Turning to Creativity in Difficult Times

Christie and Rosemerry converse on creative practice as nourishment, empowerment, connection, vision

“If you're following an emotion, you have suddenly access to all kinds of intelligence that you would not have access to if you didn't have that emotion.” —Holiday Mathis

Preview: Emerging Form Episode 126

When times are difficult, how can a creative practice help us move forward? We asked a few previous guests and folks in our Facebook group to weigh in about how big feelings can be a blessing, how creative practice can be comforting, how mantras can boost us, how we build trust in our own process, the power of embracing paradox and the ways that creativity can help us live into the world we most want to believe in.

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What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• How do we change from within? How do our dreams of what the world might be become reality? I am ever in love with this poem, “Last Night as I Was Sleeping” by Spanish poet Antonio Machado, this version by Robert Bly.

• Thinking of our theme for this week’s podcast, one of the poems I turn to again and again (and again and again) is this one by Wendell Berry, “The Peace of Wild Things.” The missing first person pronoun in the last line is the key to me.

Christie:

• This blog post by Adam Mastroianni, Underrated Ways to Change the World, really resonates. He offers so much great advice about tangible, effective ways that, even in these terrible times, it’s possible to create real change in the world. Make it so.

• After the election, I just needed a dumb story to fall into that didn’t have any moral or political themes. Zero Stars, Do Not Recommend by MJ Wassmer is a plot-driven story about how a bunch of hapless folks deal with the apparent end of the world. The characters are a little stereotyped, but they grew on me and it was just the kind of fun but not too serious book I needed just now. Thanks for the recommendation Kate Hobson (via her Three Great Books substack). 

• How To Capture Carbon, by previous Emerging Form guest Cameron Walker, is a wonderful book of short stories with a magical, deep and philosophical take on the world. Her characters will stay with you for a long time.

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Reciting Poems to Each Other in a Difficult Time

It might have looked as if we stayed
in our respective squares—
nine separate rooms made of pixels—
but for an hour the poems we shared leaped
through the screen and into our bloodstream
until all our lines were gloriously blurred
and our wounds were gently tended
by the medicine of Berry’s dayblind stars
and Wellwood’s ferocious dance of no hope,
Hopkins’s shining from shook foil
and Roethke’s wondering Which I is I?
 
In another time, there would have been
a fire at the center. Someone would play a drum.
But in this time, I felt it inside me, the fire,
as poems blazed to meet the great cold.
I felt it inside me, the human drum,
that reminds me the heart beats
not for itself, but the world.
For an hour we spooned each other
the honey of poetry. Alone now,
I still taste it, unfiltered and raw,
this astonishing sweetness on my lips,
this salt of lyric communion
still feel the warmth of that blaze,
the spark still dazzling in the dark.

—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer 

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A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Starting this month, only our paid subscribers will receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support.

This week, Rosemerry shares poems about creative practice in difficult times, and also shares thoughts from previous guests, including comedian Chris Duffy and poet Sara Abou Rashed. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can go now to our website, EmergingForm.substack.com, or by clicking the button below. Thank you!

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Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. What is your creative mantra?

2. What poem or song do you turn to to get through a difficult time?

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