I climbed into bed Monday night and grabbed the book off my nightstand. I bought it while on vacation a couple of weeks ago and was about 70-pages in. Propped up on my pillows, I cracked the book open and… zoned out.
It was reading time, so I kept trying to get myself to come back to the book, but within a few minutes, I’d find myself skimming through passages and flicking pages to see how far I was from the end of the chapter (too far to convince myself to power through, it turns out).
My gut instinct was to beat myself up. I hadn’t written anything that day, and I’d been holding out for my ah-yes-a-moment-of-creative-recharging moment of the day on my nighttime reading. And yet, there I was, feeling like a major hypocrite as someone who shouts about reading and writing from the rooftops but just couldn’t bring myself to focus on my book.
This week, it hasn’t (just) been my phone and work demands keeping me away from creative priorities. I’m also feeling drained. Overwhelmed. Exhausted.
I’ve been recovering from a virus that still has me coughing and full of snot, work has been incredibly intense, and every time I get an email or get on social media, I’m confronted with a million horrors on the geopolitical landscape. Prioritizing my reading and writing has felt silly and inconsequential in light of everything else that is going on.
And maybe it is a bit silly. But in light of how absurd everything is in the world right now, is it really any sillier to create than to doggy paddle in a pool of anxiety?
Thankfully, I’m not the first person to have had this thought or these experiences, and I also acknowledge my privilege in that others face considerably worse conditions and situations than me.
In response to these feelings of tumult, I did three things:
Gave myself permission to add the book I was reading to the DNF pile. I want my reading time to be a time of joy, and since this book isn’t bringing me joy, I’ll move on to another one. Typically, I try to power through books I’m just not clicking with. This time? Scootin’ right along!
Restarted my fantasy manuscript from page one. I recently wrote that my manuscript was struggling because my protagonist was passive and his wants and desires weren’t very clear. I considered retooling what I already had, but that felt like more work than just going back to square one. So that’s what I did!
Turned to other writers and artists. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Even as creatives who often think of ourselves as creating new and novel things from nothing (err… in an ideal world, when we can put down our phones and stop obsessing over work), nothing is new under the sun. Other artists have walked this path before us, and they often have a lot of wisdom to share.
On that last point in particular, I want to share some of the insights that really resonated with me.
Keith Haring, on Sensibility
Haring is one of my favorite artists. I have several Haring prints in my home, clothes that sport his design, and I am considering a Haring-inspired tattoo as my next bit of ink. Haring kept journals for much of his adult life, and even his early-twenty entries are elucidating and full of rich reflections on the creative life. (My journals from my early twenties are quite different. I was an idiot.)
One of my favorite passages of his journals, written against the backdrop of the Cold War and the AIDS epidimic is,
"This, I feel, is the advantage to creating art at this point in time: When we realize that we are temporary, we are facing our self-destruction, we are realizing our fate and we must confront it. Art is the only sensible primal response to an outlook of possible destruction (obliteration)."
And we must confront it. Through that lens– we must confront the painful parts of life– art becomes not a luxury, but a necessity. It is the means by which we can stomach and make sense and move on in life.
Toni Morrison, on How Civilizations Heal
Another brilliant mind with a poignant sense of observation about the nature of creativity, Morrison found herself spiraling after the 2004 election of George W. Bush.
While speaking with a friend, she confessed that she was depressed and feeling creatively paralyzed. Her friend, whose name I haven’t been able to track down, allegedly interrupted her, saying, “No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work — not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job!”
It was the wake-up call she had been needing. She reflected in an essay titled “No Place for Self-Pity, No Room for Fear” that her friend's words were sobering. She writes, “I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed.”
She then went on to ruminate further on what it means to create through the pain, write in spite of the fear.
“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.
I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge — even wisdom. Like art.”
When I first read this, I couldn’t help but feel a parallel with Haring. “This is precisely the time when artists go to work,” echoes Haring’s comment that art is the only sensible response.
