Art Saves Lives

Posted on December 10, 2025 by dinafried

Next week I’ve been invited to participate in Mission Belonging’s annual solstice reading, offering poems that “that invite us to reflect on light and darkness in our lives” and also to say something about how Art Saves Lives, the backbone idea of their mission of “building bridges between veterans and citizens using the language of creative expression to promote empathy, foster understanding, and build authentic community.”

So, I’ve been thinking about how art saves lives. Especially for the core population of the Mission Belonging community: “service members, veterans, military family members, caregivers, and healthcare workers who have been gifted opportunities to use the arts as a tool for narration, self-care and socialization to offset their struggles with emotional and physical injuries caused by trauma.”

While I don’t check the box for any of these categories, I feel completely included as a civilian member of the Mission Belonging poetry workshop I attend every week, an absolute highlight I always look forward to. And I feel blessed and honored by the courage and vulnerability I consistently hear in the writing of my fellow workshop members. In so many ways, their art saves my life. It reminds me that being true to ourselves and then taking action from the core of these truths is one of our most powerful antidotes for dealing with these tumultuous times, whether they’re affecting us directly or indirectly as an individual, culture, country, and/or society. And writing–or any kind of art-making; writing just happens to be my main modality–can help us tunnel our way to this truth, which societal forces and life’s daily challenges tend to obscure.

I’m not sure whether art has directly saved my life. But when I think about the question, that tunnel image continues to come up. Maybe I can live some semblance of life in the darkness of the tunnel, but art is the way get to the truer, clearer, shining life of the light. Art also says that we matter: our stories, our ideas, the fluctuating weight of our feelings, the way we make sense of our often senseless world. And engaging in art with Mission Belonging (or in any supportive community context) assures us that whatever we need to express, there will be witnesses to hold it as the delicate, precious gift that it is. As is the creator of the art in question–also a delicate and precious gift.

Mission Belonging has continued to save many lives by opening more doors to the power of art, despite having lost a lot of government grant support this year. If you’re still working on year-end giving (or even if you’re not), I’d encourage you to consider a donation.

And my wish to you in this season of darkness: Find a way through the tunnel into the light.

Speaking Truth to Power

Posted on September 25, 2025 by dinafried

A few years ago, shortly after George Floyd’s murder by the Minnesota police, my late brother, Danny, asked me if I believed in critical race theory. He wasn’t particularly interested in my answer; he was just trying to goad me as he’d done all our lives, making fun of my favorite baseball players when we were kids, dissing the few rock stars I admired that he didn’t like when we were teens, and later tuning into our political differences as he sunk deeper and deeper into the influence of Fox News.

“I don’t call it critical race theory,” I told him. “I call it truth.”

I earnestly began to explain why I thought it was so important that we learn a true accounting of our history–the good, the bad, and the ugly–rather than a white-centered version that discounted or trivialized the experience of black people in the US. He didn’t really listen. I would have liked to chalk that up to ADHD rather than to our past history, except that he kept interrupting me with sound bites he’d clearly heard on TV that had little to do with the points I was trying to make.

Not so different from the sound clips from news pundits about a recent assassination of a right wing leader that Jon Stewart used in his “government-approved monologue” recorded after Jimmy Kimmel’s firing.

Just to be clear, I don’t condone political violence. No matter who does it to whom, and no matter what the underlying motivations might be.

But I also don’t condone this administration’s vilifying those that oppose their policies. I don’t condone their outright lying, or–as they would call it–“alternative facts.” I don’t condone their attempts to simply remove information that doesn’t speak to their political agenda, such as scrubbing DEI from government websites, removing the mention of slavery from national parks, and targeting exhibits at the National Museum of African American History, just to name a few of many examples.

While I agree that those grieving the dead should be respected, I don’t condone the administration’s and right-wing news media’s sanctification of the recently assassinated MAGA influencer after they ignored they ignored the assassination of Minnesota State House Speaker, Melissa Horton, for whom the flag was not lowered.

Narih Lee, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Sadly, this is the first time in my life that I feel I need to choose my words very carefully. The freedom of the press and the freedom to express our opinions that our (quite conservative) teachers taught us about so proudly in elementary school is at risk. Even though Jimmy Kimmel has now been reinstated on some, but not all, of the ABC-affiliate stations, others who commented with concern about some of the things this leader said about black people, Jews, LGBTQ, women and other marginalized groups permanently lost their jobs.

