When We Are Older This Will All Make Sense and It Will Be Too Late
Sibyl, I have spent a significant amount of time pursuing one career direction, and now I am unsure if that is the right way for me. This is not unusual, but I am unsure how to decide on a new direction. Early 30's still feels too old to just try out some other career paths. I have worked in religious institutions or social services or both or 5 years. Now I would like to try something more creative . . . yet I am unsure where to go or what to do. How do I explore options while still affording to live? What can I do to both explore and survive?
Sincerely, Ummm
Dear Ummm,
I am so glad you brought this up. True confession time: Sibyl has no idea what the heck she is doing with her life. Like you, I have invested a considerable amount of time, energy, and debt in following a life in the "helping professions", only to find that it is an unsustainable way for me to live. So, I am striking out into the world with writing and other creative pursuits, terrified at the outcome but totally sure that it is what I need to do, anyway.
I have learned some things along the way, which I will now share with you, dearest Um.
1. A life of service will suck you dry and spit you out when you have nothing left.
My father was social worker, and when he would get home every day, I would ask, "How was your day?" His one word response was invariably, "Crazy." Whenever I pressed him for more answers, he just said, "It's a thankless job." And that, my friend, was that.
Despite this harrowing harbinger of the life to come, I idolized my father and followed his footsteps, pursuing a life of helping others. It just seemed like the right thing to do. In college and graduate school, I heard a lot about the way the work feeds you from within, and how your thanks is in the process of helping others. This was enough for me, in my twenties. I worked my ass off at low-paying jobs, and did indeed find the work rewarding.
However, I realized that although I enjoyed this kind of work, I had some life goals I wanted to complete, namely, having a family. So, I set out to get knocked up and have a child. This is when I found that having a job that pays you very little to take care of other people's emotional needs does not work well with being a parent, which consists of being paid absolutely nothing to take care of another person’s EVERYTHING. Like you, I realized I needed to create or I would be left with nothing. Art poured out of me like my desire to "save the world" once did. But for whatever money work in social services provided, art provides even less. What to do?
2. Make a list of all your creative interests, no matter how foolish.
Let yourself really dream here. Do you want write, paint, be a film critic, cook, front a band, report the weather? Be ridiculous. Write, "I just want to be Vincent Gallo." Okay! Now we're talking. Look over your list. Where do you find the MOST energy? It is important to tell your inner critic to go take a nap when you do this. Instead of listening to that nagging voice that says "You'll never make a living that way!", listen to the one that tells you that what the world needs is more people doing what they love, what makes them truly come alive.
There are tons of practical exercises like this in the book The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. I suggest you pick up a copy and start the twelve week program she outlines, as soon as possible. It's a great way to start your explorations while still living your day-to-day life.
3. Get water from a stone.
Have you decided on what creative path you're most interested in exploring? If you chose filmmaking, you don't need to know what you want to make films about, you just need to start researching film schools, and go from there. Look up unpaid internships (I know, I know) at your favorite magazine and write for them in the time you used to spend watching sitcoms. Volunteer at your local artist collective and talk to people who actually do make a living as art-makers. The way they’ve pieced together their lives could surprise you. For instance, it may make a lot of sense to combine your helping profession efforts with art-making -- they could inform each other in beautiful ways.
Again, tell your inner critic to take a vacation while you're researching artist residencies in Maine. Or, better yet, sit that critic down, and say, "You're RIGHT. I'm never going to save for retirement and buy a house if I follow my creative goals now. But giving everything I have to others has not made me millionaire either. So guess what? I'm going to do what makes me happy. And when I'm drowning in debt, you can say, 'I told you so', and I can go make a masterpiece on my canvas. You're right, but I win."
Here's what you need to do, Ummm. Figure out the very least that you can live on. One fancy coffee per week instead of five? Awesome. Brown bagging it every day instead of eating from food carts with your friends? Excellent. Turning on the heat in only the direst of snow storms? Pull up that blanket! I know that you've probably been living a life of almost-poverty taking care of others for so long. But believe me, this is different.
Investing your time and efforts in art-making actually is enriching, in the way that all our professors told us that lives of service would be. Okay, so you don't have a living room that could be featured in Ladies' Home Journal, and you can't go on vacation and post a picture of your feet with a fancy drink by the ocean on Facebook, but guess what? You get to be you, and you get to be awesome.
You will always be that interesting person at a party who is not just talking about what milestone your baby has reached, but has a new project or idea you're working on that you want feedback from your friends about. You'll always have something to do on a Friday night, because you'll be in your studio. So, you don't have all the material bullshit and security our culture seems to uphold so much, but look how that's working out for those folks? Rich, secure, and absolutely terrified of losing that wealth and perceived security. Be bold, risk big, and yes, get mad about the fact that art-making doesn't pay actual dollars. Do it anyway.
3. Don't go it alone.
So, you've spent all this time taking care of other people, and you're ready to follow your own dreams for once. Guess what? All of that time you spent caring for others spiritually and physically was not wasted. It was all a part of your creation as a soon-to-be artist. You not only became a person of substance, who actually has something to create art about, but you stored up a ridiculous amount of good karma.
Being there for others means that they are now going to be there for you. They'll say, "That Ummm, what a good guy, he came to the hospital when my dad was sick, and now he's striking out as an artist and needs a leg up, why don't I buy one of his pieces, or, at the very least, invite him over for Sunday dinner." You've got to find your people, and chance are, you already have, since you've devoted your life to loving humans. Lean on them now. Let them take care of you in the ways you've been taking care of them. Help comes from the most unexpected places. Reach out, and see the lovely (and materialistically helpful) ways your community responds.
It will not be magical, it will happen because of all the work you have already put in. Everything is not going to mysteriously go your way once you set your mind to what you want to do, don’t buy that bull. However, it will flow back to you proportionally to what effort you put forth. You want to explore? Really excavate! Don’t hold back. You get out of the creative life what you put into it. Stop ummming and start risking, give up the fallacy of security, and be who you are, big time.
When we are older, all of this will make sense to us, and we will say, “Oh! I should have started this or that sooner.” But it will be too late. Right now, contrary to what you are being told, is not too late, because it is all we have. Dive in right this second. I can’t wait to see what you come up with.
In solidarity,
Sibyl
Akiko Yosano: Poet. Pacifist. Tanka Powerhouse.
