Back-To-School Reading From Pinkwater, Roskos, and Rowell

Sep 062014
 

Here in the U.S. kids are heading back to school after summer break. I’d like to share a few books about artistic young people to go with the back-to-school theme.

Wingman by Daniel Pinkwater tells the story of a young artistic boy who embarks on imaginative and daring adventures to escape his hostile, hateful elementary school.

Dr. Bird’s Advice For Sad Poets by Evan Roskos is the story of an enxious, depressed high-school student who sseeks solace in Walt Whitman, photography, and hugging trees.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell is the story of Cath going off to college to become a fiction writer, only to find that making friends, creating, and simply surviving day after day are too much. I especially love the characters in this book. I find a tremendous amount of heart in Rowell’s novels.

If you’re not into books written for a younger audience, maybe it’s a good time to revisit a favorite from years ago. Perhaps a book, album, play, or painting comes to mind that meant a lot to you when you were young. Take a little time to go back to a fond experience to renew yourself.

The Discipline Of Whimsy

Oct 142012
 

May was two weeks into her summer job and one full year into her new life of Christian faith, and she felt emptied out by both. Her boss Joanna sat her down after lunch for a little lecture.

“I know you’re new here and you’re a fairly new believer, so I’m just trying to help you adjust. We don’t wear earrings here at the retreat center, but I keep seeing you with earrings on. I know people have different views on these things, but we have to keep one standard so everyone feels comfortable and in harmony. And this shirt you’re wearing today, the sleeves are too short. If you’re going to wear a short-sleeve shirt, the sleeve needs to cover most of your upper arm. Things like this will become second-nature after you’ve been here a while. Is that OK?”

“Yes, I got it,” May said, tired and angry. Earrings and sleeves don’t matter, she thought, so why all these stupid rules? But she said no more and got up to leave.

“Let me know if you have any questions. I’ll see you later.”

May was between her second and third years of college, where she had fallen in with one of the campus Christian fellowship groups. The camaraderie and fun she had with the Christian crowd helped her survive the doubts and loneliness of campus life. Sarah, one of her friends from the Christian crew, told her about the retreat center when she mentioned looking for a summer job.

“It’s run by some independent Christian people, kind of a Bible-based approach to a retreat center. And they run some summer-camp programs for kids. I was an apprentice there for a year before I came back to college last semester.”

“You liked it there?”

“They really push you to grow in your faith. It’s a place for spiritual growth and accountability. I think it would be good for you too.”

May was distracted as she resumed mopping the dining hall floor. She had read through the employee handbook that came in the mail a few days before she started the job. There was nothing about earrings or short sleeves. Is this what Sarah meant when she said the job would be good for her, some kind of army-style attitude adjustment?

She missed her classes at college. The other art students were very talented and a little wild. Well, she didn’t know how wild they really were. She got along great with the other students in class, but they seemed kind of careless and disorganized. They would often stumble into class looking like they had woken up just minutes before, mismatched socks, wrinkled clothes, hair a mess. She assumed some of them were hung over a lot of the time, though she had no proof of this.

There was a small circle of art student girls that were friendly to her. They invited her a few times for a midnight run to the donut shop, but she never accepted. She needed her sleep to make it to all her classes during the day and the fellowship meetings most evenings. Back in April a couple of those girls had invited her to someone’s house in the country for a party all weekend. They said there would be some fun people, and they’d be way out in the middle of the woods where no one could bother them. May felt kind of scared of that invitation. What kind of party did you have in the middle of nowhere? Maybe it was OK, but she couldn’t just ask what they would do at this party. That would look pretty dumb. She’d be trapped out there and couldn’t get away if she wanted to. Her Christian friends would notice that she wasn’t at her usual Sunday morning worship service, and she definitely couldn’t tell them she went to some wild woodsy party with a bunch of art student girls for the weekend.

The weird thing about those girls was, they did awesome work. One of them did such striking, almost disturbing sculptures. A couple months ago she did a stone owl that made May gasp when she first saw its menacing face. It really looked like it was turning its head to look at her. Another one was great with ceramics and pottery. May fell in love with a particular piece of hers, a stout green coffee mug standing on little legs doing a dance. May couldn’t understand how the students who seemed the most undisciplined, the up-all-night and party-in-the-woodds girls, how did they accomplish so much good work?

During her afternoon break she walked out to a peaceful, isolated spot among some trees behind the horse barn. She flopped down on the ground and leaned back against a wide, old tree to get her brain straightened out. Why did she let Joanna push her around? Why didn’t she argue back that there weren’t any rules about earrings and short sleeves?

At school she had tried to stay disciplined and accountable like her Christian friends always talked about. They would tell stories at Bible study about John Wesley and other old church people who were so spiritual and holy by living a methodical life in every way. Every minute was planned, every cent was spent intentionally, every word and thought guided by the desire to be holy and pleasing to God. But what the heck did that have to do with earrings? If she wanted people to boss her around all day, she’d join the stupid army.

She sighed loudly as a horse whinnied in the barn. A few weeks back her favorite art professor had told her that she should throw herself into her work, because she had untapped potential. Something she had read about Leonardo came to mind. Something about his mind being totally enslaved by a drawing or a tiny bit of a painting. He would just think and look all day without doing anything. Then he would finally make a few strokes with his pen or brush once it was absolutely perfect in his mind. That was probably what the professor was talking about, but how do you get there? Her mind was always bouncing around, thinking about where she needed to go later or about what happened yesterday. She was especially bad about thinking over conversations, wondering why someone said this or that to her. Leonardo probably never had problems like that.