Ursula K. Le Guin, on Being Realists
Finally, I want to highlight the words Ursula K. Le Guin spoke during her 2014 National Book Award acceptance speech. Le Guin is a pioneer of speculative fiction, and her work often reflects the depths to which her introspection led her to ponder art, technology, politics, and the intersections across the three realms.
As if reading the stars and predicting the future, she anticipates exactly where we are in 2026 by saying,
"I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now. Who can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries; the realists of a larger reality."
Given what I most often write about, you can probably guess what really landed with me here… the call out of the “fear-stricken society” and “its obsessive technologies.” Those pesky obsessive technologies were just ramping up in 2014, at least as I remember it. Le Guin’s insights and her call for artists to envision other ways of being– to be realists of a larger reality– are even more prescient today than they were when she spoke them.
What They Already Knew (That I’m Still Learning)
That initial sense of ugh, I can’t do this right now came to me while I was sat in bed with a book on my lap. In a nearly complete full-circle moment, I’m back, sitting in bed, this time with a laptop on my lap.
While I initially felt a pang of guilt about not finishing the book I was reading and opting to restart my manuscript rather than fix it, I’m now choosing to lean on the lessons conveyed by Haring, Morrison, and Le Guin, reframing my unease and borderline creative paralysis as small acts of rebellion. Forrays into that obligatory work to create art through trying times.
There’s one more quote from one more creative I want to include before I wrap up. I didn’t include it previously because it should have been the most obvious to me. Long before I decided to work in tech, I had aspirations to be a Cather scholar (as any twenty year old does) and wrote a thesis based on her novel, The Song of the Lark. In that book, Cather penned one of my all-time favorite quotes. She wrote,
“The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself—life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose?”
And so, that’s how I’m moving into this upcoming weekend. I’ve got time in my cabin on the books, and I’m going to put on some classical music, pick up my pen, and try to capture a bit of that shifting, elusive element, which, I believe, is too sweet to lose, even when it’s also chaotic and overwhelming.
Until next time,
Blake
Your Turn
A Quick Request
Growing this newsletter is a lot like building a creative habit—it happens one day at a time. If you found today's essay helpful, please consider forwarding it to a friend or sharing it on your favorite social platform (ya know, instead of that endless scrolling we’re all trying to get away from).
Worth Fighting For
Periodically, I like to draw attention to the people and organizations fighting the good fight to champion a world of cultural richness instead of scroll-inducing shallowness.
Today, I’d like to give a shout-out to a nonprofit from my home state of Kentucky, Sarabande Books.
Sarabande is one of the few publishers based out of Kentucky, and they maintain an exceptionally high bar of quality in the work that they publish. Not only does Sarabande champion a distinct sense of taste in the poetry, short fiction, and essays that they publish, but they also invest deeply in cultivating the arts and literature scene more broadly.
In their own words,
“With nearly three hundred titles in print, we have earned a dedicated readership and a national reputation as a publisher of diverse forms and innovative voices. Through our free arts programming, we are proud to invest in emerging writers and serve as an educational resource locally and nationally.”
I’ve known about Sarabande for a while– their main office in Louisville, Kentucky, is quite close to where I did my undergrad, and they were generous enough to send speakers to several of my upper-level English courses.
But there was a moment last year when I took my support for Sarabande to the next level, opting to make a monthly financial contribution instead of merely offering them verbal praise. Under the Orange Shitstain’s administration, the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) levied an ultimatum to publishers and nonprofits receiving NEA funding that prohibited the publication and promotion of “trans, nonbinary, or gender fluid authors.” Sarabande refused, and the NEA rescinded its funding.
While I can’t make up for the grant money lost on my own, I can still help out. I, too, would like to tell the NEA and the current administration to kick rocks (among other things I won’t publicly document). So, I make a monthly contribution of $20 to Sarabande, and would encourage you to do the same.
Until next time,
Irreverent. Creative. Human.