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Healing Through Art
We do not escape into philosophy, psychology and art — we go there to restore our shattered selves into whole ones.
— Anais Nin
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You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory — what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our “flooding.”
–Toni Morrison
Creativity is open to anyone if they want it, male or female. For me the process involves a lot of emotion, a lot of guessing and intuiting, a lot of feeling my way forward. At least that’s how I paint. So far, my writing seems to come from a completely different place, a place of reflection and making connections, of trying to understand something.
I wait, and when a sentence or idea shows up, I write it down. The next sentence is suggested by that one and so on. Again, I never plan a piece. I…