The other day I happened upon a Wikipedia article entitled “The Top 100 Historical Persons in Japan” and I got historian-nerd excited. This was apparently a television program that appeared on Nippon TV in 2006, which had Japanese viewers vote on who they thought the most important historical figures in, well, history were. For me it’s exciting to get this little peek inside the historical mindframe of a non-Western nation—one that hasn’t been brainwashed into believing U.S. presidents, Italian explorers, and German composers are the most important people of all time-- but who has probably been brainwashed in parallel historical fashion, of course. Yet lo and behold, some of our “top historical figures” still ranked (Christopher Columbus came in at #75; Mozart’s #36; the highest-ranking Westerner of all, at #3, is, surprisingly, Thomas Edison).
The list is mostly dominated by Japanese figures, of course; almost all people who would not have placed on any Western country’s “Top 100 Historical Persons” list. And incidentally, one of these (#80) is today’s Historical Woman.
Akiko Yosano (born Shoko Ho) was a Japanese poet from outside of Osaka who revitalized, no, crushed the 1200-year-old tanka tradition in turn-of-the-century Japan. Born in 1878, young Akiko grew up in an oppressive household, daughter to a baker who privileged his sons over his daughters and actually kind of hated Akiko for the first years of her life for not being a boy. (Ja-HERK.) He got over it enough to realize she was incredibly bright, and was decent enough to get her a good education, as good as was possible for women at that time—but it was Akiko’s own ambition and talent that propelled her out of that house and into Japanese history.
Wandering her father’s library as a teenager, Akiko had become enamored with literature. She began writing poems and started contributing to Myojo, the literary magazine of one Tekkan Yosano, fellow poet. Akiko moved out of the family house and to Tokyo, and in 1901, she and Tekkan were married.
Like Sylvia and Ted, Diego and Frida, Sid and Nancy, Akiko and Tekkan had what can delicately be described as an interesting relationship. Tekkan had already been married twice before, and even after he married Akiko he continued to borrow money from his ex-wife. He was also regularly unfaithful, according to most sources, including with one of Akiko’s best friends, Tomiko, who died of tuberculosis at 29 and who Tekkan proceeded to write twelve poems about.
Tekkan had also helped to spearhead the anti-establishment poetry movement that Akiko’s poetry would be a part of, the revitalization of the centuries-old tanka form that had previously been dominated by an institution literally called the Old School (I know, right?). What’s interesting to me is that feminist icon Akiko’s husband Tekkan had actually written an essay in the 1890s called “Poetry Inviting National Decay: A Denunciation of Today’s Effeminate Tanka,” in which he advocated for a more “manly,” virile poetry. This went over well with contemporary Meiji nationalism, as the nation was in the midst of a war against China. Fittingly, Tekkan wrote some pretty “manly” stuff about swords and battlefields.
But by the early 1900s, Akiko was the famous one in the family. Her poetry star was on the rise; and Tekkan, naturally, began to feel inadequate. One day, Akiko came home to find him squatting in their yard, killing ants. (How sad is that? How freaking sad is that?) To make him feel better, she told him to go spend some time in France.
Akiko’s rebellion and feminism went beyond her poetic success story and her pants-in-the-family home life, though. Her poetry often focused on the emancipation of women, portraying women of all backgrounds sympathetically and advocating for their sexual freedom. One of her most famous collections, Midaregami (“Tangled Hair”), evokes a feminine image of a woman with “hair in sweet disorder”—this ran counter to the public beauty ideal that saw a Japanese woman’s hair as always straight, never out of place. “Tangled hair” could even be read as a sign of the erotic. Additionally, she founded a girl’s school where she also taught, passing her progressive ideas and literary skills to a new generation of little poet-feminists.
Akiko was also a pacifist in an era when the Japanese national attitude was anything but. Late Meiji Japan (1868-1912) was characterized by the rapid modernization of a formerly feudal nation, and over these and ensuing decades an increasingly militarized Japan turned its focus towards expansionism. During the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, Akiko wrote the poem Kimi Shinitamou koto nakare (“Thou Shalt Not Die”), which later became a kind of anti-war protest song for the pacifist movement.
Akiko died in the midst of World War II, and her poetry was largely forgotten for many years. She has, however, enjoyed a resurgence of late, as demonstrated by her aforementioned 2006 placement on Japan’s list of favorite historical personages. To commemorate her revolutionary-ness, and to celebrate her anti-sexism-ness, I think I’ll end with one of her steamier poems:
Fragrant the lilies In this room of love; Hair unbound I fear The pink of night’s passing.
Slowing down (with Emma and Erin)
“She appears to write much of her poetry, as Americans eat their dinners, in hot haste,” said one critic of Emma Lazarus’s early work, according to Esther Schor’s biography of the poet. I had to laugh at how the 1871 comparison still applies today. We still eat quickly, and we write quickly too, jotting off breathless blog posts and status updates without looking back. Lazarus would have thrived in today’s digital world, I think. In sharp contrast to her contemporary, the reclusive Emily Dickinson, she was a determined extrovert, eager for her writing to make it into the hands of the literary giants of her time. She wrote letters to Emerson demanding feedback on her poems. She milked her “network” in search of literary success. Her persistence and tenacity were astonishing.
But even the talented, energetic Emma Lazarus eventually hit a wall of anxiety as the speed and the pressure to produce caught up with her. As she wrote to a friend, “I have come home to hard work—finding three books to read & review by Tuesday . . . as soon as I feel that a certain thing is expected of me by a certain time, I get a panic & don’t know how to do anything. How anyone lives by writing I cannot imagine.” I was nodding emphatically as I read along. Preach it, sister.
Beyond the usual deadlines and expectations many of us receive from others or set for ourselves, I think there’s a sort of insidious pressure these days to exist online, to be always on and constantly, consistently producing. It’s the marketing advice about “personal branding” and blogging every day and building your audience. It’s that feeling of needing to “keep up” with the internet, as Erin Loechner describes it in her post, “The Rebirth of Slow Blogging.”
Forgive me if I sound like a broken record. I’ve written about slowing down here and here and here and here. It’s been at the heart of my work with Uncommon, a growing slow web community. I’ve been writing and thinking so much about slow food, slow tech, slow everything, coming at it from different angles as a way of figuring out what slow really means, as an intention and a practice.
Something clicked when I landed on Erin’s post, because I think she helps explain something important about the idea of “slowness.” It’s not about doing things in slow motion, but rather taking time for depth and storytelling. It’s about aiming for quality over quantity. It’s about taking time for reflection and creative restoration.
As I head into the new year, I’ve got Emma and Erin in the back of my mind, and I’ll be wondering about the delicate balance between creative impulse and depth, busy production and quiet reflection.
