The Creative Spirit

I flew back east last weekend, and I was reminded again what avid storytellers my friends and family all are. Because it’s where I grew up and spent my first twenty-four years, a lot of the stories shared were about Providence in the 70s and 80s. That little city has changed dramatically since I lived there. The scraggily park where my family played football now hosts a popular farmer’s market every weekend, drawing people from all over state; the drug dealers and chain-link fences in Fox Point have been replaced with artists and condominiums; it appears the current mayor has no obvious ties to the Mafia. I wouldn’t say my hometown is unrecognizable, but it does feel like a living monument to people’s unquenchable desire for something new.

A whiff of melancholy passed through me as my brother and I drove by an Indian restaurant that used be a café called Penguins, a cool little place where I worked for a few years and met many friends, and where my wife and I had our first date. Gone. Loss is the saddest idea anyone’s ever had. I’ve had it plenty in my life, and carried on with the emptiness in me it leaves behind. The notion that something good has vanished and can never be retrieved is anathema to the creative spirit. Tempting to tell a story about those old institutions, as if doing so would preserve in our hearts what no longer exists.

Our drive that day ended at my father’s apartment, where we joined my sister and mom to celebrate his 90th birthday. We told a lot of stories that afternoon over cake and ice cream. As he listened to them, my dad began to cry – moved, it seemed, by both the memories and our fond attention. I wasn’t looking forward to this party for a number of reasons, but seeing him like this I was glad I had made the trip. I saw in him the beating heart I sometimes forgot, buried as it could be in familial complications and frustrations. That’s his center, I thought, and always has been.

A good story, I decided, shouldn’t preserve anything; it should carry us forward. That’s where we’re headed, after all. Plus, the memoirist in me knows my past is largely an invention of my imagination, something recreated to move or inspire me today, to remind me why life is worth living. I don’t want to hear about what’s gone. Kindness and love and curiosity and inspiration can’t be taken from me, no matter what’s torn down or buried. The spirit of creativity is interested in the eternal, seeing only evolution and never extinction.

Check out Fearless Writing with Bill Kenower on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.

Everyone Has What It Takes: A Writer’s Guide to the End of Self-Doubt
You can find William at: williamkenower.com