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.

Predictability.  The well-worn path.  Things seen and done before.  The known.  There are comforts we return to, spaces we inhabit out of habit.  Stay on the right side of the road, do not cross the median!  Too often we sit at desks and struggle to reach for the wilderness of whimsy, the rare, untapped inspiration that still remains in the world.  We turn over stones looking for the key to the backdoor of the same brickwork house we write in time and time again.  When we do go out we take the GPS, implanted in the dashboard, always aware of the exact latitude and longitude of our corporeal existence.  And our inspiration follows.  We track it with satellite coordinates, forgoing mystery for certainty of geographic position. (We always seem to want to know exactly where we stand in the world).  Topography gives way to the simple green, blue and brown of Garmin or TomTom or Magellan, and landscape is limited to a digital screen.  All of this precision, all of this certainty by which we measure our progress towards a specific destination.  Why plan the route?  Why so focused on the most expedient path, the one so many others have tread?  Go slow.  Get good and lost for a while.  Wind among the cliffs of the Pacific and sleep with the sound of waves crashing below. Revel in the quandaries of ambiguity.  Force yourself to make a choice and suspend, for a moment, the certainties we so often return to.  We cannot write the new without experiencing the new; we cannot forge ahead without the confidence to exist in uncharted land.  Go slow.  Get lost.