Hello friends! I hope you had a good week 2.
This week I am writing about something that feels scary to share because it’s personal and reveals my no-so-admirable side, but I decided to go for it because that’s what The Artist’s Way is all about, right?
It can be summed up in two words: gold star.
A gold stars is any kind of award, label of achievement, or prize. I’m drawn to gold stars. In dark times, I crave them. A few years ago in a workshop with Amy Brady of Denver’s Stand UP, I recognized that my attraction to gold stars has to do with my need for an outside stamp approval to validate that the work I am doing is good and valuable (which probably goes back to my childhood blah blah blah).
It didn’t help my creative journey that outside of self-publishing, pretty much the only way to get a first book of poetry published is to win a first book prize. I didn’t want to self-publish my book because, due to the book’s subject matter, I wanted the support of a publisher behind it. So for the 12+ years I was working to publish White Lung, I was essentially obsessed with winning a prize. A prize would mean the book was good! A prize would mean I was the best.
Throughout those 12+ years, I did a lot of work both on the book and on myself to begin to understand that wining a prize wouldn’t really mean either of those things. The book would be good when I decided it was good; in art the idea of “best” is irrelevant. The irony wasn’t lost on me that when the book was selected for publication by Saturnalia, it didn’t win the first book prize I’d entered it in; the judge of that contest picked a different book. The Saturnalia editors of picked it from among the finalists because they thought it was an “important book” (I’ll never forgot those words from the call from I got, which came right after “you didn’t win the contest”).
I tell this story because week 2 is all about a sense of identity. A sense of identity has to come from inside–not outside from whoever has decided to award some list of literary geniuses or other gold star. I think that sometimes we shy away from art because we worry that what we create won’t earn a gold star–I know I do. When I avoid writing, it’s often from a depressive sense that there is no point, that no one will ever read what I write, and that (this is embarrassing and true) I’ll never be famous. My path back to writing always involves acknowledgment that I write because it’s what I do; like teaching, it’s part of my calling. It’s one of my answers to Mary Oliver’s famous question, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?“
I’ll leave you with a quote from the brilliant Brenda Ueland, whose book So You Want to Write has inspired me time and time again. She says:
Kimberly O'Connor 
Leave a comment