Art for Change

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Next week, I’ll be launching a month-long series of social media posts on the theme of Art for Change. I’ll be spotlighting various artists and artistic projects, posting questions for us to contemplate in our own creative journeys, and offering thoughts in text and short videos on issues related to writing in dark times. I hope you’ll stay tuned and tell others who might be interested. (People can follow me on Substack, Facebook, or Instagram.)

But today, I want to write about joy.

We could think of joy as the flip side of darkness, but I think it’s more integrated than that. As I walked through the woods early this morning, contemplating my Elul challenges this year (Elul is the month before Jewish New Year, where it’s traditional to do an extensive “soul-accounting” of places where you’ve “missed the mark” and then work on setting new intentions and forgiving both yourself and others you may have inadvertently wronged), I had an insight that the biggest challenge for me would be figuring out how to simultaneously hold onto the joy and gratitude of being alive without abandoning my responsibility to do as much as I can to work for a more just, equitable and humane world.

As beloved Charlotte’s Web author E.B. White articulated so perfectly,

“I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve (or save) the world and a desire to enjoy (or savor) the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

I got some inspiration from the offerings of our local biennial Art in the Orchard show, which I went to this past Monday. So many of this year’s works evoked fantasy or whimsy, and many of the artists said in their statements that the darkness of the times inspired them to look even more purposefully for a way to showcase joy. Maybe we need a little bit of magical thinking, like imagining this sleeping dragon playing with a fairy, rather than breathing fire, as explained in the artist’s statement below the photo. (All the pictures are mine.)

And I loved these playful caterpillars–and these rocks, dancing for joy.

 

And here’s another image worth holding onto: the phoenix rising again!

My first question (a bonus before we get to the campaign): How do you manage to balance the heaviness and the joy? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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Or one of my favorites–the phoenix rising again.

Re-Claiming Voice

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A few years ago, I started to lose my singing voice. It was a long, slow process where first occasionally, and then more and more often, I’d find myself in mid-song and unable to reach the next set of notes, my voice unraveling into some gravelly, raspy shadow of itself.

When the issue first started, I could usually get some semblance of my voice back by drinking some water and singing more softly, but it got to the point where I could barely get through a line without croaking. And while I’ve never been a diva singer or even a karaoke regular, singing has always been extremely important to me. I mourned the loss of my ability to sing as an inevitable consequence of aging, exacerbated by vocal disuse (I’d abandoned weekly singing in various choruses when the pandemic started in 2020) and felt so sad that I’d ever again be able to feel the ecstasy and musical rush I got from singing in harmony with others.

I tried to console myself with reminders to feel grateful that compared to all the aging ailments I could have, this one didn’t significantly threaten my health or functionality, but I couldn’t quite let go of the grief. Mental health is also important, and while it’s not my “art,” the way writing might be, singing is a key piece in my creative and emotional expression toolkit that keeps me balanced and happy.

For more than a year, I didn’t do anything other than complain about my loss. Then, I did something that felt really risky: I took voice lessons. I’d never had a voice lesson in my life, because I never really considered myself a singer. But I thought if I could just take a few lessons, I’d learn to do some exercises that might help restore at least some of my voice, kind of like vocal PT.

Of course, it wasn’t that simple–or that quick–but a year later, I have nearly my entire voice back–including some notes that have always been hard to reach. It’s such a thrill to practice with karaoke sound tracks on YouTube. And last week, for the first time in years, I went to a community sing, and instead of feeling frustrated and shut down, I was euphoric.

In addition to now thinking about re-joining a chorus sometime soon, I’m also thinking about the metaphor of finding voice. We writers talk all the time about the importance of establishing a credible and consistent voice, and how that voice functions to engage a reader and drive a piece forward. But voice does more than that. Writer Meg Rosoff says, voice is “about finding out who you are.” In addition, she makes the following three important points.

  1. You need confidence and self-knowledge to speak in your own Voice.
  2. The only real block to writing truthfully is being unable to access what is in your head and heart.
  3. A distinctive voice will not just help you write well. It will help you do anything at all well. (https://www.megrosoff.co.uk/blog/2011/11/14/how-to-find-a-voice)

Not singing, but one of the first times I publicly used my voice, reading poetry at age 22 at Eric’s Backroom in New York City, Photo by Lew Holzman

I’m thinking about this third point as I consider another aspect of voice: the need to raise our collective voices against injustice. And I hope that this mini-miracle of re-claiming my literal voice will help me believe in the much bigger miracle: that our voices matter and can–and will–make a difference, whether we use them for activism, writing, or singing.

