Can you help me with my book proposal?
“Art, poetry, music, all forms of true beauty, prayer, and meditation—these are the things that will save us as individuals and, if we're lucky, civilization.” -Joseph Massey, of
(a poet who’s here on Substack)Do you agree?
This idea is a cousin to the thesis of the book proposal I’m writing, and it would really help me, if you agree, to explain WHY you believe this statement is accurate. If you disagree, or aren’t sure, explaining why would be just as helpful. Please feel free to draw on examples from your own life - in fact, these would be especially illuminating.
Thank you!! I’m really looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Just click on “Leave a comment” below.
xo Susan
P.S. Thank you so much to those who participated in yesterday’s Candlelight Chat (on perfectionism and social anxiety) with the very wise and erudite Dr. Ellen Hendriksen, author of the new book, HOW TO BE ENOUGH!
We’ll be sending out the replay video to paid and scholarship subscribers, PLUS ELLEN’S FAMOUS CHART of how to break the cycle of your personal form of perfectionism and anxiety, in a week or so.
Currently going through a dark night of the soul, one of the most chaotic periods of my adult life, and also the most transformative.
Art, what would I do without the written word, painted canvases, music, community of art and artists to lend me their perspectives, context and meaning and colors for my experience? Nature, for the winter light on the western-facing mountains, because who has had the same ability to hold me the way alpenglow does in the afternoon? What gathering soothes me like sitting in silence watching my breath and hearing the great horned owl at night in the backyard hunting voles in the garden?
Friends, family, people, have never, for me, been the same *kind* of deeply personal solace that art, nature, beauty, and solitude with silence can be. It’s nothing against actual humans at all, it’s just different. I’ll love connection, but art, nature, beauty and silence have saved me when there was no one around or I felt I couldn’t be understood or comforted, and in that I know I am not alone. ❤️
I taught a poetry class to a group of bored grade 9s. I asked them to imagine life without poetry and they all could and declared it would be better, and a lot easier, than a life with it! Many of these students had suffered great loss. Then I asked them to close their eyes and I read Seamus Heney Mid-Term Break, and many of them wept, as his words reached right into them and unlocked and softened parts of themselves right there. These are indeed the things that will save us Susan. I'm so pleased you are wrestling with this.