The Empress: How to feel like the mother of creativity

Years ago, as a 20-something just starting my career at a daily newspaper, one of the veteran reporters described me as an “Empress.” 

He said it was my whole vibe … the way I walked into our office. 

I can assure you this was not weird in a “Me Too” kind of way … I took it as a compliment then, and it still makes me smile, especially after studying the tarot.

The Empress exudes easy confidence. She’s relaxed, graceful, at peace. She’s full-figured and beautiful (and she may have just read the F*uck It Diet).

The Empress is associated with Venus — ultra feminine energy — and fertile, fruitful abundance.

She’s kind of a MILF.

Most importantly, I consider Empress the mother of creativity. 

I became an actual mother when I was 36. But I birthed the most creative project of my journalism career when I was 27. 

I started working at The Roanoke (Va.) Times in 2000, as a part-time editorial assistant.

I remember walking into the features department during my job interview — in awe — as I met the real people behind the bylines: Mary Bishop, Cody Lowe, Nancy Gleiner. These were the legends if you grew up reading the paper in Roanoke. And they all wrote for the popular Extra section — which also housed the comics and the crossword puzzle.

My main job was to edit the sprawling entertainment calendar published every Thursday in Extra. This required precise data entry: Making sure countless times and dates and places were organized and entered into the computer correctly. I was soon recognized for my correction-free attention to detail.

I was also responsible for the “Things to Do, Places to Go” column, a narrow strip of content on the front of Extra, which previewed at least one event for the weekend. I poured my creative heart into this prime piece of real estate — and I’ll never forget the time our senior copy editor told me how much she enjoyed my writing nuggets.

After a year of part-time work, I pitched our newsroom leaders, making a case for a full-time job in Extra. They said yes. I absorbed more work, and my column strip expanded into a full page of local entertainment blurbs every Thursday, called Extra Weekend. 

A couple years after that, I launched Inside Out, a stand-alone weekly entertainment tabloid that was also inserted into the Thursday paper. As the print editor, I was given free reign to create the vibe and the content, which was aimed at 18- to 34-year-olds.

I’ve never felt more excited, yet at ease. I was confident and creative. I was the Empress.

Before we launched in October 2004, our editor-in-chief challenged me to come up with a short list of keywords to describe the vision: Above all, I wanted IO to be useful, funny, interactive, and good-looking. I didn’t want it to feel like a newspaper. 

This was all happening as I was completing a master’s degree in liberal studies. I was researching creativity and the conditions that help foster innovation. Everything was coming together.

Before “design thinking” even entered the lexicon, I was using that approach: Always putting the readers at the center of our decisions. How could we make them laugh? How could we surprise them? How could we make their weekends a little bit better?

Our budget was tiny — mostly for freelance writers — but our creative team was so talented. Tad Dickens — local music guru — was the online editor; page designer Lindsay Durango gave IO its signature magazine look. We borrowed stellar feature writers and artists and photojournalists and summer interns from across the paper.

Each week was an opportunity to delight readers, and we had so much fun trying. In my fantasy world, I imagined us as the printed “SNL” of Roanoke.

Among my favorite projects:

• The Quest for the Best Margarita: Over one summer, our small group of writers and editors met at local restaurants to test the best our little city had to offer. It was tasty and hilarious. Also: a real public service. Fifteen years later, I still make the winning recipes.
• Reader contests, including an “evil laugh” voicemail contest for Halloween and weekly caption contests using movie publicity photos.
• We used Barbies to illustrate Roanoke’s Hot Makeout Spots.
• We challenged readers to a real-life treasure hunt, where they had to venture to downtown Roanoke and find all of the hidden clues (most were in the architecture of historic buildings).
• In addition to publishing our own cheeky wrapping paper, we also challenged kids to do the same for a Holiday Wrapping Paper Contest, which continues at the newspaper, 15 years later.
• We reviewed public bar bathrooms in “Toilet Talk,” which inspired a thank-you letter from the World Toilet Organization (an actual nonprofit dedicated to improving toilets worldwide).
• Finally, the idea that captured so much of the spirit of IO. I approached our marketing department with a proposal: What if we created our own Red Carpet Paparazzi crew, which would travel to various community events with a branded backdrop and actual red carpet? We launched the idea in 2007, and it became one of the most popular features in several sections of the newspaper, both in print and online.