Stillness is a state of mind
“And eeeeeven when you are reaching for your toothbrush, you are dancing.” I remember my ballet teacher stretching out, cat-like, her limbs taut and lean, torso erect, one arm gesturing dramatically toward the corner of the studio. In her own masterful way, she instilled in us what Silas House describes in “The Art of Being Still,” a way of embodying your craft wherever you are, whatever you may appear to be doing. When I look back on the period of time when I was dancing, I think of it as a time when I was always dancing, just as my teacher had insisted. That meant stretching my calves at the bus stop or going over choreography in my head, but it was also something more subtle and persistent. It meant that I saw the world in relation to dance, and even the simplest aspects of daily life were metaphors for something I was learning in the studio. The flow of traffic in the halls of my high school was a chaotic, pulsing choreography. Every moment, from the sacred to the mundane, was set, in my mind, to a soundtrack of classical music.
Conversely, I also brought the studio with me into the world. The constant tension between strength and flexibility in my practice also found its way into social interactions. The discipline and intensity of my ballet training manifested itself in my studies as well.
When House explains that he gathers material for his writing while standing in line at the grocery store or biking to work, I get it. I’ve never felt exactly that way about writing, but I’ve experienced it through dance. There’s a certain state of mind that persists when your body is your tool. From the top of your shellacked bunhead to the tip of your aching toes, every part of your body seems to exist to remind you that there is work yet to be done and that whatever your other roles in life may be, you are ultimately a dancer.
It might seem odd to compare dancing with the stillness House describes, but I think it is simply a particular state of mind. It is a way of allowing the foreground of your mind to attend to the business of living, while in the background, your creative mind remains agile and supple, perhaps idling, but never turned off completely. This is not the same as multitasking or absentmindedness. If anything, it is a way of being present.
As dancers, we cultivated this state of mind through many, many hours of practice. Since we spent so many of our waking hours in the studio, it was impossible to ever really leave it behind completely. As for writing, I’ve never been quite sure how to cultivate the same sort of presence. Writing a lot helps, of course, and reading does too, I think. Not the sort of online reading, which darts rapidly from one link to another, wandering among disparate bits of information. Rather, it’s the deep reading that comes only by curling up with a paper-and-ink book and settling in for the long haul. Perhaps one’s mind is simply freer, while suspending disbelief in order to be enveloped by someone else’s world, to tinker in the background with other worlds-in-progress.
What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?
Bethany Suckrow is a food-instagramming, coffee-obsessed writer at bethanysuckrow.com, where she shares both prose and poetry related to life, faith, storytelling and creativity. Her writing has been featured in Prodigal Magazine and Relevant Magazine. She and her musician husband Matt live in the Chicago suburbs. I set out at the beginning of the year with a goal to read twelve books, hoping for an average of one a month. I began this endeavor with a few fiction classics I had always wanted to read---On the Road, A Moveable Feast---and then I plowed through the entire Hunger Games series after my cousin insisted I borrow them (after Twilight, I've grown wary of fiction fads). As the year went on, an unintended proclivity for nonfiction emerged from my choices---memoir-style works on faith, to be specific. Some I had been wanting to read, some were given to me, some I stumbled across. Reflecting back on this unintended theme in my reading life this year, I've realized that my spiritual life was starving for enrichment.
And how better to feed my spirit than to consume the written word?
This list of books has challenged the way that I express my faith, internally and externally. They've given me a better understanding of the Hebrew roots of the Christian faith, the benefit of learning from the authors' faith journeys, and encouragement as a woman when I don't understand the stories found within Scripture.
I'm curious---what do you read to fill your spirit and refresh your faith, whatever tradition you identify with---agnostic, atheist, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist? Are there any fiction books you've read that have fulfilled you spiritually?
by Donald Miller
Originally published in 2003, Miller's Blue Like Jazz is a spiritual memoir subtitled "Non-Religious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality." A lot of my friends read it in college, but I didn't pick it up until early this year. I appreciated this book for Miller's rawness as he wrestles with his belief in God and how he expresses his belief to others.
A quote from the book that explains its unusual title : "The first generation out of slavery invented jazz music. It is a music birthed out of freedom. And that is the closest thing I know to Christian spirituality. A music birthed out of freedom. Everybody sings their song the way they feel it, everybody closes their eyes and lifts up their hands."
by Lauren Winner
After her conversion from Orthodox Judaism to Christianity, Lauren Winner sought ways to incorporate the spiritual principles of Judaism into her Christian faith through the rich traditions and practices that she grew up with. What she shares in this short book is more than ritual, but an invitation to explore eleven Jewish spiritual practices that offer a transformative view of God, the world, and our relationship to both. I have loved uncovering the layers of symbolism found in the Jewish tradition that Christianity has thrown by the wayside. So much of what Jesus did spoke directly to those rituals and the meaning behind them, but Christians don't often understand them because we neither study nor practice them. Rediscovering them has helped me understand Jesus's teachings on a deeper level.
Ruminate Magazine, Issue 25 : Unraveling the Dark
This latest issue of Ruminate Magazine titled "Unraveling the Dark" explores our cultural preoccupation with remaining positive. Having lost my mother early this year, the theme of this edition touched the depth of my sadness in a way that few things have been able to during this season in my life.
Nicole Rollender's poem, "Necessary Work" throws life and death, dark and light, into high contrast with lines like, "the beautiful plum falling / from its long branch, then sweetly decomposing."
It is exhausting to live with the reality of loss, even more so to daily extol the "blessings" of grief that Christians, for some reason, always seem to expect of one another. "Unraveling the Dark" offers relief in its somber reflection on the darkness of life's circumstances. After all, even the psalmists bore lament.
by Rachel Held Evans
I had the pleasure of meeting and dining with Rachel Held Evans at STORY Conference this year, and there I also heard her speak about her new book, released this month, which chronicles her pursuit of "biblical womanhood" over the course of one year, as she explores the literal interpretations of the Bible's instructions for women.
I commend Evans for her grace, humor and valor in challenging what Christians, especially those of the evangelical persuasion, believe about women's role in the home, the workforce, and the Church. Having grown up in a faith tradition that is infamous for repressing diversity and gender equality, I found Evans' book enlightening and empowering. You can read extended excerpts of Biblical Womanhood on Evans' blog.
by Anne Lamott
This one is actually on my Christmas wish-list and so I haven't read it yet, but if it's anything like Bird by Bird or Traveling Mercies, Help, Thanks, Wow will be a great read for continuing my habit of memoir-style spiritual nonfiction into 2013. In Help, Thanks, Wow, Lamott distills our groanings of the spirit to three simple prayers for help, gratitude and wonder. You can read a wonderful excerpt of it on Salon.
