We strive to tell our stories as honestly as possible,
in order to let someone who shares our experience know that she or he is not alone,
in order to help someone who doesn’t share our experience to better understand it,
in order to make the world small.
Starting next week, my best friend Davi and I will be co-facilitating our “dream course” together. Davi and I became best friends in college. We played rugby together and drank and talked and laughed a lot, but we also found we connected on another level. We were creative people that simultaneously rejected and felt-rejected by the majority of our supposed creative communities. We came to identify ourselves as an artist who hated artists (Davi) and a writer who hated writers (me).
It isn’t that I actually hate writers; I just don’t connect to the stereotype of a writer who dresses in black, exists on coffee and cigarettes, and seems to makes her life miserable in order to have something to wallow in and write about. The idea of creating a life just around the act of writing feels empty to me. Most of my heroes (Jane Addams and Barack Obama among others) were or are writers—they have written beautiful and truthful sentences and have inspired me to strive to do the same—yet writing was just one aspect of their life’s work, a tool that helped them to first define their ideas and then communicate these ideas to a larger audience.
This is what writing is to me—a tool. And as with any tool, I believe that just about anyone can learn to use it, that some people will pick it up more quickly than others, and that practice inevitably leads to improvement, but, like the pocket-knife whittling away at a piece of wood, I believe it takes more than skilled hands to make something beautiful, that the knife is always secondary to the wood.
So I guess when I say I hate writers, what I’m really saying is that I am more interested in your wood than in what tools you use to shape it. I don’t care what your craft is; I want to know what drives you to create.
Traditionally, schools that cater to creativity are organized by craft. There are separate schools for art, music, writing and dance and within these schools the classes are separated even further by craft, genre, instrument, and form. These schools are valuable. Like any trade school, they teach students the skills they need to be proficient in their trade. But in classrooms that are organized by craft, one is less likely to find community and opportunity for collaboration. Although the students in such a classroom all want to master the same craft, they are all working from different places and have different goals in mind.
Our hope for this “dream course” of ours is to be able to supplement these sort of trade schools, with a class that focuses less on how we create, but why. Our first step in creating this course was to write down our artist statement—our “wood.” Then we brainstormed a list of friends and friends of friends that we believed created work that resonated with our artist statement. This list of people could easily be separated into two categories, two categories that would eventually define the first two manifestations of this course. The “Treehouse Collective” which will meet in our 2nd floor apartment starting next week is made up of people who live in Chicago and were able to commit to meeting once a week for twelve weeks. The “Highland Valley Farm Summer Collective” which will take place on my family’s farm for a week next summer, will be made up of people who are spread out all over the country (and world) who get jealous they aren’t living in
