WordWeaver

Summer in Tennessee is glorious. Life has sprung up all around us and the mountains thrum with a subtle energy that permeates everything. Kids are out of school and making their own sort of noise on the playgrounds, the hiking trails and rampantly through the streets. The job has me tied to a phone for most of this, watching it through windows or occasionally hearing it over the phones I answer for eight hours each day.

As wonderful as this energy is, as invigorating and affirming as it can be to turn in your eight hours, to hear laughing children or go to the zoo with your friends, it can be a potent drain on the inner energy that keeps me vital. Some people deal with this by meditation, or by sewing a magnificent scarf or painting a captivating picture.

I find my peace in another way; I write worlds.

The alarm startles me awake. My energy goes to the job, to the children, to my wonderful roommates and my beloved wife. I pour out little bits of myself for them to take until I am dry, until I am empty. The sun dips and the phone stops ringing and the kids go play. The world slows down just enough for me to take a moment and breathe, and here I start my Craft.

The craft takes different tools depending on the day. Sometimes, I’m using a pen to scratch a personality into clean white paper. On others, I am pushing my thoughts through a keyboard, squeezing a world into as many pixels as it takes. Ink or electricity, the medium doesn’t really change the work itself. I weave a person together from the yarn of memory, pulling colors from a tapestry of experiences and dreams. The words aren’t always easy to work with, they fight and bind and knot together, becoming a tangled ball I have to work back into a pattern I can manipulate.

I paint worlds with the earthy tones of lost love and the vibrancy of every First I can remember having. A first kiss forms a waterfall, a first dance creates a forest of swaying purple leaves. Cities spring up like flowers growing in fertile earth, each a place where my dreams and nightmares fall like fruit.

The plot of the piece comes slowly to me, like clay falling away under an artisan’s hand to reveal the sculpture already lying within. I carve away the excess words and run on sentences to reveal the lines and fluidity beneath. The unused clay isn’t thrown away - I am ever mindful of the value in these pieces - they are saved and re-used, sometimes to patch a place where the plot cracked and often in whole new pieces. Here again the medium itself can change, perhaps clay one day and tough granite the next. One story may be a glistening crystal finch sitting on a transparent blade of grass while another is a fierce tiger carved in marble.

The story decides the shape, I just follow where it leads. This is how I have always found my cup refilled. I sit in my chair and I scratch out the worlds and the people who populate them. I chip and cut and tap my way through figurative rock or canvas or yarn. I stitch the characters together and in so doing I find myself renewed, as though their creation re-ignites the fire within me.

Of course, this isn’t just about the stories. The plot isn’t always up to me; sometimes I only shape the character within it - a single shade in a tapestry of others, dancing with other creators in roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons or Pathfinder. These require just as much craft as individual stories, just as much care and time and passion. The difference, naturally, is that this artwork isn’t made by one artist but several - a wondrous piece of yarn and marble and ink. The artists work in their own mediums and bring about something greater than each could create on their own.

This is the purpose of Art. This is the purpose of creativity and of Craft. Whether it’s popsicle sticks or steel or paints, we do these things to refill ourselves, to find within us that eternal spring of fathomless, universal energy that connects us all.

We are, in the end, made of stars - every once in a while we have to shine.