Exiled

Last June, I was one of thousands of young women and men to graduate college with a degree in the arts. I studied English literature and secondary education at Knox College, and I loved it. The liberal arts school in western Illinois nurtured my tendencies toward the fictional and critical, toward the intellectual and inquisitive, and its English department, self-contained and contentious as any large family, yet upheld its reputation of sending off graduates with a solid backbone of instruction in a creative and academic discipline. It set me up handsomely for a lifetime of literary pursuit, and I am grateful.

Now, after officially graduating in November 2010 (after student teaching), I am six months into post-grad life and still live at home, charged with the task of translating that education into a solvent adulthood. Here I should note that my interests and ambition shifted, conveniently enough, from education to writing almost literally on the eve of my official November departure from Knox. They shifted, in other words, from the more practical to the decidedly less so of the two majors. During school I had pictured my English classes as a means to bolster my teaching pedigree, but in the end, faced with the prospect of spending the next 30+ years in a classroom, literature and writing forced themselves front and center. I decided I wanted to do rather than teach, even if that meant trying to make it in a creative field with few rules and a swiftly evolving landscape. To that end, I’ve taken up a few editing projects and now this blog as creative counterweights to my current “day job.” Other former English majors I know have entered publishing, grad school, or, like myself, draw a distinction between a mundane job and some more heartfelt line of (often unpaid) work. It seems that the prevailing attitude of the class of 2010, and probably 2011, is “Whatever works.” Right now, we just have to go at it from the ground up.

The starting ground is slightly different, though, when you’re a young, artistically driven person in the suburbs. Over the past year many of my literary and musical and whatever friends have been fortunate enough to move to the city, where most of them pay rent via one of those aforementioned day jobs and stay up late, I presume, drinking coffee and scribbling verse in their 2BR/1BTH. Being broke, it is my lot to enjoy the immediate post-grad period here in the ‘burbs, where artistic stimulation isn’t absent but isn’t very obvious, either. From this remove Chicago’s parent-less and fast-moving allure is burnished by its history of fomenting genius: I’m thinking of native greats like Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, Henry Darger, Kanye West, and the recently discovered Vivian Maier. Chicago has art and artists coursing through its gridded veins, and I am envious of the young people who have already found the means to live there among it all. I dream about walking the streets that Algren did, as if somehow they would bestow upon me the same talent he possessed. For now the most I can do is shuttle back and forth via the Metra, but at over two hours and $12 round trip, it isn’t very practical and the stimulation is sadly short-lived.

But St. Charles, of course, has its charms, and over the past few weeks I’ve made it a priority to quit moping about my circumstances (the woes of living in an affluent suburb!) and turn my attention instead to the things that make this town interesting on its own. This place has character, I think, even if it doesn’t have an elevated route. I love our Art Deco city hall building, our almost-classic theatre marquee (R.I.P. neon), and the busy restaurants that line our downtown strip. Plus, along with the neighboring towns, St. Charles features something that really is unmatched by the nearby metropolis: nature. There is nature here, and while it’s set aside in parks and preserves, certainly no match for rural plains and woods, it’s more accessible, more expansive and, sometimes, more contiguous than most of Chicago’s similar spaces. (The lakefront being the obvious exception.) It’s been a pleasant surprise to gradually rediscover all of the parks that I visited in high school and childhood since moving back home, and I’ve found they provide something that I may have sought in the city. After that end-of-days blizzard in February I slipped into my Wellingtons and walked from our house on the crest of the river valley down to the frozen Fox—or at least I tried, for I got stranded in snow over my knees in the middle of Mt. St. Mary’s Park and had to retrace my big clunky steps—and now that it’s spring I’ve been biking along bits of the Fox River trail and enjoying non-clunky walks in Dunham Woods, Norris Woods, Mount St. Mary’s Park, and the Leroy Oaks Forest Preserve. I can only imagine that if I were in the city, yes, there would be the lake and the neighborhood parks and the art scene, but much of the time I’d be surrounded by two-flats and too scared to ride my bike any further than the nearest corner. What I do now isn’t exactly extreme, but it’s proved to be nourishment for the part of me that craves art.

The last park I mentioned, Leroy Oaks, is my favorite, not only for the many good memories it conjures but for its breezy beauty. I went there last week with a blanket and book in hand (Dear Theo, a collection of letters from Vincent van Gogh to his brother) and lay in the sun for over an hour, reading and taking in the environment. Standards of cosmetic upkeep at this park seem slightly more lax than those at others—in my opinion, they should be very lax—let nature be natural, for goodness’ sake—so I admired patches of wild prairie growth, clots of explosively blooming trees, dandelions, bare earth, and the creek. It was a scene for the artist, to be sure—for anyone with a mote of appreciation for nature. That afternoon, I was completely satisfied to be there, free of any illusions of future success or present disappointment. In this “naked” state I could be exactly what I wanted to be, and I decided to refuse to concede my artistic desire to some unfulfilled expectations of milieu or scene. I won’t let my appreciation for art lie just because I’m not in the city. This blog, in fact, will likely be about all sorts of art-y things—books, movies, music, photography, etc. etc. etc. It will be about anything that I find curious, an extension of my own coffee-and-scribbling routine. Sometimes I may go into the city for material; sometimes I’ll just stay here (either way, I want it to be very much about the subject and, despite this first post, not about myself). Environment is important but it is not the only thing—and I think I am lucky, considering what Vincent says in a letter to Theo. With this I will close this first post and open this endeavor, one that I hope will touch on interesting things that touch me, and then leave even the faintest impression on you:

 Try to walk as much as you can, and keep your love for nature, for that is the true way to learn to understand art more and more. Painters understand nature and love her and teach us to see her. If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere. 

-Vincent van Gogh