Art Saves Lives
February 25, 2021 § 30 Comments
by Jan Priddy
I used to have a bumper sticker on the back of my car that read: Art Saves Lives. I was sorrier to lose that slogan than I was, eventually, to lose the car. Because that is how it feels and what we writers mean to do. We add our words to those who came before. We claim them: Sappho and Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and Mark Twain, William Stafford and Ursula K. Le Guin, Joan Didion and Mary Karr. We know them by their words. We should be humbled, but our goals are not humble.
We want to change the world with our imaginations, one word at a time. Words are our raw material, and our tools include description and reason, vision and touch and sound and flavor and scent. We know that what we put down on the page makes a story and that stories are what make us human.
Here is a story:
In 1836, a recently widowed visionary, remarried. With his second wife he fathered seven children, preached, taught, found academic employment, and wrote in his study while a large household revolved cautiously about him. Quiet. Don’t disturb Papa, he’s working.
Most of us scramble and bargain for writing time, often finding it only in slivers and odd hours, between the detritus of day-to-day responsibilities and paying work, wedged between the insistence of people who rely on us to put their demands first and our human need for rest. How lovely to sit behind a door, working until we are ready to stop, parishioners anxious and waiting, our loved ones tiptoeing past the door—Quiet, don’t disturb the Writer.
But we are not writing sermons that come crashing into the world with authority and an eager audience, we are not Calvin Stowe, that mystic composing in his study.
It is his wife we know—the wife who bore the seven children and ran the house and did not, in her day, enjoy legal recourse to law, the right to vote, or control of her own finances. The woman who provided Stowe with a room of his own, didn’t have one herself. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Harriet Beecher Stowe, nearing forty years of age and with a newborn seventh baby, began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the kitchen table while keeping house. She was disturbed by something other than noise.
The little lady who started the Civil War, Lincoln called her.
I wonder: Did she worry her words would run out? Did she call herself a fraud and suffer writer’s block? How was it possible for her to have imagined, with a household bustling, interrupting, and tugging at her, that the words she struggled to pen would change the world?
Maybe we are writing our own transformational books at our kitchen tables and we don’t even know it.
Few of us have sheltered space or devoted congregations. We are not Emily Dickinson or even Calvin Stowe. We are poets scribbling lines while we wait for laundry to spin, composing in our head on a run, letting the cat out, letting the dog back in; we are novelists running sentences across the ceiling before sleep or revising stories in the rare hour children are preoccupied; we are memoirists and essayists getting up to make the coffee and losing ourselves in words when we have so many obligations. We hear voices. We stare into space and forget where we are and what we’re supposed to be doing. (Hopefully this doesn’t happen while we’re driving to the grocery store.)
We cannot know the influence our words might have on that still-imaginary audience. We only know we want to do it—this writing.
With so little outside our need, without free time or a room of our own, the leisure and space that all human beings deserve and crave whether they are writers or not—we have words. We have imagination.
We look up from our table and out at the world and bend back to our page. We’ll write what we understand of it, or admire, or deplore dream fear hope.
We’re not done with our work at the kitchen table. Whether we transform the whole wide world, or our own private corner, Art saves lives. I know it’s true. I think it’s why we write. We’re saving ourselves.
____
Jan Priddy’s writing has earned an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship, Arts & Letters fellowship, Soapstone residency, Pushcart nomination, and publication in journals such as Brevity, CALYX, Liminal Stories, The Humanist, North American Review, and anthologies on running and race. An MFA graduate from Pacific University, she lives in the NW corner of her home state of Oregon and blogs at IMPERFECT PATIENCE.
Love this, Jan. Thank you. Will be sharing this with my writing groups!
Thank you, Joanne. I do envy you your writing group. Sometimes—too often these days, I am alone in a room, and I wish that were enough. Writing is key.
Thank you Jan. Helpful. Will forward to several friends. Tom
Thank you, Tom, I appreciate that!
