Art-making in a Time of Crisis
and ways to catalog your interests / seek pleasure in a time of displeasure
Dear Friends,
I have about a half dozen unfinished newsletters, ranging from revisiting the topic of generative AI to talking about mid-life crises. Quite a few of these drafts have been sullen. There are many days when it feels hard to find the light to create. There are many days when the immense privilege of having the time and space to make art feels immobilizing when cast against the realities of authoritarianism, genocide, and global humanitarian crises. I’ve been trying to remind myself that I can make space for all of my selves—and find value in my own complex feelings inside art-making, which in itself often aims to resist dehumanization. I’ve been trying to find justification in the thought that creativity can be a refusal against nihilism in a time of crisis. I’ve been trying to trust the strange alchemy of creation, how we can sometimes get close to speaking of the thing itself through the oblique. It’s not always easy to do this though. There are many days when carving out the time and space to practice some creative art form feels selfish, to put it plainly.
External forces aside, as I’ve returned to some of my creative writing projects again, I’ve also been wishing I could approach them as these pure forms—without all these knowledges of authorship, publishing, academia. More ingénue, less inside baseball. It’s hard for me to see a manuscript-in-progress as this amorphous passion project versus some text whose success could significantly impact my life as a working author and educator. Unfortunately, you can’t unbite the fruit once you’ve eaten from the Tree of Knowledge. However, even if you can’t unknow something, you can still try to find other ways to chase the pleasure—especially if that pleasure feels once-known and further away than it used to be. When there’s a certain amount of displeasure or guilt that comes along with art-making, I often have a conversation with myself to remember what I love about what I do—what drew to me to this adoration in the first place. It’s like a pep talk in a medicine cabinet mirror: I have to remind myself of all that which excites me, because it’s far easier to list off all that which discourages me.
A few years ago, when I was teaching literature/writing full-time at a small private university, one of the classes I’d often volunteer to teach (when we distributed our workload) was Research Writing. My secret was that it was one of my favorite classes to teach, but it sounded so dull on paper that I was always worried some kind soul would try to take the load off my plate. Subterfuge is not my strong suit, but I felt compelled to communicate some contentment with being our sacrificial lamb. I don’t actually know if other faculty members enjoyed teaching it the way I did, but I was simultaneously nervous about expressing how much I did enjoy the class, as if by speaking its name I might risk losing it. Perhaps one aspect that drew me to it was my creative side: I tend to write about our presents, so I had never really needed to learn about the archives in the way that nonfiction writers of historical fiction writers do. Simply put, teaching research had that shiny newness for me. I was learning about research inside a honeymoon phase at the same time I was learning how to teach it.
One aspect of teaching research that I enjoyed when working with my students was this challenge of trying to nurture a deep type of curiosity. I’m one of those people who can fall down Wikipedia holes for hours (which ended up always being one of the first activities I taught—trying to find some eros in browsing Wikipedia). Something I’ve been increasingly experiencing over the years is that I will sometimes have deeply uncurious students in my classroom. I don’t think “how to turn the uncurious into the curious” can be reconciled in one short newsletter, but it’s something I mull over often. Even touching upon the subject of how to conduct research is a much more demanding task for another time. What I do want to talk about today though are early-semester activities I tried to encourage students to be aware of their own interests—and how you can do something quite simple to remind yourself of what ignites your own mind.
One activity I used to run at the beginning of every semester was writing “boring” words on notecards and setting them all up on a table for my students to come collect. I liked giving them the agency to gravitate toward certain words that called out to them. Then, I would turn the students over to Wikipedia to see if learning about something commonplace and mundane could inspire inquisitiveness. One card, for example, might have been “salt.” At a glance, it’s just a mineral that we use for culinary purposes. The more you read though, you might discover that salt is also integral to many religions and spiritual practices. Salt has a place in spiritual cleansings, banishings, fertility beliefs, funeral rites…. If a student could pause and think, hey, that’s interesting, then now we’re cooking! And it’s not just salt! “Chalk”: made of ancient sea creature remains! “Mirror”—not just a humdrum reflective surface but an object with deep psychological, mythological, and magical associations (narcissism, portals, doppelgängers, divination). Or “oyster”—a beige mollusk could lead you toward aphrodisiacs—or gemological discoveries via their pearls!
