Teachers keep on teachin

This from Andrea Hairston, a writer whose playwriting course I signed up for in a now-for-something-completely-different moment in college, and then dropped after two meetings--maybe one?--because I was oh so unready for it. Spiritually. Creatively. Emotionally. She got us right to work. I didn't know what I was doing. And wasn't ready to work from that place. (I remember something from our first assignment where we had to follow people around and record their gestures. Then write a scene with gestural information.) Well, now I want to come back to some of what I didn't learn then, and am looking up her work. I know there's so much I can still learn from her. Found this, from a guest essay she has up at The Angry Black Woman:

People with power, talent, and beauty don’t necessarily get wealth, success, and happiness. The tragedies that befall us are not simply caused by the flaws in our characters. Power and talent can be a torment in a system stacked against you. People can shun the magical ones, be jealous or frightened of brilliance. Social forces can thwart even the strongest will and structural reality can crush individual imagination and agency.

In all of my stories, History and the Future are always manifest in the now, in the Present. As a writer, I ask, even if folk are talented, powerful, and beautiful, what do they need in order to come through a treacherous world, whole and creative?

How can we conjure the wondrous world we believe in?

This is the struggle I love to write about.

Indeed, this is the struggle I live.

Whew. Can't wait to read her sf novel Mindscape. What a question. Yes. How can we ...? And: How are we?