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Intentions

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I have a great meditation app called Insight Timer. In addition to guided meditations of various time lengths from a wide range of practitioners, it also has breathwork, yoga, motivational courses, music, and occasional challenges to focus on an area that challenges us from being our calmest, happiest, and most productive selves.

Most recently, I’ve joined a 10-day “morning routine challenge,” where each day introduces a new tip for starting the morning in a more healthy and meaningful way than my current habit of lazing in bed skimming the news and doom-scrolling social media. It’s enough to feel like I’ve started any day on “the wrong side of the bed,” but somehow I can’t bring myself to stop.

Even worse, I usually ignore the daily poems (from Rattle, SWIMM, Only Poems, the Slowdown, and the Academy of American Poets) that pop into my inbox, opting instead for political pundits. True, I may not be awake enough to take a deep dive into the more difficult to decipher poetry, but wouldn’t it still be better to carry a few precious smidgeons of imagery and language into my day, rather than the reminders of all that’s going wrong in the world?

Interestingly enough, today’s morning routine challenge session was about setting intentions. Not a new topic for me, and likely familiar to many of us. But I still need to be reminded that an intention is not a to-do list (which I’m way better at); it’s a mindset, focused on the qualities we want to embody as we go about our day. Insight Timer asks me every day what my intention is, but since (other than during this morning routine challenge) I generally only use it before bedtime, I always ignore the question. Still it’s an important one. Today, I set the intention to be more balanced and focused, as I knew this mostly unscheduled day would offer many choices on how I might spend my time, all of which seem like high priority. And one of my challenges when projects pile up is not being able to focus on anything, because I’m too worried about the things I’m not doing.

Photo: D. Dina Friedman

I can’t yet say whether I’m meeting my intention as we close in on midday, although I can say that so far I’m not feeling as worried about all I won’t get done today. And perhaps I was a tad more mindful in focusing on the amazing sunlight and appreciating the cool breeze before the impending heat when I went for a walk earlier this morning at Amethyst Brook in Amherst, rather than thinking too much about all I needed to do when I got home. (One of my priorities is and will always be exercise–especially walking in nature.)

Even though I still haven’t made intention-setting a habit, I can see that this practice would be especially helpful to writers, musicians, artists, etc., because it can help focus our attention on process rather than on product. Instead of mentally beating ourselves up for not writing when we sit down to write, or writing something we think is “bad,” we can set an intention, for example, to simply be open to whatever sensory observation or language pops into our heads. I know that when I returned to playing piano after a many-decade hiatus, what got me through several months of frustration and the heavy weight of generational shame for not originally “making it” as a musician was the very specific intention I set to play without judgment. In fact, I made a deal with myself that whenever I started judging, I needed to close the piano lid and walk away.

However, whenever I walked away from the piano, I felt sad and disappointed because I had enjoyed playing. So, eventually, I was able to quiet my inner judge and simply be open to the moment, complete with all its bliss and all its flaws.

I hope we can all get to a place where our intention-setting leaves us more open to embracing the whole of ourselves–the creative places and the stuck ones.

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Protest Poems

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Today I woke up to some good news. Two more of my poems were today’s offerings on the Substack site Second Coming, a poem-a-day protest against the threats to our democracy by our current administration.

And last night, I went to hear a writing colleague, Bill Mailler read from his new book of social justice poetry, Trauma, Truth, and Outrage. Bill’s poems tend to be gut-punches. He doesn’t shy away from horror or attempt to beautify it through language. His work is like that sign our small group of witnesses illuminated at the border in 2020: Don’t Look Away.

 

 

 

What I liked most about Bill’s work were the questions relating to our human capacity for meanness, a key component of the poem, Meditations on My Whiteness, where he asks directly:

For what possible reason
could good or well-meaning people perpetuate or participate….

before offering a long lamentation of possibilities including:

because we are cowards and cannot acknowledge
the consequences of our actions?

because we teach our children to deny their natural empathy
for others, themselves, animals, and the earth itself? 

I also think constantly about the issue of human cruelty. Though my own work tends to take a less direct approach to writing about political issues, neither is wrong or right. They’re just different. The point, I think, is to enter the world through a lens of empathy, rather than simply ranting or trying to be prescriptive about what you think should be done. Poet Kwame Dawes talks eloquently about this issue in his own writing: When I write the poems about Haiti, people living with the disease, I’m not writing poems so that people will give.. but so the person who experiences when they read the poem, they’ll say to me… that’s it. That’s what I’ve been feeling but I didn’t know how to say it.

