Creative Spark:

GARY AND DEANNE GUTE

While doing research for this book, I stumbled upon a quote about midlife creativity from a professor at the University of Northern Iowa, my alma mater. When I searched the university’s website to see if Gary Gute was still there, a 2013 headline popped up. Apparently, Gute was director of a new center aiming to “engage and inspire” faculty and students in the study of creativity. The center has since transitioned into the Human Potential Project, with Gute and his team continuing to help students discover their creative potential and offering them the latest research tools, opportunities for interdisciplinary and faculty-student collaboration, and exposure to renowned scholars, educators, inventors, artists, and entrepreneurs via campus conferences.

What I discovered about Gary during an initial interview led to a second one that included his wife, Deanne. Together, they were a prime example of a “creative spark couple.” Not only had they founded the original creativity center while maintaining other fulltime campus jobs, they lived an extraordinarily creative life outside of the university.

The two met as undergrads at UNI, while working as writing tutors. They soon learned they shared other common interests: an inborn fascination with old stuff and a love of history and good stories, dating back to their respective childhoods. A young Gary had collected classic records and books, while Deanne had nagged her parents to purchase old two-story houses, yearning for the creaky wood floors, attics with hidden treasures, and upper-story casement windows she’d read about in books.

After obtaining their master’s degrees from UNI, the two attended Iowa State University to pursue their doctorates. It was no coincidence that both their dissertations were related in some way to creativity, as they each had studied Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow, experiencing that sense of losing themselves in their varied interests. Deanne’s dissertation looked at bridging educational philosophies through informal learning, everyday aesthetics, and flow. Gary fortuitously ended up working with Csikszentmihalyi on his dissertation, and the two began actively collaborating on several projects on creativity, complexity, and flow.

“I doubt we’ll ever solve the mystery of creativity,” Gary says of the partnership with his mentor. “But I have some hope that we can contribute to a better understanding of it and help people cultivate it in their lives.”

One area where Gary and Deanne discovered their mutual flow state is in house restoration, beginning with their Waterloo 1920s house with a huge park-like yard. They learned on the job with this first project, decorating and furnishing on a low budget, with limited skills and the guidance of Old House Journal and Colonial Homes magazines.

The next house, in Traer, came with the builder’s Civil War diaries and an affordable price. Moving to the 1874 Italianate-style house was a no-brainer for the couple.

“We could step back in time over a hundred years and gain three times the space,” Deanne says. “All we had to do was commute twenty-five miles to our jobs, leave the house we’d just finished, and take on all the new projects that dwarfed our first one in scale and complexity. It was worth it, because the house projects have also been all about revealing hidden potential.”

They sought out mentors who would share their knowledge and inspire them with examples of house projects. They also helped plan and organize old house fairs in Traer and Waterloo.

“Through our old house work, we keep residence in two different worlds,” Deanne muses. “There is the realm of books, students, theories, and research, and then the random—orbit sanders, scrapers, paintbrushes, solvents, and high-dust manual labor. For me, learning to strip and sand things and do physical labor gave me the one form of exercise I truly enjoy, along with a sense of strength and competence. It helps me carry on the DIY spirit my parents instilled in me growing up. And restoration also provides endless venues for thinking about color, design, and creative ways to bring ideas to life within a restricted budget. I believe a strictly digital, office-bound life is not a balanced one.”

The home restoration does more than provide an exercise program. It feeds their creativity and passion for retaining beautiful and well-made craftsmanship. That means when Gary came across a homeowner who was burning parts of an 1860s house similar to their Traer home, he asked if he could salvage the parts instead. The portico slated for destruction was repurposed and attached to their house as a new “original” front porch.

“Creativity often means going against the cultural grain,” Deanne says. “In our small way, we’re trying to stem the tide of ugly, sloppy, contemporary building trends, our culture’s taste for ease and comfort, and pressure from contractors who would rather trash old structures than invest the effort to renew them.”

Besides their current Traer house, as time and money allow, the couple also works on an 1893 house that they eventually plan to move into. Originally built by a Waterloo doctor as a three-story brick home with a tower, they couldn’t resist the rich history behind a house that used to occupy an entire city block, had once been relocated by horse power, and lost its tower and third floor in a fire caused by dried hydrangeas thrown into a first-floor fireplace.

“I think of the house and grounds as my sanitorium,” Deanne says. “It only takes a few minutes on the property to feel stress levels abate and creativity surge.”

 

“A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately at peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be.”

—ABRAHAM MASLOW