The other day I got an email:

        Dear Dr. Piirto

        I have gone through your textbook, Talented Children and Adults: Their Development and Education, Second Edition, 1999. . . Research on, and support services and resources for, the gifted are now focused almost exclusively on children and adolescents. After high school or college, virtually nothing is available to gifted adults. I believe that research funding and support services and resources need to be developed for the gifted during adulthood. Before trying to do so, I would like to know the history of past efforts to do so.

I responded:

        I am not aware of any funding for giftedness in adults except within domains, and then there is a lot of funding -- check within each domain -- writing, visual arts, science, mathematics, music, etc. -- for funding opportunities.

I have described talent development in these domains in the book you read as well as in my book, Understanding Those Who Create. It is perhaps a truism that the only group which cares about "general" giftedness in adults is Mensa and it does have scholarships, etc., available for high IQ adults.

However, it appears that the funding follows talent in the domain -- and test scores don't really matter in adulthood -- performance does. Hope this was helpful.

My answer indicated what happens to "former gifted children" when they grow up: they show their talents and gifts in a domain.

Individual, Domain, and Field

The idea of individual, domain, and field is pertinent here (Feldman, Csikszentmihalyi, & Gardner, 1994). A domain is "a formally organized body of knowledge that is associated with a given field" (p. 20). Mathematics is a field, but algebra, geometry, number theory, are domains.

Literature is a field, but poetry is a domain. Education is a field, but educational administration is a domain.

"Domains have representational techniques that uniquely capture the knowledge that is in the domain" (p. 22). This is done through symbol systems unique to the domain, a special vocabulary, and special technologies used only within that domain.

A field is transformed through individual creators pushing the boundaries of the domain. People working within the domain decide that change is called for.

In order to transform a field, the researcher, the creator, must have mastery of the theory, the rules, the ways of knowing of that field, and also of the domain that is being used to transform it. I am now planning a series of books about talents in domains.

The first one is called "My Teeming Brain": Understanding Creative Writers. The title comes from the Keats sonnet. "When I have fears that I may cease to be / before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain..."

The subjects were 160 contemporary or twentieth-century U.S. creative writers. They had not yet retired and were not novices. They had reached a stage in their lives where their production and publication success had qualified them for a certain recognition and respect as writers.

That is, they were known to writing peers, though they may not have been known to the public, even to the educated public, in general. I found 16 themes in their lives.

Biographical, autobiographical, and interview material was read over many times until no new themes emerged. Data were confirmed through multiple sources of information, including encyclopedias, directories, published interviews, published autobiographical and biographical essays, and the surveys.

At least two sources were consulted about each writer. At least one of their books and in most instances more (poems, stories, novels) was also read. I discuss the base of personality and the creative process in writers also.

The themes were re-organized into categories of the five "suns" in the Piirto Pyramid of Talent Development in "sun of home"; "sun of community and culture"; "sun of school"; "sun of chance"; "sun of gender."

[Figure 1: The Piirto Pyramid]

The Sun of Home

Theme 1: Unconventional families and family traumas

Family life was not an idyllic, carefree time in many writers’ lives. Life-changing events were often shapers of the writers' choice of writing as a career.

They often come from unconventional families that were often artistically oriented, using storytelling as a means of communicating, with books and reading as a presence.

The families were often laissez-faire in the approach to discipline, though some writers had parents who were quite authoritarian.

Several writers experienced orphanhood, parental disability, neglect, frequent moving, parental alcoholism, suicide of family members, and other extraordinary childhood trauma.

Theme 2: Predictive behavior of extensive early reading

Almost all of the writers speak of their engagement with the written word from an early age. I have called such early evidence "predictive behaviors." Predictive behaviors are those that are common to people who become adult creative producers in a certain domain.

The childhood reading was often indiscriminate and compulsive, and reading was used to both escape from the world and to learn about the world. Their verbal interests were noticeable, and many of them were honor students and scholarship receivers.

Their parents may or may not have nurtured this early reading but the writers discovered books at an early age and have not yet lost their interest.

Theme 3: Predictive behavior of early publication and interest in writing

Many of the writers early on published in local poetry and fiction magazines, in children's magazines. They won contests and some were accused of plagiarism by teachers who couldn't believe they could write so well.