Once we talked about trying to be aware of the potential pleasures of seeking information, we also would conduct an “Interest Inventory” to try to tease out what my students were actually interested in. I do think that when you have some knowledge that you’re generating a list of interests with the purpose of eventually writing a research paper that there is the possibility to skew those results. Creativity feels much more connected to the abstracts and unknowns of the universe. For some reason, when I think about listing my interests, it always reminds me of LiveJournal, a journaling website that served as proto-social-media for me many years ago.
Back when I was a teenager in the early aughts, I spent the majority of my internet time on LiveJournal (what we tenderly referred to as “LJ”). Something simple that I loved about LJ’s format is that on your user profile you could list your interests. This could be anything (I believe the limit was four words per tag), and you could click said words to find other users like yourself who had listed them. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, vegan cheese, Radiohead, demonic possession movies, Joe Locke’s unibrow, pickleball, abandoned buildings. There was this way you could distill yourself into a series of tags separated by commas. That’s one of those enigmas of life as I get older: how did I ever confidently extract my being so neatly into a set of three dozen tags? At the same time, when I do interest inventories for myself, I find myself chasing down that type of distillation.
When I teach though, instead of being separated by commas, the “Interest Inventory” I would offer up came in the form of a tic-tac-toe grid (see above). The 3x3 grid isn’t exactly important, as it’s mostly serving as buckets to catch your interests in. I suppose it could be 4x4 or 5x5 grid, but I’d wager the nine different boxes helps ward away decision fatigue in a way that sixteen or twenty-five boxes might exasperate. At the top of each box, you put an overarching category: PEOPLE, PLACES, SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY, HISTORY, TRENDS & CURRENT EVENTS, ARTS & MEDIA, IDENTITY & CULTURE, HOBBIES, & EVERYTHING ELSE. Those are the nine I usually include, but you could also include jobs/occupations, things, beliefs & values, emotions & experience, nature & environments, or anything that else speaks to you. Swap in what connects to your sense of yourself; get rid of what doesn’t. You’ll see I did something that spoke to my personal interests.
If you don’t want to draw/write this on a sheet of paper, I have a Google Doc template available over here that you can grab. I used a variation of this for my own latest inventory, which can be seen above.
So how does this work? After you’ve created your Interest Inventory set-up, set a timer for 10 minutes (or more, if you need more time—take an hour if you need it—I’m a newsletter not a cop). You start brain-dumping everything that interests you, excites you, intellectually challenges you….Whenever an idea comes up, you place it in one of the nine boxes (whichever category it fits in best). At the end of the exercise, you have a nice little compartmentalized reminder of everything that makes your mind tick. If it helps, you may even want to meditate on past work you’ve created to see if any themes or images come up. You may even find yourself re-naming or re-organizing the categories as you get into the activity.
I should add the caveat that this exercise was originally intended for a research-writing class where students would have to commit to producing some scholarly paper across four weeks. Unless you’re engaging with research-based creative nonfiction, the A-to-Z path between your interests and creative writing might be much less concrete. In that instance, feel free to eschew the tic-tac-toe grid entirely and just sit down to make a list. I’d still say setting the timer helps with the ritual of mind-dumping all of your interests though. Also: don’t try to think so hard about why you gravitate towards what you do while you generate your inventory. Lean into the unknowns until you feel satisfied with the inventory you’ve produced.
At the end of the activity, that can be the time for knowing, if you would like. Part of being a creative can be naming your obsessions and making purposeful gestures toward them in your writing—either with a scene, an image, or an allusion. Or maybe not. At the end of the day, this activity aims to help you try and find some value in recalling your interests to your conscious mind. If you’ll allow me some corniness: it’s what makes you you.
As for everything going on in the world outside of your immediate self? I’m not here to tell you it’s going to get better, or even what self-care might look like for you in a time of crisis. That’s something I can’t answer for you. What I can offer up is this thought: that bearing witness to (or even standing up to) the cruelties of other humans doesn’t have to be this either/or state when placed beside creative writing or art-making. Don’t misunderstand me: I’m not advocating for “an easy way out” or even apathy. I’m offering up a reminder that we contain multitudes. You can feel outrage at warmongering, mourn the martyred, and still find time and space to create. Most days it feels like a few blood-thirsty, power-hungry, conscienceless billionaires rule the world and get to decide the fates for the rest of us. They take up so much real estate in our minds. If anything, perhaps protecting some of our imagination for ourselves can serve as a site of resistance, however small and inadequate that may feel.
Until next time,
JD