by Rachel Donahue
A quick web search of the word “generative” brings a host of returns about artificial intelligence, as though all that were required to generate in this day and age were a set of data and a prompt, and voila! a machine spits out your result like a dot matrix printer. [Cue sound.] What a sad diminishment of a green and lively word.
Generative comes from the Latin generare (“to beget”) and more fully means “having the power or function of generating, originating, producing, or reproducing.” Think of the multiplication of rabbits: the word generations comes from the same root. Try to forget for a minute any paltry associations with AI, and consider the word generative in the context of human flourishing and creativity.
Have you ever had a big, exciting, scary, delightful idea? An idea bigger than you are? One that sparked more ideas in both you and other people? Generative ideas are exactly these: the ones that grow, beget, and multiply. Like rabbits; like rhizomes under the earth; like a current of electricity lighting up a house, a street, a whole neighborhood.
What do you do with such an idea?
If you’re like me, you daydream and worry and fret about it. You tell God it’s too big, that someone else should do it (knowing full well how it went for Moses when he said this). You daydream some more, and pray, and pluck up the courage to finally tell someone else about it. And you keep daydreaming and telling people until you see that spark—when someone else starts daydreaming about it with you.
Isn’t it a wonderful feeling to have someone enter into an idea with you? To imagine together the possibilities of what this idea might become? It makes you feel sane and seen. It gives you hope that maybe one day, this idea that’s been living in your head just might make it out into the world somehow. And it gives you the courage to take a step toward making that idea a reality.
But letting an idea out into the world can be a scary prospect. The thing can take on a life of its own and quickly grow beyond your capacity and your control. Humans have limitations, and big ideas can’t come to life through a single person. It would take a whole team of people…
And here, right here, is where you must take a huge step of faith to set things in motion that cannot be reversed. It’s the point of no return.
Makoto Fujimura, in this interview with the Trinity Forum, says that generative ideas are born out of love, reflecting the generative creativity of God, who is Love. This is the language of begetting: born out of love. Generative ideas are the overflow of love.
Just as fathers and mothers beget children, poets beget poems; gardeners beget gardens; artists beget art. Through a labor born out of love, these poems and gardens and pieces of art take on a life of their own. Their existence in the world spreads love and vision, and these in turn beget new ideas in the people who experience them.
Can artists or gardeners or poets boast in a successfully generative idea or piece of work? Not any more than parents can boast in the success of a child—which is to say (if they are being honest) that they had a hand in it, but that much of the process is simply the grace of God. In both parenting and good art-making, you have to die to yourself over and over in the process—so much death and sacrifice!—but the love of Christ compels us. Love first set the example, and love draws us onward.
A generative idea, then, is not something to be produced or spit out of a cold, calculating machine—it’s something to be stewarded, cultivated, tended, nurtured. A generative idea is a gift; a generative idea is a responsibility. And to properly steward such an idea, we require community.
Just as in parenting I need the body of Christ speaking into my children’s lives to help love them and guide them as they grow, as a poet (or artist or gardener), I need the voices of others speaking into my work, helping me to love it well and make it the best it can be. Generative work springs from humility and vulnerability and connection. It grows from the soil of friendship, conversation, and shared loves.
I’d like to take a moment to share my own personal adventure with a generative idea, which just happens to be the next big project for Bandersnatch Books.
A few years ago, inspired by the poetry tea during Hutchmoot Homebound, my children and I began participating in a weekly poetry tea time with other families over Zoom. Our children would read poems to each other from beloved names like Robert Louis Stevenson and Shel Silverstein, spanning from the beautiful to the ridiculous. I loved watching these children delight in rhymes, puns, and other wordplay.
In that same season, I was actively participating in a couple online groups of poets (namely The Habit and The Poetry Pub), where I was regularly hearing and seeing delightful poems being workshopped by talented writers. I loved getting to see other poets’ strengths in an internal rhyme or the turn of a line and the way they celebrated one another’s work.
It was the marriage of these two loves that birthed a new idea: what if I could introduce these two wonderful groups of people to each other? Wouldn’t that be fun? We happened to own a publishing company, so I thought—what if we made a new, fully illustrated anthology of poetry for children written by my many talented poet friends?
It was both a delightful and terrifying prospect.
Thankfully, my colleagues at Bandersnatch Books were immediately on board with the idea. But the question remained: how on earth to begin executing a project of such magnitude?
I asked friends in the publishing world for advice and began taking notes. Then at the Square Halo conference in 2023, I shared my dream with Emily J. Person and Théa Rosenburg over breakfast, and that opened the door. Emily had just received her B.F.A. in illustration, and Théa was a fellow writer and a lover of books. Their combined enthusiasm for my idea breathed life into it. I began to hope that it just might come to pass.
For more than a year, Emily and I would check in periodically to daydream about what this project could be. It grew a name—I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry—and a structure: six broad categories of poems, including Flora & Fauna, Dreams & Whimsy, Unexplorable Depths, Cautionary Tales, Vittles, and Humans.
When I told my poet friends about the idea, they got excited, too. They started playing with words and inviting other poet friends to play with them. I’m still astonished at the way one little idea sparked such contagious joy and creativity. If I ever feared that we might not have enough poems to fill a book, I was a fool.
Turns out, these poets love wordplay and childlikeness as much as I do. They each brought the powers of the adult into the playfulness of the child and crafted wonderful, delightful, beautiful things. Sixty-something poets submitted more than 230 poems for consideration. You should have seen the piles of words as I began to sort them all!
After many, many hours of work, an actual book has taken shape, and I’m astonished again at how wonderfully the pieces are fitting together. This project is going to be so much bigger than I had originally imagined. The book will contain 170 poems by 62 poets, with every spread fully illustrated with Emily’s beautiful, whimsical, meticulous work.
A love of children inspired the producers of Hutchmoot: Homebound to include a poetry tea time in the offerings. That poetry tea time furthered a love of poetry in our children. Our children’s delight and the good work of fellow poets inspired the idea for this anthology, and the idea for this project sparked play and joy and more new poems, which will in turn spark joy and delight in more children. The generous, generative, creative overflow keeps spreading—all born out of love!
As with any generative work, it’ll take a community to make this project happen. We’re Kickstarting I’ve Got a Bad Case of Poetry so we can make it big and beautiful and chock full of colorful illustrations. If we reach the stretch goals, we’ll get to add features that improve the book for everyone, like a ribbon, printed endpapers, and foil and emboss on the cover. This book is going to be something special, entirely made by humans, and I can’t wait for everyone to see it.
The idea for this project hasn’t ceased to be exciting, delightful, and scary to me, but the farther we get into the making of it, the more I’m learning to lean back and trust the Love that has generated such creativity. People are making good, true, and beautiful things to the glory of the One who made them. Together, we get to spread that love to a new generation with a prayer that it will spark something in them, too.
Rachel S. Donahue holds a B.A. in English and Bible from Welch College and enjoys travel, housewifery, and homeschooling while fulfilling her role as Chief Creative Officer of Bandersnatch Books. She's published two poetry collections: Beyond Chittering Cottage: Poems of Place, and Real Poems for Real Moms: from a Mother in the Trenches to Another. She's also the editor of the forthcoming anthology I've Got a Bad Case of Poetry, currently live on Kickstarter.
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