This essay begins a series on opening up to the writer, poet, and literary artist within. I hope to inspire myself and others along the way.
I am embarking on a new journey to answer this question: What does it mean to be a literary artist? I use the term literary artist on purpose because it is different from being a writer. I started out as a freelance writer and made a living at it. I became a technical writer, then a writer of training materials, and then led a whole company of writers providing writing services for clients. Off and on I wrote poems here and there, and I always kept a journal. Lately, I’ve become an essayist/opinion piece writer on Medium—one who tries to give perspective on issues of importance, especially climate change. But it was never literary or artistic. It was always tangential to the real thing. The real thing is art. Creative art. Fiction. Poetry. The music of language. The beauty of story.
And in my life, that real thing has always been left undone. Unengaged. Left behind. Lately, I asked, “Why? Why do I leave it undone? Why do I always seem to avoid the very thing I need to be doing? Why do I walk away from my calling, prioritizing everything else first? What gives?”
My Guides
So, I am undertaking an exploration of that reality. My guides at this stage are Natalie Goldberg, author of Writing Down the Bones, Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, John Gardener, author of The Art of Fiction, and Mary Oliver, Robert Bly, and other poets who write about poetry and the work of doing it. I’m going to share my explorations and insights as I go through this journey to discover, nourish, and engage the artist within me who has never come out. Anyone who has other suggested resources for a journey like this, please share them!
My Monsters
Julia Cameron has a whole course on recovering creativity and I am working with some of her exercises to begin with. One of the first exercises is to name your monsters, “the old enemies of your creative self-worth.” I take it the idea is to know thy enemy, and she encourages us to remember the small slights that happened. Here are some of mine.
By far the biggest monster to my creative self-worth was my father. As a teenager, I mused about becoming a writer. "What, do you think you are going to write the great American novel?" he sneered. I’ll never forget his mocking tone, nor the crush in my chest I felt at that moment. I also recall his mocking laughter at the rhymed Father’s Day card I had made for him—reading it through, laughing, and my mother trying to cover for him. These were monstrous violations of the creative spirit I hope I never repeated with my own children.
The second was my mother. Not so direct, she subtly undermined my notion of leaving the city to build a small cabin in the woods where I could live and write at 24 years old. It was a boy’s dream of a lifetime. I signed for the logs to build the cabin. I was leaving to sign for the land on which I would build it. We stood in the driveway as I said goodbye, and she shared all the impracticalities, pulled at my heartstrings, and gently pulled me her way until I made a fateful decision. She had won. I canceled the logs. I didn’t sing for the land. My mother and her doubts prevailed.
Her sentimentality was brutal and remained so. Every time she heard a story of someone else who had done exactly what she talked me out of, she raised it onto a pedestal, talked about how neat that person was, and wouldn't I enjoy talking to him. It was like joyfully twisting a knife in my chest, killing the dream of living my destiny, and spiting me for even thinking I could do such a thing.
The third was my first wife who became a thief of creative energy. Years after we were married, she became a spinning net, the shining narcissism of a greedy soul stealing all the life force from the fountain. She burned my creative energy into ash without so much as a thank you.
In the face of these three, I stood in the snow barefoot with no gloves on my hands. Ice formed on my heart and froze my mind in place. Lorca's lobster hung there over my head for thirty years. Even my journals were emptied of their creativity. I sought the poet within but could not pass the monsters. Their faces leered at me, stared in the windows of my soul, and hung on the wall to keep watch. They only spoke when I dared to stand forth, and then only to snuff any whiff of greatness back into the box. The poet fell silent; it is re-awakening now.
The Inner Struggle
The exercise that led to these insights enables me to know who the enemy is—that's the first and most important benefit. While the people were real and did these things, the images of these people are where the power lies. All three of them are dead, but their words and deeds echo on. They thunder through my creative life every time I sit down to write. These experiences reinforce, over and over again, that my work is pointless and useless. But these images are liars. They are nothing more than my own internalized doubts about the value of my inner gold. They are the dragons that hoard gold, not the artist who shares with generosity.
The antipathy unleashed on the literary artist in me was not unleashed on the freelance writer, the technical writer, or even the essayist—although that last one is closest. This is how you know when you are engaging the artist; these monsters arise from within your imagination, clothed as persons in your past life. They rise up and they attack everything you are doing. They sow doubt. As artists, we must engage them, to be sure, but recognize that they are really just embodiments of the resistance within us. I will never convince my dad, my mom, or my former wife to change and support me, and that's not the point. What I need to do is confront the voices within me that are actually my own resistances, disguised as these three, and shut them up. Or, write them as I am here. Sometimes the struggle to create the art is just as artful as any artistic outcome.
At this stage, I don’t really know what it means to be a literary artist. Not yet. I don't know what it means to fully embrace the poet in me. I don't know what it means to fully embrace the story-maker in me. But I am on the path to finding out. I can't find out until I confront these demons through the creative process—that is, in story, in image, and in the music of language. These confrontations and discoveries, however, are on the path. They must be what artists do every day. So, perhaps in the end, we can say that what it means to be a literary artist is simply this: You stay on the path. You keep confronting the monsters. At least, that must be part of the artistic reality.
Write On!
Anthony
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Thanks for this introspective and honest essay Tony.