What Mary Brown Taught Me: Art as Community

Nine years ago I met Dr. Mary Brown. And I thought she was the most self-rightous bitch. You know the professor who thinks that her class is the only one you’re taking? The work load for Creative Writing, a simple 200–level class, was overwhelming. I was an athlete. I worked, I paid rent. I had other things to do.

              At mid-terms of that particular class, Mary and I had a sit-down meeting. I had missed over half of the class periods up to that point. I told her that I was sorry and that I would do better, and I mostly meant it. I was also dealing with a defeating case of post-breakup depression, a pretty consuming party schedule, life as a year-round college athlete. In my mind, I had a lot going on. A 200-level writing class wasn’t particularly meaningful in the scheme of my priorities.

              In fairness to my immature self, I only had so many hours in the day. I decided that I was more interested in what I would learn from a class than what grade I would receive, so any level of “jumping through hoops” (including participation/attendance grades, which I summarily dismissed at the time) I just rejected. This wasn’t necessarily all-out belligerence, although that cropped up at times. Really it was a decision that experience and learning trumped feedback and grades. I still mostly stand by this value, but at the time I misunderstood the relationship of feedback to learning. Still, I lived according to a certain degree of individual value judgment.

              Mary Brown, however, would not fall in line with my assessment of academic life. And it drove me crazy. She was this uptight, rule-driven taskmaster who insisted that doing things properly was better than doing them well. She insisted that class attendance was importance, which reeked of ego. Oh, yes, Mary, I must be in your class, to gorge on your endless wisdom?

              Life has, as it does, continued its onward march. Nearly a decade of it, and I’ve grown up a little bit. Even by the time I graduated, I had learned that Mary was more or less the opposite of all I had assumed: her approach to writing and teaching was humble, and yet ambitious. She encouraged readers and writers to dare, to buck the rules and to create great works rather than good assignments. She rapidly became one of my favorite professors, and her faith, her approach to work, her belief in the power of literature is one of the prevailing theologies, ontologies, foundations of life that I hold to. It is mystical and spiritual and hard to peg down, but it’s so very real, and so very foundational to how I approach the written word.

              Mary Brown did not care that I was there to hear her lectures. She cared that I was there to engage in the sacred art of literature. Writers cannot exist without readers, and readers cannot exist without writers, and a class setting cannot operate without both in ample supply. I believe that what she was interested in was not blind obedience, was not simply the rules of attendance, but rather steeping students in the two-way, multi-dimensional act of creation.

              I have come to believe that a work of art is not complete when it is finished. A written piece is not complete unless it is presented to a reader, who continues the creative work through interpretation. A work of art is presented by an artist and interpreted through viewing, reading, engaging. What creates a work of art is not simply what the artist brings, but what the viewer brings as well; these two things fuse in a mystery not unlike marriage, or sex: two become one, amplified. What makes an enduring work, a classic, an eternal gesture, is a piece that resonates with readers, with consumers, infinitely. Thus, it never stops creating, which is a sacred act. We are still moved by Shakespeare’s characters, or the enduring, ancient struggles of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Faulkner, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, talked about the necessity of tackling enduring themes rather than topical situations. It is these themes that continue to resonate throughout humanity, throughout time, throughout the experience of interaction and interpretation that round out what a piece of art can and ought to be: infinitely creative, infinitely holy. 

              Mary Brown understood this. She understood that creation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. She understood and taught me—not aggressively, but through the seeds of her convictions, that took years to bloom—that art is a collaborative effort. That art is a mystical experience, that art builds on the history of those who have come before and weaves into the creative work of a creative god, that art requires us to live in community, to both engage and shed our loneliness, our disparate value judgments, and instead live the vulnerable and terrifying life of an artist: a life that is lived wide open on the page, that cannot exist without some great and mysterious other reading, viewing, engaging, and creating alongside us. This is eternity: the endless rhythm and rhyme of creation mating with creation to offer something new and beautiful to the world, something that, at its best, resonates across space and time and continues to create long after the work of the artist is done.