Teresa R. Funke's Blog: Bursts of Brilliance for a Creative Life, page 40

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to all of my blog followers. Thank you so much for reading my humble words each week. I hope they have provided some joy and inspiration. I look forward to connecting in 2017.

Please recommit to your own art and creativity. Recommit to learning and growing and experiencing. We are going to need your art now more than ever!

 

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The Real Gifts Santa Brings

When I was a kid, Christmas Eve was my favorite day of the year. We had our large extended family gathering at my grandmother’s Victorian-style home in Boise. Good food, all my aunts, uncles, and cousins, and that night, Santa would come. I sometimes think he’s part of the reason I have the values I do today (thanks to my mother).

I’m straying from my normal posts today in honor of the magical evening before us, and I’m sharing here an essay that I hope you’ll enjoy. Maybe it’ll make you feel like a kid again. Maybe it’ll give you a little hope for this coming year. Maybe it will help you reflect on what matters most to you.

Have a very Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah! (click the image below to read).

View story at Medium.com

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What is Your Standing Rock – Your Passion?

I write a lot in this blog about passion, but it’s an overused word in our society. People will say, “I’m passionate about pizza” or “My passion is shopping.” But the definition of passion is “a strong and barely controlled emotion.” I seriously doubt that pizza makes you feel like you are coming out of your skin.

So what do you feel passionate about? Your partner, your children, your faith, maybe your job? Sure, but what else? What do you care about so much that you would stand in the freezing cold and face water cannons and police dogs in order to defend it? Is it the environment; equal rights for women; fair treatment of animals; proper education for all children?

What causes and organizations do you support with your time and money? What makes you so riled up that you will write a letter to the editor, or call a congressman, or join a march? What so motivates you that you will promote it via a bumper sticker on your car or by sharing it on your social media or by starting a grassroots effort to support it? What do you care about?

Because the best art comes from passion. It comes from a yearning for “the answers”; a need to set things right; a longing to serve; a desire to challenge; an eagerness to inspire; an impulse to celebrate; a need to remember. Sometimes it comes from our passion for the wider world, and sometimes it comes from a more personal place, but it always comes back to those things.

I heard an interesting interview the other day in which speaker Neen James was explaining how to become a “thought leader.”  She said, “Ask yourself two questions: What have you spent your entire life trying to figure out? And what drives you crazy?” What she’s really saying is, if you can identify your passions, you can lead us all in new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Come on, my artist friends, now is the time to embrace your passions and make some real change in this world. If not you, who?

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Holiday Inspiration for Your Creative Self

Are you feeling the holi-daze? Finding it hard to keep up during this busy season, and feeling frustrated because your artistic work may be taking a back seat? Me too. So I’m posting this video I created to help writers stay in touch with their creative sides during this stressful (but joyful) time of year. There are some good tips here for artists of all kinds! Stay inspired!

My wish for 2017 is that kindness, compassion, gratitude, and creativity will prevail.

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Is This Real?

Have you ever been watching TV or reading a novel and found yourself talking to the characters?  “Stop!” you shout. “You’re making a big mistake.” Your spouse or roommate laughs and says, “Relax. It’s not real.”

Is that true, though?  Because your heart raced. You felt it. And your mind formed the words to speak, assuming they could help. And for just a moment, you believed.

The greatest compliments I receive as a writer are when people ask me what happened to one of my characters after the book ended. “I’ve been worrying about Maggie and Colin for a week,” one woman said after reading Remember Wake. “Did their lives turn out okay?” I told her I wanted to think so, but I couldn’t be sure. After all, they weren’t “real.”

On the flip side, a few months ago I attended a photography exhibit by Richard Renaldi called “Touching Strangers.” The photographer had approached strangers on the street and asked them to pose together. If I were a cynic, I might have responded to those pictures in this way: “Ah, those people are faking it. They are just acting that way because of the camera.” And there might be some truth in that statement. Some of those people maybe were behaving better or acting up more because a camera was present.

In other words, sometimes art works the opposite way. Sometimes it takes real people and makes us behave in a fictitious manner. Sometimes we determine the direction of the story.

And that is what I love about art. It blurs the lines. It creates alternate realities. It makes us believe the impossible and question the facts. Looking at a picture of a tranquil setting brings our stress levels down. Watching a horror movie revs our nervous system up. Reading a challenging book makes us question our long-held opinions or value systems. Hearing a poem about love lingering after death stirs our souls. These reactions are true. Art is as real as we make it.

