Tonight is the second meeting of the Hubbard Hall Writer’s Workshop and Red is coming along. His first  outing as a media whore dog, very important work on my farm, right up there with sheep. He’s going to be a rock star. I have a wonderful group of writers in the workshop and have been talking to them about their blogs, writing ambitions and insecurities.

I have come to believe in my life that much of our culture spends a great deal of time telling us what is wrong with us. Creative classes – writing and art come to my mind – often seem to me to be to be about disempowerment rather than empowerment or encouragement. One of my students was told by a writing instructor that she had to choose between being an animator or a writer. She couldn’t do both, she was told, so she did neither.

Another saw her work chewed up at a writer’s weekend and left traumatized and discouraged. An awful choice to have to make, I thought. She called herself a “wannabee” writer, a term she won’t bring to my class.

I see creatively disempowered people all the time. They fear blogs. They can’t show their work to anyone. They are worried about opening up their hearts and loves. They are told all the time that creative lives are difficult, impoverished, for the very few and special, that a real writer removes himself from the world and has food brought to their rooms. I don’t think so.  We have amazing new tools with which to express ourselves – bless you, Steve Apple, for giving me mine – and all we need is a push, I think, to use them.

Almost all of them speak of being frightened to write, wary of showing their work. I don’t care for people who take money to discourage other people. So I don’t charge for teaching the work shop. I think many creative communities – photography, writing and art come to mind – have always been dominated by elites who teach the drama of creativity, almost as a martyr’s vocation. Their work is so complex and difficult, and so few people can do it. and it  requires a special neural system and vision of the world that most people come to believe it is presumptuous of them to even think of themselves as creative. I am so grateful that Gabriel Garcia Marque didn’t take a writing class so that he could have been told that parrots don’t speak and his writing was too metaphorical. Hemingway got it right I think. Writers and artists should write and make art, he said, and shut up about their agonizing lives.

I see writing – photography, art, too – as a compendium of many voices, each struggling to make sense of their world. Some make more money than others, but that doesn’t mean they are better than others. The grand poobahs of creativity hate the Internet because it allows everybody – eek! – a platform for creativity. They know that sooner or later, these people will find out that nobody outside of themselves has creative answers for them. It is an internal process, and they will ultimately do better sitting on a tree stump and closing their eyes for an hour than spending all their hard-earned money asking strangers what they ought to feel and do.

For me, the point is clear. To encourage people who want to be creative. To help them to see what they are doing right, not wrong. Anybody who wants to be a writer and an artist is one, the very second they choose to be. I remember an editor calling me up when I put my first photograph on the blog. “Why are you wasting your time with photography,?” he said. “You’re a writer, not a photographer. Your photos look like cheap Hallmark Cards.”

And then I remember asking Maria what she thought of my photos, and she just laughed. “They are all good, silly. Because you took them.”