Art Saves Lives: Bringing Our Light into the Dark by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

I sat cross-legged on a curb in the middle of New Jersey in the middle of the 1970s and wrote a poem about despair. I was fourteen, it was humid and windless, and I was waiting outside my father’s girlfriend’s apartment to go home where my father and I had barricaded ourselves in half the house while my mother and siblings lived in the other half. It was my first poem, but I told myself that it was as good a time as any to start.

Then again, I already knew how much art saves lives. I had been mitigating the damage from being born into a domestic violence situation through drawing, painting, sketching everything in sight most of my childhood or pouring my considerable energy into practicing “Brian’s Song” on the piano. My parents were too young, too ill-equipped, too broken themselves. I had the bruises to prove it.

So many of us grew up cowering in corners with a scrap of paper or a chorus of hope we had just made up and sang repeatedly to ourselves to crowd out the mother crying, the father slamming his fist through a wall, the ground falling away. So many of us grew up dog-paddling to some island of safety, real or imagined, which for me, turned out to involve making marks on paper one way or another.

I couldn’t imagine what my life would become.. I only knew in those early years of writing by flashlight under my covers, at school when I was supposed to be doing something else, on buses and trains, in cars and doctor offices, that this was the way through. Over fifty years later, I’m still sitting cross-legged, writing on the floral couch I dragged into our living room from a curb.

We’re here to be lanterns for each other in the dark, helping us listen together to hear the beating of our good hearts.

The next poem and the next taught me to pay attention and stay curious, essential qualities for life, especially when rooted in trauma. That’s the thing about writing: we start with blank space and we turn it into something else while it does the same for us. In the process, we feel just a quarter-inch more alive, a hundredth ounce more committed to staying that way.

When I started writing, I had no idea that this wasn’t just about survival or that it would lead me to many others opening their lives to the page, their pages to their communities. I just had to write. Then to support my habit, I stumbled into teaching and found – surprise! – my callings were twins.

Teaching taught me teaching just as writing taught me writing. I’ve logged enough miles in each to cross this country on blue highways dozens of times: 33 years at the college level, teaching English 101 as a way to write meaning into our lives as well as years mentoring graduate students to design interdisciplinary projects for their lives and communities. All along, teaching spilled over any pretend walls of academia, starting when I began offering community writing workshops, propelled by the notion that since writing saved my life, it could help others do the same.

I’ve worked with farm kids and rich kids tentatively or smugly starting college, adults who blew up their lives or had their lives blown up around them, luminous elders weeding regrets while finally telling their truths. Doors swung open, and my writing workshops and I were invited into community centers, public housing projects, hippie gatherings in the woods, half-way houses for addicts, tiny colleges on the high plains, big medical centers in the city, art centers and open prairies. From the nervous 17-year-old just moved into a dorm, 300 miles from a town of 68 people to the 77-year-old at a writing workshop because he’s scared and shaken by his third cancer, we’re writing to save our lives. From something. For something.

A few weeks ago, I joined 17 people on Zoom, each person here because they’re living with serious illness, part of a workshop series I’ve been doing for a local medical center for 22 years. We looked into the intimate squares of each others’ living rooms, kitchens or bedrooms. Someone wrote about her cancer returning and not knowing if anything could be done to treat it. Someone read her piece about people her age going to bars and staying up all night when she can’t even leave her house. Someone said he’s so lonely and his back and heart ache all the time. Around the fire of our open words and faces, we found warmth and light.

We are here to be stewards of each others’ truths, witnesses to our own preciousness as we unearth and revise the story we’re living. We’re here to be lanterns for each other in the dark, helping us listen together to hear the beating of our good hearts.

Artwork (As seen on homepage card for this post): New Direction, Grace Cavalieri, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 16 x 12.