Legacy as Practice: How We Come to Creative Fruition in Later Life by Marc Zegans

 

Portrait of Zegans by John Lawson

Legacy as Practice: How We Come to Creative Fruition in Later Life

by Marc Zegans

 ArtSpark first published this article at http://art-spark.org

I’d like to introduce you to a novel way of thinking about crafting our legacies. Typically, when we refer to an artist’s legacy we mean what comes after—the objects and influences that trail in the wake of an artist’s passing. But what if we imagined shaping artists’ legacies as an active and deeply fulfilling practice, one that establishes continuity between their creative work in later life and that which lies beyond? What if we saw forming legacy as a process that animates and informs creative expression, not simply as a means of attending to the future care of our work? What if we envisioned legacy as practice—a means of consciously entering and engaging the final stage of our creative careers fully and well.¹

Knocking on the Door

At some point, every artist becomes aware of diminishing energy and capacities, and with these changes the proximate finitude of life. Artists reaching this juncture may find less satisfaction in their work, and discover that previously cherished social roles no longer hold particular allure. Such awareness arises in rumblings and ruminations: “How do I continue when the work has lost its light? How do I go on when I’m unsure how long my abilities will continue to hold? How can I persist when my peers are gone and the end is in sight?"

While the appearance of these questions is animated by feelings of loss, dissatisfaction, unease and fear, their presence presumes the possibility of a vitalizing response, one that brings spark and fresh appetite for new and innovative work. If an artist is willing to make significant adaptive changes, such revitalization is indeed possible. The path to productive adaptation entails a release of past socialization and prior ambitions in favor of a return to self.

To this point, meaning for the artist has been defined by various forms of accumulation: discipline, skill, social connection, reward and reputation, and by projection of self through distinctive work, self-promotion, and strategies of influence. As artists enter later life, the desire for accumulation begins to lose meaning and the urge to self-inflation that underwrites the practices of projection diminishes in attraction. When this structure of meaning crumbles an artist may come to recognize that he or she is entering a period of life in which value and fulfillment are found by precisely opposite means.

Rather than continuing to work on old terms predicated by familiar motives, an artist’s late life finds renewal through a conscious and willing transformation of creative identity, a shift from the role of art warrior (or tribal leader) to elder. An elder artist’s task is to shape a living legacy by exchanging ambition and authority for the freedom to offer wisdom, to work with renewed spirit and emotional depth, and to bestow parting gifts while yet alive. This turn to heart and spirit can open a channel to the larger Self and yield creative work of great force and profundity. But the turn does not come easily.

Making the Turn

Though an elder’s role carries immense satisfaction, it’s often hard for artists to imagine operating in such capacity. So they resist—stretching, straining, overworking, and sabotaging the people coming up behind them; struggling to remain relevant, or falling prey to listless depression. Then, the resistance having proved futile, a crack may open, and the artist’s inner dialogue may shift. “I would come to grief if I shared with no one what I have learned. If I relinquish control and open my heart, my work may find new life. I don’t want to be careless about what I leave behind.” And with such acknowledgements the artist lets go, accepts the freedom of great age and begins to learn the practice of creating legacy.

We can see this transition to elder as a process of waking up. The artist who has accepted the elder’s role and who has begun the work of creating legacy has arrived at wry self-acceptance, come to embrace life as it is, and is alert and alive to the moment. An artist so situated speaks with clarity and directness. “I’m no longer building a creative career; I’m finishing the journey. I have nothing to prove, but I’m happy to share what I’ve learned along the way. I’m concerned with using my time well, and with what I will leave behind. I want to work now from my heart and to follow the call of my spirit. I want to die with my brush in my hand.”

So how does this newly awakened artist proceed?

Engaging in Practice

Artists thrive in late life by abandoning claims to status, reputation, esteem and control in favor of fully expressed individuality, and the capacity for deep generosity from which legacy is made. Such artists relax into the moment; discovers humor in their emerging limitations; connect with and channel the larger Self in work that travels through the heart, and bestow wisdom on those who seek it. Artists arrive at this place by developing and expressing what Carl Rogers termed, “…this underlying confidence in themselves as trustworthy instruments for encountering life.”²

In functioning as Rogers’ trustworthy instrument, legacy as practice begins. From the perspective of life as encounter, bestowing wisdom and dispensing one’s gifts become natural extensions of what we might call expressive receptivity.Energy for new work, often embracing novel subject matter and proceeding by different means arises from this same source.

