💜[01/09] the creativity for good friday five

1. ”The Cost of Staying Human” (Kelly Hayes’ remarks at a vigil for Renee Nicole Good, transcribed for her newsletter, Organizing My Thoughts)

It’s impossible to talk about this week without starting with the killing of 37-year-old poet Renee Nicole Good, who was murdered by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on Wednesday. The footage is horrible — I highly recommend against watching it, and if you already have, go play some Tetris — and it’s a reminder that none of us are safe unless all of us are safe, and that until we dismantle the systems of violence around us, we won’t see the end of losses like this for a long time.

But that dismantling, and the belief that such dismantling is possible, is exactly what Kelly Hayes spoke about in her remarks at a vigil for Good on Tuesday night:

Part of the reason I come back to Hayes’ writing so often is because she isn’t writing from a place of naive optimism. (Her new book, Read This When Things Fall Apart: Letters to Activists in Crisis, is a masterpiece for the same reason.) When I feel hopeless and like I’m drowning in grief, the reminder of our shared, stubborn, ferocious, endlessly compassionate humanity is what keeps me going — whether it’s putting pen to paper or just getting up in the morning.

How about you?

What is keeping you human right now? Where are you finding opportunities to lean into those little sparks of humanity: acts of compassion, moments of wonder, tiny pops of delight amidst the chaos and exhaustion? How are those opportunities manifesting in your work?

Prompt: Taking inspiration from author, teacher, and organizer Mariame Kaba, who posted the following invitation on BlueSky:

Do an act of human kindness today, whether it’s donating to support Renee’s wife and son or shoveling out someone’s car or making a loved one a cup of tea. Create about it.

2. ”Our Year in Visual Journalism” (ProPublica’s Visual Storytelling Department for ProPublica)

Confession time: I am immensely jealous of visual artists.

There’s something absolutely magical about visual art that — and as a writer, this is embarrassing — I can’t quite put into words. Visuals have a power that’s so different from the written word. Part of that is simply because of the different ways our brains react to an image compared to a paragraph, but it’s also about the visceral response that a great piece of visual art can evoke.

This collection of photos, graphics, and videos from the visual storytelling team at ProPublica is a perfect example. I honestly wish more publications would create wrapups like this — as a writer, seeing the way an illustrator or editor pairs an image with my work is one of my favorite things, and every one of these pieces was only enhanced by the visual accompaniment.

Of course, the power of a visual is a double-edged sword. Images and videos can be traumatizing — it’s one of the reasons I highly recommend not watching the video of the ICE shooting, if you can avoid it.

But those same heartwrenching, sickening reactions can also be a force for change. The images and videos that came out of Gaza were (and are) a defiant stand against attempts to deny a genocide. Viral clips of communities standing up to ICE with nothing but whistles and a refusal to see their neighbors harmed are a daily reminder of just showing up. Witnessing the human experiences of others makes us more compassionate, more empathetic, less likely to stand back and watch injustice unfold.

The expression says that a picture is worth a thousand words. I think any picture that inspires a single action is worth so much more.

How do you respond to visual storytelling, compared to written or audio storytelling? What do you notice? Are there particular ways of experiencing a narrative or story that bring out specific reactions? Does this change the way you prefer to experience that kind of story? Why or why not?

Prompt: Choose one of the visuals from this piece and spend one minute jotting down everything you notice about your own response without going to the related story. Once you’re done with the full story or video, spend another minute jotting down your reactions and responses. What did you discover? Create about it.

3. ”On Rejection” (excerpted from Dear Writer by Maggie Smith on Memoirland)

Rejection is fascinating. Offering up your work to any kind of gatekeeper — an editor judging your writing, a professor judging an assignment, a reviewer judging a meal — is often an exercise in setting yourself up for disappointment, no matter how much time you spend pep talking yourself about absolutely not taking things personally. I still have distinct memories of my internal monologue on the bus on the days when cast lists would go up for theater productions, convincing myself that the best I should expect was a spot in the chorus, so that if I didn’t get a good role, at least I wouldn’t be disappointed.

But however long and persuasive I made that mental argument, it was still hard not to see my name up at the top of the lists.

One of my personal old man yells at cloud issues these days is that people have forgotten how to manage rejection. Not just the disappointment, but the discomfort, the internalization, the messy combination of shame and frustration and irritation that comes with not getting the acceptance you hoped for. Experiencing rejection is a skill, like any other — it takes practice not just to get good at it, but to understand how it works, why it’s necessary, and how to grow through it.

But more importantly, it’s a skill that we need. Not just as creatives, but as people who exist among other people. And that’s part of what I love about what poet Maggie Smith says in this excerpt of her upcoming book, Dear Writers:

Our shadow CVs go far beyond our creative work. They hold the potential dates that turn us down, the kids who scrunch up their nose at a lovingly prepared dinner, the clothes that don’t fit, the dismissal of a suggestion, the wrong turns that mess up a day of plans. Every rejection, however big or small, shapes us into something new. We learn from them. We grow from them. They open up as many paths as they close. And that matters.

