For several years before her death in 2005, my disabled mother lived with me. Private home care aides allowed me to go to work during the week, but nights and weekends, Mom was my responsibility. During the time I was caring for Mom, it didn't seem burdensome. Over time as Mom's condition deteriorated my lifestyle changed too, until trips to the drug and grocery stores became the extent of my excursions. So insidious was this change that it has taken me until this fall to realize that I no longer needed to live this way.
In September, my sister-in-law proposed that we both take an October trip to Denver, "just to hang around." I was prepared to decline as I had so many times before, making excuses to stay homebound, when I realized what I had been doing. "Yes," I told her, and made my airplane reservations. I made the trip and had a great time.
Mindful of the unnecessary inhibitions I'd been placing on myself, I didn't hesitate to register when I found a fairly local craft organization offering several different weekend classes in jewelry design and fabrication. The Fletcher Farm School for the Arts and Crafts in Ludlow, Vermont is operated by the Society of Vermont Artists and Craftsmen, Inc. The organization is committed "to quality arts and crafts education, to keeping alive old traditions, and to teach new techniques in a special Vermont setting, at a reasonable cost to the public." It is located in a small village at the foot of the Okemo Mountain ski area.
I am not an early riser, but to arrive by the 9:00 a.m. start of each class, I needed to leave my home by 7:00 a.m. at the latest to make it to Ludlow on time. Most of the route wound through the Green Mountains on two-lane highways, which could mean frustratingly slow travel when following a leaf-peeper or someone marching to their own — and decidedly sleepy — drummer.
But within an hour of arriving at my first class I felt as if I was home. I had forgotten what it was like to think like an artist, to create an image and make it appear from raw materials and your own craftsmanship. For those of you who have not experienced the joy of crafts, filing and sanding a piece of silver that you've shaped yourself until it's as smooth as satin is just as satisfying as crafting a good short story. And as you become good at it, not having a file in your hand becomes as awkward a feeling as a writer not having a pen in his or her hand.
The instructor who taught silver fabrication was a bit of a character, an aging hippie who would start out each of his classes encouraging us to make "love knots," thin silver bands made from silver wire that's formed and hammered, soldered and filed and buffed until it gleams. One morning while we were making the obligatory love knots, he read to us an essay from an older text book on the art and craft of silversmithing.
It was a long passage, and his reading style was such that my attention wandered until he read a passage that postulated that creating something of beauty by manipulating raw materials was the only true artwork. The essay ennumerated the arts it found worthy: sculpture, painting, etc., essentially all of the fine arts. I objected at the exclusion of literature, but the instructor hushed me and read on to the end of the list — poetry, the only literary discipline the writer considered an art.
One of the advantages of practicing a manual craft like silver fabrication is that it is primarily tactile and leaves the mind free to wander, and I found myself examining the process of writing flash fiction against the essay's definition of creating art.
When a writer sits down to a blank page, she or he conceives a tale, begins to imagine characters, situations, conflicts, etc., just as a fine artist sits down to a blank sketch pad to work on his or her vision.
In order for the writer to do justice to his or her characters and the situations in which they find themselves, the writer must be able to create — or relive from their own background — authentic experiences to make their work credible. Given the raw materials of the story — characters, situations, authentic experiences — it is the writer's task to manipulate those raw materials into something that can grab and hold a reader's interest for the time it takes to spin the tale.
I came away from the exercise convinced that writing is indeed an art form. In fact, executed well, literature may be more powerful than the other arts, in that it is more lasting and less tangible than a well-thrown vase or a provocative painting, more affecting and less present than a beautiful piece of jewelry.