All That I Hope To Say

“All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.” - E.B. White.

My dear friend M recently told me she needs an unselfish reason to write her story. Without it, telling the story feels yucky to her, like some big ego trip. A voice comes into her head saying, “You’re just trying to get attention,” and that stops her words from flowing.

I get it. I’ve got those voices myself, the ones that say things like, Who the hell are you to think you’ve got something valuable to say? Everything worth saying has been said a million times over.

There’s no arguing with that choir. Those internal carpers will out-reason me every time. Which is why I try to put aside reason when it comes to making stuff. The reasons for our actions that our brains come up with are rarely the real ones anyway. Mostly, we follow our mysterious longings and invent rationales afterwards.

CreativityTanya ShafferJanuary 25, 2024creativity, writing, memoir, agnosticismComment

The Song You Came to Sing

There was a sign on the wall at the Lawrence School of Ballet, in Lawrence, Kansas, where I grew up, that read, Make sure the song you came to sing does not remain unsung. Throughout junior high and high school, coming and going from dance class, I saw that sign almost daily.

That sign frightened me—What if I don’t find my song?—but it also filled me with determination. I would find my song. Nothing and no one would keep me from it. I would find it, and I would sing.

Get Out Into It

February in Michigan is thirteen months long. - Bob Hicok.

That’s why I don’t want dogs! said a friend. You have to take them out every day, no matter how crappy the weather.

It’s a gray Monday afternoon, and the temperature outside is a bone-chilling 14 degrees Fahrenheit. I have fetched my offspring from school and walked the 29 steps from my heated car to my heated home. As I sit by the fire, clutching a cup of Bengal Spice tea in my hands, inhaling its cinnamon steam, the last thing I want to do is to go back outside. But within the hour, that’s exactly what I’ll do.

Being the mama of three energetic canines means that every day of the year, whether there’s rain, snow, icy sidewalks, gusting gales or, for that matter, scorching sun and humidity to rival the rainforest, I walk.

I do this because, although we have a fenced yard where they can chase squirrels and deposit their bodies’ waste, I know that this ritual of the daily walk, when they get to go beyond that chain-link fence and bask in the wider world’s infinitely varied smells for an hour or so, is the highlight of their day. I know this because the closer I get to the spot where their leashes hang, the more wildly they dash back and forth, wagging their tails and prancing with glee. I figure it’s the least I can do for them in exchange for all the unconditional love they shower on me and my family with their exuberant greetings, licks, snuggles, empathetic gazes and rollicking joy.

But here’s the other thing : As much as I long to stay hunkered by my cozy fire, as soon as I suit up in boots and coat and balaclava and gloves and step out the door (after four and a half years in Michigan I can tell you with absolute conviction that your well-being in winter is all about the clothes), something unexpected happens: I fall in love with the world.

Not Buying It: My Date With Marketer Bob

A lot of artists I know hate marketing. They know it’s necessary, but they’d give anything for a fairy publicist to appear in a glittering puff of smoke and promote the hell out of their latest project with a wave of a wand, so they could forget about websites and email programs and social media and keep right on making stuff.

Personally, I’ve long had a more positive relationship with this aspect of the business than many of my peers. When I started my career as a solo performer fresh out of college, I was filled with energy and enthusiasm for every aspect of the job, including promotion. I finagled friends into taking photos of me in costume. I wrote my own booking brochures, blurbs and press releases. I printed the text for my flyers on my printer, cut and pasted the images (literally, with scissors and glue — we’re talking 1988) and went to the copy shop to duplicate them. I walked every commercial neighborhood in San Francisco and the East Bay armed with flyers, tape and a staple gun, posting my image in spots both legal and il. Anyone I chatted with about my show for even a moment walked away with flyers in hand. I, on the other hand, usually managed to walk away with their address scribbled on a piece of paper to add to my embryonic mailing list. When I mailed out postcards for my upcoming shows, I added personalized notes in ballpoint pen. I felt like my audience members were my friends, and indeed, many of them were and still are.

Fast-forward thirty-plus years. My mailing list is now an email list. I have a website and the requisite trinity of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts, though I definitely prefer a discursive warble to a succinct tweet. My creative pursuits have evolved too over the years. In addition to writing plays and prose and hosting a podcast and taking photos and even still acting and singing once in a while, I’ve been leading Off-Leash Writing Workshops for the past three and a half years.

Never the Less

A few years ago, after reading an article about the impact of climate change on the arctic circle, I had a vision.

A friend had given me a temporary tattoo that read Nevertheless, She Persisted. As I applied it to the smooth skin of my inner arm, I marveled that Mitch McConnell, of all people, in describing his attempt to silence Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor, had inadvertently handed the feminist movement such a powerful and enduring rallying cry.

I was meditating on my living room couch the next day, my eyes closed and the ink on my arm already beginning to fade, when I saw that same sentence written across the sky in puffy cloud letters, with the first word separated into three parts: NEVER THE LESS. Seeing it broken up like that made me understand it in a new way—not only does she persist, she is in no way lessened by all she’s been forced to endure.

