As a Creator Are You…
Federica Colletti, Between Two Worlds, 2020-2021, Collage
Welcome! We’re back. It’s Thursday, January 15th.
Hello friends,
Since Christmas I have been focusing on painting.
Doing both, writing and painting, is my purpose. But drilling down on one creative practice for some time feels frictionless, less chaotic, like a vacation and a leap ahead.
Jumping back into writing the newsletter after the Holidays is exciting too.
Although, I ran into one huge hurdle while writing this issue.
The realities of Minneapolis and St. Paul shut me down yesterday. They make me shudder and sometimes, crumble.
I had to disconnect from it so badly that I slumped down from my standing desk and curled up on my tiny rebounder. The sunlight soothed me to sleep.
I woke up and knew the first thing I could do for this issue is to look at Minneapolis and St. Paul artists and writers.
Louise Erdrich came to mind. I’ve read only one book of hers so far, The Sentence.
It wasn’t a stretch to think she had written other books about resistance, collective grief, violence, and injustice.
Here’s what I found.
To clarify, I have not read The Night Watchman (which won the Pulitzer Prize), yet.
But I have read summaries and understand that it is based on her grandfather, Patrick Gourneau, who fought against the U.S. government's attempt to terminate his tribe's reservation in the 1950s. While working as a night watchman at a factory, he organized community resistance, traveled to Washington D.C. to testify, and successfully helped defeat the termination bill.
Having not read the book, I can't say that much about it.
But, what caught my eye is Erdrich's afterword...
“If you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart."
-Louise Erdrich
In The Paris Review, Erdrich states:
"I have tried to revenge through my writing" and have "never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes."
-Louis Erdrich
Music to my ears, transforming pain through words, weaponizing shame with wit and precision.
This is ancient wisdom but an urgent application.
This purpose belongs to you too.
Your words, your art, your script, your photographs, your spaces, your dances are needed now. Don't succumb. Now is not the time to quit.
Gmail shortens emails in awkward places. Read here. It’s better.
You may know that Renee Nicole Good was a poet.
She won an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020, for her poem, On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs (poem below).
I didn't know this until Saturday when NPR's Scott Simon of Weekend Edition read one of her poems over the air.
In the broadcast, Scott Simon says, "the poem is wry and funny as she tries to reconcile science and faith and wonders, 'Can I let them both be?'"
That's exactly what we do as creators.
We hold contradictions and let opposing truths exist in the same space. We ask the hard questions without demanding easy answers.
We also transform pain. The unbearable becomes relatable so that we can grapple with it. The unspeakable receives a voice so that we can hear it.
Like Erdrich weaponizing childhood shame into resistance and her grandfather Patrick organizing community action between factory shifts, Renee Nicole Good's life ended with resistance, grace, and wit with her final words on earth: “That's fine, dude. I'm not mad at you.”
As if she had seen the future and knew he was there to end her life.
Is she a person of such grace and clairvoyance that she’d already forgiven him? Or was this a calm declaration about what he was already doing with such vitriol and violence?
We can’t know. It’s truly speculative. But like Good, we can live moment by moment with certainty that our actions and our work makes a difference.
Don't just survive the contradictions, alchemize them into art that fights back. You are part of this lineage.
When the realities make you shudder and crumble, remember your creative practice isn't only escape or pleasure or money in the bank, it is resistance.
Show up. Create. Fight back.
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
by Renée Nicole Macklin (Good)
i want back my rocking chairs,
solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches.
i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores
(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):
remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,
& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.
under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat
ribosome
endoplasmic—
lactic acid
stamen
at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—
i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe my gut—
maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.
it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.
can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the classroom
now i can’t believe—
that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—
all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:
life is merely
to ovum and sperm
and where those two meet
and how often and how well
and what dies there.
Make something,
Clarissa
If you want to help here is a list of ways to support Minneapolis and St. Paul.
Source: The Paris Review, "The Art of Fiction No. 208: Louise Erdrich" (2010)
“Things which do not grow and change are dead things."
-Louise Erdrich
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