Before anyone introduced to us the terrible idea that art could be good or bad, we loved our art. We were little girls who drew and painted, wrote and performed our own plays with our friends. We were inherently happy with our creations because they were ours, like a mother with her new babe.
We learned to judge our art as we learned to judge our worth, as the outer world made its self-interested opinions known to us.
As we grew, we learned there was a system of arbiters whose job it was to judge the quality of our creative efforts. They were called publishers or directors or gallery owners or granting agencies, and their decisions guided the path of our work: out into the world or denied at the gate.
What courage it takes to cherish our creative children despite the opinions of such arbiters!
And yet, the creation of vital art demands this of us. Our unborn creations can’t afford our obsession with the rubber stamp. They need a pure channel to travel through to bring their utter magic and tremendous power to this realm.
We owe it to the unseen forces of creativity to be revolutionary enough to fall in love with our own writing without apology. As if we are six years old again and playing imaginary games with our friends. It is that love for own creative outpouring that invites the wildness of the other realms into our notebooks, where it morphs into poetry, plays and manifestos that rock this world to its core.