Let's talk about art, baby

On the Fringe Festival

Hi friends! First off, I am back from some much needed and hugely delightful time off. I want to thank Allison Kirkland, Jennifer Savran Kelly, Caroline Manring, and Ralph Walker for keeping you entertained while I was gone. I think you should follow everything all four of them do, but I want to specifically highlight two recent contributions not to miss: Allison’s moving, insightful essay entitled A Wound in the Shape of Your Words, about writing and not writing about disability, and Caroline’s piece, How to Run 20 Miles, on how to approach a long project that will appeal to novelists who will never run 20 miles (ahem, me). I am lucky to know such talented writers.

I also want to say welcome to new subscribers! For those of you just joining us, we are back on the regularly scheduled program as of today. What that means is free subscribers will receive missives on the joys and frustrations of the writing life once or twice a month as well as periodic announcements of upcoming offerings online and in person. Paid subscribers get more: an email every Friday, with writing prompts, readings, and a bonus newsletter with deeper thoughts on craft and process. And to every person who reads some of my sentences, it’s an honor to have a bit of your very valuable time and attention.

A few more things before we get to the goods:

• There’s a new episode of Writing in the Dark! Here, Ralph and I discuss the delicate art of giving and receiving feedback.

• On August 30th, Morning Writers meets (8:30-10am ET)! This is a casual, free gathering of writers looking for community and conversation. This month we’ll be talking about our identities are writers—how do we come to audaciously call ourselves writers and what events and beliefs shape (and thwart) our writing identities? If you want to join, hit reply and say so and I’ll make sure you get the Zoom link.

• For local folks who like to plan ahead, I’ll be teaching a Live Storytelling class at the Carrboro ArtsCenter starting October 30th. It’ll be the most fun you’ve had in a long, long time.

• A newly published piece of flash fiction (mine!) that honors parents and people who forget to throw things away.

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I walked past this building a few weeks ago, and immediately started humming Let’s talk about art baby to the tune of this Salt-N-Pepa classic (which, if you’re a certain age, you are already singing in your head).

I had the great fortune to be in Edinburgh during the famed Fringe Festival, when artists come from all over the world to perform their work. You don’t have to get accepted to Fringe, and there’s no selection or curation process. The outlandish thing about Fringe is if you want to go to Edinburgh and stage your solo show about miniature dollhouses, do an hour of standup about your adventures on mushrooms, or perform trapeze to A Tribe Called Quest, well, you can. Fringe takes all comers.

During Fringe, the city is absolutely brimming with energy. Because there are so many shows—over 3,700 this year—there are people on every corner handing out flyers to entice you to their chosen performance and the city is plastered with posters advertising what’s on. Shows happen everywhere—in formal theaters, in areas of bars that have been curtained off, in a big circus tent erected in a park. It’s enormously, wonderfully madcap.

With so many shows, it’s impossible to be methodical about selection. I bookmarked shows with intriguing titles and then read the description to see if the subject matter appealed. After that, decisions were made based on time, location, and ticket availability.

This approach really struck me. We live in a culture of reviews and recommendations and spend a lot of time doing our homework. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but when was the last time you sidled up to a piece of art simply because it had an intriguing title? Attended a performance you knew little or nothing about, open to whatever it offered? Some of us do make room for this spontaneity and open-mindedness, but by gum, what would the world look like if we did it more???

The results were what you’d expect—some great shows, some less-great shows. I’ll forget some of the content of the shows I saw, but I will never forget the experience of those shows and the feeling of being in a place bursting with creativity. For a few magical days, my spouse and I tore around Edinburgh inhaling art. We sat on folding chairs in sweaty bar basements shoulder to shoulder with people of all ages and colors, listening to the stories of strangers, bearing witness to their art, noticing where it intersected our own experiences and emotions, where we learned something, where we felt something. The amount of joy I felt being in a beautiful city crammed with people engaging in art is absolutely unquantifiable.

Unsurprisingly, I spent a lot of time thinking about the artists who come to Fringe and perform their asses off for weeks on end, the culmination of an unthinkable number of hours of creation and preparation. And I thought about us, the audiences, the people who show up and pay money to be entertained and moved. Also unsurprisingly, I have a shit-ton respect for all of us—for those with the guts to put their art out there and for those of us who spend money and time taking in that art, who show up to be enlightened, challenged, and changed.

We were not put on this planet to maximize our productivity or acquire goods—we were put here to connect and rejoice and despair and experience the whole spectrum of human emotion and share that experience with one another.

So let’s talk about art, baybee!*

Let’s make art joy-ful-ly.

Let’s talk about all the good art and the bad art that may be.

Let’s talk abouuuuuuut art. LET’S TALK ABOUT ART!

(*Will I be debuting this musical revue at Fringe next year? No, no I will not.)