BY KEELIN EVERLY-LANG for WEEKLY VOLCANO 6/12/2026 |
If you’ve been to the Tacoma Night Market, you’ve probably experienced the magic of community, art, and whimsy coming together. If you’re lucky, you may have also seen an artist and creativity coach standing near a wet canvas, offering you a brush and an invitation to make your mark on a community-created painting.
The person inviting you to participate in that painting is Lore Alexander.
They didn’t set out to be an artist. In fact, they were convinced they were simply not a so-called “creative” person.
Today, Alexander leads community art workshops, coaches others on creativity, and provides the freelance copyediting services that were the start of the whole adventure.
Our cover art this week is just one result of a journey spent deconstructing mental roadblocks and unleashing creativity as an intentional practice to increase tolerance for imperfection and embrace play and curiosity.
This particular piece was created during the Tacoma Night Market in April by many different community members who happened to walk by and accept the invitation to engage in some “silly, expectation-free creative self-expression,” as Alexander puts it.
Alexander’s invitation to each marketgoer was to “check in with how you’re feeling, notice whatever color or shape might resonate with that feeling, and then put that on the canvas.”
When invited to participate, many people protest that they are simply not creative and that their whimsical contribution will ruin the painting, Alexander said.
That feeling is exactly what led Alexander to dive into this rich and generative world of creativity in the first place.
When starting their copyediting business several years ago, Alexander found themself overwhelmed by the pressure of perfectionism. Connecting with other business owners and realizing that many people struggle with the same feeling helped them find grace within that process.
One day, Alexander grabbed some art supplies and said, “instead of trying to make something specific, I wanted to just watch the colors blending and moving on the page.”
The experience was delightful, and after looking back later at what they made, they described it as “an absolute disaster” with “no clear shapes, no cohesive colors,” but realized that this so-called ugly result couldn’t take away the joy of the feeling of creating it.
This began a practice of purposefully giving themselves permission to make something ugly, then letting the creativity flow.
In networking groups with other business owners and in groups of friends, Alexander started sharing how much this practice of making ugly art on purpose was helping them.
Sharing this tool evolved through other collaborations into the creativity workshops, coaching, and more that they offer today.
In these workshops, Alexander helps people “break down the mental barriers our perfectionism and inner critics have built by making intentionally ugly art in a safe, encouraging space.”
Alexander also hosts The Ugly Podcast, leads a monthly junk journaling workshop at Crafty AF, and provides the line editing, copyediting, and proofreading services that their business was originally built around.
Exploring creativity and art also led Alexander to participate in their first art show at Artsi Creative Space, a joint exhibition titled “Internal Landscapes” featuring fellow artists Ashley Laufer and Elisabeth Desrosiers.
The piece Alexander exhibited is titled “One at a Time,” which they describe as a “transposition of the word-based Feelings Wheel, created by Gloria Willcox and expanded upon by David Molanphy, into abstract expression.”
To create it, Alexander spent time painting abstract watercolor pieces while experiencing the 130 emotions represented on the wheel, whether by painting during an intense emotional moment as it arose or by drawing on memories, music, and other emotion-sparking catalysts.
Exploring creativity and releasing perfectionism does not mean things are always easy, and Alexander said they still struggle with it.
“This past year, especially, I’ve had a lot of setbacks… for a while I was really busy with my business, and then I got a divorce and had to deal with all of that, but in that process I was really stepping into myself and coming into my queerness, and of course queerness has so much creative exploration,” Alexander said.
The creativity of queerness invited exploration of questions such as “who do I want to be?” and “how do I want to live my life?”
Building community has also brought new challenges.
“As I’ve been finding more of my community, I’ve been realizing how perfectionism shows up when you’re trying to live in community in a society that is so individualistic,” Alexander said, sharing the experience of having the goal of showing up authentically become its own perfection trap.
Growth and change are not easy, and Alexander has been through a lot of growth and change in the past six years.
“I was in a cis-het monogamous marriage with a man, and now I’m queer, poly, and living in a community of really cool people,” Alexander said.
Just the night before the interview, Alexander said they and their friends started jamming together, and they spontaneously sang some of their poetry and turned it into songs.
“It was so much fun and so silly, and I never would have thought that that’s something I would do, but it was really great,” Alexander said.
Even though it has been a challenging year, the difficult moments are punctuated by spontaneous acts of creation, whether that means making cookies with friends, foraging, growing a garden, starting a YouTube channel inspired by conversations in hot tubs with friends, or partnering with Leah Morgan of the Tacoma Night Market on artistic experiences and community spaces.
Through the hard moments, having these tools around creativity and the practice of being comfortable with mistakes has been vital, as have the friendships and community that have developed from all of this creativity work.
It all stems from the “core seed of an idea that it is okay to be a mess, that doesn’t make you a bad person, it doesn’t mean that you’re going to be in that spot forever, and it’s all part of growth and learning,” Alexander said.
Today Alexander is accepting individual coaching clients and partnering with Leah at the Mothership (aka the Tacoma Night Market) for a new community event for artists to gather, make art, discuss projects, and offer support to one another called the Artist Roundtable. More information about their work and offerings can be found on their website.
