Hi y’all,
This month’s mini-salon on “Why Even Make This” with Inés Bellina from The Cranky Guide came at a helluva moment: last week on the National Endowment for The Arts was gutted and Inés lost her job, and since April, my place of employment, Northwestern University, has lost millions of dollars in federal funding across all academic disciplines.
My position as a visiting artist —which was already cut because of the budget—clearly has very little chance of ever being renewed in the foreseeable future.
We came into the conversation feeling the economic heat of the U.S.’s authoritarian government and thought it was a good time to address our present moment’s Big Apocalypse Energy.
Here’s some of what we shared:
Nothing is stopping us from finding meaning our creative work. Honestly for myself, all this nonsense is probably giving me all a more clarified meaning to my writing. I guess my silly little stories are…dangerous? I’m flattered someone thinks so!
Authoritarian governments always are afraid of artists, because our work has power. If we didn’t have power, they wouldn’t bother censoring us.
Even before living in a time of intense political dysfunction, our creative practices have always had meaning on micro and macro levels. The personal, the spiritual, the practical, and the political are all overlapping lattice-works of value. One domain of meaning doesn’t just drop off the face of the earth, but collides with other meanings, because nothing in our lives exists in an air-tight container.
Anyway I always take it to the existential level pretty quick, but there is real practical stuff to reckon with here also.
We chatted with participants on what they’re struggling with—and succeeding with—in their own creative work, and how we all feel better after sharing art in community, no matter the size. It was an uplifting conversation and I hope you enjoy it.
Thank you so much, paid subscribers, your financial support is very, very impactful right now. As a additional benefit, I’m offering twenty-minute Zoom coaching calls on creativity, writing, and spirituality to any paid subscribers who pays their yearly subscription in full ($60). Please take a look my coaching page and tell me what kind of call you’d like to have.
All subscribers can find a few of the talking points from our agenda. We diverged from some of these and added new ones and responded to questions that came up, but you get the idea.
Our next mini-salon is “Feeding the Creative Well: Resetting and Reenergizing Your Writing” on Thursday, July 10 at 12pm CT/1pm ET. Paid subscribers can submit questions ahead of time and will have access to the recording. If you are a free subscriber, the mini-salon is offered as a pay-what-you-can event with a $15 suggested fee (but we welcome all amounts). You can sign up here.
Below the paywall you’ll find journalling prompts and resources on finding/creating/deepening meaning in your creative practice. Why you should make art now, and why you should make it always.
Having fun is important!
People in the global South do not ask this question of political “meaning” because the world was already on fire
Authoritarian regimes put artists and writers in jail because art is never aligned with the goals of those regimes
Lightness is good for us
Writing is an antidote to despair
Creating mental catalogs of what we write about helps us find meaning
Interdependence. Also, life is short and not everything needs to have a quantifiable impact to be meaningful. One day you will die.
Meaning is often how we see others value our work, but how does it change our own experience?