This early validation of their writing talent by others served to spur them to further efforts in writing. Biographical and autobiographical accounts of the childhoods of writers, and published juvenilia confirm that early publication is a salient predictive behavior for later writing success.

Theme 4: Incidence of depression and/or acts such as use of alcohol, drugs, or the like.

The use of drugs and alcohol is present in the interviews and memoirs of contemporary writers. Pamela Durban, for instance, stated that after the break-up of her second marriage, "I drank too much and did all kinds of undignified and destructive things and started to write poetry."

Novelist Laura Kalpakian described similar means. "If I couldn't crack up, break down, court madness, sleep with death, flirt with suicide on my own, then there were always drink and drugs to help me."

Poet John Ashbery discussed a period when he was seeing a psychoanalyst about his drinking: "At the time I started going to him I was in a very distressed period, and was very anti-social, although I didn't realize it. I had a tremendous drinking problem, and I would go to somebody's house for dinner and get drunk and leave before dinner was served."

Ashbery was in despair: "It was as though I somehow couldn't bear to be with people, but I couldn't stand to be alone either, and I couldn't write very well, and ... anyway I really needed help. I've continued seeing this man."

Theme 5: Being in an occupation different from their parents

Although some occupations seem to have the characteristic of passing from parent to child [e.g. the family business; athletics; teaching, acting], writing does not seem to be such an occupation, as less than 5 percent of the writers had parents who were writers. That is fewer than the percentage of sons and daughters who follow their parents into school-teaching, or into business.

However, several of the parents were teachers or professors, and writing would seem to be a natural outgrowth of being in such a home where the presence of books and encouragement of reading would be present.

The Sun of Community and Culture

Theme 6: Feeling of marginalization or being an outsider, and a resulting need to have their group's story told;

One difference between African American, Hispanic, American Indian, and white writers seemed to emerge. The need to have one's group's stories heard and recognized is a theme in many of the interviews and essays.

The black writers almost unanimously expressed that they were writing in order to be able to portray the real lives of African-Americans, not those lives filtered through white writers' sensibilities, which were often formed by association with their servants.

For example, the novelist Ellen Perry was quoted as saying, "I think I'm more interested in how black women survive and even flourish in a world where there is so much against them . . . I am interested in cultural and racial clashes among people of differing backgrounds, differing ideas, and world selves. "

Theme 7: Late career recognition

Because of the financial precariousness of continuing with writing as a profession, many writers have experienced more than their share of types of jobs. It’s amazing to go through the lists of previous occupations held that are in the author blurbs in the end pages of small and large literary journals.

Many writers had other career starts before settling on and accepting their emotional need to write. Poet Frank O’Hara worked at the Museum of Modern Art as a curator. Gayle Elen Harvey has been a dental hygienist for years while publishing many poems and winning many contests.

Jorge Luis Borges was a librarian in Buenos Aires. Herbert Scott won a poetry prize for his book called Groceries, with poems gleaned from his years in management at a chain grocery store. Pulitzer prize-winning poet Mary Oliver was a cataloguer of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s papers.

The Sun of School

Theme 8: High academic achievement and many writing awards

In looking at biographical and autobiographical essays and reference works, it became apparent that these writers were bright. Many graduated with honors from high school and were given scholarships and fellowships to pursue their academic careers.

Many had risen from humble backgrounds by way of their academic talents. It is evident that the "sun" of school was upon them, and that teachers had a place in their talent development. They could be called the success stories of the field of the education of the gifted and talented, as their verbal talents are highly acceptable to schools.

One of the marks of high intelligence is memory. Memory is the stock in trade of the highly intelligent. Though they may be now called absent-minded professors, they have possessed the kind of academic memory that enables them to score high on tests—memory for what they have studied.

Visual and verbal memory are often intertwined, but many writers seem to remember the words quite well for the songs of yesteryear (many a writer’s party ends up with people singing old songs). They possess memory for emotional events of childhood that the rest of the family has forgotten.

Theme 9: Nurturing of talents by both male and female teachers and mentors

The writers were often encouraged by teachers who discovered their talent as writers. These teachers often became mentors. The genders of the mentors were more often male than female. Louise Glück described her relationship with the poets Leonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz thus: "I was working, of course, with extraordinary minds. And I was being exposed to images of dedication, not of the kind I knew, which I was not wholly prepared to comprehend."

