Pam Christiansen and her ‘Return to Creativity’ can help.

Working in sales, Pam Christiansen felt lackluster despite her financial security.

“(It) made me totally depressed,” Christiansen remembers. “I was not functioning well emotionally.”

She took some apt advice to “get back to your creativity,” and soon found herself drawing until 2 or 3 a.m. each morning. She quit her job that October, enrolled at the University of Oregon the next month and was selling textile artwork by February.

“That’s my experience,” Christiansen said. “Once you step in you can fly.”

Twenty years later, she hopes to help others reconnect with their own creativity, whether in the arts or inventing or theorizing in science or other fields. She and others in her “creative family” have founded a nonprofit group called Return to Creativity.

“Once art kicked in, I had energy,” Christiansen said. “Making ends meet has been on the edge at times, but each time I turned away, the consequences were worse.

“Returning to your creativity brings back your own individuality; it opens all sorts of possibilities.”

The nonprofit is based in a little, 1917 vintage clapboard house on Manitou Beach looking out over Puget Sound. Its tiny living room is an exhibition space, a former kitchen a studio and a small bedroom awaits guests. A colorful, flowering garden and a small labyrinth grace the grounds.

The group is starting by awarding creativity grants, for which applications will be accepted twice a year in fall and spring.

The current grant application period runs through Oct. 15 for three grants of $1,000, $1,500 and $2,500 for visual artists in Washington state plus resources such as exhibition space. Future grants will target other domains.

Christiansen says the grants are funded by the group’s like-minded persons coming together, including doctors, a music executive, a former psychiatrist and artists. She co-chairs the organization with Patrick Snetsinger, an accountant?

Christiansen has been running “creativity workshops” for the past 10 years.

“It’s getting into touch with the ideas which limit our expression,” she said. “It has to do with old thoughts that we took on in childhood that were limiting.”

As a child, Christiansen felt like she had to hide her drawings – literally, in the closet. When she was 9 or 10, her parents discovered her art and were delighted, and encouraged her pursuit.

“RTC is getting back to the place where you can dream up those creative ideas without being stifled,” Christiansen said. “When people start to realize the thoughts they’re attached to, their creativity comes to the surface.”

Christiansen says in looking for grant recipients, the organization wants to “truly embrace the person out there with the courage to reveal their creativity.”

“Once you reveal these things about yourself, that’s very tender,” she said. “We want to keep nurturing that.”

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Flowering creativity

Grant applications are available at www.returntocreativity.org and are due by Oct. 15. Grant winners will be notified by Nov. 5. For more information about the grant, call Patrick Snetsinger at (800) 884-2168.