The Gift of Art

The Gift of Art

Last weekend at the New England Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference I heard Laurie Halse Anderson, whose work I greatly admire speak on giving ourselves permission to write. Having been to countless writers conferences over the years, I’m kind of past the point of needing to hear that I have to write everyday, find a good space, ignore the seduction of distraction, etc. I already have figured out how to build consistent writing into my busy life, and I’ve gotten to the point in my own writing process where if the space in my head is clear, it doesn’t matter if I’m sitting in the middle of piles of junk in the living room, “listening” to my husband complaining that I left the laundry room light on, and my son yakking about his school day.

But then she got to point number three. “Give yourself the gift of art,” she said. Play music, paint, dance, sing, write poetry.

Duh!

No wonder, last month, after finally finishing a manuscript that took five years of birth pain, did I feel drained, empty. It was my spring break from my teaching job, and work slave that I am, I wanted to make the most of the extra time, so I immediately started cogitating all the other things I ’should’ be working on, the snippets of manuscripts I started or made notes for, the dead novels needing to be resuscitated. I couldn’t face any of them.

Instead, I started looking through things I wrote twenty years ago–a bunch of half-finished poetry and journal entries that could be poems. Though I’d published many poems in my 20s and 30s, I don’t think of poetry as my strongest art form—in fact I consider myself an imposter poet. But what did I do for that week? I wrote and revised poems. Lots of poems. They weren’t terribly good, and I didn’t really care about publishing them, but I had fun, I paid attention to language on a different level, and I felt nurtured rather than emptied. I did this for a few weeks before I slowly started going back to work on the next manuscript project, and now I’m continuing to dabble in poems as a sweet coffee break on the long road to polishing the next manuscript.

So thank you, Laurie, for putting to words what I knew in my deepest self was true. It We need to take time to replenish the well through other art forms. This week, I’m looking forward to singing.