Some excerpts from "Art & Fear" to start the year

On New Year’s Day I started rereading Art & Fear: Observations On The Perils (and Rewards) of Artmakingby David Bayles and Ted Orland. I first read it the summer before last after a short writing retreat, and it seemed appropriate to start the year with a review of this book’s gems. If you do any kind of creative work, or think about doing any kind of creative work, whether or not it’s your day job, I commend this book to you. Don’t get too caught up on identifying your creative work as “art” when considering whether this book is for you. That kind of internal judgment might keep you from reading something that could be just the encouragement you need.

Here’s are some of my favorite excerpts from Art & Fear:

“Your job is to learn to work on your work.”

“If, indeed, for any given time only a certain sort of work resonates with life, then that is the work you need to be doing in that moment.”

“Fears about yourself prevent you from doing your best work, while fears about your own reception by others prevents you from doing your own work.”

“If you think good work is somehow synonymous with perfect work, you are headed for big trouble.”

“One of the best kept secrets of artmaking is that new ideas come into play far less frequently then practical ideas – ideas that can be re-used for a thousand variations, supplying the framework for a whole body of work rather than a single piece.”

“The hardest part of artmaking is living your life in such a way that your work gets done, over and over – and that means, among other things, finding a host of practices that are just plain useful.”

“The arc to any individual life is uniform over long periods of time. Subjects that draw us in will continue to draw us in. Patterns we respond to we will continue to respond to.”

“We tell the stories we have to tell, stories of the things that draw us in – and why should any of us have more than a handful of those?”

There's so much more that I'd like to excerpt for you, but I will stop with this sampling and hope it has whetted your appetite to read more from this book or given you some food for thought and encouragement.

~~~

[Photo: taken of a hands-on weaving demonstration at an exhibit of textile artist Helena Hernmarck's woven tapestries at the American Swedish Institute a couple years ago.]

Astonished by what is

There’s a great scene in the book Charming Billy by Alice McDermott that I used to always mention when I gave talks related to Just Think. The book’s main character, Billy, gets out of New York City for probably the first time in his life and sees the ocean and beautiful houses and the black starry sky of Long Island. The year is mid-40s. Billy is overwhelmed by the beauty of it. “I never knew,” Billy said, “I never knew what it was like out here…. Isn’t that something? I had no idea those places were out here… It almost makes you wonder what else you don’t know about yet.”

“It almost makes you wonder what else you don’t know about yet.” I love that.

I bring this quote up here now because McDermott has a wonderful piece in the current issue of Boston College Magazine, which arrived in the mail just before Christmas: “Astonished by Love: Storytelling and the Sacramental Imagination.” You can read the essay here online. She starts by using the way a novel “happens,” between novelist, narrator, and reader, to explain to a student friend the three-in-one nature of the Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – which reminds me, by the way, of Dorothy Sayer’s comparison of the Trinity to the writing process in Mind of the Maker.

This conversation between McDermott and her friend yields to an exploration of how the sacramental imagination plays out in her storytelling. It’s not a motive for the stories she tells, not a kind of behind-the-scenes trigger for writing to convince anyone of anything, but rather it enters the process nearly unbidden with her aesthetic choice to write what she sees. She borrows words from Joseph Conrad: “to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe.”

“I set out to prove nothing. I know nothing about the real world. I cannot speak with certainty about what the Creator does or does not do in it.

But as one part of that holy trio that constitutes the necessary and silent confluence of minds that transforms marks on a page into a world, I can point to what we see together, in all its vividness and clarity, and say, as astonished as narrator and reader alike, by love, by grace, by God in all things, ‘Look, it is there.’”

McDermott’s essay is actually an excerpt of a lecture she gave at Boston College back in April, as part of The Church in the 21st Century lecture series. You can watch the full video of her talk here. She probes the above topic more deeply, and if you’re at all intrigued by what you’ve read here, the talk is worth watching. An additional bonus of watching the video is seeing author, poet, and professor Paul Mariani, one of my favorite people, introduce her.

From the taped lecture:

“Working steadily at words, my nose pressed to the page, so to speak, I find that meaning, perhaps even some glimmer of ultimate reality, exists in the things of this created world not because I placed it there but because the very effort to see, the labor of working at words, reveals it. To put it more succinctly, as a less than ardent Catholic, I do not bring a sacramental imagination to my work; I discover the sacramental while struggling merely to describe.”

Mosaic tiles and an exploration of work: what’s the connection?

I just sent in my revised post-copyediting book manuscript to the publisher. I’m grateful that Kalos Press is a publisher that still believes in partnering with the writer by having a copyeditor on the team. As in my day job with medical writing, I’m in awe of a copyeditor’s eagle eye for grammatical missteps and subtle syntax violations.

While rereading the manuscript a paragraph hopped out at me as one that might be fun to share here. it’s a paragraph about visiting a Barcelona landmark designed by Antonio Gaudi. Long-time readers of this blog may remember that I used to have a picture of Gaudi’s undulating mosaic bench at Parc Guëll, also in Barcelona, as the banner image. Something about his tiles and shapes really engages my imagination.

So here’s the paragraph:

There had been Casa Battló, a multi-story home, now museum, designed and refurbished between 1904 and 1906 by Modernista architect Antonio Gaudi, whose work is everywhere in Barcelona. Casa Battló’s arcs of natural wood and shades of blues, greens, and purples float you on imaginary water. Not a single straight line in the entire place, said the tour guide. The beauty of Gaudi’s signature mosaic tiles add into and become a whole so infinitely more beautiful than the sum of its parts that you’re left wondering whether to zoom in or out.

Reading that paragraph you may be wondering what place it has in a book exploring work and vocation. To that I’ll say, I hope it makes you curious enough to want to read more. That last sentence is certainly a clue about the book’s approach to the topic. 

Stay tuned, won't you?