But as writers and as human beings, our moral imperative is to speak truth to power, no matter how much we might dislike being goaded, or cowed, or threatened to stay quiet. Coming out of Rosh Hashanah, I realize this one of the things I need to do more of in the New Year.

Poet Ilya Kaminsky nails it here:

WE LIVED HAPPILY DURING THE WAR

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

I took a chair outside and watched the sun.

In the sixth month

of a disastrous reign in the house of money

in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,

our great country of money, we (forgive us)

lived happily during the war.

#art for change

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Chainsaws Gone Wild

Posted on September 2, 2025 by dinafried

Photo by haemd: https://art.ngfiles.com/medium_views/ 6994000/6994772_2373943_haemd_ chainsawman.88461deeb7794d08f5f 382a77717451f.webp?f1756587284

Last fall, I was outside with my grandchild, Manu, when he heard a motorized noise and asked me what it was.

It didn’t exactly sound like a lawn mower, or a weed whacker. “Maybe it’s a chainsaw,” I said.

“Let’s go see it.”

He got in the stroller and we took off in search of the noise, taking a few wrong turns before we found the perpetrator–a very scary industrial-size leaf-blower, sucking up everything around it.

“I want to go home!” Manu shouted as soon as he realized what it was. He’s always hated leaf blowers.

At the time I didn’t find this incident particularly significant, except that Manu wouldn’t let go of his desire to see a chainsaw. In fact, for nearly a year after, every time he heard any kind of motor after that, he asked me if it was a chainsaw, even if the lawn mower, or the motorcycle, or the helicopter was clearly in sight. And he also asked me–often–to tell him the story of “Manu and the Chainsaw,” where I’d recount the chainsaw-turned-leaf-blower-search” in detail, embellishing shaggy dog style with my purplest toddler-appropriate prose.

The story always ended like this: Manu was very, very sad that he didn’t see a chainsaw, but Grandma said, ‘That’s okay, Manu. We’ll get to see a chainsaw some day.’

Last week, two houses down from his, the neighbors were cutting up a dead tree. Manu stood mesmerized, holding my hand at the edge of the grass, a little scared, a little awed, as the neighbors ran the chainsaw over and over through the dead wood.

***

I’ve been thinking a lot about this story, and its relationship to how we deal with things we anticipate once we see them.

Especially things that are unpleasant.

For months, we’ve been told fascism is coming, hovering at the edges of our democracy, eating away at it in small bites. We’ve been told that if we don’t turn the tides in three months, six months, nine months, or by the mid-terms at the latest, we’ll be doomed.

But fascism is here. Because ICE is here: Masked thugs over-running our communities, lawlessly breaking car windows, pushing their way into houses, taking undocumented people who have been here for years, as well as people with legal status, green card holders and even U.S. citizens.

In other words, kidnapping.

We may not have personally seen ICE yet; those of us who are privileged may feel like we still have time because in our day-to-day lives, everything is normal. We still wake up in the morning, work, exercise, garden, parent, make dinner, watch our daily TV shows. If we don’t pay attention to the news, we can live happily in a pretend world where nothing has changed.

On Labor Day, I went to a rally in support of a local farmworker who is one of over 2500+ victims taken by ICE in Massachusetts alone. An organizer who spoke said she was in the car accompanying this man to a court hearing when three cars surrounded them, threatening a head-on collision if they didn’t stop. Six men surrounded the car, pointed a gun at her face, and dragged him out.

This man’s only crimes: a broken tail light and wanting a better future for his family.

The whole incident took two minutes.

This man was following government protocols. He was on his way to a court hearing. If the government wanted to get rid of him so badly, they could do that through due process. But due process is no longer a given in our fascist state.

I’m pretty sure Manu had no idea what a chainsaw was when he first asked to see one. And while he’s now seen one in action, I’m still pretty sure he has no idea what a chainsaw can do when used inappropriately. If his parents, and I, and the other caring adults in his life have our way, he’ll never find out about the Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

But too many of the authorities in our country–ICE, CBP, and any police department that cooperates with them–are chainsaws out of control.

Meanwhile, like my grandchild, too many of us are just standing at the edge of the sidewalk gaping. Not because we’re bad people, because we just don’t know what else to do.

This is not meant to guilt-trip. If I knew what to do, I would happily end this post by saying so. I do believe, however, that acknowledging the reality of what’s happening is an important first step. And that art and activism; connection, community, and kindness all have a role in bringing about the world we want to see. Let’s hope it will ultimately be enough. #artforchange

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Art for Change

Posted on August 27, 2025 by dinafried

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.)