Fashion's Ethnic Problem
I’ve been thinking about how fashion---which, side note, is one of my favorite things---tends to represent the worst in our superficial, looks-obsessed culture. For one thing, there’s the whole skinny, stick-thin, pound-obsessed, weight-watching, calorie-counting, only-one-body-type-is-acceptable thing, which marginalizes the beauty potential of all body-type-deviations.
For another, there’s the whole woman-as-canvas thing, where models seem to forgo personhood to become agency-less, blank-faced, silent background scenery.
And then there’s that whole ethnic representation thing. The continued premium on Eurocentric notions of beauty, and the exoticization of those outside of it.
Aaaand now we get to the subject of this post: racist fashion. Yes, there's such a thing, and it's such a thing.
It’s been almost two months since New York Fashion Week and its European counterparts, but there was more than enough fuel for some racist fashion ranting. There was Dolce & Gabbana’s “mammy” motif including some very Aunt Jemima-ish earrings. There was Jeremy Scott’s neo-Orientalist take on Arab punk. And there were the romantic adaptations of traditional Indian garb by Marchesa and Vera Wang, with Wang telling E! reporters she didn’t want to go too far with any of that “belly dancer” stuff. So much problematic-ness, so little time.
I’m not sure what made me think of this now---maybe it’s the way every major clothing store from Urban Outfitters to Target has suddenly been all over the Native American print trend. Navajo-panty-gate caused an uproar a while back, and yet the trend has continued to diffuse through all retail chains. You can buy bags, hoodies, or what have you emblazoned with traditional native-style prints, and UO even has T-shirts with skulls wearing native headdresses.
The prints are often beautiful, but they’re also an uncomfortable example of cultural appropriation. Meaning, the hegemonic culture, for all intents and purposes "white" though of course participated in by a range of backgrounds, appropriates the cultural heritage and imagery of a minority group without their consent or direct participation. Just this past week, No Doubt pulled its new video after a wave of complaints about its representation of Native Americans. For more on the issue, I recommend you check out the Native Appropriations blog, which does a great job of breaking down indigenous images in pop culture and even succeeded in getting an apology from Paul Frank for their “powwow” party a few months ago.
None of this is surprising, I suppose. Racism and sexism are embedded in our culture, and fashion is just another art-slash-entertainment form from which they can poke their ugly heads. (Favorite racist Project Runway: All-Stars judge quote last week: when host Carolyn Murphy asked derisively upon seeing one contestant’s design, “Where are we, Spanish Harlem?”) My only consolation is that noticing it and not simply accepting it, we recognize that those ugly heads are still a problem. And this is where my somewhat jumbled assortment of thoughts that is this week's post comes to a head.
I love you Fashion, but you can be a real jerk sometimes.
Frida Kahlo: Survivor. Communist. Mexican Icon.
Everyone’s familiar with Frida Kahlo’s face, at least as she painted it. The dark, somber eyes. The brightly-colored dresses. That inescapable unibrow.
But Frida Kahlo is much more than that famous face, with its ugly beauty and its unconventional emphasis on female facial hair. She’s also a fascinating figure who lived through some of the early twentieth century’s most interesting events, who was attached to some of the early twentieth century’s most interesting people. And on top of that, she really put the “pain” in “awesome painter.” (Sorry. A stretch, I know.)
Frida was born in 1907 in Mexico City, just before the Mexican Revolution, to an immigrant Hungarian-Jewish father and a Spanish-Amerinidian mother. She suffered from polio at a young age, resulting in a permanently withered leg. But the seminal painful moment in Frida’s life was in 1925, when she was in a horrific bus accident that left her with spinal fractures, multiple broken bones, a crushed foot, and, the one that gives me the biggest heebie-jeebies, an impaling by a metal handrail. She wasn’t expected to survive.
But survive she did—albeit with an enormous amount of pain that never really left her. She went on to have over 30 surgeries in her lifetime, the last of which may have left her with the pneumonia that killed her at age 47 (though it’s also speculated she killed herself).
Despite the immense pain that was to haunt her and characterize her relationship with her body—or maybe, in part, because of it—Kahlo went on to do great things. She began painting while in bed, recovering from the bus accident, starting with her most famous subject: herself. “I paint myself because I am so often alone,” she said, “because I am the subject I know best.”
At age 22 she married famed muralist Diego Rivera, who was two decades older and two hundred pounds heavier than her (!). Their relationship helped her to develop her own work, while also being one of those Hollywood-style tumultuous marriages with tons of affairs on both sides and even a divorce thrown in the middle (after which they remarried, each other). Frida, for her part, had affairs with many famous figures, both men and women, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Leon Trotsky, whom she and Rivera put up in their home after his flight from Russia. (Ironically, after he was assassinated she became a Stalinist.)
Meanwhile, Kahlo’s work was feted in New York City and Paris, and she was the first 20th-century Mexican artist to be featured in the Louvre. I can just imagine her mingling in that most romantic of settings, 1920s Paris (think Midnight in Paris), at an art showing, being toasted by Picasso and Miró and Andre Breton, a Parisian anomaly in her long, bright, traditional Mexican dress.
But as it were, Frida rejected what she called those “artistic bitches of Paris.” Her heart remained in Mexico City, where she lived most of her life in La Casa Azul, the house she was born in (which today houses Museo Frida Kahlo-- a must on my world tour list!). She and Rivera were also involved in a movement called Mexicanidad, aimed at preserving an essential, traditional Mexican culture in opposition to the encroaching cultural dominance of “the West.”
Kahlo attempted to live this Mexican ideal in her dress, in the symbols and colors of her art, and, also, in her rejection of conventional beauty norms. In fact, it’s reported she even darkened her unibrow and mustache to emphasize a kind of pre-Columbian femininity— where in this case, pre-Columbian means “before tweezers.”
Because of this, Frida Kahlo remains to this day a shining symbol of feminism and Mexican culture, and her art and celebrity have been completely embraced by the mainstream. But it’s easy to overlook the ways in which Kahlo’s art, and life, were less about empowerment and more about suffering, about the visceral experience of bodily pain and the social and political difficulties of being a woman. One of her most affecting works, My Birth, was painted after her miscarriage, depicting a bloodied Kahlo-like head emerging from a woman’s body.
Additionally, it should be recognized that "authenticity" movements seek an essentialized, pre-modern, sometimes imaginary past; in this case, a pre-Europe Mexico. Kahlo's embracing of "authentic" Mexican culture must be understood as a kind of political statement, rather than a representation of the Mexico that actually surrounded her.