Now, more than ever, we need our artists to help create our new reality by challenging our long-held beliefs, by stirring our emotions, by bringing us together and even driving us apart. Now, we need your art and your stories. It’s time.

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The Artist in Me Thanks the Artist in You

Today I’m grateful for the artists. The writers, poets, singers, musicians, dancers, actors, filmmakers, photographers, painters, sculptors, potters, weavers, architects, and craftsmen whose art is the axis on which this world turns.

Without artists, we would have no understanding of cultures long gone. It is their pottery, cave paintings, and temples which we study to learn who they were. It is their stories and songs, passed on for generations, which reveal their beliefs and values.

People do not line up outside of banks to stare at piles of money or outside of most factories to watch products being built. But they do line up outside of The Louvre in Paris to see the great works of art. They do line up to purchase concert tickets for their favorite bands. Our minds, bodies, and egos need material goods, but our souls need art.

And when dictators, tyrants, or terrorists seek power, it is the art they try first to destroy. Why? Because art unites us, and tyrants wish to divide us.

Not a single day will go by in your lifetime when art will not affect you. Not one day will pass when you don’t read a book, watch a movie, listen to music, walk past a picture hanging on a wall, hum a song, tell a story, snap a photo, or say a prayer that someone once wrote.

Artists are mirrors. They reflect humanity back to itself. They ask, “What do you see?” And we answer. Sometimes we like what we see, and sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we celebrate it, and sometimes we vow to change it.

Artists teach us how to overcome adversity, how to work through pain, how to open our minds, how to heal, and how to love. They speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. They speak for those who are being ignored. They speak for those who don’t realize they have something to say. And sometimes they just speak for themselves.

We are all artists. And what you create today will last. Long after the dictators have been overthrown and the empires have crumbled and the civilizations have fallen or evolved, your art will live on. For a few, it will hang in a beloved gallery, for many, it will sit on a great-granddaughter’s shelf, for some, it will be covered by the earth, but like a beacon, it will call to future generations who will seek to understand.

Today, be grateful for your art. Today, create!

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Artists, Immigrants, and Refugees in a Changing America

I don’t often re-run posts, but given the uptick of hate crimes against refugees, immigrants, and other marginalized groups, it felt important to reprint this post from September of 2015. 

When I was in college, I befriended a girl whose family members were refugees from Laos. She went by the name of Jenny because her teachers had deemed her real name too hard to pronounce. I learned it, though, and called her by that. I can still remember how to say it, though I can’t recall how to spell it.

Jenny invited me to her home one day, a small duplex in a modest part of town. She shared a tiny bedroom with her two sisters, her parents and youngest brother occupied the other bedroom, and her teenage brother slept on the couch. Her parents didn’t speak much English, but they were welcoming to me. Her father was a janitor, I believe, and her mother took in sewing. Later, I learned their whole story.

Jenny’s family had escaped Laos in the dead of night by hiding in the bottom of a fishing boat. They left everything behind, save for a few pictures her mother managed to sneak out, but what shocked my naïve 18-year-old self was that in their home country, Jenny’s father had been a physician and her mother had been a teacher. They were educated, professional people who had once lived a more prosperous life. In America, they were just a few more “boat people.”

I think of Jenny every time I see news stories about the thousands of political and economic refugees streaming into Europe these days, and I wonder how many of them are doctors or teachers or engineers. How many were shop owners or tradesmen or students in their home countries? How many were writers or artists?

I watch the news reports and learn about their journeys and about the implications of their arrival for the countries they enter, but I want to hear more of the stories. Because “refugee” was just a word to me until I met Jenny.

So I’m praying the artists among those masses of exiles will tell those stories, and soon. Because no one expects to be a refugee one day. It just happens. But artists can help us understand how it feels when it does. Artists can change the meaning of a word.

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How to Create Art When Your Heart is Broken

Some of the greatest songs and stories are created by artists who have suffered a major loss or break up. They channel all that pain, frustration, anger, confusion, disbelief, and sorrow into their creations, and we embrace those songs and stories because they speak to our suffering too.

Other artists, when faced with heartbreak, drop their art for a while as they work through their pain. It’s sometimes years before they pick up a pen or paintbrush or instrument again.

Some artists create work just for themselves in order to process their sadness. They scribble furiously in journals or create sculptures they then destroy or write songs they crumple up and throw away. Their pain is private, but their art is still the best way to express it.

