Art in the Fires
I wrote a quick thread over on Bluesky the other day while out walking because I had words in my head that I needed to get down.
Making art is about joy. Creation is the point, the ACT of creation, not the outcome. This is one of the reasons AI is so insidiously terrible. It strips away the joy of the process. Creation is difficult, messy, imperfect, and that is the entire point. (anyone who's interacted with children making art knows this, we tend to forget about it as adults though)
Fascists and failures, those who are so afraid of failing and getting things wrong want us to plug things into a program and get a result. That's not what we do when we make art. We dream. We mess up. We learn and grow. And that's the joy of making art.
I have been struggling so much on the daily with trying to stay on task, even as the fear rolls through me, even as the uncertainty about what this country - this world - is going to become.
As I watch the battlefields grow, watch my neighbors and friends put themselves on the line, I'm even more aware now of how important it is that I don't stop, that I keep writing and telling stories. Stories are resistance. Joy is resistance.
So keep making art, neighbors. If for no other reason than the fascists don't want us to do it. They don't want us to be creative.
I have been running behind all week and trying to get to this newsletter. (A relief to realize I had this one mostly written already.) It is cold today, though we've only been sideswiped by the storm that will crash into the East here in a few days. My thoughts are on the people in Minnesota fighting the good fight in so many ways.
The fascism hits closer to home every fucking time I turn around. Yesterday morning I got a message from a friend in Maine to say a co-worker of hers had been taken. I don't know what we'd do without ICE saving us from *checks notes* Emergency room workers saving lives and five year olds in blue bunny hats. That image of Liam Ramos will haunt me for the rest of my life.
I'm going to leave you with the poetry of Renee Nicole Macklin Good, murdered by ICE on January 7, 2026. It's a stunning piece of work, made all the more heartbreaking by the knowledge that the only reason we're all reading it now is because she is gone. As my heart continues to break with the knowledge that I have eaten at that IHOP on the corner of Powers and Stetson Hills, maybe even the same booth as Renee. That I am alive and she is dead and there is nothing fair about this life. I try to hold that up as gospel, that my task is to keep making art as she did and keep resisting as she did.
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs - Renee Nicole Macklin Good
As poet Charlotte Pence wrote, “poetry’s great power [is] to hold space for what others have tried to silence.” Poetry is one of the “oldest art forms to articulate resistance,” she wrote. “Partly why all art forms—and poetry in particular—are key vehicles for resistance is that at their core, they are unpredictable. And it’s that quality that fascists hate, because unpredictability makes a group harder to control.” - From Why it Matters that Renee Nicole Macklin Good was a Poet
I love you. Please take care of yourselves and your communities as best as you are able.
K