Adorning The Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making
By: Andrew Peterson
B&H Books (October 15, 2019)
174 pages

Adorning The Dark is a wonderfully poetic book about being an artist. Peterson weaves his own story into practical advice that all artists can use, particularly songwriters. This book reads like Patti Smith’s books Just Kids and M Train, told from a theological perspective. As I take on little projects myself (even if they are only blog posts of poems, drawings, and random ideas) I see how making art is such a calling and daily struggle. Somehow, maybe, you were made for this. Or you weren’t.

Two of my favorite quotes:

I’m not ashamed to admit that when I go to Barnes & Noble I still visit the fantasy section first. I still run my fingers along the spines and study the cover art. And I still feel that 1987 tingle. Sometimes I even read some of those books. I tell myself it’s just for fun, but I’ll let you in on a secret: I’m on the hunt. Somewhere out there, there’s another Tolkien. Somewhere out there, men and women with redeemed, integrated imaginations are sitting down to spin a tale that awakens, a tale that leaves the reader with a painful longing that points them home, a tale whose fictional beauty begets beauty in the present world and heralds the world to come. Someone out there is building a bridge so we can slip across to elf-land and smuggle back some of its light into this present darkness. I’m always looking for that bridge. I suppose you could call it a quest.

I confess, a mighty fear of irrelevance drove me to this vocation, a pressing anxiety that unless you looked back at me with a smile and a nod and said, “Oh, I see you. You exist. You are real to me and to this world and we’re glad you showed up,” I might just wither away and die. That’s not exactly a noble reason to fling your creations into the world, but it’s a decent place to start.

Buy this book.

Devotion (Why I Write)
By: Patti Smith
Yale University Press; Reprint edition (September 4, 2018)
120 pages

Devotion (Why I Write) is a poetic memoir that highlights selected glimpses of the writing life. The romantic life portrayed comes across in fiction, travel, and the rhythmic poetry of everyday life. More than I already do – this book made me want to read and write full-time. To spend the days lost with paper and words. I also devoured both of Smith’s previous memoirs Just Kids and M Train. If you care about writing and art, read Patti Smith.

Two of my favorite quotes:

Why is one compelled to write? To set oneself apart, cocooned, rapt in solitude, despite the wants of others. Virginia Woolf had her room. Proust his shuttered windows. Marguerite Duras her muted house. Dylan Thomas his modest shed. All seeking an emptiness to imbue with words. The words that will penetrate virgin territory, crack unclaimed combinations, articulate the infinite. The words that formed Lolita, The Lover, Our Lady of the Flowers.

There are stacks of notebooks that speak of years of aborted efforts, deflated euphoria, a relentless pacing of the boards. We must write, engaging in a myriad of struggles, as if breaking in a willful foal. We must write, but not without consistent effort and a measure of sacrifice: to channel the future, to revisit childhood, and to rein in the follies and horrors of the imagination for a pulsating race of readers.

Buy this book.