~~~

[Photo: taken of planters on the wall of Casa Battló.]

A joyful noise

This past Sunday at church, a young boy (8 years old?) whose family regularly attends played “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring" on the organ. He nailed it. With his fingers still on the keys of the final notes he turned to the congregation and beamed. There was no calculated modesty, no self-conscious turn of the head downward. He proved the elemental equation that all children know: mastery (in a relative, not perfectionistic, sense) plus sharing yields joy.

~~~

[Photo: Taken at Minneapolis Sculpture Garden. My daughter-in-law pointed out to me the wind chimes in the trees. I might have missed them otherwise.]

2014 Blog tour

Thank you to my friend Cathy Warner who invited me to participate in this "blog tour." What that means, in case you’re unfamiliar with the term, is that a blogger answers some questions (determined, I suppose, by whomever first launched the current blog tour) and then tags two additional bloggers who then answer the same questions and tag two additional bloggers each and so on, allowing for the tour to expand exponentially until everyone in the blog-o-sphere has been tagged or enough new invitees eventually call it quits. I met Cathy through the Seattle Pacific MFA program. She is a poet, an essayist, and an editor of the "Good Letters" blog in addition to being the writer of her own blog, “This or Something Better.” Her first book of poetry, Burnt Offerings, was recently published. You can find Cathy's responses to the blog tour questions here.

The questions in this blog tour are:

• What am I working on?
• How does my work differ from others in its genre?
• Why do I write what I do?
• How does my writing process work?

What am I working on?

The most exciting thing on my writing plate right now is bringing my next book, Finding Livelihood: A Progress of Work and Leisure, to completion. I’m thrilled that Kalos Press is publishing it, with a release date sometime in 2015. Although the manuscript is written, there is editing and revising to do and lots of other getting-ready sorts of things. I’m also starting to think about the next book project and have been making some notes and doing some reading. It’s too soon to say what that is yet, however; I’m still figuring it out myself. Another thing I’m working on is this blog. After calling it quits in April 2013 I recently started it up again and so am allocating a good portion of my writing time to posting at least a couple times a week.

How does my work differ from others in its genre?

I write in a genre that goes by many names – creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, lyric nonfiction, personal essay, lyric essay. People who write in this loose genre have a personal slant to what they write, so their work, in terms of approach, content, tone, and structure, is largely a function of who they are. At a basic level, therefore, my work is unique because I bring my own experiences, interests, processing style, and voice to a project. One of my interests is faith and I often bring those kinds of inquiries to the page, which isn’t the case with much of mainstream creative nonfiction; similarly, mainstream spiritual writing does not commonly take the form of creative nonfiction. Regarding approach, my work tends to be idea-driven. While I draw on personal experience, I am more interested in following an idea or a question than in following my own narrative. In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit wrote that "In essays, ideas are the protagonists, and they often develop much like characters down to the surprise denouement.” Yes to that.

Why do I write what I do?

Usually I write because I’m trying to figure out something, trying to answer one or more questions. When I wrote Just Think, the questions were how do you serve and love God with your mind and how do you keep your mind strong and steady when life seems increasingly unsteady and complicated. When writing Finding Livelihood, the triggering question was along the lines of how do you make peace with work (or lack thereof) when it's not all passion and bliss, although that question evolved and expanded throughout the writing. 

How does my writing process work?

My process is very slow! Let me say I’m in awe of writers who can put out a book a year or write long weekly essays for blogs or other websites. I’m on the seven-year plan. It takes me a long time to write anything. Books for sure but even an essay is likely to have sections in it that I first wrote down or started playing with years before the essay was written. Partly that’s because I work full time and write creatively in the after hours and there’s only so much time to go around, but it’s also to no small degree because I find it takes a long time for questions to be answered or for thoughts to mature to the point of sending them out into the world. I write by hand much of the time and then archive lots of random writing in one long Word document that spans months and even years. I go through it and pull things out when it seems to be the right time to work on them. I print things out and cut them up and arrange them on my floor or tape them onto index cards to shuffle around. I am trying to find ways to better use electronic archival, retrieval, and writing systems but can’t seem to fully let go of the hands-on physical approach.

Next up!

Thanks for reading. Now let me introduce you to the two writers I’ve tagged to pick up the baton for this blog tour.

Adele Konyndyk Gallogly is another writer I know through the Seattle Pacific MFA program. She writes fiction, essays, and book reviews, with a focus on justice issues. She also writes a robust blog, "The Greater More, The Smaller Less.”  You can read Adele's blog tour post here.

Margie Haack writes a print newsletter called “Notes from Toad Hall" and a blog called "Toads Drink Coffee." Her memoir The Exact Place was published by Kalos Press in 2012. She and her husband founded Ransom Fellowship, which publishes Critique, a thought-provoking print magazine that my husband and I have been reading for years. Read her blog tour post here.

Adele and Margie will be posting their answers to these questions on their blogs. I’ll let you know when their posts are up, but in the meantime I hope you take some time to peruse their other posts and publications.