Beyond dispensing wisdom and developing novel work, legacy as practice often entails cultivating a capacity to collaborate with skill and generosity. Artists, particularly those in the performing arts, entering later years often find themselves working with less experienced, less knowledgeable, and less skilled colleagues. For artists still enmeshed in their roles warriors for the craft, this can be a source of immense frustration. (i.e. “I can direct circles around that idiot thirty-year old. Why should I put up with this crap?”)

Artists who have embraced the role of elder meet such experiences quite differently because these encounters represent for them neither an indignity, nor a threat to reputation. Consequently, they proceed with generosity, engaging the possibilities in the moment, embracing the naivety, insecurity and awkwardness that accompany the vital energy of their younger colleagues. By exercising warm sagacity in such situations, they become valued collaborators, passing on their craft by illustration and through gentle suggestion.

Such emergent capacity for collaboration, and the need for older artists to infuse their lives with new sources of inspiration, especially in domains, such as writing and the visual arts, where artists commonly work alone, suggests the need for a robust intergenerational brokering system that pairs older and younger artists. Possible pairings might include: mentorship programs; actively curated project-based associations; intergenerational exhibitions; master-classes; social events and service activities. The need for such intermediary structures presents a robust opportunity for educational institutions; arts support organizations, and philanthropies.

A Trustworthy Instrument

The artist creating legacy is facing neither inward, nor outward, but is balanced: accepting and offering, inspiring and expiring, a swinging gate through which life and expression pass simply. This artist is free, vital, unencumbered and engaged. Such an artists accepts fully that he or she does not know how things will end, but sees the openness of the situation as a shaper of priority and as a spur to action.

An artist so situated brings powerful resources to the enterprise, among these: a capacity to look back with awareness; a knowing of how things can unfold; an embodied sense of loss that can direct attention, inform action, and instruct methods; deep grounding in the methods of production, and variety in experience and human encounter. More powerful is the wisdom to see that these are simply resources—tools, available to be used, but not binding on the artist.

The sage artist understands that the art of creating legacy is a process of live engagement and self-determination, informed, but never governed, by accumulated experience and the resources it provides. It is a means of working intentionally and astutely from the heart, accepting what comes, offering what one has, and producing that which is needed. Proceeding from this awakened state, artists, who conceive of legacy as practice, unleash the prospect of producing work that sparkles with vitality, pulses with humor, shines with love, and perhaps finds transcendence. And that is why fulfilled artists never stop working, because for them legacy is practice.

Footnotes:
1. For more on the stages of a fulfilled creative life, see Arc and Interruption | Grantmakers in the Arts
2. “Toward Becoming a Fully Functioning Person,” Carl R. Rogers, ASCD Yearbook, Perceiving, Behaving, Becoming: A New Focus for Education, 1962.

© Copyright Marc Zegans, 2017. All rights reserved.

Marc Zegans is a creative development advisor who helps artists; writers and creative people thrive and shine. He is the past executive director of Harvard University’s Innovations Program and a working poet with four collections in print.  Marc can be reached for consultation at:  marc@mycreativedevelopment.com.  His website is www.mycreativedevelopment.com.

Ibbetson Street 42 due out this month or early next...

Here is the new cover of Ibbetson Street that is due out Nov. 2017. (Click on picture to enlarge)

Podcast: From the Bloc 11 Cafe: Doug Holder interviews documentary filmmaker Olivia Huang

 Huang talks about the documentary she produced " Grolier Poetry Book Shop: The Last Sacred Place of Poetry," at the Bloc 11 Cafe in Somerville, MA. with Doug Holder .

  Podcast: The Grolier Poetry Book Shop: The Last Sacred Place of Poetry  link  https://ia801504.us.archive.org/13/items/IMG0020_201710/Z0000018.MP3

Women Musicians Network 21st. Anniv. Concert. Berklee Performance Center. Nov. 9, 2017

"There's nothing exactly like it. Which is exactly why you'll like it."

