May 31
Lessons from My Grandmother on Unrequited Creativity
My grandmother wrote poetry from at least the 1920s until shortly before her death in 2001. She typed her poems on a typewriter, assembled them into hand-organized anthologies with titles and indices, submitted them to magazines and publishers, collected the rejections, and submitted again. Grandma had lived through war, famine, occupation, and displacement. She just wanted the world to read her…
#art and self-expression#audience-free creativity#creative fulfillment without validation#creative practice without metrics#creative process without audience#creativity and chronic illness#digital archive personal history#family archive digitizing#grandmother legacy#intrinsic motivation creativity#Jewish diaspora poetry#making art for yourself#making things in a noisy world#metrics and creativity#poetry rejection and resilience#Rahel Gil poet#shtetl poetry#social media and creative worth#unrequited creativity#why we make things