In my opinion, the complexity of her personal and political life and the tragedy of her experiences, as well as the diverse vitality of her influences—which range from street artists to Catholic votive paintings to images of disasters to pre-Columbian folk art—makes her work all the more fascinating. There's so much beauty in what she created. Beauty in the attempts at authenticity; beauty in the expressions of human suffering; and, perhaps most surprisingly, beauty in the ugliness. I'm not going to grow a unibrow out in solidarity, but doesn't mean I don't appreciate what that unibrow represented.
Seasons of creativity
There are a few distinct stages in the creative process, and they come in cycles, at least for me. Sometimes they align with the seasons, and sometimes they are seasons of their own. Each may last a day or a few weeks, months or even a year, but each has its own delights and challenges. The first is the beginning of an idea, a project, or a concept, and it often looks a lot like spring. New directions and possibilities are blossoming all over the place, and inspiration pops up around every corner. This is my favorite creative season, because in it, everything seems possible. The challenge is choosing which path will be yours and letting others fall away, gathering enough momentum to sustain you for the journey ahead.
What follows (one hopes) is a long, hot summer of productivity. If spring seemed bright, summer feels too bright, lit by the harsh florescent glow of long hours at the office or studio or in whatever sort of incubator your work requires to take shape. Here the challenge is showing up each day with new energy, even though you’re a bit dehydrated from the day before, and brushing off the negative spirits (both internal and external) who insist you’d be much better off spending the summer at the beach.
The afterglow of completion is something like autumn. There is a chance to harvest the fruits of your labor, which have inevitably turned out quite differently, for better or worse, than what you intended when you first imagined them back in the spring. There is a moment of exhaustion, then relief, then joy. Take time for celebration here. This season is the most fleeting.
I think you know where we’re headed at this point. The winter of creativity is strange and disorienting. It is the season I most wish I could pass right over—and sometimes I do—skipping right from an end to a new beginning. But this is a sort of fallow period for the creative body and soul, and though it’s uncomfortable, it offers the potential for restoration.
When I began writing this column a few months ago, I was just settling into life in a new city and increasingly swept up in planning a wedding. Now that my world is awash in brightly colored leaves and the glow of autumn, it feels like I can safely call this place home, and the wedding has passed into the category of a shared memory. I am wondering where I’ll redirect all of that creative energy next and hoping I won’t have to endure too much of a winter to figure it out.
How about you? Does your creative process come in cycles? Where are you at on your creative journey?
Artist Envy
Do you ever wonder what it’s like inside someone else’s creative world? Are you a photographer who wishes she could write? Or a painter who wishes she could dance? Sometimes I am a writer who wishes she could paint or sing or sculpt. Of course, I realize I can learn about other media by taking a class or simply experimenting on my own. And often this sort of experimentation facilitates a kind of creative cross-pollination, in which trying out a new medium allows you to see your most familiar medium in a new light.
But sometimes I just get a little restless with the joys and challenges of working with words, the material I’ve been wrestling with since I learned to put pencil to paper. I begin to wonder whether life would be more exciting or whether my stories would be more effective if they were told through music or visual arts or dance.
I often feel this tinge of artist envy when I catch a glimpse of some of the interesting and beautiful spaces in which other artists sometimes work and the worn, tactile objects they use. For example, I love this book, Inside the Painter’s Studio, by Joe Fig, and I can’t wait to dive into Jennifer Causey’s new book, Brooklyn Makers.
Most of the time, I love that writing requires so little from the tactile realm—simply a pen and paper or a keyboard of any sort. Chalk on a sidewalk works too, or a finger tracing out letters in the sand. I love that I can write almost anywhere, as long as I can muster up the presence to hear the sound of my own voice inside my head.
But after a long stretch of arranging and rearranging letters on a page, black on white, line after horizontal line, I can’t help but daydream about the lives of artists whose creative worlds are made up of vibrant colors, infinite shapes, and rich textures. I can’t help but fantasize about artists whose days are brimming with sounds and movements far more diverse than the tapping of fingertips at a keyboard.
Similarly, when I received this collection of poems by Jorge Luis Borges as a gift a couple of years ago, I was confused at first, then shocked, then delighted. Borges is renowned for his brilliant, imaginative fiction, and I had no idea that he identified primarily as a poet throughout his life. Although poetry and fiction are, of course, crafted from the same material, I was surprised to learn that this author, who was so beloved for one form of his work, seemed to have left his heart in another.
How about you? If you are an artist or maker or creator of any sort, do you work in one medium, or multiple? Have you ever dreamed of switching lives with another artist for a day, or trading one format for another?
Isla Negra
Every morning, on a remote shore along the Chilean coast, in a small house overlooking the sea, a bulky man blew his trumpet while observing the ever-moving sea surface. This man was Pablo Neruda, the most famous poet from South America, and the place where he chose to spend the later part of his life was Isla Negra, a tiny hamlet an hour’s drive from the capital, Santiago. In 1939, when Neruda started to compose Canto General, he felt the need of a new shelter. He found Isla Negra, a precious spot unknown to most people, on a newspaper ad. The place, a lot with a tiny stone cabin that back then looked more like a wreck, was sold to him by an old sea captain, and it slowly became the poet’s own boat . . . anchored on land.
And soon “the house was growing, as people, as trees . . .” African sculptures, Chinese prints, Buddhas, compasses, maps, old paintings, and even a skull. Ship’s figure heads, shells, nautical decors and more than a hundred bottles the poet bought in the flea markets in France. Neruda loved to surround himself with collected objects, remains and relics from the past, while growing dreams about the future.
“The wild coast of Isla Negra, with the tumultuous oceanic movement, allowed me to surrender with passion to the venture of my new song”.
Rambling and creative architecture, quirky collections of world art, and a stunning ocean view. In the house of Isla Negra Neruda found the perfect place to write, and put together an important part of his literary work. The poet’s appetite for life was endless. He indeed described himself as omnivorous---“I would like to swallow the whole earth, drink the whole sea".
Neruda hoped to leave the house as a heritage to Chilean people (“I don't want my heritage of joy to die”), but sadly that refuge wasn’t far enough to escape Pinochet’s oppression. During a search of the house at Isla Negra by Chilean armed forces at which Neruda was present, a soldier asked Neruda if he hid weapons or something threatening in there. The poet remarked: "Look around---there's only one thing of danger for you here---poetry."
Sonnet LXXX by Pablo Neruda
My Love, I returned from travel and sorrow to your voice, to your hand flying on the guitar, to the fire interrupting the autumn with kisses, to the night that circles through the sky.
I ask for bread and dominion for all; for the worker with no future ask for land. May no one expect my blood or my song to rest! But I cannot give up your love, not without dying.
