Diving Back into the Book

and introducing monthly zooms for collaborative discussions

Yesterday was Labor Day, and quite a different one than I’ve had in many a year. This holiday usually passes without much attention, other than the desire to avoid freeway traffic and all the folks returning from vacations with mega-RVs. Thankfully, I’ve been comfortably sequestered in my studio, walking distance from my home. Because it was early in the day, my walk was not accompanied by the tantalizing scents of barbecues wafting through the neighborhood and the cheerful sounds of people partying in their backyards. In the past, I might have felt some longing to be invited somewhere, or to be playing outside, swimming, camping, or hiking, but today there’s not a shred of FOMO moving through me as I write or draw. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, taking care of myself by moving words and images through my body, heart, and mind. It’s a real luxury, and I’m not taking it for granted.

When I started writing this Substack series of essays back in June 2022, my plan was to draft pieces from which I would select the most juicy and salient to populate my next book. The book has changed titles a few times. It was originally called “Rewilding Our Muses: Creative Strategies for Navigating this Time in the World.” But after a year of sitting with that title, I saw that the term “rewilding” was showing up in many podcasts and essays, so I decided to shed it. Now I’m patiently waiting for my muses to deliver a new title. Occasionally, a title similar to “under the radar” or “emerging from the cracks” wants to get attention, but we’re still waiting for the non-cliché phrase to arrive.

More information about the new images emerging in my studio can be found at the end of this post.

What has inspired this book is my attempt to assess how art can help us navigate within these uncertain times. While synthesizing the lessons learned from my somewhat marginal presence in the old paradigm of the art world, I want to place within the fractures of my memoir, examples of positive possibilities I’ve encountered over the past decades, especially during the pandemic times: examples of cultural democracy, disobedient public art interventions, projects that create bridges and dialog across seemingly impassible divides, and rituals that build solidarity and provide an antidote to dystopia. Few of these will be written about in mainstream media outlets, although some will show up in social media used by movement collectives.

Some of the projects that have come to my attention may convince more folks that the over-culture’s most prominent ideas of artistic success are obsolete and it’s past time to redirect our energy. I don’t necessarily see these creative experiments and interventions as solutions to the mess we’re in, but I see them as a collective refusal to participate in the status quo, and that, in itself, is deeply encouraging. At the very least, they can function like a homeopathic medicine in response to the depressing news we encounter daily.

The intention to prime my writing engine through '“substacking” has worked fairly well, although it seems that fewer folks have time to read my offerings this summer, or at least, don’t feel compelled to let me know that they have. (Thankfully, Anyakara, Chris K, and a few others are wonderful exceptions to that trend.) This form of creative expression has prevented me from becoming dysfunctional, and that’s enough motivation, even if the audience is too busy to read my missives.

With some of the stressors that were impacting my focus sitting somewhat outside of my immediate range of vision, I am getting closer to organizing all of the material that I’ve been harvesting. While I know that I need to choose the pieces that are essential to the book’s intention and ascertain what may still be missing, I have a proposal for you, the reader. One of the ambitions that I have for this book is to break with the old assumptions fed to us by the over culture. I want to see how I can shift more deliberately from an individualistic process to a more collaborative one. It is something that I feel is essential to the thesis of the book. I do have some trepidations about creating something more interactive; it may make the process of getting this out in the world more cumbersome, but I’m willing to risk it.

While there’s no guarantee that this experiment will work or have any momentum, I am curious whether I can offer prompts to you, the reader, that will get you to think more deeply about what you believe art can do for us in a time of crisis, and maybe you can share some of the miracles and insights you’ve gotten from your own creative practice. To this end, I would like to invite paid subscribers to a monthly zoom when we can discuss this. Our first Zoom will be on Sunday, Sept. 15th at 4 pm, Pacific Time. You’ll need to email me for registration info (bnaidus@uw.edu).

In truth, all of our creative processes are collaborative, but we are not always self-aware that this is the case. This morning I am collaborating with the person who harvested the lemon I cut up and squeezed for my morning drink, as well as the truck driver who delivered the lemons to Trader Joe’s, the farmers who were willing to and had the resources to get certified organic, and the bees that pollinated the lemon tree, as well as the plumber who piped this house for the town’s water system and the engineers who saw the path to bring water from local rivers and mountains. When one focuses in how interconnected we are, those relationships are infinite, like the mycelial networks in the soil of a forest or in my backyard. Without all those resources, and hundreds of thousands of others, I would not be able to sit here and write. If I change my focus to who made the laptop and the resources extracted for this seemingly magical machine, I could really dive into a rabbit hole of unseen and unrecognized collaborators, as well as a whole shitload of suffering (thinking of the extraction and exploitation that is attached to any material wealth). Or we could go internally to examine how the bacteria in our bodies determine the ideas that emerge in our brains or the energy that allows me to sit at my desk, a very hidden collaboration. Sources that have inspired this way of thinking come from Bayo Akomolafe, Sophie Strand, and Merlin Sheldrake, all of whom have helped me frame the fluidity our daily reality in new ways.