How do you respond to rejection? Are there types of rejection that hurt more than others? Have you ever had to reject someone else’s creative work, and if so, what was it like? What, if anything, did it change about the way you experience rejection yourself?

Prompt: Make a list of the top five reasons people have rejected your work (if you’ve never shared your work anywhere, make a list of what you think might make someone reject it). For each of those reasons, find something about your work that made it worth sharing anyway. Create about it.

4. ”Marked by Loss: Memorial Tattoos as Modern Grief Ritual” (Sean Colgrave for Talk Death Daily)

Earlier this week, my partner went and got a tattoo — adding the birth and death year of our first shared dog, Sammi, to his existing tattoo of her paw print.

There are a lot of memorial tattoos in my family. I have my grandmothers’ birth month flowers. My partner has his dad’s guitar, in addition to our dogs’ paw prints. My sister has an outline of one of the polar sky scapes created by our friend Devra, who I wrote about a few newsletters ago. They’re a way to keep them with us, wherever we go.

That permanence, ink drawn on the body the same way grief is written on our souls, is exactly what tattoo artist Sean Colgrave talks about in this piece from Talk Death, one of my absolute favorite outlets when it comes to writing on death, grief, and end-of-life rituals:

When you sit down to write a piece of fiction, some of the most common wisdom out there is to start in medias res — beginning with some aspect of the plot already underway, rather than going back to the earliest possible starting point. No one needs to see your character waking up and getting dressed and having breakfast on a Tuesday when the action actually kicks in at lunchtime on Friday. But wherever you start a piece of fiction, there’s always a sense that that narrative does have, in one way or another, a distinct beginning and end.

Grief, on the other hand, doesn’t. Grief is a process and a feeling and an experience, but it’s also a snapshot of a particular moment, an acknowledgment of a changing of circumstances that can never go back to the way things were before. Grief is permanent because even if it fades, becomes less intense, even gets forgotten on the conscious level, there’s a part of us that will always remember it.

Memorial tattoos are a way of taking that snapshot and turning it into something tangible. It’s a particular type of creative translation that requires a tenderness that I don’t think every tattoo artist is necessarily capable of, just like not every writer or artist can tell every kind of story or make every kind of art.

Grief tattoos are what happens when memory and heartbreak meet compassion and creativity, turning something fleeting into something indelible. Not every type of art can do that — but these can, and that’s beautiful.

What types of art do you consider “permanent” and why? What distinguishes them from art or creative work that you consider less permanent? Is permanence tied to the form? The content? Something else, or a combination? How do you feel about the permanence of your own work?

Prompt: Set a timer for two minutes and make a list of as many works as you can think of — your own or someone else’s, in any type of media — that feel “permanent” to you. What do they have in common? What sets them apart from one another? Create about it.

5. “Planting the Seeds of Climate Hope” (Aliya Bashir for The Conversationalist)

I’ve written a bunch about climate grief in the past few years, for obvious reasons, so it’s always something of a treat to find an article that focuses instead on the idea of what Aliya Bashir here calls climate hope. But what I love most about this piece is the way Bashir talks about it, grounding that hope not in something transient or optimistic, but in what hope actually looks like in the day-to-day: Slow, steady, intentional work, undertaken without expectation of reward.

Bashir has been covering climate change in the Global South for a long time, and many of her wonderful other stories are linked within this piece (and are totally worth a read if you have the time). The uniting thread across them is women’s determined persistence against the roaring fires of our heating planet, their refusal to accept that there is nothing they can do to ensure a better world for their daughters. Some of that is practical — some of the work of climate resilience is also the work of, well, work, and economic independence is life-changing for women in the Global South — but it’s also spiritual, emotional, and tied to deeply-held beliefs about the obligations we have to not just our loved ones but to all the generations that come after us.

“When I got married, nobody asked my choices,” one woman told Bashir on her daughter’s wedding day, two years before this article. “Today, I ensure hers.”

And isn’t that what creativity is, after all? Proof that we can imagine different choices? A different future than our own pasts? A better world? A world, maybe, where the planet flourishes, where grief is met with tenderness? Where every story has a chance to be told?

Where every mother, every poet, every person, who stops to protect their neighbors makes it safely home?

Where our neighbors don’t need protection from the state at all?

I hope so.

What seeds do you hope to plant with your creative work? What narratives do you challenge, and what systems do you attempt to dismantle? What kind of tending do those seeds require? Will you be part of that gardening, or will those who interact with your work take up their own role in cultivation? What seeds, planted by others’ creativity, do you care for through your own?

Prompt: Imagine your work as a garden. What season is it in at this moment? Where are you in your cycle of growth and cultivation? What happens when you harvest what you’ve planted — to you, and to what you’ve grown? Create about it.