Rachel Barlow is an inspiration to me. She has been a student in my writing workshops for a number of years and is one of the most creative and compassionate people I have ever known. Rachel has suffered from severe depression as well as chronic abuse, she is a loving mother, wife and an amazingly diverse creative who has a successful blog, draws and publishes books, sketches and has become one of the most successful landscape painters in Vermont.

Her work is beautiful, filled with emotion and feeling and detail. She has worked through debilitating depression and found grounding and purpose in her work. She had a show of her paintings at the Round House Cafe Sunday afternoon, and while there, I learned of a remarkable new program she has creared called drawpaintcreate.org, a program to get art kits and creative tools into the hands of newly-arriving refugee children coming to America.

This is a powerful idea and is desperately needed, and I will launch a campaign tomorrow on my blog to support her idea, which is already distributing art kids to isolated and bewildered children. She is seeking to raise $900 to get 60 art kits made and distributed. It is a beautiful and urgent cause.

I will be writing more about this tomorrow, today belongs to Rachel and her artistic accomplishments.

You can follow her rich and diverse work on her website, and see some of her paintings there.  She has offered several of her paintings to support the new Mansion Assisted Care project to put some art on the empty walls of some of the residents.

Rachel affirms so many of my theories about writing and creativity. She had many hard and confusing times, she put her blog up, painted and sketched, wrote and published, found her landscape work. She uses new technology skillfully, but writes and sketches from the heart. Hers is big. In America, I sometimes feel so many hearts are turning to stone, hers has turned to gold.