When I taught Labor, Globalization, and Art at UW Tacoma (from 2003-2020), I assigned a project to the students called, “The Journey of an Everyday Object.” They would work on this exercise in teams of two or three students and research what the object was made from, what resources were used to make the object and the impact that might have had on the environment, where the object was made and the impact of the labor conditions on the worker, how the object was marketed, and what transportation and environmental costs might have accrued to get the object to market. It was fascinating to see what the students learned and how they turned their research into something visually compelling, whether as a performance, an installation, a public intervention, an artist’s book, or a series of posters. Failing to find a photo that well documents this exercise, it's best to remember this project as a process rather than as a finished product.

But I digress: does anyone really need more evidence about why the old paradigm of serving up art to the rich is not serving the needs of artists, their communities, and our ecosystems? Last week, at a bi-monthly community potluck hosted by friends, I met Kwabi Amoah-Forson who drives a Peace Bus and organizes events like this Friday’s gathering to get folks to discuss how to end gun violence. He asked me if I believed in the possibility of world peace, and I said, yes, and he asked me how I thought we could achieve it. I said, we need folks to make lots of art in all the forms to release their pent up feelings, and offer somatic trauma therapy to everyone so that folks can recalibrate their nervous systems and not be so reactive and cause harm that way. He said that no one had ever answered that question in the way that I did. I was surprised, but maybe he’s not circulating in the places where I roam.

I also learned about a group that formed “under the radar” in Toronto back in 2017, called QUIET. Believe it or not, one of the heirs of the infamous Walton family, seeded this project initially - in the same way, he seeded our local Alma cultural center. In 2022, he withdrew support from both projects, but QUIET appears to be continuing in some manner. They just launched their website last week. They start with this: “WHAT IS THE TRUE VALUE OF ART & THE ARTIST'S ROLE IN SOCIETY? Quiet is an artist-led community based on trust, care and empowerment. A community built through creative practice and common purpose. A community seeking abundance, through giving, not taking. We began with a question. What is the value of art and the artist's role in society outside of money, fame and industry?” I am hoping to begin a dialog with them and wrote to them, but have yet to hear back.

Clearly I am not alone in this desire to reimagine culture that supports those who need the true nourishment it can provide and to support its emergence in all sorts of ways. We all need to advocate for creative expression as way to develop clarity, process grief, move anger, and to celebrate what is alive in us. The collapse of the current cultural hierarchies will likely be greeted with applause by many who have been victimized by its delusions. If you were one of those artists who pinned your success on a doomed system, perhaps you can be reminded that its imminent collapse creates a space for something more nutritional to arise. Examples of the latter will be interspersed within my narrative to give readers inspiration to create their own emergent strategies (thanks to adrienne, Complex Movements, and Grace Lee Boggs for this way of framing things).

While sharing stories from my particular history may be meaningful to younger readers who have some nostalgia about the life of an artist when rents were still affordable, the key focus of my book is to reimagine what an artist’s life might be outside of the colonized paradigms most of us have been sitting inside. By inserting examples of what I’m witnessing breaking through the asphalt of our current over-culture, I hope to inspire readers by asking lots of questions about what’s important to nourish in these times.

And finally, this book is being written for young folks and for their descendants who are looking for ways to use their creative gifts as part of the healing of the world. I don’t have answers, but I will offer stories and questions that emerge from them that might help those who read the book find their own ways. Here’s a recent podcast to remind us that the game is not over as so many “doomers” seems to feel it is: “Ada Palmer is a historian and science fiction author who believes that when we zoom out to a centuries scale, humanity has a lot to be hopeful about.”

Notes about the two paintings posted above: After almost a year-long hiatus, images have surfaced in my unconscious and demanded to be drawn and painted, so I am back in the studio playing with whatever wants to emerge. I am using up paper and supplies that were just sitting unused since I retired from academia (I was given a windfall of materials due to unspent grant monies during the pandemic).I am letting these pieces teach me what they want to be and where they want to go. I thought I was done with adding more to my overstuffed flat file archive, but obviously the muses had other plans. I have no exhibitions or dealer or career plans for this work. I will just post them on social media and have them on display for visitors who come to the studio. In truth, I’ve been self-censoring for way too long, thinking that image-making is archaic. In fact, that way of thinking has haunted me since I was in grad school. My elder self has finally had enough of this way of thinking. Bee says, “You get to do whatever wants to arise as long as it does no harm. Surrender to the muses and be of service.”