Keep the Light On

Dear Everyone,

I hope this finds you as safe and well as can be. A phrase keeps haunting me, I’m not sure where it came from: “Keep the light on.” Maybe it comes from Wallace Stevens, who wrote that the role of a poet is to share their imagination with others, and therefore to make it “become the light in the minds of others.” And thus “to help people live their lives.”

I’m trying to keep mine on, so I have the strength to help those who need help, and to keep doing my work. And to keep living fully so I never forget everything there is to lose.

I greatly admire and appreciate the essential chorus of voices expressing outrage, solidarity, fear, sorrow, even despair, even a little hope. I am grateful to everyone who is writing and thinking and engaging, and figuring out how to resist.

This semester I am teaching a class to a marvelous group of graduate students in the MFA at Saint Mary’s College. It’s called Everyday Creativity, and in it we are reading and discussing works that are emblems of continual creative engagement. Each student is also engaging in a daily creative writing practice. It’s a pleasure and honor to be in the room with young artists who are carrying forward the light of the imagination, and sharing it with others.

I have already gotten so much out of being with them, and therefore decided to teach a class on line so I could be in discussion and community with more people, Maintaining a Creative Practice in the Chaos. I’ll be in conversation over a series of weeks with some amazing writers: Amber Tamblyn, Victoria Chang, Daniel Handler, Ingrid Rojas Contreras, and Maggie Smith. These are writers I adore and revere and we’re going to talk about how to keep going and making. It starts on March 11th, please join if you want.

In my own spirit of making, I’ve been writing some new work, and playing a lot of music, which has been a real sustaining joy. My band back east, The Figments, is making a new record, and I am being sent the nearly completed songs and putting down lead guitar tracks. It’s weird to sit in my room in front of a computer by myself and play my guitar and have it sound massive and full of energy, as if I were with some of my favorite people in the world, and then to take the headphones off and realize they are thousands of miles away. But better that than not to rock at all.

And I’ve been writing songs and playing music with a great group of musicians here. Our band is called The Date Nights and we have some upcoming shows, one at a bar in the east bay on the eve of Sunday, March 2nd, and a benefit concert on March 28th for adaptive programs in the town where we live. I can’t currently locate our social media team to ask them why we don’t have any presence on the internet. But if you’re interested lmk and I’ll send more info.

Again, I do all these things not despite but because of the worry and helplessness I feel all the time. If it helps at all, I am sending you my light, and you can send me yours, so we’ll be ready for whatever comes.