As many of us are staggering through these times with deep and heavy feelings about what’s happening in the world, reading a protest poem or a political piece of artful prose can help us feel less isolated as we try to make sense of our grief and uncover a path through it into some kind of meaningful action. That’s why when I’ve read my own protest poems at workshops or readings, even raw and unfinished generative responses to prompts, I often got more positive feedback than I expected because I was able to verbalize something that someone else had not yet been able to verbalize–touched a nerve, so to speak.

This isn’t to say writing protest poetry is easy. While I do believe that all attempts at creative expression should be acknowledged, respected, and validated, it’s difficult not to fall into ranting, generic abstractions, slogans, self-pitying, etc. And the problems with these pitfalls is that it becomes easier to lose the reader, who’s likely heard it all before and can gloss over or check out. Keeping empathy in the forefront can help. So can paying careful attention to language–using sensory details, fresh verbs, and unexpected metaphors. In prose, this might mean creating vivid scenes where the viewer can watch what’s happening to characters and form their own judgments.

What has made the process of writing protest poems and stories slightly easier for me in the past decade has been my being able to more fully integrate my life as a writer and an activist. While this wasn’t true in my earlier life, I now feel the fallout from political issues as viscerally as the other subjects I feel urged to write about. Allowing myself to deeply feel the horrors of all I read about in the news has certainly made it more difficult to maintain emotional balance, but I do think it’s necessary. We need, somehow, to find a path into a more deeply rooted empathy if we really want to break the pattern of ignoring atrocities–often done in our name by a system in which we are all still passively participating.

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Metaphors

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slowking4, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons

I finally dived into Ellen Bass’s Living Room Craft Talk Series (half-price sale ends today) and so far, I’m finding it well worth the value. Though I usually find it hard to focus when listening to online lectures, Ellen has a way of making you feel as if you are truly in her living room. But make sure to have a notebook at your side to jot down the countless gems of tips and inspirational tidbits, and be prepared to press pause to play things over. However, even if you miss stuff, Ellen has graciously included handouts of all the quotes from her lecture in their entirety, as well as the sources of the books they’re in, so you can read more of what grabs you most.

While I might have arrogantly thought that after a lifetime of writing poetry I knew everything I needed to know about metaphor, I was surprised how much I learned from Ellen’s examples of the different ways writers use metaphor. And while I often express things in metaphors in all sorts of writing–including even emails–I’m often not super conscious of when and how I’m using metaphors in my poems, and whether I’m milking their impact to the fullest.

So yesterday I reviewed all the poems in the packet Ellen used to supplement her lecture and highlighted all the metaphors. While on my first read I’d recognized the ones that stood out in the wow zone… (e.g. grief as a homeless dog from Denise Levertov’s Talking to Grief & hands that “fly up like two birds while I speak” from Tim Siebel’s Ode to my Hands) I was amazed at how many metaphors there were, and how smoothly they flowed through the poem… to the point where I barely noticed the comparisons.

This led me to thinking more about metaphor as a conscious tool, rather than a momentary flash of subconscious inspiration (which is where I probably get 90% of my metaphors). Ellen talks about the importance of really working metaphors… choosing where to insert them by creating little slits in a poem in places where the message/meaning/image can be unpacked to create more emotional resonance or exploration of nuance. So I looked at one of my poems in progress, surprised to discover that in this particular poem there were no metaphors–just a generative rehash of a difficult emotional situation broken up into lines and made to look like a poem. I wasn’t sure this poem would have legs for anyone but me, but I spent some time consciously inserting metaphors and detail… and lo and behold, something with perhaps a little more staying power began to emerge. I’m still not sure whether the poem will have enough meaning for others, but I do believe the details and the comparisons have the capacity to generate more places for others to connect.

I know that people have different degrees of tolerance for metaphors. There are some folks who can find meaning in an amorphous avante garde play and others who prefer more directness and clarity. So, it’s important to think about what our audience(s) might need and how we want them to respond to our writing, and then craft our metaphors with care. Ellen points out the importance of grasping for the unusual metaphor, rather than the expected one, but not so unusual that people can’t make the leap. But I also know that not only have metaphors improved my  writing by giving more life and possibility to images and details, they’ve also helped me communicate hard stuff to others through a story or image that’s more relatable than a common abstraction.

And I love how metaphors often take on more than I might have originally intended through the lens of a reader/listener’s interpretation, unveiling possibilities that neither of us might have previously considered.