There is no right way to grieve, not even for artists. Whatever route you take, don’t judge it. Trust you are where you need to be.

Be curious, though, because that is the strength of the artist. Don’t run from the pain or anger or frustration, ask yourself why you are feeling it and how it is changing you. Try to understand why others might be feeling pain too or why they are not. Let your thoughts flow. Don’t stop them. They may take you to some dark places or to places that feel much lighter than you would have expected. Don’t feel guilty either way. Stay in those thoughts for a while. Feel into them. Notice every emotion and wonder what it is telling you and where it might take you.

And when you are ready, pick up the tools of your trade and get back to your art. In times of trouble, people need artists. We create those spaces where their own pain and worry and sadness can rest, and where their broken hearts can hope again. We don’t have the answers, but we know how to pose the questions. And those questions start within us.

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Give Us Some Old-Time Suspense and Romance

The other day, my grown children and I were watching a 1939 Bob Hope movie, The Cat and The Canary, with my aunt. In it, the cast of characters is trapped in a creepy house with a killer. You know, it’s the type of movie where the secret passageway creaks open and a hand slides slowly out. My daughters were squirming like madwomen on the couch whenever that would happen. “There’s a hand, a hand,” they would squeal. Now these are young people who routinely view movies and TV shows in which someone’s head is chopped off and rolls to the ground, but it was the old-time suspense that had them jumping in their seats.

A few days later, I was watching an episode of Poldark on Masterpiece set in 18th century England. In it, a husband presents his wife with a fine pair of stockings, for which she feels unworthy. To demonstrate that she is not, he asks permission to put them on her. Here is a scene with a husband and wife, of all people, in which the man is putting clothes on the woman, and yet it was one of the most romantic scenes I’ve seen in a long time.

It sometimes seems like the pendulum in entertainment has swung so far toward the grotesque, violent, and perverse that it must, at some point, swing back toward the middle. That’s gotta happen soon, right?  How much further can we go?

My intent here is not to sound prudish, it’s to remind artists of all mediums that your audiences were blessed with an imagination at birth, and sometimes it’s best to let them use it.

Instead of seeking to impress us with your showy effects, you might find that our reaction and interaction with your work is all the more intense for the faith you put in our creative sensibilities.

In other words, quit trying so hard, and let us do some of the work.

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Did Bob Dylan Deserve the Nobel Prize in Literature?

Someone recently asked what I thought about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature. Opinions among writers on the internet is certainly divided. Some feel there are plenty of accolades and awards for songwriters, and that Dylan has achieved more than his fair share of fame and fortune from the music industry, and that songwriting is not literature. Others feel that Dylan’s lyrics are, indeed, poetic and even influenced by classic literature, and that good writing is good writing, period.

I’ll admit my first reaction was mild dismay. I don’t disagree that Dylan has made a lasting and unique contribution to art and culture, and he certainly has a large and varied volume of work, but he has been justly and aptly recognized for that in numerous ways.

While the glorification, appreciation, and consumption of music remains high, the same cannot be said for literature. Fewer books are being read and purchased, and author incomes are down by 20-27% in the past decade in various countries. Celebrating the contribution of authors to world culture seems important right now. I’m feeling kind of protective lately of the few ways in which authors can establish their presence.

But in thinking more about it, I realized, as with everything else, the more we separate ourselves, the weaker we become. I’ve long been a proponent of collaboration between the arts. By doing so, we not only learn from each other, we expose our audiences to different art forms. If Dylan’s win helps music lovers take an interest in the Nobel Prize in Literature, maybe they will seek to read some of the other winners. And if someone is doubting whether songwriting is a “real art,” this award may give him the confidence to pursue that interest and maybe even take it more seriously.

On the flip side, maybe his win also gives authors permission to think outside the box to discover for themselves the true meaning of “literature,” and that could lead to some exciting new forms.

Dylan’s win has us talking, partly because he is famous and his win is controversial, and any time we talk about art and culture, that’s good.

Maybe it’s also time that artists admit we are influenced by each other and we cross the lines all the time. I know writers whose story ideas were sparked by a lyric in a song and musicians who took a friend’s poem and set it to music. I know painters who were inspired by a TV character and actors who based a performance on the nuances of an eccentric artist.

The Nobel Prize is big, but it’s just one committee’s opinion. I have read award-winning literature that made me yawn and never-awarded books that changed my life. So debate it all you want, then get back to producing your own art and share it across the channels! Because that is what really matters.

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