- Creativity for Good
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- on putting creativity to good use
on putting creativity to good use
or: why start a newsletter when the world is on fire?
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the world is…not in a great spot these days.
Art never happens in a vacuum. Strong emotions can be a powerful vehicle for creativity — many a brilliant piece of art has come from joy, anger, and grief — but in general, a sudden swell of acute feeling is an easier pathway to creation than the chronic, overwhelming despair many of us are experiencing today. Social media has expanded our capacity for empathy and understanding by giving us new windows into the suffering of the world, but also creates a potential vortex of anxiety that can be paralyzing — cutting off not just our ability to create, but our sense that we can do anything to make a difference.
But art always makes a difference, whatever form it takes.
Creatives create because we can’t not. Because we have something to say — about ourselves, about the world as it is or as it could be, about hope or fear or pain or possibility. Our work is how we express not just what we have to say but why we need to say it, how we communicate what we care about to as many people as possible in the hope that it will open eyes, change minds, touch hearts.
That work has almost always gone beyond the (metaphorical, but also literal) page. There’s a reason that artists, activists, and revolutionaries so often run in the same circles. Making art and taking action are not separate and complementary ways of moving the needle on the issues we care about, but rather overlapping and deeply interconnected pathways to creating the change we yearn to see in the world.
In Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, Adrienne Marie Brown writes,
Art is not neutral. It either upholds or disrupts the status quo, advancing or regressing justice. We are living now inside the imagination of people who thought economic disparity and environmental destruction were acceptable costs for their power. It is our right and responsibility to write ourselves into the future.
Or, to put it more simply:
So. Why this newsletter? Why now?
Like just about every other creative, I’ve been struggling to find a way to use my voice, my particular wisdom, and my network (such as it is) to make a recognizable impact. I may not have a huge platform, but what I do have is a more than a decade of experience in social change work — learning, writing, organizing, fundraising, and networking — and more than two of using storytelling to turn my values into art. If there’s anything I know how to do, it’s talk to people about what they care about, what they believe is possible, and how they’re connecting the two.
That work is taking as many different forms as there are unique artists around the world, and I can’t wait to talk with some of them about it — and to show you how the creatives you know and love (and some you may never have heard of!) are making a difference. In alternating newsletters, I’ll also share notes on creativity, craft, community, and drawing connections between art and action. Full disclosure, I’ll also occasionally share some updates on my own work,
When I talk about creativity for good, about something being created for good, I don’t just mean for good, as in, for the purposes of making something better, but for good, as in, to last. To continue. To build something that stays. I’m not saying the world isn’t on fire, or that the crushing despair of existence isn’t overwhelming. But just because the world is on fire doesn’t mean we have to let it burn to the ground. Art is our way of turning a forest fire into a controlled burn, our way of turning something set on destruction into something that can be shaped into something new.
Something good.
resources, links, and further reading
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