She spoke of the polite scrutiny of her teachers: "One of the rare, irreplaceable gift of such apprenticeships is this scrutiny; seldom, afterward, is any poem taken with such high seriousness"

Theme 10: Attendance at prestigious colleges, majoring in English literature but Without attaining the Ph.D.

Another theme in these successful writers' lives indicates that perhaps the college one has attended as an undergraduate or graduate student has some relationship to future success.

The choice of college is important, and one could compare the college connections and training received to the ancient practice of the guild. Meeting professors and writers who can help and to whom the writer can apprentice herself should be an important facet of college choice.

The Sun of Chance

Theme 11: Residence in New York City at some point, especially among the most prominent

An odd fact surfaced in the tallying and evaluation of the themes in these lives. That is that many of the writers had lived for a time in or near New York City.

Although they had grown up all over the nation (and the world), for some reason New York City figured as a domicile for at least a while. Whether this was to put themselves into proximity with the publishing world or for other reasons, is not known. Stories of New York life abound.

Theme 12: The accident of place of birth and of ethnicity

Of course, the "sun of chance" shines most clearly with our circumstances of birth. Where we were born, into what family we were born, into what community we were born, all influence the trajectory of our lives. Regional writers are only "regional" to those of other regions. The environment in which we were born and in which we grew influences us forever.

Yusef Komunyakaa said that his tour of duty in Vietnam wasn’t as frightening to him as to others: "I wasn’t afraid of the essence of the vegetation. . . . I felt there was a kind of celebration within the context of the landscape, the same kind of celebration that I grew up with, the idea that anything would grow."

Komunyakaa, who was born in Bogalusa, Louisiana, "in the sultry humidity and enervating heat of the deep, deep South," liked the light in Vietnam. "There was a quality of greenness."

The Sun of Gender

Theme 13: Conflict with combining parenthood and careers in writing;

Like most women creators and women who have careers, the women writers experienced overlapping interferences in their attempts to combine family life with their creative work. I was unable to detect much concern among the men about how they would combine being a father with being a creative writer. Women feel it and express it; men do not feel it; or if they do, they do not express it.

Theme 14: Societal gender expectations incongruent with their essential personalities.

Ambivalence about the role they play in society did not start with motherhood for many of these writers. They had been equivocal about being female and then female writers long before they became mothers in a culture that still defined that function within rather narrow boundaries.

Some of them did manage to rise above their earliest negative feelings about their gender and writing, and some even found a great advantage in being a female writer, but most struggled with this identity.

The theme of androgyny (that is, not being rigid in sex role behavior— having characteristics of both men and women) seemed key.

Theme 15: History of divorce more prevalent in women.

The women writers got married, got divorced, and many remarried. Others had two marriages and a divorce, and some had been married three times (Angelou, Piercy, Smiley, Raz, Wakoski). At least 85 percent of the women writers had had at least one divorce. This is far higher than the figure given for the population at large, which has been estimated at 40-50 percent.

However, those who were remarried or in primary relationships without benefit of the legal ceremony, wrote and spoke about having supportive mates who encouraged their work. Others were single by choice after having divorced, or had never married. Several were single but in lesbian relationships.

The men seemed to be more committed husbands than the women are wives, as only 29 percent of the men have been married more than once, which is much better than the current divorce rate of 50 percent for the population at large.

However, several of those male writers who did divorce seemed to have had more than one; Norman Mailer has been married six times; Saul Bellow five times; Russell Banks, Gary Snyder, and Robert Olen Butler four times; Sam Hamill, Jay McInerney, Arthur Miller, and Robert Kelly three times; and others, more normally, twice.

Theme 16: Military service more prevalent in men.

One theme that surfaced in the biographies of male writers did not appear in the biographies of female writers, and that is the influence of being in the military on the men. None of the women had been in the military (to my knowledge), but twenty-four of the eighty men, or 30 percent, and had. These were mostly the older men of the group, born in the 1930s and 1940s.

The subject matter for such men writers as Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead), Joseph Heller (Catch-22), and Tim O’Brien (Going After Cacciato) was World War II and the Vietnam War. Profoundly affected by their military experience, they shared the horrors of those experiences with a public hungry for a sensitive portrayal of men at war.

These sixteen themes resonated throughout the lives of successful U.S. writers. You may never have heard of them but they are well known to the domain of creative writing.

