Why I Love the Arts

LeAnne Martin at the Christians in the Arts blog is running the second part of her three-part interview with me today. Here's what I said:

Why do you love the arts? Have you always loved them?

Since I can remember I have loved the arts, and I hate that so many of today's fine arts--opera, symphony, museums--are inaccessible to those in lower economic groups.

I grew up in Oregon's lush Willamette valley in a modest home that sat on five acres. The two living room windows looked out on Mt. Hood in one direction and the Willamette River in the other. We sang on car trips, and Mom read us great stories. I remember my dad singing me to sleep at bedtime playing the autoharp. Going to the library was a weekly event in the summer.

Then when I was ten, my parents decided my Dad would take a job transfer to Washington, D.C., because they wanted to expose their five kids to culture. So for the next seven years we went to free Juilliard String Quartet concerts and National Geographic lectures and Smithsonian tours. My favorite attractions were Jefferson's Monticello (so much creativity!) and the Bureau of Printing and Engraving, where we watched money being made.

By the time I hit ninth grade, I'd had a year of piano and seven years of viola. Every kid in my family played an instrument, and we'd attend each other's endless concerts and we'd also have hootenannies with other families. (As grown ups, we turned out to be a musician, a curator, two teachers and a writer.) We didn't think of ourselves as creative types. We just loved music and history and problem-solving, and we played outside instead of watching a lot of TV (though we complained bitterly at the time). And we watched our mom sketch during afternoons on camping trips.

The arts were not a separate category in our lives. They were interwoven into everything we did. They were just "normal."