WHAT?
To live is to be creative – we are all creatures of creativity. I mean, I remember figuring out how to tie my shoe laces. That’s creativity. The ants figure out how to get into the hummingbird feeder! I’ve worked cleaning common areas of an apartment buildings, as a phone solicitor, in my father’s manufacturing plant, as an office manager, and for one day at Burger King where I (creatively) took my uniform off, left it in the bathroom and walked out. At 21 I traveled cross country with a band (The Midnight Special) that played top-40s bar music (lots of “Proud Mary” & “Hotel California”…) I met them here in Detroit, then went with them to Texas, Colorado & California. There, the band broke up so I stayed in California and went to photography school. I returned to Detroit on the insistence of my two best friends (who knew I was lonely in L.A. and offered me a place to live in Inkster.) I spent the next 20 years as a professional photographer.
WHY?
Writing is a transformative art – all art is. If you can write down three things you saw today (oatmeal, a squirrel making it across the road, a shoe in the street) then you are paying attention to your world differently. You might even own your immediate and long term history differently. You can use those images in a poem or work of prose, you can ball them up and throw them out, you can hand them to someone who may acknowledge (or resist) them, but, by writing you not only discover yourself, but you are in control of those discoveries in new and exciting ways.
I began writing seriously after those two best friends died tragically less than three years apart. We all three had lived together for a year after I returned from California. In 1990 Jim, who I laughed more with than anyone else in my life, died from AIDS. Less than three years after that, Linda, who I saw or spoke to every day since we met in high school, was murdered by her husband. I had been with her that morning (yes, he then killed himself, leaving behind a three-year-old.) My family completely ignored me. What was I to do with such trauma and loss?
HOW?
I went to college at age 42, got an Associates, a Bachelors, and then studied in both an MFA and in an MA program in literature. I also attended a gazillion poetry conferences and workshops. I learned from great writers and great teachers of writing.
Creativity has always saved me. I was a child in & out of the hospital from age 5 until a teenager. I was terribly behind in school. My home was not always a gracious or safe place. But, drawing was. Music was. Gardening is, putting together a shoe rack or tackling a closet is. Teaching is creative and life affirming. But writing, even if it is making a list, releases onto the page something tangible, some tangible history, even of stirring this morning’s oatmeal.
Joy Gaines-Friedler worked for ten years at Oakland Community College in Michigan as a Literacy Para-Professional in a Developmental Literacy classroom and she tutors Political Science and Humanities. She runs creative writing seminars and workshops around the community, including Haven Residential for Battered Women, Children’s Village for “At Risk” girls, Oakland Community College, Oakwood Hospital, Henry Ford Hospital, Eaton Academy, Roeper School, The Jewish Historical Society of Michigan, and Springfed Arts. Among her awards are First Place in The Litchfield Review 2006 contest and First Place in the 2004 Mandy Poetry Contest. She has a Pushcart Nomination. Her poems have been featured in many literary journals, including, The Driftwood Review, Pebble Lake Review, Lilliput, HazMat Review, RATTLE, Margie, The New York Quarterly, and others. Her poetry books are Like Vapor and, most recently, Dutiful Heart.
Her books may be purchased directly from her website or on Amazon: Like Vapor; Dutiful Heart
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