Happy (belated) Halloween, everyone!  Sending spooky thoughts out to all you candy-comatose costumed hooligans.  With all of the festive emphasis on fright and fear, I couldn’t help but begin to wonder how our fears affect how and what we write. 

What are you afraid of?  I don’t mean in the giant hairy spider kind of way, although that could be a factor as well.  What I am referring to is real, persistent fear, the fear that gnaws at your belly and creeps into the corners of your mind when your thoughts begin to drift to darker things. Does fear motivate you? Does it drive you? Or does it beckon you towards it with the allure if an adrenaline rush?  How do our fears shape us? How does it shape our work? I am drawn further into this mental debate and begin to wonder how can art be used to confront fear, to use fear to our artistic advantage? Mark Twain wrote, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it.”  Can art be courageous?  Can artists?

Some say art is driven by fear, by the need to express ourselves and the fear of being looked over, the fear of passing through this life without a means to validate our existence.  As we take this evening to celebrate the scary and glorify the gory, let us also reflect on and respect how our deepest fears influence our art.