"You can teach people how to read you, my partner said, gently. He paused, then amended the statement: "You will have to teach people how to read you." He was referring to my body of work as a playwright. I had just been venting, I cringe to admit, about being misunderstood as an artist.
There is an idea, or perhaps an ideal, among professional artists that one's work should be able to stand on its own. In actuality there has only ever been a small proportion of creatives who could present provocative work without defending it. New voices, young voices, historically silenced voices, have always had to train the mainstream ear to appreciate our timbre.
There is a related ideal that a person's vote should be able to stand on its own, that our civic duty can begin and end at the ballot box. I say "related" because I consider political organizing an intrinsically creative endeavor. The writer and activist Adrienne Maree Brown describes political organizing as science fiction, since it requires collective imagining of a future society that does not yet exist.
This story is from the November 2022 edition of Town & Country US.
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This story is from the November 2022 edition of Town & Country US.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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