Recently in Writing Community Category

When I worked at the bookstore, I picked up a book called A Sense of the World by Jason Roberts. The book chronicled the life of a blind traveler named James Holman. This is not his story. During this time while I was exploring Roberts's web page I stumbled upon an article called How to Build a Grotto by Ethan Watters (first published on Guru.com). Ever since that first reading I've come back to the page again and again, taking careful notes, planning how I will execute the idea. This is what I want to do with my life.

The community office space will be in Kansas City. Three or four writers will have offices in the beginning. We will run The Red Ink Journal from the space, plus lead community workshops and classes. Storyteller will lease or buy a space and sublet to freelancers for a reasonable price. I'm not going to explain the benefits of shared space for writer's here: Watters already did a wonderful job of that in his article.

The cartoon above first appeared in Ben Franklin's The Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754. He captioned his snake differently, giving each hacked-up body part the abbreviation of a colony (N.Y. for New York, or N.J. for New Jersey). More effective than P. Diddy's Vote or Die campaign, this snake is credited as the first political cartoon ever published. Just one in a long line of firsts for Ben Franklin.

I was thinking this morning about what to post here. Instead of writing something I downloaded Franklin's cartoon and looked at it for a long time. Then I dipped my Photoshop paintbrush in white and erased the colony names. I typed in the various kinds of writing, so-called, and molded them to the body: Poetry, Literature, Screenwriting, Journalism, Composition, Fiction, Blogs, Rhetoric. Then I inverted the file and saved it.

I had intended to write something about how scholars need to forgive each other, understand one another, work together towards a common goal. Actually I don't know if that's possible. With so much competition, can writers unite? In my life I've not always had the best success with friends. Who has? Yet sometimes a lost friend can be found. Friends become enemies; enemies become friends.

It makes me smile to think of Ben Franklin with his pen scratching ink onto two hundred and fifty year-old paper. The sensationalism of the cartoon, combined with its almost embarrassing earnestness, must have seemed silly to some at the time. Twenty-two years later, Franklin would be proved right.

The world is unstable. Violence in Tibet, with China hunting the Dalai Lama and, taking a cue from America, labeling him a "terrorist"; civil war in Iraq and rising extremism in dozens of other countries; the collapse of the U.S. economy. I won't deny that I worry about the future.

We need to come together, writers and artists, and show strength. We need to stand and show courage. I'm not talking about taking over the Dean's office. That's stupid. Generally writers and artists are quiet people, men and women who live both in their heads and on the page, between the lines. But that doesn't mean creating takes no courage. Quite the opposite. Part of an artist's responsibility is to take the map his ancestors have been working on for centuries and, like those before, color in the blank spaces with care and passion.

Writers don't show truth by logic. We show it by emotion and by imagination. I believe in the courage to create, and I believe in a moral responsibility of the artist as Lev Tolstoy imagined it. Critics can scoff or be cynical. I admit I am a cheeseball, an idealist, and more than a little goofy. But I still believe that we as writers, and we as a Human Race, must Join, or Die.