Writing No Matter What
Resistance often begins in art
As we sit here the week before the US elections and to my mind, the most important election in my lifetime, I wonder as I often have in the past, what’s the point of continuing to write in the face of all that worries the world. I felt this way after 911 and during the pandemic and the feeling is coming back again. I’ve been doing lots of political work which has lifted my spirits because, for me, action is the only cure for despair. But I’ve developed a powerful case of what I call “creative anxiety.” It’s happened to me before and I’m sure it will again. I’ve been away from the novel I’m working on for over two weeks. My characters are calling to me from where I left them, mounted on horses, hiding in a thick forest, searching for a young woman who has fled a convent.
A writing friend sent me this wonderful video of Ursula Le Guin speaking about freedom and writing and it restored my sense of balance.
“We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
Ursula K. Le Guin
You can watch her speaking here
So go vote, early if you can, work in whatever way you choose to get out the vote, to affect the change you want to see….but take time for your art.
Go back to those characters in the forest or that line in the poem or that color on the canvas or the next dancing step or the tune on your instrument, be it a saxophone, a fiddle or your voice.
The art you practice might not feel like it will change the world but it will comfort you and inspire you in the days and weeks to come… and who knows? It might also prove one day to be an act of resistance.
Goodbye for now. I’m headed back to the 14th Century.
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`The Conquest of Naples by Charles of Durazzo
Elizabeth Winthrop Alsop (www.elizabethwinthropalsop.com) is the author of over 50 works of fiction for adults and children under the pen name Elizabeth Winthrop. These include the award-winning fantasy series, The Castle in the Attic and The Battle for the Castle as well as the short story, The Golden Darters, read on the nationwide radio program, Selected Shorts,and included in Best American Short Story anthology, and Island Justice and In My Mother’s House, two novels now available as eBooks. She is the daughter of the acclaimed journalist, Stewart Alsop. Daughter of Spies: Wartime Secrets, Family Lies, a family history about her parents’ love affair during World War II and their marriage lived in the spotlight of Washington during the 1950s was published by Regal House, October 25, 2022.
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