🧵 Thursday Thread: This is How Civilizations Heal
Artists have always faced steep challenges head on. It is our calling and our mandate.
Writing in the Dark’s tagline—”for people who do language”—comes from a much longer Toni Morrison quote, which reads as follows:
“I am staring out of the window in an extremely dark mood, feeling helpless. Then a friend, a fellow artist, calls... he asks, ‘How are you?' and instead of ‘Oh, fine... and you?', I blurt out the truth: ‘Not well. Not only am I depressed, I can’t seem to work, to write; it’s as though I am paralyzed, unable to write anything... I’ve never felt this way before…' I am about to explain with further detail when he interrupts, shouting: ‘No! No, no, no! This is precisely the time when artists go to work... not when everything is fine, but in times of dread. That’s our job.' I felt foolish the rest of the morning, especially when I recalled the artists who had done their work in gulags, prison cells, hospital beds; who did their work while hounded, exiled, reviled, pilloried. And those who were executed... this is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
Thank you, again, Toni Morrison.
Re-reading this Morrison quote gave me a very necessary reminder of the reason Writing in the Dark exists. I’m pasting here the actual text from the About page of this newsletter:
From the very beginning, my writing and teaching have been grounded in the mystery of uncertainty. I have always asked myself and my students to “peer over the edge of doubt,” where new things come from. In 2012, I founded my creative writing program, Writing in the Dark, on the power of “negative capability,” a term coined by the Romantic poet John Keats, who drew the concept from his admiration for Shakespeare. In a letter to his brothers in 1817, Keats described negative capability as “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” He also said befriending uncertainty was essential for artists.
I agree.
Then the pandemic struck, followed by escalating racial inequity and violence (including the murder of George Floyd and the protests that followed in my home city of Minneapolis). Since then, we’ve endured relentless political upheaval, war, and the real-time unraveling of democracy. Not to mention the spiraling impacts of climate change. Let’s just say that sometimes, befriending uncertainty is easier said than done. To embrace mystery and leap into the unknown of creative risk during quieter, safer times is one thing … but to do so in times like ours is quite another.
And yet.
Artists have always faced steep challenges head on. It is our calling and our mandate.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”—Margaret Mead
I had to remind myself of that when, in March 2020, almost immediately after I signed a contract for my debut memoir, The Part That Burns, COVID-19 locked the world down. On top of all of the other reasons that was terrifying, I was also faced with the sinking feeling of launching a book, one that took my whole life to write, in the middle of a tragedy during which people could not leave their homes safely. How would this work? I was also used to earning my living as a teacher and leader of group workshops and retreats, all cancelled indefinitely.
Not knowing what else to do, I opened up an online space for people like me: people who were afraid, who were losing their livelihoods, who were struggling to imagine what the future would look like, and who were flailing in their creativity, but determined to somehow create anyway, on however small a scale, even as the world burned.
I called that workshop Writing in the Dark, and I offered it on a sliding fee scale down to zero with no questions asked so that it would be accessible to anyone with a computer or phone. I intentionally structured Writing in the Dark as a low-pressure but high-rigor space, where we could be serious about art but gentle with ourselves and each other. The first session of Writing in the Dark kicked off in April 2020, and it flourished beyond my wildest imagination, and flourishes still in its new form as WITD: THE SCHOOL.
So, all this to say, that first panicked idea for a workshop grew itself into a beautiful and mighty creative community of thousands of writers making work in spite of the chaos that continues around us. I could never have predicted when I started Writing in the Dark that those would be the very people who rallied to make the launch of The Part That Burns a great and celebratory success in 2021, even in the midst of an ongoing lockdown. Community, it turns out, is everything.
Everything!
And that, that everything, led to this newsletter. Because, given the wild and gorgeous experience of the Writing in the Dark community (and the limited space in the actual workshop), I decided to start offering a similar kind of conversation and community here on Substack, where it would be accessible to all.
In Writing in the Dark, we don’t deny that art is difficult and can break our hearts—indeed, art will break our hearts if we are doing it right. So we celebrate and embrace that truth. Because we need art now more than ever. We need our hearts broken. We need, as Franz Kafka says, art to the be axe that “breaks open the frozen sea inside us.” Perhaps most of all, we need creative writing, because creative writers are guardians not only of deep truth, but of language itself, and the ability of language to retain enough meaning to tell truth in the first place.
This is the role of the writer. And this is the light in which I take Kafka’s full quote: “But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves … A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.”
That is also the premise of this Writing in the Dark newsletter. Except you need not desire to make a book in order to thrive here. We celebrate the Word in all its forms, including through simply following Mary Oliver’s wise, ever-timely advice to pay attention, be astonished, and tell about it. I think of it this way, as my mentor—the poet and teacher Paul Matthews—writes about the “writing circle”:
“Maybe when we meet there seems to be nothing at all between us; yet if you give me your word I can reply with the next, collaborative, responding to questions asked, needs recognized, testing each other’s immediate joys and fears in the writing. That is how I started my work as a poet-teacher—with nothing, almost, with simple acts of human language—till gradually I became aware that through a word or a sentence shared in writing we could move into the presence of a communion greater than anything I had intended. At such moments it was no longer a classroom with me, as teacher, at the center. It became a “circle of truth, poetry, and love” in which we were all servants of the Word … that is beyond any skill or genius that we might have in language.”
Through this seemingly quiet but actually radical practice, in the strength and light of community, we can—just as Margaret Mead said—change ourselves, each other, and our world. We’re doing it already, one word at a time.
Re-reading the very mission of Writing in the Dark helped me today, and I hope maybe it helps you, too.
A few other readings I’ve appreciated in the last 24 hours (other than Rebecca Solnit and poetry), are:
We Have Nothing to Fear from Despair by Katherine May at The Clearing
Through the Darkness, Some Rays of Light by Judd Legum at Popular Information
Broken Bones: America’s Violent Indifference to Women by Kate Manne at More to Hate
This is How Much America Still Hates Women by Anne Helen Petersen at Culture Study
I loved the sound of your voices yesterday in the first post of The Art of the Scene and will hanging out there and here today to catch up with you and re-center myself in the beauty of this community.
So, what are you reading/listening to/watching/doing/not doing etc. to get or stay grounded this week?
Please link to stuff, and thank you in advance. I’m grateful to all of you every day.
Love,
Jeannine
PS Threads/comments are a fun, safe and intellectually vibrant literary space for paid members to convene. Upgrade/manage your membership any time to join the conversation, or give the gift of WITD to someone who needs it. Thank you for Writing in the Dark together!