifeworld just because it isn’t working for the local economy. I found this to be a really interesting way to think about creative work. It isn’t about where creative work is done, but how it develops out of necessity. In your article, you show how different people in the community engage in the creative economy. For example, you found that some residents were developing their creative skills, but others were turning a creative side job into a full-time livelihood. How do people in this community see themselves and what kind of future they envision? I found that there was a mixture of people involved in creative work, or what I call “creative workers.” They were all part of a community and were doing what they could to make a living in their town. Some, for example, were involved with writing groups and poetry slams, some were painters and musicians. They saw themselves as creative workers who are engaged in their community, and who are not competing with people in the industrial economy. I also found a lot of people who are working as freelancers, or with creative enterprises that are inextricably tied to the town. These people are trying to create a community where they can live and work. In other words, you can have a more diverse, vibrant economy where all your resources aren’t being sucked out of town. There are a few people who don’t necessarily view themselves as creative workers but who are using creativity in the workplace to develop their careers. They come from different backgrounds and experience, but they’re all working toward something that provides them with some level of financial stability. They might be working as designers or programmers and have created side projects that have made them some money. I saw a lot of them, as these people create jobs for themselves through projects, which they use to explore their creativity. On the other hand, there are also people who want to create a full-time livelihood in the creative economy. As with some of these other people, they’re from this community and want to live and work here. There are local shops and restaurants, and there are other creative workers who take advantage of that. People work in local businesses and then have the choice to go further out into the world to create their own creative products or to work for someone else. It seems like people are using creativity in unconventional ways, from repairing their community in creative ways to making a living from writing apps or music. How did they get to this place? One of the things that keeps coming up is a sense of community—not only as being friends, but as being in the community of artists. Some people feel a strong sense of community that grew out of their experiences. They shared the excitement of working together to realize their creative pursuits. Others have grown up here and feel a connection that’s not about a certain craft or a certain interest but is about belonging. These ideas are the foundation of this group’s way of being and its approach to the world, and it all starts with creative work. A lot of the work I see involves using or making stuff together. For example, they’re making handmade T-shirts, a craft, that then generate income to pay rent and support creative work. You also see people developing their artistic talents through a lot of these creative endeavors. One person collects rocks for his creative inspiration, which he then uses as the inspiration for his writing. In a town of about 4,500, it doesn’t seem like there is a huge need for more things to be made, but these people are responding to that need in a creative way. That’s one of the best parts of doing this kind of study. What it gives you are the kinds of connections people are making all around the world. Did you have any other interesting discoveries? I was surprised at how creative people are in that small town, how they were creating things and finding ways to have a sense of community. For example, the local community college hired a group of graduate students who were working on interdisciplinary collaborative projects. They were doing what’s called civic hacking, where people come together to hack on city government. This wasn’t directly related to their area of expertise—they were all artists—but they figured out how to do it in a way that wasn’t possible in a small town that didn’t have the funding to hire consultants. These people created a city-government hackathon, essentially. They had a lot of fun coming up with ways to hack on city government, but their first effort was a way to help older citizens who wanted to exercise, but couldn’t really get out in the winter. They wanted to walk in the snow, so they created the idea of “exergaming,” exercise games for people who are trying to get in shape but don’t have a lot of money. It’s a creative thing to use creative people in a way that doesn’t just reflect what they already do. They create something unique to the town, to their own community. The most important takeaway from your study is that new forms of creative capital are appearing everywhere. When I got to the end of my study, I wrote about it as a time when the creative economy was evolving—in a post-industrial city. In the book, I talk about how people use this to reclaim their futures from economic decline, and to reclaim their lives from a certain kind of economic arrangement that has failed them. What’s interesting is that these are very similar to the things that are happening in a lot of cities around the world. People are struggling for a creative way of being together. So much of this seems like a natural thing that is happening everywhere. What does the future look like in your mind? This isn’t going to be something that happens overnight or across the board. For some, this is the economy they have to settle for, so they have to accept that fact. But what’s interesting is that there are people who are choosing to use their creative capital in different ways. For example, some are using it to run their own small business. You have to believe in something, and you have to be hopeful, but it’s not just about the economy or about money. You have to believe in a certain way of living. You can’t have a creative economy without some people having creative capital to begin with. You need people who are interested in those kinds of things. So you can take people who are willing to move to New York and become an artist or an artist’s assistant and then get these people in other towns to want to be like those people who are willing to do that. It’s an interesting connection.