Naleighna Kai's Literary Cafe Magazine January 2018 New Year, New You | Page 32

A Call to
Arms
J. D. Mason
“Stories are like spiders, with all they long legs, and stories are like
spiderwebs, which man gets himself all tangled up in but which look
so pretty when you see them under a leave in the morning dew, and
in the elegant way that they connect to one another, each to each.” –
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
This year, 2017, definitely turned the world
upside down and inside out. It’s been a year
of WTFs? and of “I can’t believe I’m having to
protest the same crap my parents protested back
in the day”. Our country had turned her head
180 degrees to marvel at her ass, and so yeah.
It’s been challenging, attacking our sense of
well-being, culture, and what we “thought” was
progress, leaving souls feeling shredded and all
of us scratching our heads wondering “How bad
is this going to get before it gets better?”.
As a creative person, it’s been tough maintaining
a shield around my psyche to keep all of the
negativity from infecting my creative flow.
My goal as a writer has always been, first and
foremost, to entertain readers. All I’ve ever
wanted was to provide an avenue of escape from
day to day life, into a world that hopefully helped
to take your mind off your problems and focus
it on someone else’s. My challenge in writing
has been to take readers on adventures and to
immerse them in a world that was different from
their own and to introduce them to fascinating
and interesting people that they might not ever
meet in real life.
This year has been particularly challenging for
me because, like everyone else, it’s been hard
not to feel enraged, defensive, and afraid. These
obstacles hinder creative flow and make it
difficult to focus on seemingly inconsequential
things as trivial (in comparison to what’s going
32 | NKLC Magazine
on in the world) as writing made up stories.
Images on social media bombarding us with
the faces of our sons and daughters being
beaten and shot because they made someone
else feel—as always comes to light after the
fact—“afraid for my life”; news of missing people
being trafficked, enslaved, abused and tortured
has been unbearable. So many feel helpless to
stop these things from happening. They have
taken their toll on all of us. It’s in our eyes, this
posttraumatic stress resulting from a year that’s
truly shown its ass in the worst way, causing us
to ponder, “What is humanity, really?”.
And so I questioned, how important is what I do
in a world that’s turned on itself and embraced
all of this ugliness? Is it worth it to continue?
Do people even care anymore? And then, I
answered myself. Being an artist, a creator, is
more important now than ever. Art is life, an
expression of life, and people need it most in the
darkest hour. Art heals, and it makes us laugh. If
you don’t believe me, check out Alec Baldwin’s
impersonation of Trump on Saturday Night Live,
and see how much better you feel afterward,
when you’ve laughed for ten minutes.
As artists, we need to continue creating and
working harder than ever to make sure we tell
our stories, share are paintings, our movies,
and music. People need to be refueled and
reinvigorated, enlightened, and uplifted when