Notes on Festivals, Writing, Creativity, and Identity

The challenges of this past week means this post is a bit less polished.

It is important to support local and small scale writers. The kind of writers who have great stories to tell but who you will rarely find in a traditional comic shop or bookstore. I make an effort to try to make it to as many events which support these writers as I can. Though often all I can afford to give is my presence.  Last Weekend I was able to go to two festivals celebrating local and small press writers.

The first was CAKE (Chicago Alternative Comics Expo ). Some of these comics were alternative in subject matter and some were alternative in how they were physically made or drawn or written. But you could tell that these were works of love. And it was an opportunity to see comics I would never see elsewhere, like one about feminist thought in Finland or one which the author explained as "Transgender individuals doing boring at @#$% stuff". These were comics which shared the stories and experiences which rarely make it into mainstream comics. These were also more personal stories which were created for one particular audience and therefore did not feel that they had to be everything for everyone.

I also went to the Printer Row Lit Festival which is a yearly salute to writing in general. There were individuals authors with the one or two books they have written. There were small scale publishers (including quite a few academic publishers). There was even  Book TV. It is always cool to be surrounded by individuals from every walk of life who are all joined by a love of the written word.

I happened to go with my roommate, who would introduce me as a writer. This made me feel warm and gooey but also like I was somehow trespassing at the same time.  It made me ponder how I consider myself as someone who writes (Blog posts, Poems, Reflections, Short Stories, Novellas during Nanowrimo, etc) but calling me a writer feels a little wrong. Maybe because, despite coming from a family of writers, I somehow see real writers as these angels of the written word who are published (and sometimes even paid) and have the power to change everything we know about others, about The other, and about ourselves.

I have been thinking about what being a writer means and the meaning of Legacy as I have been processing the tragedy of Orlando through listening to and developing a obsession with the musical Hamilton. As I wrote when I finally heard the whole soundtrack this week:

I have no tidy answers or endings for this pondering so far. I will continue to write. I will continue to struggle with the question if I am a writer. I will continue to put words down one after another and hope like the great writers, those words will touch others, and change the ways they see the world or themselves. I will hope that my ramblings and muses and thoughts add up to something meaningful. And that I will be able to reach higher then I could ever imagine.