That's my feeling--shared by many--about the annual W.M.N, concert. This is always the most diverse concert of the year; for 2017, acts range from pop and R&B, to gospel and Peruvian jazz.

The focus is on Berklee women students and their bands from around the world. Guest acts include the Pletenitsa Balkan Choir, and world-music band Skybridge.

A special guest this year is Eric Jackson, legendary host of "Eric in the Evening," on WGBH radio. Eric will give a short address, and also receive a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Last year, this concert received a number of major commendations for "Excellence" and "Community Service."

This Thursday, Nov. 9th, you'll see why.

Somerville's Olivia Huang Celebrates the Grolier Poetry Book Shop with a new documentary!

 

Somerville's Olivia Huang Celebrates the Grolier Poetry Book Shop with a new documentary.

Article by Doug Holder


   In the coming weeks the Grolier Poetry Book Shop will be celebrating its 90th anniversary. This famed bookstore in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been in operation since 1927. It is an all poetry bookstore, and has seen the likes of Lowell, Eliot, Ginsberg, Hall and many other much--lauded poets grace its environs. Olivia Huang, a young filmmaker from  Guandong  China, (a southeast coastal city), who now resides in Somerville, has produced and directed her first documentary titled, "Grolier Poetry Book Shop: The Last Sacred Place of Poetry."

I met Huang at my usual seat at the back of the Bloc 11 Cafe in Union Square. She is a  serious young woman, and is unfailingly polite. She said she never had been to the Bloc--but was impressed my backroom hideaway--with its fireplace, its ancient bank vault, and well-appointed tables. Huang has been in the states for the past 4 years. She recently received her advanced degree in Digital Media from Northeastern University.

Huang admits that she knows very little about poetry, but a friend of hers is a writer, and she showed her an article about the best bookstores in Boston. The Grolier grabbed her attention. She was surprised by its long history, and its devotion to selling poetry books. She reflected "It is amazing that such a small place can contain so much literary history."

Huang had a number of talking heads in this 35 minute film, including the owners Ifeanyi and Carol Menkiti, Elizabeth Doran, the clerk/manager of the shop, poets like Ben Mazer, Gloria Mindock, Patrick Sylvain, Susan Barba--(The senior Editor of the the New York  Review of Books), yours truly and others.

Huang  told me she researched the Grolier, and tried to get in touch with the former owner Louisa Solano, but due to health issues at the time she was not available. The film mostly deals with the current times of the Grolier, but Huang may do a followup that will concentrate on its rich history.

Huang and co-director Alice Lin, have entered the documentary in the Barcelona Film Festival ( it is a semi-finalist), the Los Angeles Cine Fest, the Red Corner Film Festival, and is hoping for a slot in the Boston Film Festival.

Huang told me she is a painter, and to judge from her portfolio, a very skillful one.

The film has so far been screened locally at Somerville Community Access TV, Cambridge Cable Access TV, and it is soon to be aired on Endicott College TV.

Huang told me the the most important thing she is trying to achieve in her work is telling a good and compelling story. And after viewing this story, I feel it undoubtedly  will whet the viewers' appetite for even more exploration.

Link to the 90th Anniversary Event    http://bostonlitdistrict.org/event/90th-anniversary-celebration-grolier-poetry-book-shop-musical-notes-90/


Trailer for documentary       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0Q3CnIzrH8

Learning From Richard Wilbur with Tom Daley

( Click on Pic to Enlarge)

Somerville Writer Daphne Kalotay to Read at the Boston Book Festival October 28th, 2017

Daphne Kalotay

I had the good luck to touch base with Somerville writer Daphne Koltay who will be reading at the Boston Book Festival Oct. 28.  Her session for "One City One Story" will be held Saturday, October 28, at 3:45pm at Old South Church's Mary Norton Hall, located at 645 Boylston Street in Copley Square.


Daphne Kalotay is a novelist and short story writer who lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. She is known for her novels, Russian Winter (Harper, 2010) and Sight Reading (Harper, 2013), and her collection of short stories, Calamity and Other Stories (Doubleday, 2005), which was short listed for the 2005 Story Prize.

Doug Holder: I read that you are based in Somerville, but you are a Princeton University Professor--how does that work?

