Matter Notes - update -

Matter Notes – update

Matter Notes is on an extended hiatus.

Due to my involvement with several creative projects – fiction writing, music, film production, and other miscellaneous stuff, the blog has gone quiet. I plan to revive it at some point. The old posts remain available, so pull up a chair, pull on your favorite beverage, and have yourself a fine browse.

If you’ve come for:

War on the Humanities, start here.

Writing and its Discontents, start here.

Creativity as spirituality, start anywhere.

You are reading a post from Matter Notes, Karen Michalson’s blog on creativity as spirituality and the war on the humanities. Her most recent novel, The Maenad’s God, is available on Amazon.

But if the writing doesn't matter to the writer solely for its own sake, without hope of external validation, then it doesn't matter.

If you can’t write for yourself, if you can’t write for those shadows creeping along a silent wall and measuring out your time on this earth in increments of everything else you could be doing, if you can’t write while knowing you are destroying your time on a beautiful madness that nobody will ever validate and many will mock – then please don’t call yourself a writer. Real writing isn’t for sissies. It’s more than putting words on the page. It’s denying everything else to be able to put those words on the page while knowing that the mess of language you’ve created is all you’ll ever get out of it.

-Karen Michalson, “Why We Read Strangers”