When Art isn't Just About "The Big Things"
On enjoying the pretty and happy moments
Last week, my new Substack friend, Karen T. Smith (if anyone else wants to be my Substack friend, my digital doors are always open), shared with me that she is teaching a writing workshop on finding joy.
Every night, Karen publishes on Substack the three best things from her day. She finds the small pockets of delight, such as a conversation with her child or a beautiful feather she kept seeing on her walk. It’s a collection of reminders that we have a choice in how we walk into each day and a choice in how we lie our head on our pillow at the end of each night. It’s a practice I’ve long been cultivating in myself, and I was enthralled by her publication.
Karen expanded on her workshop to me over chat:
I have this difficult relationship with the idea that we’re supposed to tear our hearts open and spill them out onto the page and that’s the only way to be a Good Writer. There are beautiful writers who write about beautiful things, or how hard it can be to experience beautiful things. Or who can acknowledge the bitter sweetness of an experience, but also look at what’s wonderful about it, things like that seem to be often overlooked in The Discourse.
Oooooh. Girl.
When we endeavor into any form of art, we’re dedicating ourselves to noticing the world around us and trying to make sense of it through our work. It’s a nihilistic depreciation of our world to give less credence to the beautiful parts; I would go so far as to say that we are not being good artists if we can’t expand our perspective to interrogate what it means to feel joyful, hopeful, at peace. What stories do we overlook when we insist that good art stems from trauma and heartbreak only?
I think a lot about the perception of the Midwest as boring, how stories of Midwest experience sometimes take on an air of unimpactful in the same way as stories of joy. Systems of entertainment have surely been built stronger in other places, but I find it shameful to let that frame how we view our experiences.
Our hearts break. Our relationships are complex and layered. We have a perspective, insight into what it means to be a person.
I imagine that some of this is a problem I’ve created in my own head. Of course, there are millions of stories set in the Midwest, millions of paintings of prairie sunsets and snowy evenings. There are writers and musicians and actors and visual artists all across this great region who are creating beautiful things, and there are millions of people absorbing these beautiful things with hunger and passion.
What I aim to get to is this idea that postures that art has to be about the Big Things, the overwhelming and the earth shattering and the transformative. Those moments that fundamentally change us as people.
But consider the scene outside of my office window. We are at the tail end of a week of blizzard conditions. Wind whips through the brown leaves somehow still hanging on in January, probably a vestige from the unusually warm beginning of winter (don’t tell me if this is wrong. I’m a writer, not a scientist). A blanket of misty snow moves through the air like the ghost of winter’s past. The ground is blinding.
Several children barrel down the hill behind our apartment building on plastic sleds, screaming with the pent-up excitement of multiple snow days and a Saturday with nothing but white on the horizon. Giggles flit between gusts of wind.
What stories are these children writing? A rare moment of sibling harmony? Some of their last opportunities to indulge in childhood? Building the instability of young friendship?
There are small moments happening outside on that hill that will go on to define these children. There are small moments in every day that will define what the world looks like tomorrow, a flap of the butterfly wings and your toast burning on a cold morning.
Take Karen’s lead. Find the narrative in every day experiences.
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