Keep Writing

Why I Write, Why Music Matters, Why Stories Matter

In case you were wondering….

I write because I have always written myself into my next becoming. At this point in time, I have twenty albums of music trailing behind me. There were hits and total misses along the way as I honed my craft. I'm an untrained musician and songwriter and so in those early days I learned by listening, reading, playing until my fingers developed thick calluses and singing along with Joni Mitchell’s Blue until I could imitate all those strange and beautiful intervals. I was intuiting my way forward, and so that explains some of the early unevenness, sometimes even within the same song. But I had good instincts and was I was absolutely tenacious.

It is a strange thing to have your personal and professional growth be so public, especially for someone who is by nature a pretty private person. You can listen to this album or the next and hear, "Oh that's when she figured out not to rhyme words like orange" "That's when she started reading Natalie Goldberg's Writing Down The Bones" "That's when she figured out don't date jerks." But it does allow me to look back and see how I was always circling around particular questions, always reaching further than I could see at that moment. I can listen to a song and see how I was intuiting so much more than I knew at the time. Each song was a flashlight illuminating the next step forward.

I can say without a doubt that music, poetry, writing and art saved me in every way that matters. My daughter used to tell me "Mom, you're crabby, go write something." I write because I can't imagine living an unexamined life or how I would possibly process living in this broken, bewildering, beautiful world without it. And yet, if writing was only for myself, I don't believe I would have been so compelled forward. Terry Tempest Williams wrote “finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.” It is one of those lines that has stayed with me and encouraged me to keep creating because I need it, it saves me, but not just me alone.

There is something in the human heart that keeps rising up, that against all odds does the right thing, and senses what shimmers in a moment. We create stories and songs and art of all kinds to name what is unnamable, to give form to our suffering and healing, to map where we get lost, to remember what is still true, still good, still possible.

I keep writing because it is what is mine to do in this troubled world, and because I believe art, and what it describes, honors and expands will be what save us.

In such pivotal times, when the worst of human tendencies are on full display, tsunamis of news about greed, revenge, violence, conscious cruelty and fear meet us every day, how important it is to bring forth another story, a better story.

We are the authors of our lives, but also the authors of how we might live.

I’ll be honest, I am frightened and enraged most days by the direction we are going as a country, as a world wide community. And so each day I wake up and ask “what is mine to do” and “who will go with me?”

The answer that comes back is “be kind, be curious, be courageous, be clear, be compassionate even to myself and make art.

Keep leaning into beauty, keep telling a truer story, keep listing the luminous and naming the transcendent.

Keep calling in what shimmers in our daily lives, keep writing the song that rises up with purpose and without apology.

Keep telling the story that must be told, and in the telling makes us all more whole.

Keep writing.

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Practice

After reading the poem below “What Makes Sense” create a list of what makes sense to you…even in senseless times.

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Question

In the comment section, list some of the things that make sense to you.

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Music Always Music

Ok…this song was written with the thought that every line could be a writing prompt. Yes I’m that kind of nerd :-) It’s called A Book of Questions from my album A Great Wild Mercy.

Poetry too…

What Makes Sense 
by Carrie Newcomer

I pledge alliance to a drop of dew
Wobbling on a broccoli leaf,
To the silver pattern on a zucchini frond
A perfect spiral at the center of a cabbage head.
I bow my head to the licorice smell of fennel filagree,
The taste of rounded peas and knee-high corn
And the perfect dun of barley hay.
I namaste a row of beans,
To garlic scapes and turnip greens
To the sweetness of sweet potato vines
To the last red radish and first blueberry.
I lift up my face to the summer sky
The sound of larks
And the feel of dirt
To all that keeps making sense
In senseless times.

One Inch Photos

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Fall Tour Schedule

I’ll be back on the road this fall. For more details on my public performances and workshops visit my website tour page at www.carrienewcomer.com/tour

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