The Craftsman

Weekly wisdom to level up your creative life in 3 minutes, for free.

A SHORT STORY

Ten years ago, I got to meet the great writer Charles Bowden.

In an email exchange before we met he wrote, “The day promises to be miserable weather, so we can all sit inside, open a vein and rail against the wind.”

I couldn’t believe it. Chuck was one of my favorite writers of all time. The beauty and eloquence of his prose has always cut me to the core.

I was incredibly excited to talk with him because I was working on a piece with Theater Mitu about the “murder capital of the world,” Juárez, and this was Chuck’s life work.

He was a mythical figure. He was someone who had a bounty on his head from the drug cartels, who worked tirelessly for the citizens of the border to uncover the truth, even in the face of death.

We spent four hours talking about the Drug War, but we also talked about life, art, and who we are when we are when we are most ugly. Chuck helped me understand that we should never look away from the darkest things about us because that is where we will find that which is most beautiful.

Chuck passed a year after we met, but his ideas still haunt me.

I remember how he told me, “There’s another word that I hate and that’s closure. There’s never any closure in real human experience. It’s not like wow, I’ve solved that! There is no closure. You’d have to be a turnip to have closure. Dogs don’t have closure, no reason you should.”

Or his idea about the moral obligation of a writer— “Look, you have a gift, life is precious. Eventually you die, and all you are going to have to show for it is your work.”

Chuck was a craftsman. I use that word particularly because he once told me, “I’m not a journalist, I don’t write in a fucking journal.” But he was a craftsman, he woke up everyday and wrote not because he wanted to but because he had to. He was attempting to uncover something mysterious about humanity and himself.

How do you define your craft? What are you attempting to uncover through it? How do you want your work to be remembered?

A CREATIVE TOOL

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I have been a huge fan of RunwayML since 2020 - when I created this weird little social media video featuring machine learning choreography below!

A PIECE OF ART

“Joy is Such a Human Madness” by Ross Gay

originally published in The Book of Delights

Among the most beautiful things I've ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about her pedagogical aspirations or ethos, how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: "What if we joined our wildernesses together?"

Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexpected territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. Might, even, join.

And what if the wilderness - perhaps the densest wild in there - thickets, bogs, swamps, uncrossable ravines and rivers (have I made the metaphor clear?) - is our sorrow?

Or... the 'intolerable.' It astonishes me sometimes - no, often - how every person I get to know - everyone, regardless of everything, by which I mean everything - lives with some profound personal sorrow... Everyone, regardless, always, of everything. Not to mention the existential sorrow we all might be afflicted with, which is that we, and what we love, will soon be annihilated. Which sounds more dramatic than it might. Let me just say dead. Is this, sorrow, of which our impending being no more might be the foundation, the great wilderness?

Is sorrow the true wild?

And if it is - and if we join them - your wild to mine - what's that?

For joining, too, is a kind of annihilation.

What if we joined our sorrow, I'm saying.

I'm saying: What if that is joy?

Grateful,

Michael