My Room to Create

Hello, I’m Anna Thompson and I’m a graphic designer/painter/letterpress printer (shall we say creator?) based on the east coast of the US. My creative identity has always been with me, but it took on a new balance when I started working for myself back in 2017.

After I got my BFA in graphic design/printmaking, I lived in the Hudson Valley at Women’s Studio Workshop. I lived in a shared cabin, never saw a key, and walked down a gravel road to my job every day. Life moved slowly and quaintly there and I had space to hear myself think, to notice things, and to let ideas arrive on their own time. It was where I first understood what it felt like to be creatively full rather than creatively flooded.

At the end of my time there, I packed up and headed back to Virginia, certain that my New York chapter was done, but a month later I wound up back north again, this time to Brooklyn.

For the next few years, I worked as a book designer at Penguin Random House. On one hand, it was a true dream job. I felt like Kathleen Kelly in You've Got Mail, walking to work with my coffee and black tights and into a beautiful high rise office surrounded by books. Free books! Sharing a building with design legends! Ina Garten would come by and bring cookies, for god's sake. There were a lot of happy times, and I truly loved being in the book world.

But as the years passed, I was also slowly deepening into a creative identity crisis.

Despite all of the perks, I looked at my boss's role as art director and felt I should want it, but I could never quite find the drive. I had this feeling of being at the bottom of a ladder and having no desire to climb it, no incentive for what was at the top.

The truth is, New York was a lot for me, and that made me feel like a creative failure. I would often wander Central Park on my lunch break, just trying to regulate. One voice would say, how can you complain! You have this magical park to access just steps from your cubicle! But a deeper, truer voice would say with longing, I just wish I wanted this more.

I'm a Pisces, and for me that often means that I feel like a saturated sponge, and in New York, it was hard to wring out. The inspiration would come to me constantly, but the stimuli didn't stop. It became like a firehose, where I couldn't stop taking in new sensations, experiences, and feelings. It wasn't long before I knew I had to get out, and if I was going to leave an industry I loved, I knew going solo and starting my own business would be my next step. In some ways, I always knew I would try it.

This is where you find me now–not the quiet of the Hudson Valley, not the roar of New York, but something in between. I’ve lived in Richmond, VA for 9 years now, working for my own business called Palindrome (just like my name).

It appears that something in between is what suits me best, and going solo has been the wringing out I needed. I’ll be writing about creativity, life, and everything in between here on Off Stage, and I hope you’ll follow along.