Finding the Sun (or, The Ramblings of a Frustrated Artist and the Search for Literary Shamans)
The World is Stupid and Cruel:
I can maintain productivity through the most stressful life situations: grad school while parenting 2 small children? Done. Stressful pregnancy that threatened my life? Didn’t miss a paper deadline. Death of my mother? Cancelled class twice.
And then it catches up.
I sink into moods of extreme frustration and irritability. The cruelty and simultaneous stupidity of the world drags me down to the point of feeling claustrophobic—struggling to breathe. Why are the loudest people so stupid? And why are so many listening to the dumbest, cruelest people? How do they not see? It’s Cassandra and the Trojans, on repeat. I sink. I scroll social media but I don’t post. I watch too many webinars—too many reels. There are no answers there—well, okay, there are in the webinars, but even this work horse gets sick of going in circles sometimes.
Sinking In:
This results in sinking into more reading (I mean, I’m an intellectual, for god’s sake, get off the damn internet and read a book, right?): books about writing, philosophy, art, and eternal struggle. I am reminded that this isn’t new—cruel dumb people have always existed. I tell myself, I’ll finally read through Plato’s works, in full this time! (I will not.) I will read other philosophers—they must have the answers! (They do not.) I’ll restart War and Peace—Tolstoy, now there’s a fucker who had ideas. He’ll know what I should do! Like Tolstoy is now some kind of shaman.
A literary shaman. A person who writes the beauty and ugliness of the world, all tangled together, and still somehow finds the sun at the end. That’s what I need: a team of literary shamans.
Who else would be in my collective of literary shamans?
Jesmyn Ward. There’s a start. Her prose is beautiful and sad and intensely stunning.
Barbara Kingsolver. There’s another. Those philosophical asides all through Demon Copperhead? Breathtaking.
Madeline Miller. How can she write so beautifully that—even though the end of the story is obvious and tragic, and we know this from the get-go—we still cry at the end?
And fuck it, I’m putting T. Kingfisher on the team, too. Fighting evil in a fantasy world while carrying a chicken-possessed-by-a-demon? Yes, please, show me your way of finding humor in the darkness, because sometimes I forget.
The Sun Returns (for like 2-3 minutes extra each day, but it’s something—atomic habits and whatnot):
Maybe that’s it: finding humor and beauty in the darkness.
Who else? Help me build a list of writers who find beauty or humor in the darkness. Maybe names we haven’t heard a thousand over, maybe not. Maybe living writers, maybe quite dead writers. Fuck it. It’s your team. Who’s going on it?
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