As in other talent areas, the domain is what defines the field (Feldman, Csikszentmihalyi, and Gardner, 1994). An author whose book is on the best-seller list may not have the respect and validation of other, peer writers, even though the public may think highly of the writer’s work.

An example is the novel Bridges of Madison County, which was admired by the public and disparaged by many adult creative writers. Making money may not be the key; awards, recognition, and a clear regard by fellow writers is.

In fact, it is very difficult to support oneself as a writer; many writers have been taken up by the academy and they teach writing in high schools and colleges; others struggle in other fields.

Peer recognition in the constant acceptance of stories, poems, and novels by struggling small presses is an extrinsic motivator. But the true motivator is that they must write to make sense of life; writing to them is often self-therapy.

References

Brown, F., & McDonald, J. (1997). Growing up Southern: How the South shapes its writers. Greenville, SC: Blue Ridge Publishing.

Durban, P. (1991). Layers. In E. Shelnutt (Ed.), The confidence woman: 26 female writers at work (pp. 7-26). Marietta, GA: Longstreet.

Feldman, D. H., & Piirto, J. (1995). Parenting talented children. In M. Bornstein (Ed.), Handbook of parenting (pp. 365-389). New York: Longman.

Glück, L. (1991). The education of the poet. In E. Shelnutt (Ed.), The confidence woman: 26 female writers at work (pp. 133-148). Marietta, GA: Longstreet Press.

Jordan, S. J. (Ed.). (1993). Broken silences: Interviews with black and white women writers. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Kalpakian, L. (1991). My life as a boy. In E. Shelnutt (Ed.), The confidence woman (pp. 43-58). Marietta, GA: Longstreet.

~ ~ ~

©  Jane Piirto 2001.  From the book, My Teeming Brain: Understanding Creative Writers.  I hope you will buy and read the book!  Published by Hampton Press, Cresskill, NJ.   I have made presentations on this book at the QUIG conference, AERA, NAGC, ECHA, the Wallace Symposium.

If you print this out and copy it, please cite it.

Contents of "My Teeming Brain"

Blurbs

Here's what Howard McCord said: 

"After fifty years as a writer and forty-two as a teacher of writers, I can say we are an odd breed, and that Jane Piirto's fine study clarifies the distinctive characteristics of writers better than any other book I know. She reveals what sort of folk--wise, ribald, depressed, excited, insightful, and sometimes blind in a useful way--spin language and imagination into worlds others can enter and explore for a while. We grow complex structures out of the stuff of our generally messy lives in which both acceptance and rejection can come in the same mail, misunderstanding is a brother, and praise for the right reason almost a miracle. Jane Piirto understands all this and has organized her wealth of information about writers into a wonderfully informative and interesting book."

--Howard McCord, Retired Director of Creative Writing Program, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, ,Author of The Man Who Walked on the Moon.

Here's what Michael Pyryt, Ph.D., said:

"Jane Piirto's My Teeming Brain makes the writer's life come alive by combining biographical and autobiographical excerpts with a solid theoretical framework.  I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the psychology of creative writing."

--Michael C. Pyryt, Director of the Centre for Gifted Education, University of Calgary

Here's what Barry Panter, M.D. said:

Jane Piirto in My Teeming Brain: Understanding Creative Writers has written one of the best books I've ever read about the creative process. She provides clear definitions and useful examples of the impulse and stimulation evolving into the creative work. Equally important are her suggestions for recognizing the creative process in your life and how to channel it into life enhancing productive outlets. Everyone who is interested in the creative process will benefit by reading this excellent work."

Barry Panter, M.E., President, The American Institute of Medical Education, Clinical Professor of Psychology, USC School of Medicine, Author, Creativity and Madness--Psychological Studies of Art and Artists.

Here's what Dan Wakefield said:

"The book is vitally useful for writers as well as psychologists, and [the author] understands writers and their problems better than anyone else in this field."

--Dan Wakefield, Author, New York in the Fifties, Returning

~ ~ ~

Jane Piirto, Ph.D. directs Ashland University's Talent Development Education (TDE) program. She teaches graduate courses... and teaches undergraduates in educational psychology and creativity. The Mensa Education & Research Foundation has presented Dr. Piirto with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

~ ~ ~

Related pages :

GT Adults blog

Highly Sensitive blog

intensity / sensitivity

intensity / sensitivity resources : articles sites books

GT Adults giftedness

giftedness : articles

giftedness : books..

~ ~ ~