{"id":1257,"date":"2011-03-12T11:05:00","date_gmt":"2011-03-12T11:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=1257"},"modified":"2018-11-20T05:33:54","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T05:33:54","slug":"dear-writer-with-love-from-1992","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/?p=1257","title":{"rendered":"Dear Writer, With love from 1992"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Stuff<\/a>When you move, do you end up moving boxes that you never unpacked? I do – but only very small ones. I have a box that contains postcards from a friend who spent his gap year in New Zealand the year he recovered from cancer; I have boxes that contain my journals from high school — not something I have the intestinal fortitude to read too often. Most of my life is organized and at least attempts to be tidy, but there are dusty little boxes which contain who I was, once upon a time, and they’re an amusing — and occasionally horrifying — time capsule to open.<\/p>\n

This morning, I found a note I’d written to someone in college, and never gave them… it’s TYPED, double spaced. On a TYPEWRITER (I hated dot matrix printers from their inception, and so loved the print function on my typewriter, that I kept it). It’s so …full of sound and fury and earnestness and meaning(lessness) that I have to share it with you. Remember the YA novel<\/a> about calling your past self to give yourself advice? This is me contacting my future self with a letter instead. <\/p>\n

I’m not sure I achieved what I set out to say — and, forgive the hyperbole and the dramatic cynicism — my college years did lend themselves to these things, after all.<\/p>\n

It is a struggle to be an artist in a dying world.<\/p>\n

It’s true, you know; the world is dying by degrees, slowly draining its vital resources into a quagmire of futility. We are going absolutely nowhere fast. How does the artist, he or she who is attuned to beauty and peace and eschews the crude, vulgar, or ugly — how does one cope in a slowly fading, slightly drooping, silently sliding, swiftly tilting planet?<\/p>\n

The answer, I believe, lies in the will to produce. Most artists have a keen drive to leave their mark on the world. In making a place for oneself, one need only to observe, digest, and divulge. Writewritewritewritewrite. Regardless of the fact(s) that upon occasion what one writes is silly drivel, fully useless and quite unreadable; regardless of the fact(s) that the world is an ecologically unsound, biologically unstable and horrendously evil, look<\/i>. Look at it. Look at it and live… not because of it, certainly not through it…merely live.<\/p>\n

I wish I could teach you to feel. At time it appears that there is too much to feel, too many swirling emotions that envelop one like a fog. We are taught not to feel, not to give in to the madness. But,<\/p>\n

if you let it take you, if you let yourself go and ride the avalanche,
…you will learn to gently break your fall. Yes, you’ll cry a lot, yes you will be enraged at the apparent callousness and stupidity of the world at large…<\/p>\n

but you will feel. and you will write.<\/p>\n

i promise.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The artist, I have since learned, does not, in fact, eschew the “the crude, vulgar, or ugly,” because those things, too, are a part of life, like it or not. But, there is some truth there… I was fumbling my way towards some major epiphanies. (Emphasis on fumbling<\/i>.)<\/p>\n

What’s a relic from your young adulthood that you’ve run across lately?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When you move, do you end up moving boxes that you never unpacked? I do – but only very small ones. I have a…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[15,27,17],"class_list":["post-1257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-random-notes-and-errata","tag-what-we-do","tag-who-we-are"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1257"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6455,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1257\/revisions\/6455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/writingya.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}