Earlier this year I was invited to fill a visiting position in Princeton’s Creative Writing program. I at first didn’t know how exactly it could work, since it would mean spending the 12 weeks of each semester in Princeton half the week. But I often take temporary teaching positions, since otherwise I have to scramble for things like health coverage. And this was a chance to work not only with bright students but also an amazing faculty I might otherwise not get to know, and to have a good salary and healthcare. So I accepted and am really glad. It’s been a terrific semester and is really stretching me as a teacher, which is an unexpected plus.



    I have been a panelist at the Boston Book Festival, and enjoyed it very much. The festival is very much in sync with the spirit of the city. Boston has a very unique literary sensibility--how would you describe it?

In one word: nerdy. Which I mean as the highest compliment. On the one hand there’s that conservative side that perhaps goes back to the 19^th century “Banned in Boston” tradition and to the influence of programs like Boston University’s MFA program, where I studied and which historically has tended to favor less experimental fare. But there’s also an exuberant seriousness about literature here that’s pretty unique and wonderful. By that I mean that both readers and writers here seem to embrace all kinds of writing with genuine intensity.



    You have a short story "Relativity" published for the "One City One Story" component of the festival. Tell us a bit how you connected with the festival, and why you chose to have it as a premiere publication at a festival rather than a literary magazine?

Last winter, I saw a call for submissions for “One City One Story,” which I was already familiar with and think is such a fantastic way to reach out to a whole new community of readers. I’d attended the event in the past and had read most of the previous stories, so I knew they liked stories with something New England in them—and I had just finished writing “Relativity,” which features a social worker visiting various Boston neighborhoods and also has a subtle Puritan sub-theme. I knew it was a good story that would probably stand out, but I also supposed the subject matter might come across as too dark for a community read. Anyway, I submitted it to the contest as well as a couple of journals. When the BBF selected it, I had to withdraw it from one of the journals, but The Florida Review said that since the Festival is local, they still wanted to publish it, so it will appear there this winter. And while appearing in a journal with a national readership is always great, there was no question in my mind about premiering it at the festival. The fact that the judges didn’t shy away from a story that confronts painful material, including metaphysical mysteries like birth and death, and existential mysterious like human cruelty and kindness, shows the great respect they have for Boston’s readers: that readers understand that reading means being open to things that might be uncomfortable.

 You have chosen a 99-year-old Holocaust survivor as the protagonist of your story. What brought you there?

She is based on my 100-year-old grandmother, who died just last week via medically-assisted dying, which is legal in Canada; otherwise, like the protagonist of my story, she would probably still be here, though less and less comfortably—so she chose to go out when and as she wanted. Which is a great contrast to the fact that during the Holocaust an entire government was actively trying to kill her, along with my father and his sister, who unlike their father—my grandfather—also survived. I’m acutely aware that most of that side of my family was killed and that there are so many people and stories I’ll never know. My grandmother to me is a symbol not just of survival but of the fragile link to these long-ago people and stories.

Doug Holder interviews poet Allen West

The Sunday Poet: Bridget Galway

Bridget Galway

Bridget Seley- Galway artist/poet- Her art has graced several covers of Ibbetson Press, Bagels with the Bards, and individual poet collections of Doug Holderand Molly Lynn Watt. Her poetry published in 2009-16, Bagel with the Bards, Ibbetson Press #34 and #39, #41,2016 Poetry Porch, and featured on WOMR 2001-02 Provincetown Poetry Corner. She has exhibited throughout New England. From 2009-12 was arts editor/curator for Wilderness House Literary Review. In 1990 co-founded/directed El Arco Iris free arts center in Holyoke. In 2014 procured funding, established/facilitated Youth Arts Arise free after school arts program at Arts at the Armory in Somerville. Ma.

Summer’s Dusk to City Night

The air’s cooled blanket

waves over my skin with the breeze.

I look up to the leaves quiver in response,

and higher still to the bright half Moon

peaking through gray blue to waning light-

as it expands down,

to disappear behind a mix of architecture,

where the sun has since set.

An hour ago everything was different,

when the light was glaring before the end of day.

Now I turn to the Moon reflected in a blackened window,

creating another curtain to peak through.

Now the night couples city lights,

from shops, strangers windows, and cars passing;

soften the landscape of brick and cement.

Now my imagination expands into endless stories,

separate from mine, beyond my before.

