Cultivating Creative Community
All by Dyana Herron
When I look back on this year, I see a deep and abiding vein of grace that has brought me to the place I am now, safe, and I am so grateful for that. But it has existed in what has seemed mostly like a nightmare, so much like a nightmare that my memories of it are fragmented and disjointed, and the images rise up out of it like terrible fish out of a black pond.
Why we think of up as good and down as bad, I’m not sure. That directionality seems arbitrary, but everyone knows that heaven is above us and hell is below. When we are sad, we are feeling closer to hell than to heaven. We are feeling low. We are feeling down.
I think we must try, though, through our artmaking or loving or any of the myriad actions we perform in a day, to “sing of somewhat higher things.”
In my letters I tell him, “I wish you were here so I could make dinner for you.” I daydream about how when he is released, eight years from now, I’ll have mastered new cooking skills and will prepare him whatever he wants, however much he wants. I imagine I’ll hold a spoon coated in sauce or frosting up to his mouth and say, “Here. Taste this.” And he’ll close his eyes and taste it and then smile, like we were in a movie or something.
I wanted to do it alone. I lit the candles in the kitchen and turned on some music. Today, this would be the way I talked to God, and what I wanted to talk about was my grandmothers, and the way I wanted to talk about them was by doing something with my hands that their hands had done time and again.
You have been betrayed by your body, when you had gone around all this time thinking you and your body were one thing, inseparable, a winning team. And although the doctor’s approach you with their sterile, shining instruments and unfailing clinical cool, still you panic, and inside you feel hurt. 
Wait — a book? All this — the tears, the sure-to-come-lecture from my mom, the imagined corpses — over a book? I was so relieved I laughed out loud. 