Jenna Bean Veatch is a multi-talented renaissance woman who brings her prodigious ability to encourage creativity, connections, and community. In a little more than a decade, she has built a devoted community in Whatcom County.
Just over ten years ago, Jenna was working at a job she hated, knowing she was a person who had some things she was good at, but in a job that demanded skills she didn’t have. To make a change in her life, she started by asking herself what her skills were. “I call myself a dancer, but I didn’t have great technique, yet I love choreography. I’m not a virtuosic ukulele player, but I’ve written some clever songs. I can make costumes, although they may look homemade.” Jenna’s personal discovery was that the act of creating “lit her fire.”
A Path, a Direction and a New Way for Singles to Meet
Once she knew that, she decided teaching the creative process and guiding others was the right path. With an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts & Creative Inquiry from the California Institute of Integral Studies, she launched her program, Creative Workspace, offering three 12-week sessions a year (online and in person), an annual summer gathering, and she produces several exceedingly popular Not-Creepy Gathering For People Who Want to Fall In Love where singles meet.
Jenna, who lives in Bellingham and grew up in the Northwest, started the Not-Creepy Gatherings – the most recent at WinkWink! on March 2 – because she wanted people to feel comfortable about making connections in any way. “People feel an urgency around dating,” she says, “but if they allow themselves to be open to connecting, the urgency disappears.” The first gathering started as a dance theatre show, but Jenna realized her goal was to facilitate connections, so the participatory gathering evolved with some writing activities and small group opportunities for people to get to know each other better. Ages range from people in their 20s and up, and everyone is welcome.
Creative Workspace
This philosophy extends to the Creative Workspace program. People come together to respond to Jenna’s prompts, such as poetry readings by Yoko Ono, essays from Miranda July, Lulu Miller’s beautiful piece on grief in Orion Magazine, free-hand drawing, and movement during class. It is a safe space where people support the work of others and are guided by the generosity of spirit Jenna engenders.
Long time participant – she’s taken 12 workshops in the last several years – Cat Enright describes it as “Such an open invitation for whatever I’ve got going on. Jenna and the Creative Workshop connect me to a world of artists I would never know. She exposes us to readings, interviews, and ideas and keeps it fresh from session to session.” The fresh approach often shows up in the work people create and share each week.
The Creative Workspace concludes with a gathering where participants present a final project. One year, Cat created paintings of bubbles representing what she was grieving. The paintings, in turn, inspired her to write a fairy tale. Everyone got a copy at the final meeting.
Another continuing participant, Ali, also acknowledges the community building. “Building community becomes part of the creative process,” she says. “It’s a weird and wonderful mix of intimacy and space ideal for art-making, whether you write, make videos, sing, paint, sew, whatever floats your boat. Everybody gets to shine.”
Even the final project gathering is a little exotic, held at the Consulate de Monte Cristo in Bellingham and the Fremont Abbey in Seattle.
The summer extension of this open invitation to let your inner creative out is Workshop Workshop, a summer camp for grown-ups held in Port Orchard at the very camp where Jenna spent her childhood summers. Here, not only are people engaged in creation in a beautiful spot, but there is a different leader for each workshop during the four days. Topics have ranged from “Get Lost to Find Something: A Guided Creative Wandering” to learning about aquatic macroinvertebrates that are water quality indicators in lakes to a PowerPoint on surrealism that Jenna says completely blew everybody’s mind! “With different leaders, everyone’s a teacher, and everyone’s a student,” she explains, “What happens depends on who shows up and what they bring.” The next one is June 26 to 30. Registration for the all-inclusive session is open now.
It All Comes Together
If it all sounds a little ephemeral and as if art in its many forms is the primary outcome, Etalia and Spencer, who met at a Not-Creepy Gathering, explain it this way, “We kind of met but didn’t meet. We were never in a group together at the Gathering.” Etalia had noticed Spencer, and Spencer had also spied her. In the end, people were invited to write a thank you note to others in the group who had caught their attention. “All of a sudden, there was this hand giving me a note,” says Etalia, “and he spelled my name right!” In the note, Spencer reflected on what he had heard her talking about earlier in the evening to Etalia.
They both emphasized that they were open to connecting in any way, not just hoping to find romantic love. Spencer, who had been visiting from Seattle, went home, and two days later, Jenna connected them by email (with permission). “The curtain parted,” he said, “following our first date, I had the very strong feeling I had found the person I wanted to be with.” The couple’s marriage and six-year-old daughter are the result of a serendipitous evening.
The common theme in everything Jenna does is connection, inclusion, and finding community through creativity. “I really work to create spaces where we get to show up as our whole selves. Worries, self-doubts and excitements, we get to bring all of that to create a safe space for vulnerability and emotional honesty.”
Check out Jenna Bean Veatch’s website here.
