Minibabble: Creativity in Difficult Times

Posted on June 25, 2025June 25, 2025 by suki

The Babblery

Minibabble: Creativity in Difficult Times

00:00 / 8:23

When writer and artist Patrice Vecchione found herself crippled by anxiety and despair in early 2025, she responded the only way a creative person can: she wrote. In this mini-episode, Patrice talks about using art to surmount difficulties, and the importance of creativity in our lives. She reads her poem, “Young Poetry Teacher, Del Mar Middle School, the AIDS Epidemic, 1982.”

Visit our full episode, “Holding the Inner Flame: On Creativity,” for a wider discussion of creativity and links to more information. Read the transcript to find a written version of her poem: [Click for transcript]

Please leave feedback!Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

[00:00:23] Voiceover: I am your host, Suki Wessling, and this is a Minibabble. We recently released a full length episode on creativity featuring researcher Dr. Joanne Foster and writer artist Patrice Vecchione. In the full episode, which you can find @babblery.com, Patrice talked about an experience she had in January 2025.

[00:00:45] Patrice Vecchione: One thing that’s that happened for me was, um, the anxiety that I was living in, for a few months and I gave up my joy. And joy is a creative act and if we succumb to despair, we are going to be unable to find solutions to problems. Solving problems, whether they’re mathematical problems or cultural or societal, political problems, is a deeply creative act.

[00:01:21] Voiceover: Like many of us, Patrice was deeply concerned about the chaos in the Middle East and the chaos of the new administration in Washington. We all react differently to upheavals, and in Patrice’s case, she reacted by withdrawing. It wasn’t until her creativity bubbled up in an unexpected place that she was able to step back into the world and move forward.

[00:01:43] Patrice Vecchione: The end of January into the middle of February, I wrote a chapbook of poetry. I hadn’t written poetry since my father died 10 years before. I’ve been writing publishing prose. There in the midst of this desperation, my creativity came forward to save me, to restore me, to remind me that you know, what was lost was not actually lost.

[00:02:09] Voiceover: Here is Patrice Vecchione reading her poem.

[00:02:16] Patrice Vecchione:

Young Poetry Teacher, Del Mar Middle School,

the AIDS Epidemic, 1982

“There’s trouble in the classroom,” said the school principal

who met me out in front, in her suit and high heels,

leading me, hand on my back.

“A couple of girls say they saw you on Saturday night

near the movie theater, kissing another woman.

The kids are angry and confused.

The girls are waiting for you in my office.”

Alas, there’d been no kissing.

Nathalie and I had argued all weekend long.

The girls sat, arms crossed tightly against their chests,

chips on their shoulders,

pointing at me.

“We saw you!” said one. “Yeah,” said the other,

“across from the Rio, leaning on your old MG,

kissing a girl!”

There was no breath to catch—mine

had evaporated. “No,” I said.

“I don’t know who you saw, but it wasn’t me.

And, really, anything I do

outside of school is none of your business,”

surprised at finding those words.

This was when you couldn’t say. I couldn’t say—

I needed my job.

“But you could give us AIDS!”

“Huh? I could do what?” “You could give us AIDS!”

“No,” I said, “it doesn’t work like that.”

“Come on, let’s go back to class.”

“But we saw you!” loud, in my face, unsteadying me.

And I knew my look: crewcut, jeans,

purple cowgirl boots did, in those days,

give my love-life away.

Joyously, I knew well the feel of Nathalie’s tongue

inside my mouth, the sensation of sucking it,

knew the smoothness of her face, the softness

and weight of her breasts, the sound our laughter

together made, the life we lived inside her house

and—carefully—outside of it,

the places we had gone, were going.

The 7^th graders sat in rows, squinting

at me, accusations darting out their eyes.

The teacher at her desk, looked kindly in my direction,

offered nothing more.

“We may not write poems today,” I said. “We need to talk.”

A sign ran through the room,

then a hammering of questions, first shouted

all at once: “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“What’s her name?” chuckle, chuckle.

“Are you a les-b-ian?” met a roomful of chair-scraping

laughter, boys falling over, guffawing,

getting up from their seats to poke each other

in the ribs, with nothing from the teacher.

Two boys’ questions made my job for the day clear:

“If I sit next to someone on the bus

who has AIDS, will I get it?”

And from the other, “If I touch

a person with AIDS,

will I die?”

Hardly an expert on the disease,

I thought about Andrew up in Canada

who would soon be dead, wondered

if Guillermo in Mexico, Greg, that sweet boy

from high school, and other men I knew

would survive.

I did my best to explain how the disease got passed

from one person to another, nervous

about saying even this much to 7^th graders:

“Sex without being safe,

shared needles, blood transfusions, but no, not ever

from just being next to someone.”

The room calmed

a little.

Until the question I was unwilling

to respond to in a middle school classroom,

“Do you kiss girls?”

I did my best to answer what I could

and remain their poetry teacher. The word I wished to say,

hung—fragile—in the air between us.

Patrice Vecchione

[00:06:10] Voiceover: I asked Patrice to speak with me for this episode on creativity because she is a fierce practitioner of the art, someone who spreads it through her classes, all the way from young children to the elderly. And she is someone who knows that creativity is the sweetest of weapons against despair. Here she ends by quoting Marie Louise von Franz.

[00:06:36] Patrice Vecchione: It is through creativity that we are going to get through this difficult time, and it is through retaining joy and celebration that we are going to get through this time. I implore people who are listening to celebrate. Your creativity is yours. Your defiance is a creative act and you have joy that is irrepressible, and we need your joy. We need to bolster each other up right now. “It’s easy to be a naive idealist. It’s easy to be a cynical realist. It’s quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.”

[00:07:28] Voiceover: Thanks to Patrice Vecchione for sharing herself and her work with us. You can hear the full episode and access links to Patrice’s books @babblery.com. Music by Rrrrrose Azerty on loyaltyfreakmusic.com. Thanks for listening.

[00:07:46]