Good Art: What it is and How to Share it

I’ve written before about the power of stories and how they’ve held me. I’ve also written about the stories we call “myths”and their beauties. Now I’d like to start exploring specific stories and the ways those stories have changed me. But I also have in mind something larger, and for that, I’ll really like some help.

This direction is, in part, inspired by an interview I saw with Neil Gaiman (one of my favorite storytellers). In response to Gaiman’s 2012 commencement speech and its development into the book Make Good Art, the interviewer asked him a really good question: 

What is great art?

Here is Neil Gaiman’s response:

Great art for me is anything that provokes a deep emotional reaction at the time that you hear it and then you can’t get [it] out of your head… whether it’s a painting or a piece of music or a book…With a book it’s that moment where you put it down and you go…,“I’m not quite the same person that I was before I read that book; I’m not the same person that I was before I saw this painting.” University of the Arts 2013 interview

I would like to use this as the guiding principle for the stories and other art that I share here, as well as the stories and art that I would like you to share with me and everyone else in the world. This will be a safe place for people to share stories (in any medium) that have deeply moved them and have positively changed the way that they see and experience the world. And in the future, I would also like this to become a place where storytellers and other artists will feel comfortable sharing those of their creations that have changed them.

The Last Unicorn by Su Blackwell (2012)

With this storehouse of tales and the lessons we’ve distilled from them, my hope is that “each reader will undoubtedly find his or her favorites: be they tales that edify or perplex, astonish or delight, be they myths that stick in the craw, force one to reconsider, or make the heart melt. For there [will be] as many gates in [the following posts] as there are stories (and some would say, as there are readers)” (from the preface to Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism)

To get us started, here’s a piece I just wrote about Into the Woods and why fairy tales still matter.

Now, if you have experienced good art that has changed you and would be willing to share a bit of that art with others, please e-mail me at seeinglessons@gmail.com.

Happy story-sharing…