So: play the waltz of the tranquil moon, the barcarole, on the fluid guitar, till my head lolls, dreaming:
for all my life's sleeplessness had woven this shelter in the grove where your hand lives and flies, watching over the night of the sleeping traveler.
The DIY Illusion
Long before Pinterest, which seems to have become the ultimate repository of DIY dreams, I was cursed with the insatiable desire to surround myself with beautiful and interesting things and to announce proudly to the world that “I did it myself.” This urge to emulate the creations and achievements of others extends even beyond the realm of tactile objects to skills and feats as well. When I visit a museum, I can’t help but think, “I will return next week and copy the masters!” When I discover that someone has written a poem a day for a year, I think, “What a great idea! I should do it too!”
This impulse has resulted in a number of false starts. I seem to recall joining one of those 356 groups on Flickr and subsequently following through for about three of 356 days. After reading Eat, Pray, Love, I bought an “Easy Italian Reader” and a yoga mat, both of which have seen embarrassingly little use since their addition to my collection of very-useful-yet-unused self-improvement tools.
I know I’m not the only one. Tutorials, how-tos, and advice columns make up some of the most popular information on the internet. We want to know, in 500 words or less, how to build our own websites, sweep own our hair up into classy side chignons, and paint striking works of modern art for our homes.
Don’t get me wrong—I love reading this stuff, and I love writing it too. I am a strong advocate for homemade food and handmade things and tools for self-improvement. But I often find that I don’t give enough consideration to the “yourself” aspect of DIY inspiration. I so easily forget to account for where I'm starting from. I see a hair tutorial and try to ignore the fact that my hair is the frizzy, chaotic alter ego of the long, silky locks in the photo. I see “Easy Italian Reader” and realize much later that I still can’t read it if my Italian vocabulary is limited to food terms.
This is not to say that we should all abandon our DIY dreams and leave the doing and creating and achieving to the experts and professionals. There’s certainly nothing wrong with gathering inspiration from the creations and achievements and adventures of others. But if I hope to cultivate motivation from the things that inspire me, rather than disappointment at my failure to replicate them, perhaps a bit more self-reflection is in order.
The DIY illusion is not the idea that we can do things ourselves. Every piece of inspiration we encounter broadens our sense of what’s possible. There’s certainly room in this world for more faith in what each of us is capable of. The illusion to be wary of, however, is that we can do new and unfamiliar things quickly and effortlessly, if only we had the right tools or the time to watch a five-minute instructional video.
So the next time I file away a glamorous photo or add a new how-to book to my wishlist, I hope to take some time to differentiate between inspiration and aspiration. Often what’s most inspiring about beautiful creations and fantastic achievements is not the glamorous photo of the end result to which we may aspire but the story of the person or people behind it, the combination of time, talent, learning, commitment, failure, and perseverance that made what’s possible real.
What Are You Reading (offline, that is)?
We're huge fans of Jenny Volvovski's work. She is a member of the award-winning creative group Also with Julia Rothman and Matt Lamothe. She has been re-imagining book covers for the books that she's read, and we've thoroughly enjoyed following along on From Cover to Cover. In our minds, any project that combines reading and design is awesome. This is no exception. Here, Jenny shares her reading list, along with her re-imagined covers.
From Cover to Cover is a project I’ve been working on for more than a year now. It has a very simple premise: I read a book, and then design a cover for it. I started it because I love to read, and always think about a book’s cover before buying the book, while reading it, and after I’m done. I also wanted to have a project independent from my client work, where I could have the freedom to do whatever I wanted, without worrying about feedback and revisions. Book covers are a great medium for graphic designers because so much content has to be condensed into a single image. The cover has to relate to what's in the book, but also not give too much away.
I wanted all the book covers I made to feel like part of a series, so I gave myself restrictions; a color palette (green, white, black) and limited type choices (Futura, typewriter, hand drawn/handmade). I always prefer working with a set of limitations, so this made the project both more challenging and more fun.
Skippy Dies by Paul Murray
Skippy Dies will probably be made into a movie. It’s a very plot driven novel that follows the adventures of a couple of teenage boarding school boys (and eventually girls and teachers) at Seabrook College in Ireland. It covers typical school-age topics like love, and bullying, but also some very non-typical ones, like opening a portal to a parallel universe. The story starts with Skippy dying (this is not a spoiler) at a donut shop and that’s primarily why I chose donuts to be the main visual elements on the cover. Donuts are mentioned later on in the book as a metaphor for life. I also like to think of each donut being a metaphysical stand-in for the main characters in the book.
Cloud Atlas
by David Mitchell
Cloud Atlas was recently made into a movie, and I am not quite sure how they pulled it off, but I would recommend reading the book before seeing the movie (sage advice). The book consists of 6 seemingly unrelated stories starting with travel journals of an American notary traveling in the Pacific in the 1850s, and ending (kind of) with the adventures of a clone in a post-apocalyptic future in Korea. There is a thread between all of the stories, which I will not give away, and as you turn the page and start over with each new narrative it’s really exciting to find out how the previous story relates to the next. Since so many topics, characters and time periods are part of the story, it was hard to pick a visual for the cover that made sense with all of them. So, I decided to make the focus of the cover the structure of the book. There are 6 stories, they start chronologically (earliest time period first). The first 5 are interrupted, the 6th starts and concludes at the center of the book, and then the initial 5 are concluded in reverse chronological order. So, the folded paper on the cover is a reflection of that. The type is printed on top of the paper, so some spills from one piece of paper to the other, like the overlapping stories. The shadows and the white paper give a “cloud-like” effect to the cover.
The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall
Since there’s a running theme of books being made into movies, the Lonely Polygamist fits quite nicely, as reading it feels like watching the continuation of the HBO show Big Love. The book follows Golden Richards, owner of a fledgling construction business, husband to four wives, father to twenty-eight children. He of course, is unsurprisingly cracking under the weight of all the responsibility. In order to deal with the stress Golden has an affair. And not-surprisingly this doesn’t solve his problems. For the cover of the book, I made the title and author name act as a family tree for Golden Richards’ family. He is represented by the white O in the middle, his wives are the bigger letters connected to him, and the smaller letters represent the children (there weren’t exactly the right number of letters to account for all 28 children, but I thought this was close enough). And, if you look closely, one letter stands away by itself with no linear connection - representing the affair.
