Welcome to Art Needs Us!
We're here to amplify creative organizers, bringing their behind scenes brilliance into the spotlight.
“To create means to relate.”
—Corita Kent
We all know these people, the ones who plan events, send invitations, reserve rooms, and share Google Docs. They are the people who bring up others’ names to the table. They do the often overlooked work of creating spaces in which creative communities can thrive. They do the vital work of community building that each of us needs in order to survive as artists, storytellers, and writers.
We think about the creative process as something solitary, artists working alone in a dark room, isolated from the rest of the world. But creativity does not exist in a vacuum and creatives can’t do this work alone. We thrive in community. From famous creative communities like The Bloomberg Group to art friendships like Charlotte Brontё and feminist visionary Mary Taylor, art need community. We are here to celebrate people who help writers leave our desks and connect with other writers.
We called this project Art Needs Us because art needs each of us. And we all need each other in order to share our work. In his treatise on creative economies, The Gift, Lewis Hyde writes “a circulation of gifts nourishes those parts of our spirit that are not entirely personal, parts that derive from nature, the group, or the gods.” We each have our personal gifts, but the work of bringing us together in community is what allows those gifts to circulate. Readings, parties, workshops, write-ins, at these events, writers gather to dust off our personal gifts, share them, send our words and stories out into the world.
Art needs community connection. Art in community transforms from a personal gift to a cultural value. And for that, we all need those people who help make community happen. Our art needs community organizers. Art needs us.
Meet Trish and Kris
Meet Trish Fancher: Four years ago, I made two new year’s resolutions: first, take no new lovers and second, find or build creative communities. I was mildly successful at the former and wildly successful at the latter. Now, I have every sort of writing community: workshops with friends whose project I believe in with all my heart, Monday morning accountability groups, brainstorms with wine on zoom, long walks with friends up hills so steep that I lose my breath and lose the story’s thread. I was also raised in a cult. I know that community is life giving at best, and life-controlling at worst. I spend a lot of time thinking about what our communities are doing, and what they are not doing.
A few months ago, I left Kris a seven minute voice message about how I don’t want a Substack but that I had a great idea for a project to showcase creative communities. Not only did she listen, but she responded with a voice note of her own, agreeing to collab on this project (which did, obviously, eventually become a Substack). As writers and community facilitators, we both understood immediately that this project would work best if done as a collaboration—with one another, with the incredible community organizers we’ve interviewed, and with you, the reader—so we all can learn from one another
Also relevant, I’m a writer and teacher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I have a PhD in rhetoric and writing. I host a monthly writing group the Lowstate Writing Salon and it gives me new life each second Tuesday. For my first book, Queer Techne, I spent a couple years digging in the archives of the invention of computers, looking for the communities of gay men and women who shaped early Artificial Intelligence. For my second book, an in-progress essay collection, I’m digging into my own personal archives, trying to uncover what I learned about community by being raised in a cult, escaping, recovering. It’s about family and community, and how love and control are often only a hair’s width apart. Read an essay from the collection in The Sun. www.pfancher.com/
Meet Kris King: Hi I’m Kris! A writer, teaching artist, and yoga instructor based in Washington, DC.
While writing has always been a core component of my creative process, in the past few years, I’ve started shifted from thinking of myself as a “writer” toward thinking of myself as a “creative,” that is, someone who gets deep pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfillment from creating whether what I’m creating is a piece of writing, a lesson plan or yoga sequence, a community event, a sloppy doodle, a warm loaf of banana bread, or what have you. With this in mind, I think teaching (both writing and yoga!) and community facilitation provides countless opportunities for me to grow and stretch my imagination and discover new, interesting, and eclectic information.
Further, I believe that art enriches our lives and opens doors to knowledge and understanding and, to that end, that community is the cornerstone of creativity. Inspired by the walking artists of the 1970s, I think a lot about process vs. product and the role of the artist alongside the audience. I am currently working on a project called The Wonder Walks, collaging responses from walking interviews I facilitated with others (including Trish!) over a two year period, alongside research into vocation, community, and spiritual ecology. Art Needs Us aligns perfectly with this project, as well as with my work facilitating community programming in Washington, DC—from Poetry Hikes through Rock Creek Park to Creative Salons, Writing Workshops, Literary Pub Crawls, Yoga and Journaling Sessions, and more!
To put a fine point on it: I put equal stock in my creative work as a writer as I do my creative work as a teaching artist and community facilitator and I believe that to be a teacher is to be a lifelong student, a role I take very seriously. I think one of the many benefits of being a student—whether in yoga, the creative arts, or others—is the understanding that learning is a continual journey, rather than a destination. It is constant work to remain aligned and in tune with your intuition alongside a community of others with their own understanding of the world. But remaining true to, and curious about, that work pays off both on and off the page and on and off the mat. I also pursue this work as a graduate student at George Mason University where I am an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction (emailing Trish with semi-regular total breakdowns as I try to navigate the wild world of academia). kristenzoryking.com
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