Bridget Seley-Galway

Grolier Poetry Book Shop 90th Anniv. Celebration!

http://www.harvardsquare.com/events/musical-notes-90-donald-hall-ee-cummings-poems-set-music-fundraiser-benefit-grolier-poetry

The Sunday Poet: Deborah Leipziger

Deborah Leipziger

Deborah Leipziger is an author, poet, and professor. Her chapbook, Flower Map, was published by Finishing Line Press (2013). In 2014, her poem “Written on Skin” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is the co-founder of Soul-Lit, an on-line poetry magazine. Born in Brazil, Ms. Leipziger is the author of several books on human rights and sustainability. Her poems have been published in Salamander, POESY, Wilderness House Review, Ibbetson Street, and the Muddy River Poetry Review, among others.

To S

Draw me a map of your body,

its crevices and precipices

your tender places of longing.

Guide me through the unexplored places,

your Atacama desert

and singular oasis.

Let me trace the river veins

with my fingers.

Where are the bruises,

the disbelief,

and the fingerprints

of those that caused you pain?

Take me behind the waterfalls,

through the caves into the deep canyons.

Help me navigate the hollow places

of the space between us.

 --Deborah Leipziger
--  

Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perotta

 

Mrs. Fletcher by Tom Perotta. Scribner, 307 pages. $26.

By Ed Meek

A summer read that pushes our buttons and makes us laugh.

Tom Perrotta, who lives in Belmont, is one of a select group of successful American novelists and screenwriters. Dennis Lehane is the other local writer who has made it big.  Where Lehane’s work is dark and edgy and focuses on crime, Perrotta is a satirist who likes to make the reader a little uncomfortable by having his characters engage in behavior that flies in the face of political correctness. In one famous story, “The Smile on Happy Chang’s Face,” a father who is having trouble dealing with his son’s gayness, breaks his son’s nose when he slaps him. But then, Perrotta creates sympathy for the same character when his wife divorces him, he is shunned and he feels terrible about what he did.  By zeroing in on political correctness in his writing, Perrotta is able to make fun of many of our current cultural obsessions. At the same time, Perrotta is an accomplished writer who knows how to plot and how to withhold information to keep us reading. Finally, he can write with fluidity from a number of different points of view. As a grad student at Syracuse, Perrotta worked with Tobias Wolf who is also adept at all those facets of writing (Our Story Begins, This Boy’s Life, etc.) and Perrotta appears to have learned quite a lot from his teacher.

As the title suggests, the main character in Mrs. Fletcher is Eve Fletcher, a 46-year-old recently divorced woman who runs a senior center.  The novel shifts between third person sections from her point of view and first person sections from the perspective of her son Brendan. Brendan is a “bro” who is starting college at a local university.  These two characters enable Perrotta to take on the older single woman looking for love and self-affirmation and the shifting sexual and identity roles in the current college scene. 

 Because her son goes off to school, Eve decides to expand her horizons. She takes a class at a local community college in gender studies taught by a former male basketball star who has transitioned into a woman. When Eve receives a mysterious text calling her a MILF, she begins exploring porn and becomes obsessed with amateur lesbian encounters. Meanwhile Brendan, who has left his cheerleader girlfriend behind, falls for a beautiful college female softball player with swimmers’ shoulders who is running a club in support of autism sensitivity.  She and Brendan have much different ideas about sexual roles.

When Brendan first gets to college he meets with an insipid advisor who reminds him that “No means no.” I thought Perrotta might venture into the quagmire of rape on college campuses where a female victim might drag a mattress everywhere as performance art but he stays away from that touchy subject.  There are points in the novel when the characters come close to going right over the edge into wildness and the plot threatens to blow up, but Perrotta knows his audience or perhaps he has a prudent side. In any case, he pulls his characters back from the brink of disaster and into what we used to refer to as normality. In other words, it’s no Wonder Boys. It is the kind of novel you want to share with someone else and it will have you laughing to yourself as you’re reading and after you put it down.

With Eve working at a senior center, Perotta also gets to poke fun at the old (with a light touch) when Eve’s transsexual professor comes to the center to give a talk about her life, and when the young woman Eve has hired as an assistant sports  hardcore tattoos. Eve’s husband, who left her for a younger woman, gets more than he bargained for with an autistic son. In each of these cases, Perrotta upends a stereotype, playing with our preconceptions by developing his characters.

