I’m sitting in the car waiting for my grandson. Moments ago, I read a post by Grant Faulkner, who in 2016 was the Executive Director at National Novel Writing Month.
“I’ve been remembering the 2016 election this week,”
he wrote.
Normally, he said, November draws thousands of
writers; however, after Trump’s election in 2016, writers’ stories literally
collapsed.
It wasn’t just the NaNoWriMo writers. (Writers who
commit to write 50,000 words for a novel in 30 days.) Many of his friends and
professional writers stopped writing.
They were traumatized.
Faulkner said before that November, he didn’t believe
in writer’s block, but then he saw that writing is difficult and sometimes
impossible for a battered brain.
Trauma and depression can turn off the spigot of creativity.
“It’s easy to think that our art is trivial when it’s up against such a menacing and malevolent block of history as we’re living through, but the opposite is actually true: our art isn’t trivial; it’s what can deliver us.”
Faulkner said that James Baldwin (Go Tell it on the Mountain 1953, Notes of a Native Son, 1955) expressed the importance of the role of the artist better than he could:
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.”
Howard Zinn’s quote, “An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian,” provided Faulkner with hope because we need to see that “compassion, sacrifice, courage, and kindness” are a part of every era.
I look up from behind the steering wheel and notice that the great flock of Canadian Geese I admired before settling into this page have dwindled to about 25.
The 25 are scattered about the grass, their white
breasts glowing like snow patches left after the bulk of snow has been absorbed
into the ground. Some are preening, and occasionally, one—male or female, I
can’t tell the difference –will spread their wings in a morning wake-up
stretch, revealing dark feathers beneath.
(Like some of us, some geese are slower to wake up or are simply basking in the glory of the day before getting to work.)
Don’t let them destroy your connection to life and the joy of living. Appreciate the world we live in and the fantastic beauty surrounding us.
If you are still reading Your Story Matters, Living Your Life in The Most Awesome Way Possible, Chapter 54 "What We Need is a Wise Grandmother," is posted here Page: Edit
