When I was a child, I showed some art talent and my parents sent me to take adult drawing and painting classes from a local artist. One thing our teacher said was something along the lines of, “You’re ready to sell your paintings only when you don’t care about selling them.” Looking back years later, I think, what a Zen thing to say. My teacher did have a couple little fat Buddha statues in her home studio. She was considered a character in our small Midwestern town. In our class she gave us the benefit of her philosophy, drawn from Kant and her own life.
Over the decades since then, some of that philosophy has stuck with me, while the painting skill has atrophied. I married, completed degrees in English and in business, had children, went to work for a large firm, learned how to develop software, saw our children grow and leave home to set off on their own lives, ran my own small business for decades, and eventually shut it down. As I write this, we are all doing well, for which I am grateful.
When I began writing fiction in earnest, I thought back to the definition of “art” that my teacher had given us. (It is “the intentional expression of feeling,” in case you want to know.) With the memory of my teacher and my own long life’s experience, I write.