The Beauty of Nowhere
I live kind of in the middle of nowhere. Which is a surprising fact if you’ve met me in real life. Friends have dropped their jaws and commented on my surprising nearness to agriculture. You see, I’m a city girl, tried and true: I like fancy coffee and large libraries, and the occasional shopping jaunt. But upon moving back from Bangladesh, it just so happened that my husband was offered a great job that just happened to be in the middle of nowhere. He drives on several gravel roads everyday just to get to work, which means I’ve given up on ever having a clean car.
Technically I suppose we don’t live in the absolute middle of nowhere, but we are on the outskirts of a very small town. As someone who has always lived in the city (or at least in the suburbs) this is about as foreign as living in Bangladesh. It’s different in a new way. I like to say we’re ‘enjoying the experience,’ because an experience it is; there’s literally a cornfield in my backyard. A cornfield!
Most of the time, I don’t mind living in the middle of nowhere: I get to work from home, I rarely have to drive anywhere, gas and groceries are cheaper here. But sometimes, sometimes I miss fancy coffee so much it makes my teeth ache. Sometimes I think I might like to be the kind of woman who sits at an outdoor café with a book and a cup of coffee, just watching the world go by. Sometimes I wish for a post office with one of those automated machines and a library whose collection wouldn’t fit in my parents' basement. I miss the air inside an art museum, how you can just about breathe in the beauty. I crave a Sephora and an impulse nail polish purchase.
And then I jump in the car (to console myself with a cup of gas station iced coffee) or look out the window. And I am just struck. Struck still by the view. The whiny voice in my head stops cold, my breathe catches, and I just stand there, staring. The views out here, the beauty of nature, the colors of the sunset, the vastness of the sky; it takes the air right out of my lungs. I stop thinking about overpriced coffee and salespeople on commission. And I breathe in the air as if I’m standing among priceless works of art; I have the same humbling sensation, the same whisper that creeps through my bones, the same tingle in my soul. I’m seeing, I’m surrounded, by color and brilliance and something so beautiful and strong that it passes the mundane and edges closer and closer towards sacred.
The sky reminds me of a Georgia O’Keefe painting hanging in The Art Institute in Chicago. I don’t remember what it is called, but it’s a huge field of blue and white or white and blue depending on your perspective. There is no horizon, it’s just sky, and it is magnificent. Out here, the sky is so much more than just atmosphere. It dominates the landscape, it IS the landscape. The clouds hang heavy, as if I could reach them if I only had a ladder. In the city, clouds seem far away and less sturdy, more of a haze. The clouds in my sky have depth and dimension. I imagine if I had my ladder and reached up and poked one it would bounce back like a freshly baked cake.
In my backyard, just below the clouds, is a field of corn. It’s less green than I imagine the farmer would like (we’ve been a little short on rain here), but the golden tops of the stalks remind me of wheat in Kansas. During the day, as the light changes the same view twists into a hundred different varieties. Sometimes the stalks are crisp and clear in the sunlight and heat. Sometimes they’re a little hazy in the wind. In the evening, they’re bathed in the pink of a country sunset. Again, I’m reminded of a painting, or in this case a series, Claude Monet’s Haystacks. Monet was fascinated by light, and how it changed everything, and so he painted the same subject, a haystack, in myriad lights and seasons (he did the same with water lilies).
The corn will be gone before long, and my view as I look out my back window will be completely different. I can’t imagine it will be anymore breathtaking than the field of gold I’m currently enjoying and obsessively photographing. But that’s the great thing about art, it’s always surprising you.
YWRB: It Takes Nerve
By Amanda Page It took nerve to go to the microphone and ask a feminist legend for some advice.
It takes real nerve to be a rebel.
It took a year of writing about rebellion for me to build up the nerve to finally claim my life as my own. I was 22 and ready to travel and it seemed like the whole world was telling me, “No.” I simply wanted to get on a plane.
“You can’t go,” I was told. “You can’t leave.”
My biggest rebellions have always been about going after what I want for myself instead of living in service of what others want for me. It’s hard to hold our own desires and protect and honor them. The wants and expectations of others can so easily become the “shit” that we’re not supposed to take. If we don’t respect our own wishes, then we’re taking shit from ourselves.
It takes nerve to take no shit . . . from others or from yourself.
Nerve is like a muscle. Rebellion is the exercise that builds the nerve muscle.
And you can do rebellion by writing it.
It took nerve to whip out our pens and legal pads in bars at midnight. It took nerve to declare that we were writing a book. It took nerve to share the idea with the wild woman from my poetry class.
Each action was a tiny act of rebellion, working my nerve muscle, making me more capable, more daring, more able to surprise myself.
I was told, “No,” but I said, “Yes.” Yes, I will.
I can now say, “Yes, I did.”
The stories we hold dearest are the ones that come from the times that we dare ourselves to do something.
Do something that scares you. Today. Anything. Ten years from now, it might be the moment that changed everything. It might be your best story.
Your best story takes nerve.
The Art of Japanese Sweets
These traditional japanese sweets (called "wagashi") are not only something yummy to eat, but also a piece of art. There are many seasonal pieces you can only find at certain times, making us appreciate the season more. My favorites are sakura (cherry blossom), which can be found everywhere in spring. They are pretty and so tasty, too!
Some sweets even resemble gold fish swimming in a jelly, but don't worry---they're not real!
Almost Not There
There's joy in solitude sometimes, and satisfaction in company. But what feelings lie on the continuum in between? This series explores one such gray area. [gallery link="file" columns="2" orderby="title"]
The Surprising Joy of Inadequacy
When I began my first semester of college, I really didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what I wanted to study, and I remember when it came time to register for classes I felt pretty lost. I knew I would be taking Latin; Bryn Mawr had a pretty weighty language requirement and I had taken four years of Latin in high school. I had to take a required freshman writing seminar that all new students took, but that left two class slots wide open. My high school education had been very traditional and middle of the road. I went to college not even knowing what anthropology was, for example. I took some great classes in high school, including AP offerings in both Latin and Economics, but overall, I would say that the program offered at my high school, while solid, was not dynamic.
I had gone to a state-run educational camp for two summers while in high school (three weeks at a local college, all expenses paid for everyone, a pretty amazing thing looking back) and one year I had done creative writing. So, that first semester, I enrolled in Introduction to Writing Poetry. I didn’t think I’d make it into the course as Creative Writing offerings were notorious for being popular and oversubscribed, with priority going to juniors and seniors. When I received my schedule, though, there it was.
I figured this would be pretty straightforward. I had written some poetry at camp, and it had been well enough received. While in high school, I hadn’t really read any poetry at all, saving old standards like William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis,” which I remember enduring in AP English. Nonetheless, I figured I would be set.
