PARIS – The idea of the creative economy is nothing new to Maine, the woman from the Maine Arts Commission said.

“We have creative communities and creative people in abundance here,” Abbe Levin said at a Wednesday forum at Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School. “It’s really just a matter of organizing, identifying and marketing what we already have to offer.”

The forum was the last of 13 held around the state since last October, with the aim of building awareness for the Blaine House Conference on the Creative Economy May 6 and 7 at the Bates Mill Complex in Lewiston.

Around 600 community and business leaders, along with artists, artisans and members of cultural heritage organizations are expected to attend the Bates Mill conference, which Levin called “a launching point” for the real work of building Maine’s creative economy.

It’s been known for years that New England has a larger number of creative workers than other areas of the country, Levin said. The task now is to create a “synergy” of business, the arts, culture and the community to create a new economic vitality in the wake of the loss of traditional manufacturing jobs, she said.

Levin said Norway has been selected as one of five case studies being researched by the University of Southern Maine’s Muskie Center for Public Policy. The idea is to create an economic development model showing how existing cultural assets can be used in a spirit of creative collaboration between individual, organization and community.

She noted that Maine has a tremendously active group of filmmakers about which little is known outside the state. Even more unique, is the fact that Maine has “75 intact downtowns” which is a much higher number than most states. Such downtowns have great historical and cultural significance, Levin said.

Conference planner Laura Davis said she’s proud to live in Buckfield, “which has probably the highest percentage of jugglers in the country,” referring to the talent that performs at the Odd Fellow Theater.

“Just this past year the Buckfield Inn reopened,” said Davis. Western Maine residents already know about the area’s cultural assets, and the Blaine House Conference will be “a nice way to promote it to 600 people.”

Davis said many Maine towns have “large empty mill spaces” that in the past have been thought of as liabilities. In the mindset of the creative economy, she said, “we should think of these vast empty drums” like the Bates Mill and the C.B. Cummings & Son dowel mill in Norway as “living space, working space, and business space, for artisans, artists, potters and manufacturers.

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