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How the Doing the Arts Makes Us Better

January 26, 2016 by rurugby Leave a Comment

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I am currently re-reading Mark Vonnegut’s “Just Like Life Without Mental Illness Only More So.”

In chapter 17 “There’s Nothing Quite as Final as a Dead Father”, in his case the legendary Kurt Vonnegut, he talks about one of Kurt Vonnegut’s more famous quotes, the one that actually starts my chapbook, how about how art makes us better and creates something.

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

Here are some of Mark Vonnegut’s thinking about making art. He was a writer and also liked to paint watercolors.

My father gave me the gifts of being able to pay attention to my inner narration no matter how tedious the damn thing could be at times and the knowledge that creating something, be it music or a painting or a poem or a short story, was a way out of wherever you were and a way to find out what the hell happens next and not have it just be the same old thing. It’s better to live in a world where you can write and paint and tell a few jokes than one where you can’t.

All the arts are ways to start a dialogue with yourself about what you’ve done, what you could have done differently, and whether or not you might try again. Whether or not you want to make a living or can make a living at it, people who consistently bother to try almost always get good or at least a little better.

Kurt was always trying to reach a little beyond what he was sure of. His refusal to find a groove and stay there when he was famous and successful was admirable, but it was also because he dreaded what life would be if he stopped being creative, honest and willing to be awkward.

Right now I am trying to learn Spanish, I should probably do some Babbeling today on babbel.com. I am trying to learn guitar playing with the guitar for a while most days, and trying to write everyday with the blog and Three Good Things on Facebook. I guess one disadvantage of doing Three Good Things on Facebook only is that it is effemeral to me until I see the anniversary of the thoughts. But, I think that is okay, I guess I could make a Three Good Things Blog. So many of them are similar each day. I love my wife, I love the kitties, nature is beautiful, the little things matter.

I have been also quoting other Mark Vonnegut after Googling “Mark Vonnegut Quotes” on going on Goodreads, there are 3 pages of them.

“Beyond a certain point, gathering further evidence of the hurtfulness and shortcomings of one’s family, employer, et cetera is like eating the same poisonous mushroom over and over and expecting that sooner or later it will be nutritious.”
― Mark Vonnegut, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir

“I understand perfectly why some of my autistic patients scream and flap their arms–it’s to frighten off extroverts”
― Mark Vonnegut, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So

“Writing is very hard mostly because until you try to write something down, it’s easy to fool yourself into believing you understand things. Writing is terrible for vanity and self-delusion.”
― Mark Vonnegut, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir

This one is very sad.
“I don’t think the people today who start hearing voices, stop eating and sleeping, and run amuck are likely to get good treatment. Having more knowledge, better diagnostic capabilities, better medications with fewer side effects, can’t make up for the fact that most patients are being treated by doctors, therapists, and hospitals, who are operating under constraints and incentives that reward non-treatment, non-hospitalization, non-therapy, non-follow-up, non-care. Lost to follow-up is the best outcome a health insurer can hope for.”
― Mark Vonnegut

“If you believe that the dollars made by the pharmaceutical industry are plowed back into research that leads to better and better medications, you probably believe in the tooth fairy as well.”
― Mark Vonnegut, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So: A Memoir

“We’re here to get each other through this thing, whatever it is.”
― Mark Vonnegut

“What occurs to people when they read Kurt [Vonnegut] is that things are much more up for grabs than they thought they were. The world is a slightly different place just because they read a damn book. Imagine that.”
― Mark Vonnegut

“Introverts almost never cause me trouble and are usually much better at what they do than extroverts. Extroverts are too busy slapping one another on the back, team building, and making fun of introverts to get much done. Extroverts are amazed and baffled by how much some introverts get done and assume that they, the extroverts, are somehow responsible.”
― Mark Vonnegut

“Who but a brazen crazy person would go one-on-one with blank paper or canvas armed with nothing but ideas?”
― Mark Vonnegut

“None of us are entirely well, and none of us are irrecoverably sick.”
― Mark Vonnegut

“I often took him as one of God’s little jokes on me. When I was in desperate trouble, what saved me from a fate worse than death? To what do I owe my life? Was it love, affection, understanding, friends, wisdom? No no no. It was a man who looks like a poor copy of Walt Disney, drives pink Cadillacs, wears baby-blue alligator shoes, and appears to have the emotional depth of a slightly retarded potato.”
― Mark Vonnegut, The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity (I think this was Kurt Vonnegut he is speaking of)

