In verse, in story, in image, in song — art is where we meet each other.
It may seem absurd to talk about the importance of art at a time when the very infrastructures we’ve built our realities upon are steadily crumbling beneath our feet. When there is so much chaos and doubt and pain and grief; so much unrelenting, ongoing grief. When it can feel more pragmatic — necessary, even — to turn our attentions solely toward material needs for our survival. But as Audre Lorde so deftly asserts in her formative 1985 essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” poetry “forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”
The same, I think, can be said for art more broadly. Because here’s the thing that so many wise souls — Lorde included — have reminded us again and again for generations, for centuries: art is the actual bedrock of society, because without it, there is no connection, no community, no collective “we.” Without art, the spaces we occupy are stagnant, unyielding, insular. Art is what gives our lives texture and meaning. So as we witness these systems and institutions collapsing around us, let us seek shelter and solidarity through our art, because its perpetual abundance is what will keep us afloat, alive.
Art is where we meet each other because it is how we keep each other’s spirits safe.
At the Seventh Wave, we’re recommitting to a promise we spoke into the world 10 years ago: to champion art in the space of social issues. For us, that means creating more spaces for writers, artists, and activists to gather and to share their experiences and their art, most especially for creators who have oft been overlooked or relegated to the margins. When we began in 2015 as four recent MFA grads eager to make our mark on the world, this foundational refrain guided us through our earliest days: “Rise together.” With community as our north star, we experimented and adapted and grew and changed, expanding from our beginnings as a literary magazine to add an in-person residency, then two; dreaming up a digital version of the in-person residency during the pandemic; then creating more programs to welcome in aspiring editors and facilitators. We keep beginning again and again because we understand that this work is not a luxury; it is readying the soil for what our community intuitively knows can grow here.
Over the past 10 years, we’ve been fortunate enough to be in conversation with nearly 400 writers and artists from around the world — editing, publishing, facilitating, learning from, exchanging ideas with — always with the goal of deepening our collective understanding of one other. We’ve gathered on Zoom screens and around tables full of food and on cushions in living rooms with the fire burning late into the night, trying to understand this incredibly fleeting thing called life and how best to capture it so that we might share it with those around us. The creative “process,” as we call it, can look like this. Writing can feel like this, even as naysayers only understand it as words pinned onto a page.
Art can be this generous space of belonging, of authenticity. To survive, it must be.
In our next 10 years and beyond, we’ll continue tending to the things that matter most, offering different spaces and avenues for connection, whether it’s through our annual literary magazine, our community anthologies program, our in-person or digital residencies, or our one-time talks. Every evolution of the organization has happened because we’ve sought more ways to build and then strengthen our relationships to each other as writers, as artists, as active thinkers in this world. Every new beginning has been an attempt to build more pathways toward collective liberation through meaningful art and conversation. Because in times of division and strife, the only way through is together — and this, too, is its own kind of ongoingness. As activist Mia Birdsong reminds us in her book How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community: “The way I’ve come to understand it, freedom is both an individual and collective endeavor — a multilayered process, not a static state of being. Being free is, in part, achieved through being connected.”
So cheers to creating this incredibly joyous, polyvocal, kindred community together over these past 10 years. We wouldn’t be where we are today without each and every one of you. Whatever the next month, or year, or 10 years brings, we’ll be here, creating more spaces for art to flourish and to expand our capacity for good.