I implicitly understood our mission to be extremely local: This was about spotlighting all the Roanoke area had to offer. During the month we launched Inside Out, I remember being interviewed by the public radio station. I talked about how we would be covering what people are most passionate about — the fun, creative endeavors that give life meaning — and that this was a privilege. 

Not only was it a privilege, it was pure joy.

Peter Senge, author of “The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization,” has described joy as the energy of innovation.

And this innovation felt like a party.

As we all know, the party would soon be over for newspapers. Our paper began to shrink — shedding both people and pages — and I was eventually squeezed into other roles, and out of journalism altogether.

No job has ever felt the same.

Years later, I still crave the cool confidence, the creative flow, the time I walked like an Empress.

By focusing on the meaning of the Empress tarot card, I’m able to more deeply reflect on WHY this was the most creative time in my life.

I was completely engaged in the work and felt meaning, autonomy, growth, impact, and connection — which spells MAGIC — an acronym I learned in the book, “Engagement Magic: Five Keys for Engaging People, Leaders, and Organizations.”

Meaning: Thanks to excellent leadership at the paper, I was urged to articulate a vision for Inside Out, to help create an identity and keep us focused. And we focused on serving a specific audience — the young and young at heart) in the Roanoke region. To help make their lives and our community a little bit better. We were place-based and intentional, and we shared our hearts.

Autonomy: I was granted the freedom to lead and write and be creative — but only after building knowledge and trust within my organization (and confidence within myself).

Growth: Every day — every issue — was a new creative challenge, and we all felt stretched. Sometimes those stretches were painful … sometimes embarrassing. But our conflicts made us stronger and better.

Impact: We could see our impact immediately — mostly through emails and calls from readers. Sometimes our colleagues would share the fruits of labor: Like the time one editor overheard a mom RAVE about our “School’s Out” edition in the bleachers of a baseball field (we listed all of the free and cheap fun for kids over the summer in one place).

When we reorganized and merged IO into the more conservative Extra section, we received this email from a reader in Blacksburg, which still explodes my heart: My wife and I have lived in a lot of towns — LA, Boston, Dayton, Portland, Detroit — and we’ve taken the paper in all of them. Every paper has a section like IO. Believe it or not, the IO of last summer (going back to its inception) was one of the best I’d ever seen. No, it wasn’t as big as some, or as “indie” as some or as literate in its reviews and recommendations. But it was really local, and when you read it you felt like the cool kids were letting you in on a few secrets. … Since I have a feeling the old IO was an extension of the personalities of the editors, let me let you (and the staff) … know that there were people who really liked and appreciated your work. Thanks.

Connection: The most creative magic happened because of the joyful collaboration between our team members and with our readers. And we know it was magic because it was So. Much. Fun! I intentionally organized social events to bring us closer together — fun times where the jokes and ideas flowed. Examples included our Quest for the Best Margarita, and IO’s first birthday party, where staff and freelance contributors were invited to rank store-bought birthday cakes.

I was so young and made very public mistakes and still had so much to learn about leadership. But I received one of the best compliments of my career during these years. One of my colleagues simply thanked me for “saying yes.” I think about her note often. About building the trust and courage to take creative risks together.

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Questions to consider if you draw The Empress:

• When have you felt confident and comfortable and creative like an Empress?
• Do you experience engagement “magic” in your current role? Do you have meaning, autonomy, growth, impact, connection?
• What’s missing? What’s stopping you from feeling this magic?