The Creative Life

Three hundred Junior High School students shove their way into the auditorium. Backpacks thump on the floor, folding chairs screech. I stand next to the podium and watch kids squirm in their seats, poke one another and flirt. When the principal announces, brightly, that a biographer is here to speak to them, I hear a couple of groans. Sullen faces, slouching bodies, eyes rich with one message: you can make me sit here, but you can't make me interested.

These kids know in the deepest fibers of their young bodies that being assigned a biography is the kiss of death. A book of at least 100 pages followed by a book report. Boring dead people. Outlines, topic sentences, and footnotes. Misery.

I'm out to prove 300 kids wrong. Or at least some of them. I've written two biographies: Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange (1998) and This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie (2002, both Viking). All those slouching young bodies are a challenge. I want to show these kids what it takes to live a creative life, the joys and satisfactions, and why these two artists kept at it, despite the crushing costs they paid—emotional, physical, and financial.

I start with a slide of Dorothea's photograph, "Migrant Mother." Most kids have seen it in the Great Depression chapter of their American history books—a close-up of a mother with a baby at her breast, two filthy kids leaning on her shoulders. Her hand cups her chin, a look of flat despair in her eyes. I start with the story of how Dorothea took the picture in 1936, how close she came to not taking it, and the difference one captured moment made in the lives of a group of starving workers.

I move on to Woody Guthrie's wild, cross-country trip a few years later in 1939, at the height of the Depression, and tell the kids how he listened to Kate Smith's "God Bless America" pouring out of jukeboxes across the country. The song promised everything would be all right. Woody thought things were a mess with staggering levels of unemployment, desperate people looking for work, and a world throwing itself into World War II. In a sleazy hotel in New York City he wrote his own song, "This Land is Your Land," patriotic, full of love for America and her people, but with a clear-eyed look at our problems.

In case the kids think Dorothea and Woody had easy, comfortable childhoods filled with art and music lessons, I recount some of the childhood experiences that gave them grit, and honed them into tough and tender adults. I tell them how polio struck Dorothea when she was seven, forcing her to walk with a rolling limp. I even demonstrate her limp, since I remember it well. She was my godmother and I grew up with her.

The energy in the room is shifting. Some kids lean forward, listening. I ask them to imagine what effect her limp might have had on her work. Some of them can guess—it made her compassionate. She understood hard times. They usually don't realize it also made her instantly accepted by the down-and-outers whom she was photographing, opening a whole level of unspoken communication between them. When I explain her family problems during her adolescence, some of the kids can relate to how unhappy she was. She cut school often, and spent days walking the city streets, looking at everything, everybody, for hours on end.

After playing one of Woody's dust-bowl songs, I talk about his disastrous Oklahoma childhood. He was nearly seven when his sister caught fire and burned to death, with neighbors whispering she'd been set on fire by her mother, Nora. Several years later Nora lit Woody's father on fire with a kerosene lamp, and was locked up in an insane asylum, where she died of Huntington's Disease. By the time he was sixteen, Woody was living alone in a small shack on the edge of town. He was in and out of school, drawing, learning folk songs, and coaxing plaintive sounds out of a harmonica. There are attentive faces in my audience now. Can they see how even as adolescents, Woody and Dorothea were defining themselves, outside of school, outside of their families?

I tell them how both Woody and Dorothea grew up to be difficult and contradictory individuals, putting their work before everything else. Life didn't get much easier for them as adults, either. Dorothea struggled to raise children and stepchildren (six in all) and still take pictures and work in her darkroom. Woody's need to be out on the road, rambling and singing, following political causes, and writing songs (more than 4000 in all) made him an undependable father to his eight children and a pretty lousy husband to his wives (he had three). By the time he was in his late 20s, he both knew and denied that Huntington's Disease was closing in on him, just like his mother.

