Writing for Vision

It's not easy to see in the dark. But following up on his previous work, Writing to Heal, Kendall Johnson gives us some insights into how artists and writers can navigate an increasingly dark world and, in the process, create light for the future.

Cultural fragmentation, political unrest, and unrelenting ecological threats are all closing in on us, intruding upon our individual spheres in rapid-fire succession and with an alarmingly repetitive insistence. Everything seems to be falling apart.

The promise, and it is an ironic one, that those who create can give the rest of us is that human beings working together are the best hope for restoring our own balance, for revealing truths that can ultimately guide us toward change, toward transformation, toward hope. The creative soul is, by its nature, continually exploring alternatives, continually stretching boundaries, continually reaching for transformation.

Artists, whether they are creating visual or written works, music or drama, understand struggle and despair better than most. But they also understand perseverance. They are propelled by a need to express and to relate, to face uncertainty, and to speak in a language which many will not understand. And yet they persist.

The central message of Writing for Vision is to remind those who are prone to despair that this is exactly the time when persistence in the arts, even if they are quiet efforts, is the best hope for the future. The best promise for seeing beyond the darkness.

-Kate Flannery, Editor-at-Large for The Journal of Radical Wonder and co-author of Prayers for Morning: Twenty Quartets