Not Just Another Blog about the Christmas Blues

Last week, as I held the last final exam periods for my fall semester, I realized I was dreading even thinking about the holiday season. It occurred to me at some point that many people I know are themselves experiencing similar feelings. Over the last fifteen weeks, I have learned that many of my students were experiencing anxiety or depression over the loss of someone. Perhaps I noticed this only because of what I had to go through myself. For whatever reason, I decided as my creative writing class met for our final workshop reading to share a poem I wrote years ago after my sister's death. Here is the poem:

Some Lines Written Down Nine Months after the Funeral

What I say to myself
here in the basement among your
things that remain, no one
wants it.
I can't give it away.

Keep it.
Keep daily the silence
and give away the other things--
bread,
information,
art,
if you can.

I am not anywhere near the place described in the poem. I am not ready to begin turning from deep feelings of loss to making a life out of giving to others. But my students seemed to appreciate talking about this. It seemed strange that I had experienced loss and yet had not talked about it. So after I read the poem, we talked briefly about how grief was something that we writers may have to face more than others, and our challenge was that we could learn how to channel it into our writing for the benefit of others. 

I should note that I have long resisted the suffering artist stereotype that has so taken over our imaginations as we think about people who are creative. Even so, friends reflecting on my son Michael and what they heard his friends talk about at his memorial service said that they saw him as a suffering artist, and perhaps there was something to this. I am only now beginning to really understand how much he was suffering at the end, and I am only now understanding because he wasn't willing to let anyone else know what he was really feeling. He was creative and unique. I do think that his suffering also kept him from finishing things. 

It is this last reflection behind why I've rejected the idea that creative people suffer more than others. I've held to an older, pre-Romantic era idea of art captured by Aristotle in the word techne, which includes the important idea of craft in it and suggests long, disciplined study, not merely intuitive knackery.

I still think this. I still hold to the view that the artist is the one who engages in enough craft and discipline to create something worthwhile. This is what keeps me going as a writer, keeps me returning to the page, returning, sometimes, to healing. And that is what I tried to urge on my students last week. 

I hope that I can listen to my own teaching on this as we enter the Holiday season.