Making Art in a Week Like This
This has been a difficult week to be a woman on the internet.
The story coming out of Cornell has been everywhere. Here in Louisiana, another story involving a student at LSU has been circulating at the same time. My social media feeds have felt angrier than usual, sadder than usual, and filled with women recognizing something painfully familiar in one another.
There is a phrase appearing again and again: Jane Doe. I suspect far too many of us have a Jane Doe story, and I have mine.
I am not going to tell it here. That story belongs to me, and I don't believe women should have to lay their worst experiences on the table as proof that they understand what another woman might be feeling. There are things we are allowed to keep for ourselves.
Still, carrying a story changes the way you experience weeks like this. It changes the way you read the comments, the things you remember, and the way anger can suddenly arrive while you're making coffee, scrolling through Facebook, or doing something completely ordinary.
Somewhere in the middle of all of that, I had an art market.
Saturday morning, I was the featured artist at the Baton Rouge Arts Market. I got up much too early, hauled displays and artwork and bags out of storage, built my little temporary shop, and spent the morning surrounded by Unbelongings.
People came by to look at the work, talk with me, laugh at strange creatures with strange names, and, in some cases, take pieces home. Friends stopped to say hello. People supported local artists, and for a few hours, a small part of downtown Baton Rouge was full of people making things, sharing things, and choosing to bring something beautiful or peculiar into their homes.
I have been thinking about that contrast ever since.
There is sometimes an expectation that when terrible things are happening, talking about art or comedy or books becomes frivolous. It can feel strange to talk about selling a drawing when women are frightened and furious, or to get onstage and make people laugh when the news is heavy, or to sit down and invent stories when the real world feels cruel enough already.
I think those questions misunderstand what creativity is for.
Art has never required a peaceful world. People have always painted during wars, written poems during periods of political upheaval, told jokes at funerals, sung songs while doing brutal work, embroidered beautiful things while grieving, and told stories to one another during nights when the darkness outside felt enormous.
We make things inside the lives we actually have, and those lives are rarely made of one emotion at a time. They contain joy, grief, anger, tenderness, absurdity, exhaustion, and hope, often all within the same week.
My little creatures did not solve anything Saturday morning. Selling a piece of art did not make the world safer, and making someone laugh did not erase anyone's fear. Those moments still mattered because they reminded me that cruelty does not get exclusive ownership of the human experience.
People are still making things, supporting one another, speaking up for women they will never meet, laughing with strangers, writing songs, finishing books, planting gardens, cooking meals, and gathering under white market tents on Saturday mornings. None of those things cancel the darker parts of the world, but they exist alongside them, and that matters too.
I try to keep this blog focused on the creative life and, most of the time, on the hopeful parts of it. I wondered whether this week's ugliness belonged here, and I think it does because a creative life cannot exist only when the world behaves itself.
If art matters at all, it has to matter during weeks like this one too.
Maybe that is one of the quieter purposes of making things. We pay attention to what is happening around us, including the things that hurt, while refusing to surrender every inch of ourselves to them. We make room for beauty, for laughter, for strange little creatures hanging in ornate frames, and for the stubborn human impulse to keep creating even when the world gives us plenty of reasons to stop.
And in the middle of this very complicated week, there was one more bright thing worth celebrating: The Rootheart Whispers came out on October 1. Another story made its way into the world, which feels especially fitting after spending so much time thinking about why we keep making things in the first place.
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