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A Sense of Place

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I’m always surprised that no matter how much I might originally intend otherwise, the bulk of my fiction (including nearly half of the stories in Immigrants) is set in New York City–with a large percentage in the immediate neighborhood where I grew up. While I’ve often joked, You can take me out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of me, this is really more of a truism than a joke. Each time I visit, I can feel the city’s resonance and vibrancy, even as I recoil at the noise of the subway chugging on the elevated tracks, or the food wrappers and soda cans tossed into people’s yards and the flyers disintegrating into muck in the puddles along the curb.

As a child, I never noticed these kinds of details. Tuning out was my superpower. I kind of had to in order to stay sane. As someone who had a rich fantasy life with imaginary friends since I was very young, it always felt way more easy and pleasant to pay more attention to the world in my head rather than the world around me. So all the ugliness of New York, or anywhere, never seemed like a problem. But tuning out is a problem when you’re trying to establish detail in your writing and develop a strong sense of place.

In the book I’m working on now (in fits and starts), the two teenagers who center the story both live near where I grew up in Queens. One lives in the rows of brick apartments in Jackson Heights, and the other lives a couple of miles closer to Manhattan in a row house on a rundown block in Woodside. So, on my most recent trip to New York to visit my mom earlier this week, I spent some time exploring both neighborhoods for street details I could use, trying to pay attention to who was on the street in both locales, what public places (stores, schools, parks) were nearby, and some precise specifics on what the houses looked like in detail: Peeling paint? Colors of the houses?  The arrangement of numbered addresses on the doorframes? What kind of door frames? Types of gates framing the steps? How many trees and other plantings were on the block and what kind of shape were they in? The list of questions you can ask about the concrete (pun intended) nature of a place can go on and on.

True Confession: I can think of very little that is more boring that developing lists of these kinds of details–even though I know that some people thrive on this. There are writers out there who are marvelous stylists, known for their ability to describe meticulously. And these are people who will happily lose themselves in place research and/or other types of historical research, taking days or weeks to investigate all the nuances and possibilities before committing words to paper. I admire them!

Call me lazy (though I’ll argue than in most aspects of my life I am anything but lazy!) but I just don’t do this. My descriptions aim for just a few salient but highly sensory details, which, when I feel I need to, I flesh out with metaphors, rather than more particulars.

Neither way of describing is better–or worse–they’re just different.

Diversity Plaza, Jackson Heights, NY (I took this pic on a previous trip.)

And another true confession–though not necessarily what I’d recommend: I didn’t take notes on my walks through these neighborhoods. I didn’t even take pictures (though I might be able to rely on some pics my partner, Shel, took.) Instead, I plan to rely on what I remember, perhaps a bit blurred or distorted from what I really sensed, but, hey, I’m writing fiction, not documentary.

And like a watercolor wash over whatever details I try to bring to life will be my long history with the city where I grew up and came of age–a melding of what’s actually there and my inner response to it. Because even as I grooved in my fantasy world in the countless hours where I walked the streets of New York as a younger person, it seeped inside me and will be there forever. As I said, you can’t take New York out of me. 

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Putting Your Work Away and Bringing It Back

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My daughter’s piano teacher used to tell her that when you put a piece away for a while and then bring it back, it comes back better.

I think this is also true for writing–at least it’s true for me.

Most recently, I “put away” my piano memoir, Imperfect Pitch, for several months. I had been shopping it around unsuccessfully for a couple of years, and then I was offered a consultation with an agent who told me she thought it would be more marketable if I turned it into a “self-help memoir.” So, last summer I added a bunch of short sections reflecting on the themes I’d raised and offering prompts and prescriptions people could use to tackle perfectionism and self-judgment while amplifying joy and forgiveness. I was excited to give that version to a few readers, but then disappointed when they uniformly said that the self-help voice was intrusive and detracted from the thread of the story.

I put the book away for a couple of months so I could read it fresh. But other than realizing that they were right, I couldn’t figure out what to do.

Then winter hit, along with the new administration and my father’s illness and death, and I was too depressed to do any substantive writing for a while. But the book was there at the back of my mind, niggling me. The project was too important to me to abandon. In fact, of all the things I’ve written, this is the book I most want people to read, because I believe its messages about creativity and mattering are essential to healing ourselves–both individually and as a culture. That was why I was going for an agent and the big publishing houses, rather than the small ones–and why I was willing to take this agent’s advice about so-called “marketability.”

But as the months passed and my writing fog started to clear, I realized it was ok for me to loosen my expectations on the marketability angle. I’ve always personally been an outlier when it comes to popular culture. So why should my book be any different? Yet, there was something in the added sections I liked–a wiser voice that could look back on the memoir incidents I wrote about and make sense of them. It was the poplike “you-too” voice that felt insincere and inauthentic to my newly attuned ears.

