Over the years I’ve been a part of many writing communities and they’ve had varying affects on me and my writing. One of my favorite writing community experiences was “The Department of Modern Verse” it was a site built  on the pathetic.org code that I worked on with my friend Steve Podielsky. We had it going for a tiny bit more than a year and had fairly close to 1000 members when we shut it down.

In some ways I regret shutting it down, not only because so many of the members never fully forgave me after, but also because I had so much fun with it. I made tons of friends and they were all so genuinely supportive about my writing. But there was a dark under-side to that whole thing that was very difficult for me to really understand a the time.

The saddest part of it was the way it became a baby-sitting gig. Constantly being the diplomat to prevent blow-ups between different people on the site. Ensuring that the environment remained good for people to join and grow and write became a harder and harder job over time. That devolved rather quickly into a sort of resentment inside of me that made me hate the place more and more – not only the place bu the people who were making my life hellish.

The lessons I learned as I took it down really stick with me to this day, and have probably held me back in some ways, but in others they’ve really helped me maintain a high level of productivity.

I thought about this a little as I was walking about through doors open Lowell today. Whether it’s in writing or in life, our community is both a huge blessing and an invisible barrier, and we must embrace both parts of that.

To the degree that a community offers opportunity to connect and share in all of the best things in life, there is absolutely nothing more important and vibrant. As an artist, I would be nothing without those connections, the hands shaken, the smiles collected, the hugs stolen on a truly bad day – these are the things that lift me up and carry me through. They’re the brilliant and wonderful moments that inspire me to write, to paint, to imagine a better world. So yay for that.

But there is also the other part of community, the part that leads to shame and guilt. There is the shame from the people that are upset when you don’t make their event, or the guilt from the ones that look at your askance because they don’t approve what you’re doing – all of that uncomfortable awkwardness that is built by the pillars of the community that just don’t like you becomes an enormous barrier to sharing and creating work.

It’s easy to say, “Hey, if they don’t like what I’m doing, screw’em.” Easy to say, hard to do.

But then, I walk around on a day like today. I walk into buildings that have been re-claimed from the jaws of demolition and find beautiful inspiring places that were recently just the dreams of men and women at drafting tables. I bump into acquaintances and share smiles and laughs with strangers, and I feel ashamed that I ever let the little bumps and barriers hold me back at all.

I admit, I am a bit of a bull when it comes to creating things every day, so maybe I’m not the best one to go on about the problems of being blocked and uninspired. Still, I can say this, there are a lot of opportunities in any given day to connect with the world around you and it is on you to make that happen – the world won’t do anything for you.