This week’s a little different. I’m not starting with a quote, with an author, because I’m hoping some of you will be my authors moving forward. So this week is a request: will you trust me with one of your stories?
                There’s an old idea of the artist as a kind of parent, sending out their immortal children—The Iliad, Macbeth, Moby-Dick—into the world. I understand the wish to make yourself immortal, but I’d rather leave that wish behind. I like art as a place where we meet, as the bridge we pull into existence, a beautiful, surprising, impossible chance, between us. It seems incredible (in the sense of unbelievable) that I can throw an arc of stone from my mind to yours, that you might want it to land, might build the other side of the bridge so that this new path begins. So we can stand on the bridge we’ve made and look down at the water, or up at the sky, and talk to each other. And help. It seems like it shouldn’t be possible, but it is. That’s incredible in another sense, too. Maybe we’re all The Incredibles, stretching out and racing off and holding together so that individuals become communities. Become families.
                “You mean artists as conduits,” a professor told me a few weeks ago when I tried to explain.
                I smiled. “Something like that.”
                I think everyone has a story. I think everyone has something to teach. Over the last years I’ve created a project, Voices, to help build shared spaces where these somethings are heard. Voices weaves together different people’s real stories to give us a glimpse of ourselves and each other, and so pull us together. So far my Voices projects have been grounded in a place, but now I’m going to do one grounded in time. My next project is about right now, about what it’s like to be alive with COVID-19 and physical distancing and all the rest. It’s not about my stories, it’s about yours, so I’m asking: do you want to write down an important moment from your recent life, and share it with me? Want to help build this bridge?
                Here is a page with instructions and a link to share stories. Please feel free to pass it along to others who might be interested.
                Sometimes I don’t know where I’m walking, but the fact that we get to walk together is wonderful.