The Blueberry Art Festival this week is prime time for creativity in Ely. And the fabulous array of craft items for sale — antler lamps, Hmong art, twig furniture and Barbie tents — this entire extravaganza just hints at the tip of the creativity iceberg in Ely year around.

I got to thinking about this when skimming a book a friend dropped off, The Rise of the Creative Class, by Richard Florida, an imaginative name apparently adopted by a guy named H. John Heinz III, a professor and columnist for Information Week.

Now, granted he focuses his attention on much bigger places, creative juggernauts like Austin, Hollywood, New York, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. And granted he has a lot to say about the attractions of these places to visitors and residents: high employment, population concentration, vibrant night life, high tech industry, universities, and racial, ethnic, gay and lifestyle diversity.

But, while Ely and surrounding communities don’t share these urban qualities, we are hotbeds of other kinds of attractive creative and cultural spark.

Baby loon food. Carmen the opera. Mukluk Ball. The Slovenian ambassador visit. Art Walk. Indian Taco Feed. A Generation W (teenage) newspaper. Wolf howls, bear snorts and long-eared bats.

I’d bet that among us we could list 1,000 cultural and creative activities and adventures happening here over just one month.

Let me start with baby loon food. The Ely Field Naturalists recently received a post on its list serve from a gentleman in North Branch who had taken a photo of an adult loon offering something green and limp to its plump brown baby. What’s that food that the young one was being fed at the rate of about one a minute, he asked? A crawfish, perhaps, came the answer from a local naturalist. And the posts go on throughout the day featuring an upcoming bird outing, a bog walk or visit to an abandoned quarry.

Just as the Field Naturalists enrich our lives in dozens of environmental interest areas, the Ely Chamber of Commerce weekly lists upcoming community events—a burgeoning gold mine of outdoor, arts, sports, and creative activities and programs at www.ely.org/events/calendar.

Economist Paul Romer, quoted in The Rise of the Creative Class says, “Birds build nests, bees build hives, and we build guns and cars…where people excel as economic animals is in their ability to produce ideas, not just physical goods. An ant will go through its life without even a slightly different idea about how to gather food. But people are almost incapable of this kind of rote adherence to instruction. We are incurable experimenters and problem solvers.”

We see a rich vein of problem solving in Ely. What to do with the town’s 1938-built Community Center? The Ely Heritage Preservation Commission has been leading the effort to find practical uses for this historic Ely building once the library leaves it for new digs. Creative thinkers are at work; one of the more fascinating ideas is to use it for indoor hydroponic farming – greens all year long for local consumers.

The Ely Regional Community Complex team is, likewise, in the middle of a feasibility study to see if the area would support a facility with amenities like a swimming pool, gym and indoor walking track. Go team!

Ely takes the creative road when it comes to promoting area businesses. It is a vacation town known for its April Fools Day gag by the Ely Tourism Bureau that gains statewide and national attention. The introduction this year to the Ely Cable Channel spoofed folks with shows like Sauna Wars and Scat Trackers and invited others to add their programming suggestions. My humble contribution is Loon Dynasty.

Why get creative with marketing? There’s the story of the bait store with a card in its window advertising “Fishing Tickle.” A customer pointed out the spelling to the owner and asked, “Hasn’t anyone told you about that before?”

“Sure,” the owner said, “and when they come in for a laugh, they always buy something.”

Creative people and projects abound in Ely, making ours a vital, enticing town. While it doesn’t feature some of the big city attractions, it’s a place where we can come and be ourselves—to explore our painting and dance, our acting, song and Clown Band performance. Where we can invent a roof snow remover. Or canoe and fish, bike, hike and search for the elusive moose and then write about it.

We’re not Paris’ Left Bank. But we have WELY’s Putumayo World Music Hour. We’re not New York’s Greenwich Village, but creative people here keep taking the stage, twirling lawn chairs on the Fourth of July, making music on Tuesday nights, photographing the Northern Lights, writing books and creating the kind of place creative people want to live. Don’t be satisfied with my list of the imaginative, curious, artful, entrepreneurial aspects of Ely. Make your own. I bet we can get to 1,000.