After many months of being silent on this blog, of very clearly not cluttering it, it suddenly feels like it’s time to write. Life since my last post in January has been full of new ventures and adventures. I embarked on a degree program with the Global Leaders Institute in Arts Innovation and also have been busy with the life of my local community and family. I have no idea where any of this is going to go, but I’m enjoying exploring and learning new things. I like to think I’m becoming comfortable with the current ambiguity of my path, and many days I am. But of course I’m still playing the horn, teaching privately, and coaching chamber music. I’m not sure I would feel like myself otherwise.
In the midst of all the busyness of my life, I’ve been trying to find ways to simulate the long stretches of time I used to have in childhood and early adulthood. Time to sink in. Time to be with my horn or the piano, time with a friend, with a book, with a poem, with a pen in my hand, whatever it may be. The nature of the time we live in is that too much comes at us too fast, and before we have time to consider anything, something else is coming at us. Tying this to the degree program I’m a part of now, I often wonder if this isn’t one of the main challenges of our time and that the arts have right now. So I’m asking myself how we might collectively make room to encounter the things that are worth encountering—how to preserve spaces, or create spaces, that allow for the composting and sifting we need to do as artists and human beings. One of the important ways I find that kind of space, in addition to music, is through literature and poetry, so I thought I’d share of little of what I’ve been reading (sometimes, I admit, in 3-minute snatches).
In the GLI program, I’ve been studying logic models and funding models and learning how to understand and analyze an organization’s structure. These are helpful tools, no doubt, but putting things related to the arts into boxes is a new mental exercise for me and sometimes it feels necessary to go read a poem. There’s a poet I love named Mary Szybist who (fortunately, for my current state of mind) wrote a poem entitled “It Is Pretty to Think” in the form of a diagrammed sentence. I can’t help but wonder if an Impact Business Model Canvas could be an interesting container for an experimental poem…? In any case, I’ve loved revisiting her work. I have her second collection called Incarnadine. It is extraordinary.
I’ve been so glad to come across the work of Garth Greenwell. I’ve just finished his new novel Small Rain and I keep up with his newsletter on Substack called “On a Green Note.” He studied as a vocalist at Eastman School of Music and his background in music is clear in his writing. I love the way he writes about poetry, art, and music, and in Small Rain he weaves those kinds of contemplative deep dives into the narrative of his protagonist. Brilliant.
Assembling Tomorrow is also in my stack. It is by two professors at the Stanford d.school Carrissa Carter and Scott Doorley. The premise is that we are living in an age of runaway design (tech and AI for instance) and that we as a society should start to think more about how the things we create in turn create us. The authors discuss and show (sometimes using pieces of speculative fiction!) how we can think more imaginatively about the possible futures, positive and negative, that our inventions and designs could create for the generations to come. If you don’t have time to read the book, maybe you’ll like this interview of the authors by Lee C. Camp of the podcast No Small Endeavor.
Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is another one I’m enjoying slowly making my way through after having read her Teaching a Stone to Talk last year. What I like most is watching the workings of her mind unfold. My own mind is not nearly as adept, but I feel a kinship with how she views and moves through the world. This is a good pairing with Robert Macfarlane’s Wild Places. His power of observation and use of language stun me. I also highly recommend his books Underland and The Old Ways. All of these books will take you to places that allow you to feel time as deep and geological.
I just received Abbie Kiefer’s poetry collection Certain Shelter in the mail and devoured it quickly, but I’ll be returning to her beautiful poems over and over. These poems revolve around the loss of her mother, her own experience of motherhood, and the decay of an industrial town in Maine. She holds so deftly all the paradoxes—beauty and decay, joy and grief.
Lastly, I keep coming back to a book I finished last year, Akiko Busch’s How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency. It speaks to the conflict between needing time and space for our minds and souls and whatever we are creating to deepen and wander, and the pressures and expectations (and sometimes the requirement) to constantly share. This is probably a familiar sensation for artists of many kinds, and I loved spending time considering the gifts of being unseen.
Here’s a picture of my stack which includes a couple other books that have been important to me recently.
Until next time, whenever that may be.
