Finding Community in a Time of Isolation
Emerging Form interviews Kayleen Asbo about fostering creative community
Even when we’re falling—it helps to know we’re in it together.
Preview: Episode 28 with Kayleen Asbo
“I created my communities because I was starving for something that didn't exist anywhere,” says this week’s guest Kayleen Asbo, founder, creative director and resident mythologist of Mythica. “So I began putting things together (poetry and classical music and art) that I love and offering it. It turns out that what I was hungry for also fed others, and it has been expanding ever since.” In this episode of Emerging Form, we talk about why we need creative communities and many tips for forming and maintaining them. Two of the most important pillars of community? Courage and vulnerability.
Things We’re Reading:
Rosemerry:
I’ve been reading Know My Name by Chanel Miller. Ouch. And oh. I read, like many millions of others, the victim impact statement Miller wrote after her rapist had been sentenced to just six months in jail. This is an astonishingly well-written, honest account of how women who have been raped are not well served by our society or the systems in place to promote justice. A book of trauma and transcendence. I wish everyone would read it, tough though it is.
I’m a new fan of Alfred K. Lamotte’s poetry, and I am loving his most recent book, The Fire of Darkness: What Burned Me Away Completely, I Became. Paired with the art of Rashani Réa, it’s ecstatic. Just the medicine I needed—a glorious collection that focuses on unity,
Christie:
I love this essay from The Journeys of Trees author Zach St. George describing how a used bookstore helped him change a more useful metaphor for his impending manuscript deadline.
Jess Zimmerman’s Slate piece, “Let’s Just Lie on the Floor and Scream Together” captures something I’ve felt off and on through the pandemic. “I will act miserable because I am miserable and I want to act the way I feel, and I don’t need to act like I feel better and you can’t make me. It’s a way of externalizing feelings that may be too big to communicate or contemplate on their own: maybe I can’t deal head on with the void of the future, but by god I can sit here refusing to get up until I need to pee REALLY bad. It is, in its own way, a kind of self-care.”
I recently had occasion to read this delightful story in Knowable Magazine, “Bent into shape: The rules of tree form.” Rachel Ehrenberg’s writing is captivating, and the subject — how trees develop and find their form — is totally fascinating.
There’s a good chance you’ll be looking at some election maps this week. Before you do, have a look at Betsy Mason’s important demonstration in the New York Times of how election maps as they are commonly drawn are confusing and misleading and might even increase our perceptions of polarization. She also shows some ways to draw better maps.
One Morning
One morning we will wake up and forget
to build those barriers we’ve been building,
the one between us that causes tears,
the one we’ve been creating
for years, perhaps out of some sense
of righteousness and boundary,
perhaps out of habit.
One day we will wake up
and let our empty hands
hang empty at our sides.
Perhaps they will rise,
as empty things sometimes do
when blown by the wind.
Perhaps they simply will not remember
how to frighten, how to grasp.
We will wake up that morning
and we will have misplaced all our theories
about why and how and who did what
to whom, we will have mislaid
all our timelines of when and plans of what
and we will not scramble
to write new strategies we know will not satisfy us.
On that morning, not much else
will have changed. Whatever is blooming
will still be in bloom.
Whatever is wilting
will wilt. There will be fields
to plow and trains to load and children
to feed and work to do.
And in every moment,
in every action, we will
feel the urge to say thank you,
we will follow the urge to bow.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, originally published on Gratefulness.org
Two Questions:
(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)
Why do you resist being in a creative community?
What do you most long for in a creative community?