So, I took out that voice and shortened the reflections, making sure they all sounded like me–a wiser, calmer me than the me in the throes of wrestling all my musical baggage, but still me, without artifice. I hope they now feel like a cool wave momentarily breaking the heat. We’ll see. I’ve given the book to at least one more reader. And then, after what will likely be another round of revisions, it’s off to market one more time–perhaps no longer exclusively on the big press circuit. While I’ll continue to attempt to build my platform, I’m no longer interested in being anything less (or more) than who I am, whether or not my messaging ever gets popular enough to build a huge following.

Photo by Shel Horowitz

Incidentally, I also put away the Brahms Intermezzo I fell in love with and worked diligently on for two months. I got it down pretty well, but far from perfect. Which is ok, now that I’m no longer mentally beating myself up for piano imperfections. Still, I hope I’ll be able to make it way better when I pull it out again.

Have a listen here from pianist Jean Marc Luisada.

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Empathy

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My 2.9 year old grandson, Manu, loves the playground, especially when there are no other children and he has the whole place to himself. A few days ago when we arrived, we saw another kid in the sandbox who waved to him enthusiastically. “That kid wants to play with you,” I said.

He hesitated before answering, then said, “I don’t play.”

Photo by Shel Horowitz

This surprised me because I have clear memories of being 2 and wanting nothing more than for other kids to play with me. I remember Linda, who lived a few houses down in the apartment complex we lived in and how I liked nothing better than running down the hill with her at top speed in our shared yard. And in kindergarten, I remember Mary Ann, with her perfect blond braids, how I cried because the teacher wouldn’t let me sit next to her.

While I don’t remember the specific incident, I also remember the day I came home from kindergarten crying  because some kids had said or done something mean to me. My mother simply shrugged and said, “Children are cruel.”

I was shocked! Children? My tribe? (I was already aware of divisions: that I was a child in a land of adults and a girl in a culture where boys ruled.) But how could children as an entity be labeled as cruel? I was a child and I wasn’t cruel. And why was being cruel something to be shrugged about and accepted as a fact of life?

Unfortunately, cruelty is not something confined to children. Our human history of wars, torture, and the oppression of one group by another is all the proof we need. And if we want to fast forward to the present and our own country, all we need to do is look at the initial reports from “Alligator Alcatraz” (aka “Alligator Auschwitz”) where inmates are reporting no bathing facilities, one maggot-infested meal per day, elephant-sized mosquitoes, 24-hour lights, and alternating periods of sweltering heat and chilling cold.

What should we do? Shrug, and say, “People are cruel?”

In both my most hopeful and most devastated days, I find myself pondering why we humans as a species are the way we are. How can we possibly have the capacity to harm each other in the ways we do? The “hopeful me” looks at this question as a puzzle that, once solved, can change the entire trajectory of how humans can live together on the planet, while the “devastated me” wants to curl up somewhere and cry–with many more tears than I ever shed because I couldn’t sit next to Mary Ann.

Elon Musk recently said, “the fundamental weakness of western civilization is empathy.” But that’s the voice of the dark side. Empathy is the only thing that might be able to save us from ourselves. It’s empathy for others that can catalyze those of us who have the privilege and the capacity to speak out. And we must speak out–despite empathy’s ability to also render us paralyzed because we feel the pain of others so deeply.

On a recent day at the playground, Manu wanted to climb on a rock where another little boy was standing. He stayed at the bottom of the rock for minutes looking up at the boy, who stared down at him from the top, neither of them saying anything, just staring each other down and holding their position. Finally the boy on the rock made a fist and released his index finger, as if he were shooting a fake gun. It was subtle gesture, and I wasn’t sure if I was interpreting it correctly, but I think I was, because he did it several more times.

Where did he learn that? I wondered, with horrified distaste. Who taught him?

Then I tried to use my empathy, and reason from the kid’s perspective. He was enjoying being on the rock and didn’t want anyone encroaching on his space. We humans have an innate tendency to protect what is ours, and when we’re young we often have to learn not to grab or be aggressive towards others to get what we want.

Even though neither of the little boys thought so, there was enough room on the rock for both of them. Just as there’s enough room in our country for all of us who are here to live peacefully with each other.

Eventually, the boy’s mother finally came over and picked him up, enabling Manu to climb on the rock unimpeded. Eventually, Manu, too, will need to learn how to share his space. Hopefully he’ll get to a point where he thinks it’s much more fun when other kids are also at the playground. Hopefully, we’ll also get to that point. Somehow. Some way.

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