amazing idea :)

the need to communicate...and to feel the message has reached... anyone...
sad

It's a terrifying and heartbreaking problem for artists, and one that makes you feel sometimes like you're a complete foreigner to society. I was trying for a feel that would at least click with, if not overtly refer to, John Gardner's Grendel.

I tried to soften the blow a bit with the image strongly hinting that the member of the audience that understands best is the dog. :) It's often our animals that we rely on to understand us best and love us no matter what our problems are. I may have to retouch the image to make the dog more visible. It hardly shows up at all in the smaller version of the image for the mobile site....

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does it make me less of an artist that it's not a preoccupation of mine? Or do you think it's just a result of how I came to it all - an assumption (however erroneous) that if an editor thinks it worth commissioning that means at least some of his circulation will read it?

I don't think all artists have the same need to be understood, that desire for a connection... Some artists just put something together and throw it out there (or keep it to themselves, even) and never worry about what happens afterward in any way.

And there are artists who do need to know that there are people who are getting the message -- but know that the messages they send aren't so hard to decipher. Or if they are, the artists in question have actually met and talked with a few people who understand and know they're in the audience.... Knowing there's someone out there who gets it is quite often enough.

And getting an endorsement from an editor or a publisher or a curator or a producer or what have you -- some kind of gatekeeper who might find your work worth sharing to the rest of the world -- that counts for quite a bit. :)

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Your description was so visceral...I wanted to actually experience the performance but am satisfied enough to have read about it. Really fascinating story, had my rapt attention.

Thank you, Becky. :)

A bunch of my stories have animals in them that behave as human beings. I'm not sure why that is. It occurs to me that this is the second one a tree sloth has shown up in....

The more bizarre the stories are, the easier it seems sometimes to get across the important bits, the feelings or the actions. I really wish I understood why that is....

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Metaphors give trappings to vaporous ideas, and when you free yourself of literal meaning, you're open to expressing anything. I think comparisons are easier than definitions. Maybe by writing something removed from reality you are just freeing yourself better to express what you want to say.

We only store things in our brains in terms of comparison and contrast. We don't think in definitions; we think in simile and metaphor. That's why richness of experience improves out ability to communicate.... This is like that, that is like this. The more of this and that we have to draw on, the richer our vocabulary becomes.

Or words to that effect. :)

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