If I am this, then I am not that.  If I am a writer, I am not an artist.  If I am to go on to do this, then I must leave that behind.

This is a common enough view, but it is, I believe, a fallacy.  All of our experiences enrich our lives, and each other.  Also, different perspectives enable us to see things in new ways.  Because I studied history, I see a landscape in a particular way.  Because I am obsessed with maps – including historical maps – I see landscapes in a particular way.  Because I am an artist – and specifically a textile artist, engaged with colour and texture, form and function, techniques and materials, symbols and metaphors – I see a landscape in a particular way.  Because I am a historian, a map addict AND a textile artist, I see the landscape in a way which is uniquely informed by all those lenses – more complex, more nuanced, more sophisticated and more original that if I were solely a writer, a historian, a map addict, a textile artist – a way that is greater than the sum of those parts.

In our culture, we are encouraged to focus on a few things in life.  It starts early, in our education system, where by our mid teens we have to select those subjects which are to be taken forward to public examinations.  If we reach university, our mental paradigms are narrowed still further to one, two, or at the most three subjects.  By postgraduate study, the focus is on one small aspect of one subject, and the emphasis is on depth, not breadth.  There is still the expectation that we will stay in the same job – or at least the same type of work – for the whole of our working lives, as our parents and grandparents did before us.  But we live longer lives than ever before, and this expectation should be obsolete.  More and more of us (myself included) are making one or more career changes – reflecting the massive changes in society and the economy during the half-century and more of our working lives, which have caused entire industries to disappear and others to be invented, but also reflecting the change, growth and development in ourselves as people over that time.  Sure, there are things that don’t change – for example, my love of history was formed young and continues unabated.  But we do develop, change emphasis, change our outlooks.  It would be sad if we stagnated, with our life, work and worldview the same at seventy as it was at twenty – that would imply that we hadn’t lived, hadn’t experienced anything, hadn’t learned or adapted or evolved.

To my mind, there is a close correlation between openness to change and creativity.  Creativity, by its very nature, is the antithesis of the ‘but we’ve always done it this way’ school of thought.  You cannot make a new thing by doing everything the old way.  This is not to value innovation at all costs – that way lies a senseless waste of heritage, skills, knowledge and resources – but to be wedded to habit can only stifle new growth.

It seems perverse, therefore, for me to acquiesce with the cultural notion that we can only be one thing – a writer, an artist, a teacher, whatever – and cannot, should not, also be something else;  that it is a cause for surprise, and somehow unsettling, to find that the local street sweeper is also an award-winning poet, for example, or that the sheep-farmer is a best-selling author*.  The idea that if you are this, then you are not that.

For a while now I have been finding it frustrating that, in order to focus on writing, I have felt that I have to turn my back on my art practice – to say no, I’m not an artist, I am a writer.  But as well as being frustrating, I feel this could weaken the quality of my writing – deliberately excluding the perspectives and insights of the artist me has, I would argue, risked making my writing unnecessarily one-dimensional.  As a writer, I write because of who I am, with experiences, perspectives and insights from all the aspects – relationships, careers, interests, study, skills, identities – which make up my life.  And my best writing is always when I allow one of those things which makes me ‘me’ to play on the page.  When I write ‘as a writer’ I am sometimes disappointed by how flat the resulting work is.  When I write because I can’t help myself, because I am so passionate or fascinated or curious or entranced that I just have to write, it’s then that the magic happens.

A few days ago, a number of factors came together – quite randomly, in that serendipitous way which so often births the best things in life – and I had an idea for a book.  A book that would reflect on landscape and place, and would engage with history and maps and identity and all the things I get excited about.  A book, moreover, which only I can write – because I am a textile artist AND a writer.  BOTH/AND, not EITHER/OR.

It is not unlike the way I am not British OR Dutch, but both – I feel that by embracing a multiplicity of identities my life is enriched by the diversity of experiences, perspectives and insights.  To be one thing to the exclusion of the other feels like a limitation, an impoverishment of my life and, by extension, my writing.  Wilfully to narrow my world-view, limit my sensory and intellectual input, and put large parts of my life into a box labelled (like on the steamships of yore) ‘Not Needed On Voyage’ feels wrong – and, if I am striving for the best writing I am capable of, counter-productive.

So – I am embracing this new book project, which requires me to be the artist me quite as much as the writer me.  It’s scary, it fits into no known genre of writing, and selling the idea to an agent or publisher is going to be a challenge – but I know that I have to write it, because only the BOTH/AND not EITHER/OR that I am can write it.

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* Both these examples are genuine.