We wanted to add a creative to our speaker lineup this month who’s taken the challenge of bridging the divide between the tastes of two pretty specific audiences, and creates special moments of shared experiences between them. Enter Jack Forman, bass player and front man for Recess Monkey, a trio of three Seattle teachers who make music for kids and families. It’s not really new that adults make things that are reflective of their childhood, but finding ways to make it accessible and appealing to both adults and kids is a feat in of itself (Schoolhouse Rock, anyone?). We think you guys will enjoy his upcoming talk, What If… (Surprising Creativity is Hidden in Open-Ended Questions), which you can still grab tickets to right here.

CM: How do you define creativity and apply it in your career?

JF: To me it starts with the energy and emotion and everything comes into place after that. I love segmenting projects into little incremental steps and challenge myself to do creative problem solving with each one. I’m constantly thinking along the lines of “yeah, but that’s the easy way” when I’m at my creative best—not complicating the product, but adding some constraints to the ideation process so that I really have to push into new territory. Someone asked our band early on how we’d know that it was time to stop making music, and the consensus was, “when we start trying to write songs we’ve already written.” 

CM: Where do you find your best creative inspiration?

JF: There are two answers here:

External: My work primarily centers around children, and I get so much from just riffing with kids. I feel like any conversation I’ve ever had with kids where I entered with an agenda—like “how to do long division”—it always falls flat. It’s the moments where kids are running the conversation that I get most excited creatively and just on a human level. Size is the primary difference between kids and adults—everything else can be largely indistinguishable.

Internal: The shower. When I get truly stuck, this is where I go. When we’re working on new albums, there’s a noticeable increase in our water bill in the next billing cycle.

CM:. What’s the one creative advice or tip you wish you’d known as a young person?

JF: Not any one piece of advice, but probably about a dozen different tips about organization. (A dozen because I probably would have lost eleven of them between the car and the house). A small notebook that I carry around and a clean desk are the two greatest tools I employ and it took a long time to get there. And I didn’t really learn how to write songs until I discovered the audio recorder on my phone- I’d lose the melodies all of the time in the 5 minutes it took to get to a musical instrument. 

CM: Who would you like to hear speak at CreativeMornings?

JF: John Vanderslice. We just made a record with him at his San Francisco recording studio Tiny Telephone and it was one of the most creatively inspiring stretch of days in my life. He’s a funny dude. You should ask him.

CM: What was the best advice you were ever given?

JF: I taught for 13 years at University Child Development School here in Seattle. A fifth grader there once said, in passing, “You know, you kind of make your own luck.” That was such a huge moment for me and I go back to the words all of the time. There are so many takes on what this means practically, so many lessons that I think it embodies. First, it’s a reminder that in order to “luck out,” you have to recognize that you did! That, on every scale, you have to be aware of what’s happening around you, to never tread too long in the same water. Being “opportunistic” in the least selfish way possible. But I think it’s also such a strong affirmation of the value of working hard with huge, murky goals, with the notion that somehow, somewhere, this is all going to pay off. What a vindication to the sophomore in college who dropped all of his classes fall quarter on the precipice of a serious course correction that it would have led to so much luck down the line. This is not to say that I haven’t been truly lucky in a way that has been completely out of my control. Gratitude, wherever it’s directed, is such an important thing. 

CM: What is the one movie or book every creative must see/read?

JF: They probably have already read it (everyone has, right?), but Vonnegut’sSlaughterhouse V is one of my two all-time favorite books. The other is Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. I keep going back to both of them again and again; both marry a childlike whimsy with wit, darkness and deep creativity. The novel I wrote when in the creative writing program at UW was sort of a love letter to those two books. They’re gorgeously written but weird!  David Shields, the creative writing professor with whom I spent two years writing, was the first person to say to me that “The written word is the most intimate connection one can ever make with the mind of another human,” and I like to think that these two books, somehow, have opened a little a creative wormhole into their brains. I feel the same way when I look at a Jasper Johns painting or watch the movie-of-a-play Hurly Burly. It’s inspiring stuff to me.