~~~

[Photo taken a number of years ago in Chicago on Michigan Avenue in front of Fourth Presbyterian Church and the John Hancock tower. It was the Sunday after Easter. Blue ribbons had been tied all over this tree that was still dormant from the winter. I used to have this as the banner of my blog.]

Creative bursts on busy days

The universal commonly accepted advice to write every day, if you call yourself a writer, is impossible to follow sometimes.  Life pushes in and you can't always push back sufficiently to gain the physical, mental, or emotional space to write, particularly if you are writing "after hours."

That's been the case with me the first half of this year - new intense work projects, a son getting married and all the related festivities (finding just the right mother-of-groom dress takes time right?), a family health crisis, car trouble, and so on. In other words, the stuff of life.

The purists would say to get up even earlier, stay up even later, make writing time inviolate. They are right. But it's also right to recognize limitations on time and energy.

In grad school one of the best pieces of advice I got was from poet Madeline DeFrees, advice that has often served me better than "write every  day." (Actually she was the source of numerous pieces of good advice). She suggested that on days when you're swamped with other things, taking the time to jot down a single sentence or thought or even a single word gives you a burst of creative energy that lasts the day. She's right. I've long been convinced of the value of jotting down thoughts that come during the course of the day, but I like this promise of creative energy coming from such jots. Try it!

~~~

[Photo is taken during a walk at one of my favorite places.]

Creative work and creative idleness

This past week I've been at a writing workshop at the Collegeville Institute on the campus of St. John's University. Someone has written on the whiteboard, "Write Till You Drop," as a nod to Annie Dillard's essay of that name and also the intention of the week, to make good use of time.

Good use of time doesn't mean constant work, though, and so there have been walks to the lake, sits in the sun, evenings of conversation, a hands-on introduction to improv, and many other interludes of leisure. The words of Brenda Ueland are true:

“[I]f it is an idleness that children have, an idleness when you walk alone for a long, long time or take a long dreamy time at dressing or lie in bed at night and thoughts come and go, or dig in a garden, or drive a car for many hours alone, or play the piano, or sew, or paint ALONE...that is creative idleness. With all my heart I tell you and reassure you: at such times you are being slowly filled and recharged with warm imagination, with wonderful living thoughts."

~~~

[Photo: taken in a moment of creative idleness at a fountain on campus of St. John's University.]