“The biggest gift of being unambiguously mentally ill is the time I’ve saved myself trying to be normal.”
― Mark Vonnegut, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So

“He couldn’t help thinking that all that money we were spending blowing up things and killing people so far away, making people the world over hate and fear us, would have been better spent on public education and libraries. It’s hard to imagine that history won’t prove him right, if it hasn’t already.”
― Mark Vonnegut (on Kurt Vonnegut)

“Today it’s nice to be able to entertain odd thoughts without having to marry them all. Thank God. I can think whatever the hell I want. Entertaining odd thoughts won’t make you crazy. Refusing to entertain odd thoughts won’t make you well.”
― Mark Vonnegut

“At the end of his life, which had included financial ruin in the Great Depression, his wife’s barbiturate addiction and death by overdose, and then his own lung cancer, Doc said, “It was enough to have been a unicorn.” What he meant was that he got to do art. It was magic to him that his hands and mind got to make wonderful things, that he didn’t have to be just another goat or horse.”
― Mark Vonnegut, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So (on Kurt Vonnegut)

Another thing that I like in Mark Vonnegut’s book is that he has terrible handwriting too. Although unlike Mark Vonnegut my handwriting is okay.

Here is an excellent NPR story about “Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So” by Mark Vonnegut, that includes the first few pages of the book.

It’s an excellent book, that I still need to finish today.
***1/2

Filed Under: acceptance, books, creativiity, facebook, Kurt Vonnegut, My books

Colleen Hoover Tribute/ Inside Back Cover of Embrace The Geek Chapbook edition. My first chapbook and book #1 in my writing career.

April 11, 2013 by rurugby Leave a Comment

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My friend Colleen Hoover started her writer’s journey with me as a self-published author in January, 2012. I was one of the first people to read her amazing debut novel “Slammed”. She is a major tribute of my first book. Here it is as part of book #0 of my poetry writing career to 100 copy limited edition chapbook of “Embracing the Geek: A Writer’s Journey Selected Poems 2010-2013”. A better edited true bound edition of the work that will probably be around 75 pages (chapbook is only 45) will be coming out near the end of the month details on that soon. Here is my tribute to Colleen and buy her book, please. The poem “Write Poorly” is previously published in Colleen Hoover’s book “Point of Retreat” that was both self published in e-version through Kindle and other e-readers. It is also published by Atria publishing, and imprint of Simon and Schuster. I encourage everyone who loves poetry and a good story to read Colleen Hoover’s “Slammed” series. The first book is Slammed, second book is Point of Retreat, and the third book “This Girl: A Novel” is due out in ebook form on April 30th and print form on August 13th.
Colleen Hoover’s story of a social worker getting by, who writes a book after hours is inspiring. She lost sleep in order to write “Slammed” a young adult romance novel that involves slam poetry, and released it on eBook in January, 2012. And a few months later she was able to buy her first house, and become a New York Times Best Selling author. It’s the American dream and it happened because of the eBook. Although eBooks are still not great for poetry. You can’t keep the line formatting when you expand the text.
Thank you for buying my book, and I hope you enjoy it. You can contact me via, Facebook, Twitter, or my e-mail address. Let me know you bought my book and would love to friend you on Facebook at Edmund Charles Davis-Quinn. My twitter is @rurugby. And you can reach me by e-mail at edquinn@gmail.com. I would love any feedback and thank you so, so much for enjoying my writing, my poetry and my art. Make art, it’s good for the soul.
Edmund Charles Davis-Quinn
Westbrook, ME
April 11th, 2013.

Filed Under: acceptance, books, family, FridayReads, Kurt Vonnegut, No Filter, poetry, reading, The Blog, The Ecq Review

Embracing the Geek: A Writers Journey Selected Poems 2010-2013. My first book.

April 10, 2013 by rurugby Leave a Comment

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My first book called “Embracing the Geek: A Writers Journey Selected Poems 2010-2013” is almost ready to be available in PDF tonight.

I need to type in one poem that is still in journal, and then do formatting with my wife tonight.