Mrs. Fletcher will make a funny movie. Will it be as good as Election? (one of the best satires of high school ever).  Admittedly, it isn’t easy to maintain a satirical tone throughout a feature length movie, and satire only works with actors who aren’t afraid of looking a little silly like Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick in Election or Francis Farmer and William Macy in Fargo. If we’re lucky Mrs. Fletcher will be out next summer.  That should be plenty of time to think of a better title.

Newton Free Library Poetry Series: Nov 14, 2017 Drexler, Ruescher, Young

Click on poster to enlarge

Poet Malcolm Miller Brought to Life at Endicott College

 

Malcolm Miller

REVIEW BY    Caroline Moll


Too often, we see stories of poets work going undiscovered or underappreciated until they have passed. A variation of this cliche is reflected in the style of a documentary titled, “Unburying Malcolm Miller.” This documentary concerns the late Malcolm Miller, a Salem, MA. eccentric, and often homeless poet, who was well-known character in his native city. I attended a screening of the film, and was able to sit down with director Kevin Carey (a professor at Salem State University), along with writer and friend of Miller, Rob Kessler. Each showed obvious passion for the film they created, saying the poetry sadly was overlooked during his life. This particular screening of the documentary showed 45 minutes of the full 60 minute film.

Before the viewing, Kessler gave me some background on his relationship with Miller, and what inspired him to make the film. He told me that he had been receiving poetry in his mailbox, with a note attached reaching “send $5 if you like this”. His reaction was to send the money, but never thought to read the books. Later he took the time to read them. He mentioned feeling that his biggest regret around it was not reading them earlier. Despite a questionable mental stability, the poet’s talent stood out. On multiple occasions, he asked Miller to to speak to students, all of which he declined. His death prompted Kessler’s reaction to take Miller’s work and get it noticed on a wider scale.

The feeling of honesty and divided views of a single person really drives this film. With a dichotomy of modesty and vanity as traits, interviewees on screen familiarize the audience with Miller’s character, while also showing him in different lights. Before the screening, when I was able to speak to Kessler (recently retired as a professor of English at Salem State University), he mentioned that Miller never wanted to be a coffee table poet. It was always about the writing, it seemed, and not the profit. The raw format allows for the ones in his life to tell their story fully and honestly. The shots also visually went along with Miller’s work. His poetry is satirical in tone, but he focuses a lot on nature in his topics, describing its beauty. Especially during moments where poetry is being read, multiple wide angle nature shots are used. However, other poems are read on location and on screen, including my personal favorite entitled “Tea”.

One specific quote stuck out to me. It is subtle, yet I find it one of the most important lines in the film. “There is beauty in everything”. In retrospect, I wish this quote was emphasized even more. In a way, it encompasses everything the film stands for; it takes an unusual subject and through his legend, creates something beautiful. The beauty in the film exists in its honesty, ditching flashy cinematography or over-the-top drama. It is truly the good, bad, and ugly, of the life this man led. We, as the audience, see Miller as the sketchy man hanging around Salem, the talented yet humble poet, and everything in between. The readings of his poetry are not anything exceptionally hitting, yet are true to the tone of the writing. You can openly hear the words as he means them, in his own idiosyncratic way. Carey explained that there reasoning to filming the readings outside. He had been hoping to add a sense of authenticity, which this technique achieved. Often times music plays in the background of scenes, perfectly selected for a beautifully simple aesthetic.

We are typically judgmental culture. I find the angle this film took admirable, as it shows Miller from different points of views. Carey took a subject that the public may have viewed as crazy or absurd, and uncovered an idea of his true personality and the life he led. This Caulfield meets Thoreau type of character/writer’s story unfolds through his own poetry and other’s reflections of him. Mentally ill, or too eccentric for the world to relate to? This documentary subtly criticizes those who can not see past a person’s intimidating front, to admire the art they create. 



 Caroline Moll is a first year undergraduate student at Endicott College, studying marketing communications/advertising. She has a passion for writing that began as a kid, and has stuck with her ever since. Looking to pursue a career in advertising, she hopes to be able to combine her love for writing and visual art.