What came to me next was an image of the earth as viewed from outer space, that glistening blue-green-brown ball with white swirls of cloud hovering above it. With it came a deep knowing that the words NEVER THE LESS, SHE PERSISTED referred, not to me or women in general or even humankind, but to Her—the earth Herself. She is the one who persists, who will continue to persist, no matter what we do to Her, or to ourselves, or to Her other, non-human inhabitants. Even if we managed to destroy Her ecosystem for a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years, that would be barely a breath compared to the five billion years She has left before Her precious sun burns itself out. She’d have plenty of time to get us out of Her (eco)system. She’s uniquely positioned to sustain life, and sustain it She will, with or without our cooperation. Should we go belly up, no doubt other species will make their way in, or evolve their way up, to fill the void.

Give It All, Give It Now: A Manifesto of the Creative Life

Confession: I still doubt myself. A lot. Even though I’ve lived more than half a century, even though I’ve been putting pen to paper on an almost daily basis since I was nine years old, even though I’ve made the arts my profession throughout my entire adult life, as actor/writer/solo performer/producer at various times, I still ask myself why I do these things and what makes them worth doing.

There’s an ebb and flow to this inner questioning—there are periods in which I’m so utterly absorbed by the work itself that the existential dilemmas blessedly recede and I’m carried along by the current of pure doing. Love those times. But when the Muse takes a call on her cell, leaving me with the ditherings of my own mind and the eternal struggle for a more disciplined daily existence, the doubting voices return. The most persistent of these is the one that says Why bother in the face of…fill in the blank: mortality, climate change, humans’ abhorrent treatment of each other, violence, racism, poverty, greed…

A year ago, I added regular teaching to the list of creative endeavors that comprise my professional life. Leading others in the act of writing has been an incredible gift, but it’s also ignited a blazing new round of self-doubt. Who am I to take the lead? Am I capable of holding a room? What do I have to give? And accompanying all of that, the old underlying refrain: why why why why why…

Since this inner Why has been with me for so long, I’ve developed a litany of responses, drawn primarily from the work of other artists: songs, poems, passages from favorite books. So when the questions arise within me, these alternate voices rise up to answer them. Together they form a kind of Manifesto of the Creative Life, a buttress against despair. This is why. And this. And this. I share them with you today, dear Reader, in the hope that they may help you through your own moments of darkness. And if these things don’t resonate with you as they do with me, I hope the examination they sprung from may inspire you to develop a Manifesto of your own.

Thinking About Wearing My Jewish Star Necklace

It’s been more than a year since we moved across the country, but there are still boxes that I haven’t unpacked. Last weekend I came across a delicate bubble-wrapped packet inside a small jewelry box. When I carefully pulled back the tape and unfolded the bubble-wrap, out fell a tiny gleaming Star of David on a slender silver chain. Made of iridescent glass, it shimmered when I moved it back and forth.

My first thought was, I’ll wear this today.

My second thought was, Maybe I shouldn’t.

After the Giddy Plunge

How to describe the beauty and challenge of that day? How high and steep the dune, how fine and bright the sand? How the ocean—no, Lake Michigan (ha, I wrote ocean!)— spread out below us, an impossibly pure colorscape, gradations of aqua, turquoise, teal leading out to a deep true cobalt?

We were at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, in the Northwest corner of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. We were traversing the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive when we stopped at #9, the Lake Michigan Overlook.

At first I tried to stop D and E from rolling down the nearly vertical dune, fearing they’d lose control, plummet over the edge and disappear. They started rolling anyway, tentatively at first, stopping and starting, looking back. I glanced uncertainly at my husband—I’ll call him H—and he, ever the cautious one, shook his head. I called, half-heartedly, Boys, come back. They ignored me, of course, and I discussed with nearby adults whether it was safe to go down. A couple with toddlers shook their heads and left. But then a man with two young kids, maybe 7 or 8 years old, appeared on the horizon as if by magic.

The Me Who Stayed

When I was younger, I was judgmental about the use of anti-depressants. I thought that unless you were so depressed that you couldn’t get out of bed, taking anti-depressants was a cop-out, a refusal to engage with your own darkness. When a college friend started taking them, I was disappointed. I thought she was depriving herself of an essential part of the human journey, that facing whatever arose unadulterated was part of what was required to season the soul.

I was judgmental about meditation too: I thought it was a waste of precious time that was better spent taking practical, concrete action to make the world a better place.

It seems I am doomed to do everything I judge.

Landscape of the Heart

I was born and raised in Kansas, and though I haven’t lived there in more than thirty years, its stretches of wheat and corn are within me still. That’s the thing about where you’re from. Even if, like me, you’re born to Jews and immigrants, who are no more of that place than an olive tree or an arctic fox, you are of that place simply by growing up there. Somehow the soil of the place, the shape of it, takes root inside you and never lets go.