The goal of the book is in the wonderful quote by Kurt Vonnegut in my 2nd favorite book of his (to Slaughterhouse-Five) “A Man Without a Country”:

“If you want to really hurt you parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

So make something, anything. A pot at a pottery store, it may not be symettrical, it may crack, it may not hold water and need to be used for pens, but it will be your cup, that you made, with your hands. And it will be art.

Or like me and Lanna Lee you could blog every day. If you average 100 words a day it’s a novella, 250 words a day a full modern novel (365 pages). And the post can simply be “today f**king sucks. Ow!” That’s a blogpost you kept up your writing journey. And you will keep improving and if you use a blogging program like WordPress easily archive your work.

It’s also about gratitude to my writer’s journey. From 2nd to 4th grade I wanted to be a writer. I learned to create my work on a computer and let it flow. Then in 5th grade, I had a terrible, horrendous, not very good English teacher that thought me being on a computer was an abomination of his narrow worldview. These terrible teachers have tenure, and continue to infect students for decades. Meanwhile the amazing, creative teachers who inspire art, creativity and writing are on 1 year contracts and not hired on. There is both my amazing 4th grade Language Arts/English teacher and some of my friends I am thinking of here.

The book starts with the Vonnegut quote and then has a very long acknowledgment. If you are listed on it, congratulations! You have earned a free PDF copy of the book. I only have 100 copies of the book, signed and numbered so if you want one assigned (there are about 35/100 books unclaimed before even PDF release) please let me know on the blog, or my e-mail address edquinn at gmail dot com (to avoid spam), my Twitter feed at @rurugby or my Facebook at Edmund Charles Davis-Quinn.

Here is the acknowledgment:

This limited edition chapbook is designed for all the people who have helped me in my writing and poetry journey. So if you have made this list of people who are awesome, you have earned a free chapbook. I would love to do trade for the poets in the room, and to pass the gratitude forward for those who are not. And maybe even inspire you to write.
I first want to dedicate this chapbook to the love of my life, the wonderful, fabulous and amazing Lanna Lee Maheux. She is my rock, my partner, and makes me life immensely richer. I love you.
Next I want to dedicate this book to the radically inclusive and safe space, Rhythmic Cypher. The 2nd poetry slam from the amazing small city of Portland, Maine. This was a dream and vision of my good friend Tina “T Love” Smith, and had a difficult birth in an imperfect space. Now that it has found its true home at the amazing Dobra Teahouse in Portland, Maine at 7pm on Sundays, it’s one of the best poetry slams in America. A place where genderqueers, gays, lesbians, freaks of all size, shapes and colors, and those afflicted with madness can feel safe. Where a 16 year old with panic disorder can read a beautiful and amazing poem about her condition and feel safe. Where Toben Tilgenman can make an amazing poem about what it means to be a man who was born in a woman’s body. Where music backs the poets, and the poets back each other. It is a spectacular success and I am so happy it is part of my community.
Next I want to thank New York Times bestselling author Colleen Hoover for first creating her wonderful young adult romance “Slammed” that used the power of the poetry slam to make the beautiful story of woman loses dad, woman loves boy across the street, boy across the street has no parents so transcendant, thank you. My friend Gennyfer Hanley sent me a link with the free eBook of slammed, and I loved it wrote a positive review on Amazon saying I was a slam poet and how much I love the book. She followed my blog at ed2dq.com and we became friends.
While Colleen was writing the follow-up to Slammed this time ahead in the story and from Wil (the boy’s perspective) called “Point of Retreat” she happened to see my blogpost/poem “Write Poorly” about simply writing and turning off the editor. She printed it off, put it up by her computer and looked at it whenever she felt discouraged or needed to remember to just write. I plan to make my second chapbook called “Write Poorly” with 500 copies. It is amazing to me that my little poem on my often not that read blogpost that often gets less than 10 pageviews a day inspired an author so much. So much that she put it in her book “Point of Retreat” that is a bestseller that has been read and loved by hundreds of thousands of people. Her 3rd book “Hopeless” is the number two eBook on Amazon so far in 2013, behind only behind Nicholas Sparks’ “Safe House”. Bemazing. That fact is surreal and amazing, that I may have more page reads in 2013 than the absolutely incredible and amazing Andrea Gibson who was the number one seller of the best slam poetry publishing house in America, Write Bloody Publications in 2012. Just ridiculous, if you haven’t read Andrea Gibson’s work yet and live in Portland, Maine go to Longfellow books and get a copy of her work, it’s outstanding.
Next I want to thank the Port Veritas writing, slam and poetry community for showing me love, giving me a place to read, and encouragement. Wil Gibson is a force of nature, and him saying “Write Poorly” is the best thing I ever read meant a lot. I have seen Port Veritas go from Acoustic Coffee, to the much beloved North Star Café, to Wil’s House, to the Mayo Street Arts Center, to Blue, to the wonderful restaurant Local Sprouts, and to it’s current location at Bull Feeney’s upstairs every Tuesday at 7:30pm.
I would be incomplete without talking about the amazing contributions of Tricia Hanley to Portland’s poetry scene and craft beer community. Her little bar, Mama’s Crowbar in Munjoy Hill, has some of the best craft beer you will ever drink in a wonderful small place. It would be my regular if I lived on the hill, but alas I live in Westbrook. They also host a reading hosted by Ryan McLellan that is unmiked, and at 9pm on Mondays. I do wish the reading is earlier so I can attend more. Unfortunately, I wake up at 4am most Mondays. It’s a great place to read.
Next I want to thank the heroes, friends, and compatriots of my journey towards embracing my inner geek. My recently departed father, Henry Edmunds Davis who passed away very recently on April 1, 2013 at 66 years old to brain cancer. You are one of the nicest men and fathers any son could wish for. I expected you to live so much longer, as did my wonderful mom Christine Davis. Their marriage is the great love I have seen through my life and it’s so sad it’s over after 42 years. Mom, I love you.
I also want to thank my wonderful and insanely intelligent sister, Melinda Davis Layten, who is ABD (all but dissertation) in computational biology and SUNY – Stony Brook. Dad’s illness I think took a lot out of my sister and brother-in-law Robert Layten, and I hope my dad’s journey away from pain, suffering and cancer allows her to become the brilliant scientist she is meant to be.
Next I want to thank the people who I have known the longest growing up in Montgomery Township, New Jersey north of Princeton. This chapbook may have the longest acknowledgements ever and I will just name some of my good friends that made feeling like an outcast in school easier: Greg Seidel, Bill Dyer, Conrad Saam, Anthony Schubert, Ben Dalbey, Eva Hanna, Kayt Sukel (who has an amazing book called “Dirty Minds” about the neuroscience of sex and love), Beth Cooper, Laura Hahn, Susan Flora …
Teachers including: Cheryl Watson, Jay Prag, Mr. Juliano, Mr. Harry Brobst, Ms. Williams and so many others.
And of course fellow poets including, who are mostly performance poets. I am about 20% a performance poet, and 80% a writer. Many of these excel at both and include: Heidi Therrien, Greg McKillop, Beau Williams, Jen Jacques, Toben, Emma Bovril, Paulie Lipman, Rachel McKibbens, Andrea Gibson, Billy Tuggle, Ryk McIntyre, Tony Brown, Melissa May, Sam Sax, Denise Jolly, Zanne Langlois, Robin Merrill and the fabulous Nancy Henry.
There are so many others I can mention but this is already an over 1,000 word acknowledgement to a chapbook. To all the friends I have made in the amazing city of Portland, Maine. Twitter has been an amazing way for this geek to meet people so I must thank Chyrstie Corns, and .. for creating them.
Also want to thank my Twitter heroes and friends like Alex Steed, Alexis Lyon, Keith Luke and so many others who make Portland a jewel of American cities.
I can’t name all the people who are part of my journey towards acceptance, but thank you all so much.

The last line of the book is “Make art, it’s good for the soul.” And it is so true.

Thank you and with much love,
Edmund Charles Davis-Quinn

Blessed be.
Make art! Suck!

Filed Under: acceptance, acceptance, books, breathing, Edmund Charles Davis-Quinn, Embracing the Geek: A Writer's Journey, FridayReads, graphic novels, grieving, haiku, Kurt Vonnegut, library, meditations, minerva, My books, NaPoWrimo, page, poetry, Port Veritas Poetry Tuesday, reading, Short Stories, sickness, silly, slam, spirit, Spirit of Sunday, Spirit of Sunday, The Poetry Conversation, The Saturday Night Review, Thoughtful Thursday, Weekly Blog Themes, westbrook, Whispering Deer, woods

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