Make art, truth, and beauty
work for you for a change. by HR Smith When I was in preschool, my mom took a writing class at the local community college. Then she took it again. And again. The whole time I was growing up, she was taking some iteration of the class. Her writing crew was an eclectic bunch, very different from the goody two-shoes that she hung out with during her regular social life. She was proud of the fact that they were banned from the local Dennys for being too rowdy. The instructor—an extremely prolific freelance writer with a butterfly tattooed on her face—was less about driving people to generate publishable material (although that certainly happened) and more about throwing out writing prompts like: “Kill someone, and dispose of the body” just to see what happened. Witnessing this was a valuable education in art as a counterpoint to the grind of day-to-day life, both the paid kind (my mom’s jobs usually had “analyst” somewhere in the title and involved a lot of spreadsheets and office politics) and the unpaid kind (everything to do with family). Writers’ group was a bulwark against the scope creep of day-to-day existence.  Making a living off of art is demonstrably hard. Making art once you’ve figured out how to make a living doing something else is, if not always easy, a hell of a lot more sustainable. Community colleges like PCC and Mt. Hood are good places to start since they’re often the most affordable option, especially for studio classes like pottery, but Portland is full of arts organizations that may be more convenient to where you live and when you’re available.