Creativity Against Violence?

To say I know more about violence than anything which worries the federal government will be taken as a truism by those who knew me decades ago. Bad tempers run in my family; so does anger. When I ha no outlet for what angered me about myself, about the world, I turned it onto myself and that fed my depression. When I finally crashed and burned and still found myself alive, I took a long look at my life, found the way I had been living had not been profitable, and decided there would be a change. I think of this when I became lucid. When I found the Orthodox Fathers, I found plenty enough to sustain my lucidity.

What also helped was KH suggesting I go back to writing fiction. This was something I gave up decades ago.

Which all leads up to Creativity as the Opposite of Violence: Makenna Goodman Interview...:

Creativity as the Opposite of Violence: Makenna Goodman Interviews JoAnne McFarland

MG: The second poem in the book, “Pathfinder,” incorporates excerpted text from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs’s seminal autobiography about life as an enslaved woman in the antebellum era, including a detailed account of sexual abuse, her struggle to protect her children, and mothering through the horrors of enslavement. You layer your poem on top of Jacobs’s words, in white text, creating a striking image: yours and  Jacobs’s words as both inherently linked and singular. History, as it were, is made visible through the implementation of shades of color: gray, darker gray, and white. I found the choice of dark gray text to invoke Black, too, as a felt but unseen color, that takes the shape within the emotion and experience of what the words recall. Can you speak about these visual choices in Pullman? Visual art is central to your work and life, and I’d love to know how it plays both into this book and your oeuvre as a whole, both conceptually and practically.

JM: “Pathfinder” speaks to my belief that violence and creativity are opposites. Every violent act I can think of is oriented in the past and grows out of a belief system that already exists. A violent act seeks to control, to stop something from happening. Creativity, by its very definition, is oriented toward the future, using current resources to manifest what we can imagine, or, sometimes what we didn’t even know was possible.

Yes, it has been good to channel my anger into something more useful, what I call creative, than violence, the impulse for destruction.

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