By Scott Mahoney
Oberlin News-Tribune

I happened to catch a glimpse of Luka strolling down the hall on his way to lunch and his teacher, Mrs. Burton, with her intrepid watchfulness, several paces behind. Luka had been lucky enough to have another veteran teacher, Mrs. Garrett, last year for Kindergarten. That room had his teacher’s hand painted trees and sky and clouds on all the walls and window shades. And I was another lucky one, meeting them all last year when I was artist in residence at their school.

This is an article written by David Schiopota and Stacy Goldberg of Young Audiences of Northeast Ohio. It was originally published on Uniting Arts and Education.

When I was raising kids, the lovelies, I had very little time to write songs, play guitar, send little postcards and play out. But I did both, kids and art, because of my inner drive. I’ll never know whether my children or I or both would be better off now had I never followed that drive. These compulsions don’t ask our approval and I, for one, seldom question their motives. But I’m doing it now.

"Creativity is neither a rational deductive process nor the irrational wandering of the undisciplined mind but the emergence of beauty as mysterious as the blossoming of a field of daisies out of the dark Earth."
Thomas Berry, The Great Work

The challenge and lament of kindergarten teachers the week before Christmas strikes a winsome chord in me as I wind down from a spate of arts residencies in far flung public schools. Ponder days disappeared from my date book mid Fall. Early excursions o’er gray interstates to small Ohio towns took my imagination elsewhere.

"Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud

But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair

Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go"

Certain sons and daughters asked to stow their overflow with us so they might follow their dream to far off places. Since I’d begun to clear out the glacial accumulation of stuff from our attic and basement awhile back, inspired by the dismantling of my dad’s place, I was less than aligned to the prospect of yet more stuff. But family can hardly be denied when room can be made.

In Folly, protagonist Rae Newborn works her way out of debilitating depression by building a house. Artisan of wood in her former life, she pieces together her redemption on a solitary island in the Pacific northwest.

Rae is not only the scarred creation of her writer. She is the writer’s scars, revealed as socially useful things.