I write to save my life. It’s been that way now for 25 years, after our daughter went to college and I needed an outlet for thoughts and feelings, and words. Lots of words.
Yes, that is what we do. We find ourselves sometimes, only when we see what we have written. Thank you.
[…] first, because this has been a hard week, I want to share a publication on the Brevity blog: “Art Saves Lives” I am wearing my Acme hat, handmade on the east slope of the Olympic […]
Thank you for this!!! This perfectly describes life right now and I am finding corners and moments to write.
We are all seeking those crevices and odd moments despite sheltering and general chaos. Ha! Thanks, Heather.
This is incredible! I love it, Jan. My jaw dropped when you revealed who the wife was. So many resonate moments but I’ll just mention this one: “We cannot know the influence our words might have on that still-imaginary audience. We only know we want to do it—this writing.” This is true in life. The kind gesture that years later someone recalls, etc.
Thank you, Jeanne!
It’s odd that I wrote this long ago and it happens over and over that a former student recalls something I did that I had completely forgotten. For example, I posted a daily quote for many years, and a student told me later that he’d copied many of them from his class journal and posted them on his bedroom wall. I would never have guessed.
Oh see that’s great. I, too, sometimes start classes with quotes but often students don’t take notes nowadays. Yours smartly did!
motivation: I always allowed them to use their journals during quizzes and usually tests too. Sometimes I would ask a bonus question on a quiz about a daily quote.
Lovely, lovely, lovely.
❤
Grateful for the relative peace-&-quiet to compose my thoughts these days… I hesitate to call it a “blessing of COVID” because the virus and shutdown have had such a devastating effect on so many lives, but… to me, it IS a form of grace to have the luxury of taking time out to sort my thoughts and emotions, and gain perspective. Art continues to save my life. ♫♥♫
There is loss and fear and death, but this past year has evolved as an opportunity for many people to reexamine their lives.
I still have an “Art Saves Lives” button I used to clip to a chain of amulets and odd little charms. It always worked for me! What a great piece Jan! I had a father around whom we tiptoed when he was writing, while my mother sorted the laundry. At least I can thank them for teaching me the ability to do both.
Well, Nina, small world. Dinty has the slogan too!
Thank you for this. Today your writing reached and reassured me as I lie next to my sleeping husband tapping out words on my iPad and groping to find the purpose and meaning of a remembered scene. So often I wonder why I do this at all, but today you reminded me that maybe my words will reach someone else, and even if they don’t, the writing is necessary to me.
We all need reassurance these days, don’t we? There was the line from Forster—something like: How do I know what I think until I hear what I say? It was a silly character who said that, but I wonder if even Forster would agree that writing does that for many of us. It clarifies.
What a wonderful reminder of the possible. Thanks for this.
Thank you, Sandra.
I am 70…. I used to keep a diary. I actually had a small library of notebooks and hardbacks filled with my thoughts, wishes, fears and hopes…. Then my son “helped” me clean house and threw it all away. By the time I realized they were gone it was too late… deep sadness.
Even when we never look at them, there is something about such written records that proclaims: I was here. I am sorry for your loss, but even so, you are still here!
Lovely essay and timely for me as I near the end of my employment with another and begin employment with myself. And these lines: “We stare into space and forget where we are and what we’re supposed to be doing. (Hopefully this doesn’t happen while we’re driving to the grocery store.)” Ah, well, yeah, sometimes it does happen to some people while driving 😉
We’re so often trying to satisfy two demands at the same time. May you enjoy a fruitful and less fraught “retirement.”
Time is distance but love is a bridge. What do you say that we forget the past, forget all that we have been before, forget the future even, and we simply look to the here and now? Isn’t that all we ever have in the end? Need more love with https://bit.ly/3sFK4EN
Brilliant blog…
[…] 12, 2021March 12, 2021 janpriddyoregon Lorraine Ortiz and Terry Fullan read my recent post on the Brevity blog about missing my “Art Saves Lives” bumper sticker and sent me a new […]