Neither Woody nor Dorothea could stand to be boxed in, or behave according to others' rules. "I have a very great instinct for freedom. Anybody cuts into that and I churn," Dorothea said (Restless Spirit, p. 73). She insisted on doing her work and living her life on her own terms. When Woody performed at a posh fund-raiser in New York packed with wealthy, important people, he sang very badly, keeping his eyes shut. His friend who had set up the benefit asked why his eyes were closed. "All them white shirts and diamonds are blinding me," said Woody. Furious, his friend whispered that these were some of the most important people in New York. "They act like it," Woody replied (This Land Was Made for You and Me, p. 98).

So what made Dorothea's photographs and Woody's songs so memorable? They understood the symbolic story that is contained within an individual one. I show the kids "Migrant Mother" again, and tell them more: her name was Florence Thompson, and her husband had just sold the tires off the car to buy food. No tires, no more following the crops to pick. No way to earn more money. But the "Migrant Mother" represented more than her own story: struck down by circumstances beyond her control, she's all mothers who can't take care of their children. I ask the kids to imagine being in her place. What would they do? How would they feel? What would they say to a child begging for something, anything, to eat? Some look stricken. The power of one moment, captured in a photograph.

I play one of Woody's songs, "Plane Wreck at Los Gatos," and show slides Dorothea took of migrant workers in the fields. Woody's song tells the story of a plane filled with migrant farm workers that crashed as the workers were being sent back to Mexico. Newspaper and radio reports didn't give their names, only called them "deportees." Woody's song was a memorial to the migrants as well as a scathing commentary on our system of agriculture that depends on Mexican labor, but doesn't dignify them with their names. Imagine, I urge the kids, imagine being one of those migrants. Imagine being the family at home, waiting, and hearing nothing. The power of one incident, captured in a song.

Driven by a strong sense of compassion, Woody and Dorothea were on to something. "I had to get my camera to register the things about those people that were more important than how poor they were–their pride, their strength, their spirit," Dorothea said (Robert Coles's Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime [Aperture, 1982], p. 62). Woody expressed a similar sentiment: "I am out to sing songs that'll prove to you that this is your world, no matter how hard it has run you down and rolled over you. I am out to sing the songs that will make you take pride in yourself" (This Land Was Made for You and Me, p. 3).

While I'm talking about these two amazing artists, I'm watching for the kids who love to dance, to dream, play music, paint or write. The ones who might fold up their dreams and put them in a drawer because they don't know how to live them. I hope they're listening. I'm particularly trying to make contact with the kids who are full of despair. Despair from rotten things happening at home. Despair over an education that bores or enrages them, a world that confounds them. Sometimes I think I spot them, slouching in their folding chairs, willing their bodies not to betray any interest, but once in a while I see a flicker in their eyes. I want them to know there are people who have made it through, used their art to express themselves and to help others, and in the process even became famous. These people are sitting between the covers of a book, waiting to share their life stories.

There are lots of biographies on interesting people, and more coming all the time. I throw out names and brief stories of other inspiring 20^th -century artists like dancer Martha Graham; painters Georgia O'Keeffe, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera; photographers Ansel Adams and Margaret Bourke-White; poets and writers Langston Hughes, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, and John Steinbeck; and musicians Ella Fitzgerald and Paul Robeson.

I'm working on an unspoken agreement, a pact between librarians and authors. As Michael Moore said about librarians: "You think they're just sitting there at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them" (www.buzzflash.com/interviews/2002/03/Michael_ Moore_031302.html). I'm praying these kids will mess with those quiet librarians. We've got a revolution taking place, one kid at a time, just like one photo or one song at a time. Here's what I'm hoping: after the kids leave my talk, later—maybe way later—one of them will sidle up to a librarian and ask: "Do you have a book on that lady who painted flowers… and skulls… and lived in the desert?" I'm counting on the librarian's eyes to light up as she heads for the stacks. And maybe that book report won't be so hard to do. And a life won't be so empty with all those great, inspiring people to get to know.