Pilgrim at Home: Stafford discusses RACC fellowship project

Here's a note copied from the Regional Arts & Culture Council's "Artnotes" newsletter, in which RACC Fellowship in Literature winner Kim Stafford discusses the project he'll pursue with the fellowship funds.

Pilgrim at Home
By Kim Stafford, RACC Fellowship Winner in Literature, 2008
(The Regional Arts & Culture Council is thrilled to award this year’s Individual Arts Fellowship in Literature to Kim Stafford. RACC selected Kim through a rigorous and competitive application and panel review process, and he will receive $20,000 for his work. Given his mastery of the written, spoken and sung word it seems fitting to let Kim tell us about what he has planned. --Eloise Damrosch)

Something mysterious happens when you get a call from the Regional Arts & Culture Council that begins, “Are you sitting down…?” The news that lightning has struck, that you have been chosen to receive a creative Fellowship for a year of focused work in art, leaves a scorch mark on the heart, and quickens the pulse to danger level. Many tributaries from your life now come rushing into one. It’s time to work in service to the culture of our region.

But couldn’t this happen without the fellowship? Couldn’t an act of will swell the river of your creative attention? Yes, and this is what I tell my writing students every day: Choose your calling. Recognize what is at stake. Establish your creative practice. Find friends who can help you seek your most authentic imperative to create….

Strangely, though, I have found it hard to be selfish like that. Is that the right word --selfish? To focus one’s attention on writing, painting, photography, dance or some other semi-self-indulgent discovery process can run against the grain of a work ethic that has kept me at a college for 25 one-year contracts, that urges me to take on almost every little job that comes my way. To turn aside from at least some of that clamor in favor of pure creative time requires a high-torque psychic shift. Now I must turn to art first, and fit my obedient life of labor around that kindled flame.

Can you tell I’m giddy? I’m babbling. But I do want to witness for this mystery: We say we love art. We say we want to experience cumulative practice toward haunting structures of discovery, to be carpenters in the brash crew for making a City of Art. But we defer --or at least I have long deferred --total attention to creative discovery. I work part time at Lewis & Clark College, and part time at the Pacific Northwest College of Art…and I respond to several dozen requests each year for additional small jobs in writing and teaching here and there.

My project for the RACC fellowship --Pilgrim at Home: Local Encounters Beyond the Epoch of the Car --is to wander. My project is to venture on foot or by bike or bus to Powell Butte, to the deepest shadows of Forest Park, to neighborhoods and river banks, to the source of stream, path, intuitive whim --and there to report in writing on the people I meet, what I learn from resonant places, what wants to be said through me, and to consider what our local experience might be like after the era of the automobile.

Somebody has to do it. How might we tune our culture in a new way to find pleasures and be citizens without this beloved machine we live for?

A friend once took a sabbatical in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He wandered the streets with his notebook, trying to be like Faulkner, he thought, to be a writer of stories that would hold up to the master’s way. But in the wee hours on Decatur Street one night he encountered the street musician they call Bucket Man --the one with drum sticks and five-gallon plastic pail for wild syncopation every day at Jackson Square. Without warning, rapid fire, Bucket man demanded of my friend: “Why are you here? What have you learned? Have you put yourself in danger?” Then Bucket Man disappeared, and my friend wandered on with a new agenda for his seeking. These three questions from a familiar stranger became an assignment for the writer in service to his city.

My plan is to open my attention to what the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gassett calls “meditations,” or “exercises in intellectual love,” or “salvations” --short evocative reports that strive to save places that speak, people who witness, ideas that beg to be considered as we all seek kinship with each other and the earth.

All it takes, really, is a notebook, and the freedom to turn aside.

To read more about Kim Stafford’s Fellowship Award visit www.racc.org/fellowshipstafford. Also visit Kim’s site at www.lclark.edu/~krs.