She shook her head slowly and chuckled. Sarah, the Christian crew at school, and this Joanna person, it seemed like the one sin that a person should avoid was doing something impetuous or unpredictable. Why were people so afraid of … what? Whimsy, was that what you call it?

Joanna walked around the building one more time, but she couldn’t find May anywhere. No one had seen her for hours. “look,” she told a few of the people preparing dinner in the kitchen, “I gave her a little lecture about keeping her appearance modest. So maybe she got upset about that. Just let me know when she comes back so I can talk to her. I’ll be in my office”

As she was about to sit down at her desk, she saw something on her chair. It was a piece of paper folded up. It was a note from May.

“Thanks for the opportunity to work here. I apologize for leaving with no notice. I know it’s not the Christian thing to do. Please say goodbye to everyone in the kitchen for me. I’ve realized that I need to be more accountable to my imagination rather than to other people, so I have to go. Plus I want to see if some of my art-major friends want to hit the donut shop tonight. Good-bye, May.”

The Attitude Of Abandon

Feb 202012
 

Imagine a bunch of kids in a backyard football game. They play for the pure fun of the game. The game is not a means to an end–just a pleasure in itself. None of them think about the status and wealth that comes to the most gifted athletes. They play because it’s fun to play. The kids abandon all thoughts except the game itself, losing themselves in the moment of the action.

Lose Yourself

How can an artistic personality bring an attitude of abandon to his work?

  • Lose track of time. Set up your schedule so you have some blocks of time to just hang out with your work. Find an afternoon or evening where you don’t have to think about the next thing coming up in an hour. Even better, set up a regular time. “Every Saturday night I stay up late with my sculpture work.”
  • Lose yourself in space. Find a comfortable place where you feel good doing your work. That place might be a typical work area, such as a library or home studio. It might be an unusual place, such as sitting in your car in the park, or on the steps leading up to the attic. Find a place where you can get lost in your work without interruption, even if that means negotiating some spatial boundaries with others in your home.
  • Lose yourself in the work. Produce without worrying about marketability. You can decide which finished pieces you will send out into the public later. First things first–just work and forget everything else. Your imagination has enough material most of the time. It only needs you to struggle through the hard work of choosing, creating, revising, and finishing.

Play games

Give your imagination some freedom, let it run off its leash for a while.

  • A poet who is stuck might try to write the worst poem possible, or she might try writing a love poem to an earthworm.
  • A musician struggling with an intense piece of music could try playing a few lines backward or in a silly rhythm, just for some comic relief.
  • An actor might parody himself, or imitate his cat performing Shakespeare.
  • A novelist could imagine a plot where a large rock is elected prime minister of Canada, and how that would bring about world peace. Or perhaps a story where scientists discover that the number eighty-two doesn’t really exist.
  • An artist could draw cartoons of giant forks and spoons having a dance in the kitchen.

Though these are silly suggestions, there is a serious side to the attitude of abandon. Sometimes the intensity of artistic work makes a soul miserable. Sometimes a creative person holds to tightly to her project. She tries to hard, worries too much about outcomes, and suddenly the joy of the work turns into resentment and harsh self-criticism.

For the artistic personality that feels discouraged or stuck, letting go with the attitude of abandon can help break up the ice around the imagination. What are some things you can do to grow the attitude of abandon in your creative endeavors?

Patti Smith Shows The Artistic heart

Jul 222011
 

There’s a danger in getting personally involved when reading memoirs of artists, musicians, writers, and other creative people. These books can distort your perspective on your own times and leave you in unrealistic comparisons with others. Admire your heroes, though you can never follow exactly in their footsteps.

Take as an example the first generation of rock musicians, from the middle 1950s through the 1960s. Those were very tough and unique times in America and Britain. The end of the second world war, the introduction of television, multi-track recording, electric guitars. The civil rights movement, Kinsey reports and Masters and Johnson, the Vietnam war, the killing of America’s progressive leaders. Those were troubled decades, and looking back one sees more differences than similarities when comparing today with the lives of the first rockers.

As I’m reading Patti Smiths memoir, Just Kids, for the second time this summer, I’m experiencing a stronger connection to her words than I usually feel for a memoir. I’ve read memoirs by U2, Clarence Clemons, Keith Richards, and Pat Benatar recently. Digging into their creative process and business struggles fascinates me and inspires me. But I keep a safe distance, knowing that I have to make my own life in my own times. Patti Smith’s book is different, because I feel the emotional power in her honest and intimate words.

Smith’s memoir focuses particularly on her relationship with artist Robert Mapplethorpe from the late 1960s through his death twenty years later. She tells their stories in clear, emotional insights, how they met, fell in love, and struggled day by day to create artistic lives in New York City. It’s rare to find such self-aware description of the inner thoughts, dreams, and feelings of young creative hearts. Smith describes her first attempts in poetry, art, theater, and eventually her poetic punk music that broke open new directions for rock. She also describes Mapplethorpe’s early installations and fashions and how he eventually found his voice through photography.

There’s a lot of mundane detail in this book–so many outfits, names, and references. Smith is brilliantly literate and tells her story in her own terms, and I honestly can’t keep up with many of the artists she mentions. But the mundane details go hand in hand with the very personal telling of the two young artists in New York City’s artistic cauldron. There are some great stories about celebrities of the time, such as Sam Shepard, Janis Joplin, Harry Smith, and Johnny Winter.

If you feel a connection to Patti Smith’s music or Robert Mapplethorpe’s art, you’ll find this book a stirring experience.