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“Carly, tissues,” Rachel Schwaller nods toward the door.  

I am no stranger to this sentence. I quietly slip out of the room, swing into Schwaller’s office and grab the tissue box off her desk. It sits inside a head shaped like an Easter Island statue, with the tissues poking out the nose. The perfect comedic relief for what can be hard moments. 

Art majors are used to people crying in classes. Some may consider it unusual. 

“I think it’s because it’s so highly charged. And that goes to your, ‘Art students cry. That’s weird.’ What we do is so multifaceted to the body. It affects the physical body, it affects the mental capacity of our body, in our psyche and our emotional state. I think we’re holistic beings,” Schwaller said. 

Most students would be mortified crying in front of their classmates and professor. It takes a level of trust and comfortability many students do not receive in other classes. With Schwaller’s classes it is never a surprise, every art student has to undergo one class that tends to produce the most tears. Welcome to creative process. 

Creative process was created to teach students how to better cultivate their creative practice independently, to give them the tools to make art on their own post-graduation. This makes it the broadest “choose your own adventure” type class. It is all dependent on work ethic, honesty and vulnerability. Hopefully by the end, students learn more about themselves and what drives them to make the work they do.  

“I feel like I throw students into the fire with that class,” Schwaller says half-jokingly, “sort of like ‘here you go, here are lots of different ways that you can learn to cultivate your own creative process.’”  

Amber Swinehart is a fellow studio major currently in creative process.  

“I didn’t realize how in-depth it was going to be. I thought it was just the surface level of this is how you make stuff, or this is why you make stuff. ‘I make stuff because it’s interesting,’ or ‘I like animals.’ But no, it’s like deep into your psyche. ‘Who are you as a person,’ creative process. I had some expectations, but they were swept away almost immediately,” Swinehart said.  

One of the unique components about the class is the lack of grades. Students only receive a midterm and a final grade. 

“I felt like grades were really stifling and people would then just work towards the grade and not towards finding themselves, finding their work, finding their practice, finding their process,” Schwaller said. 

Students have to learn to find intrinsic motivation and validation for themselves. As most do, I struggled with the class my sophomore year, for many it can shift your perception on a future in the arts.  

Stepping out of your comfort zone and taking risks is crucial to the class. Schwaller incorporates this through risk exercises with specific materials, challenging students to push what they can say about themselves or their work.  

“You have to put yourself in a position where you’re not comfortable I think, to succeed in that portion of this class. I don’t think you can stay in your comfort bubble and do well, because the whole point is to be risky. Either risky physically, mentally, emotionally, just something,” Swinehart said.  

This can bring about the crying component. Creative process truly fosters a strong sense of community and trust amongst its participants. It gives students the opportunity to talk and work through ideas they may have never been able to before.  

“I think allowing that cry space is just a place where students can let their guard down. Be real and say ‘I don’t have all the answers. This is the place where I don’t have to have all the answers.’ And just be honest. I think that’s where the tears end up coming,” Schwaller said.  

Schwaller creates a space where nothing is off limits for discussion. She encourages all emotions, both positive and negative.  

“I think it allows everyone in class to trust each other a little bit more just because it is that vulnerable side that in America you’re not supposed to share. But almost everybody has cried in class, so then everyone’s like, ‘Everyone has seen my ugly crying already. What else is there to be embarrassed about?’ I appreciate her attitude towards it because I think more people just need to cry,” Swinehart said. 

Briauna Mingus is a junior and another studio major who is one year out from her experience with the class. 

“It’s actually pretty reassuring and comforting to have someone say you can cry and that this is a safe area to cry and to express your emotions. It’s nice to have an authority figure be like ‘this is ok,’” Mingus said. 

Like many classes, you get out of it what you put into it. Students have to recognize that effort and hard work can really strengthen what they produce after this class. 

“The most important thing I learned is that it’s ok to mess up. Not everything has to come out perfectly. Things can be messy or not work out, but they can still be beneficial for your work,” Mingus said. 

With creative process, most students recognize the benefits and their growth after completing it. Nearing the finish line of this semester, Swinehart has noticed the potential.  

“I think people are starting to realize that the conversations we have together are valuable and it’s not just another class to get through,” they said. “To me, this is one of the most important classes I think I’ve ever taken, just because it’s really delving into my creative process and what I want to do and why I want to do it.”   

My own work would have never evolved and grown to what it is now without creative process. It has given me independence and problem-solving skills and helped me understand myself better as a person. I believe other majors in the arts like English or theatre would find benefits from taking the class in developing their craft. 

“It could definitely help people outside the major be less afraid of failure and be more experimental with whatever you do in your career path. It could also help a lot of people mature emotionally and understand their emotions and maybe make people more open to being emotionally vulnerable,” Mingus said. 

Schwaller’s ultimate goal is to push students to their fullest potential. This makes creative process the hardest class she teaches, but the results are worth it.  

“If I can get students to surprise themselves and be proud of something they’ve done and be really uncomfortable and live with that uncomfortability,” Schwaller said “That’s why I sort of push as hard as I do. How do you make yourself, how do I make you more uncomfortable? Can you surprise yourself with some of the things that you think about, that you do? That you’re brave enough to talk about? That’s like the sweet spot of making really great work for me.” 

The level of advanced work and thought that can be seen in students’ work after creative process is evident. Creative process has shown myself and my peers that putting in the hard, sometimes emotional work truly does make the difference in bettering our potential futures. 

 And if there is one thing I have learned from Schwaller, it is that tears are okay.  

Always okay.