I realized immediately that I was thoroughly mistaken. The other fourteen young women in the class were not there because they couldn’t think of anything else to register for. They were there because they loved poetry. They had written oodles of poems and read even more. Before class even started, they were swapping favorite poets, most of whom I didn’t know at all. It was frightening and intimidating. I am not entirely sure why I stayed in the course, but I think my main reason for staying was that it had been such a surprise to be enrolled, I didn’t want to give up this stroke of “luck.”
I struggled. I did all of the assignments and I did them carefully. I began to pick up the lingo and learn how to function in a workshop environment, and I do think I offered my classmates the occasional trenchant critique. That said, I did not write good poems. I couldn’t think of things to write about, let alone “wordsmith” as we were encouraged to do. The poem of mine that was best received in workshop was built thematically around a life experience that I had never even had, making me feel as though I was thumbing my nose at the confessional poets I had come to love like Sexton and Lowell. I felt like a minor leaguer, a lost child, a flop. I ended up with a slightly above average grade, but there was no sense that I had done any work that semester to really remember.
In that class, though, I met some absolutely amazing women whose talent was evident and crackled around them like radio static. They ranged in age (Bryn Mawr has a program for students of “non-traditional” age), race, socioeconomic class, geographic background, and sexual orientation. In some ways, that class was a little microcosm of the community as a whole. The professor was kindly and warm, but not at all mincing. She didn’t patronize, but she wasn’t cruel.
I should have left that class demoralized. I didn’t distinguish myself at all, and it was one of many experiences at Bryn Mawr that left me feeling as though I didn’t measure up. So, what did I do? I enrolled in the follow-up course Advanced Poetry Writing the next semester. I was never going to be much of a poet, but I was not going to let the opportunity of spending more time in that challenging, electric environment pass me by. True, I didn’t break any new poetic ground in the next course. I didn’t earn a fantastic grade. I sometimes felt silly and I sometimes felt stupid. Even in those moments, though, I felt supported and I felt inspired.
That sort of environment is rare and, I believe, a force of nature. It can’t really be created. A good teacher can facilitate the possibility of such camaraderie, but it takes many things coming together in a specific way for what I felt to happen (and, to be fair, I can’t say if everyone in the room felt the same way, although I suspect many did). The power of people (and in this case, women) creating art together (even if some of it is amateurish) should never be underestimated.
Time Traveling
Nothing swirls history into the present for me quite like wandering through aging structures---those kinds of architectural treasures where you know people walked, and slept, ate, and died hundreds of years ago. One afternoon, visiting Seville's Alcazares palace and gardens, I found myself stuck gazing into a corner as the evening sunlight painted the walls alternating shades of peach and gray with passing clouds. As I watched, I realized the sun had shone here on these walls, just like this, every afternoon in April since they were built. I was only one of hundreds of people to have met that corner at that hour and seen the sun glow there. So I traveled in time for a while. Photographing as the palace, indifferent to the date or year, came alive for me, as it always had for anyone who cared to watch. [gallery link="file" orderby="title"]
YWRB: Genesis
We were young writer party girls in college. At the time, creative nonfiction was the new, hot genre. We were asked to write essays. We understood essays. We learned that the word “essay” meant “attempt.” We attempted constantly. We attempted friendships and sophistication and reputations and all the things you can try on and discard while young and starting out. Everything felt like rebellion: against parents, expectations, systems and growing up. And it was. We couldn’t articulate it at the time, but one thing I know now is this: the most rebellious thing you can do, at any age, is be yourself.
I remember the moment the title came to me. I was sitting on a friend's black leather sofa, drinking vodka and fruit juice from an old flower vase. I was wearing a ballgown. We weren't going out that evening, but that's what we did when we stayed in. Anyway, in the moment of garish getups and pride in our own ridiculous behavior, the quick thought came to me: The Young Women's Rebellion Bible. I thought I knew something about rebellion. Dressed up for a party, but lounging on a couch was a rebellious act in my twenty-one year old mind.
Later that week, I was in a bar with Amy before our creative nonfiction workshop. I told Amy the title and before the words were completely out of my mouth, she screams, "Oh my God, we could totally do this!" We immediately started brainstorming topics. We took quick notes on napkins and then ran to class, high on possibility and buzzed on cheap beer. Amy's enthusiasm made me believe we could do it. We could write a book of instructions or stories or something that taught others about rebellion.
We liked pushing boundaries, walking edges. Although the English building was designated non-smoking, on breaks we'd find an empty classroom and lean far out the window with our lit cigarettes. We relished that rush. A little rebellion made us bold. Writing about rebellion made us rebel. Our process was born.
We enrolled others in our mission. Our creative writing teachers, the head of the English department, the owner of the restaurant where Amy worked, the bartender at our favorite haunt. Amy's enthusiasm made other people believe we could do it. And before I knew it, we were.
For several months, we wrote essays about our behavior, our rebellion, our romances and our families. We filled yellow legals pads full of ideas and ways to organize chapters. We wrote in coffee shops, bars, the library when necessary. We were relentless, but we weren't entirely clear about how it would look or what it should be. In that way, the project mirrored our lives.
In June, we graduated, flew to Greece together, and split up to go our separate ways. Amy stayed on the tiny Greek Island of Mykonos and I hopped a ferry to the mainland and spent a lot of time on trains. When we returned, seperately, to the states, we lived in different cities. We embarked on very different lives. We drifted apart. Fifteen years later, we reside in the same city, once again. And the Young Women's Rebellion Bible was reborn.
We have very different notions of rebellion, as does every woman, I believe. And our rebellion has looked very, very different from one another's over the years. Amy is married, a mother, a writer and wood toy maker. I am single, a dog owner and avid rescue supporter, a writer and part-time teacher. Amy has put down roots and I've been a wanderer. We've both embarked on creative endeavors, but nothing has had the same momentum, the same dizzy, blissful energy as the Young Women's Rebellion Bible.
A few years ago, I pulled the manuscript from the trunk where I keep sacred things and I photocopied it and sent it to Amy. I've held on to it, maybe as a way to hold on to that time with Amy, to hold on to that enthusiasm and the belief that it is possible that we do this. We're doing it now. What we knew of rebellion at twenty-one is a very different knowledge than what we know of rebellion at thirty-six and thirty-eight. With the fine partnership of The Equals Project, we'll explore that knowledge and examine its impact. To do that, we need your help.
We want to explore rebellion with you. Every week, we’ll prompt you to consider rebellion – and we challenge you to share it with us. We’d love to feature your stories and experiences as part of our exploration. Send responses and stories to Amanda at amanda@bold-types.com.
This week, we want to know:
If you had the chance today, what would you tell your teenage and/or college self about rebellion?