How to catch joy in the palm of your hand. How to spin grace from grudgery and let it fuel your days. How to perceive the world with fresh eyes. And, more importantly, why we must keep little sparks alive when the world grows dark.
The 2024 Sydney Writers’ Festival talk on creativity, joy, and grace answered these questions, and more. Led by interviewer and curator Michaela Kalowski, the few hundred people lucky enough to be in the City Recital Hall last Saturday, were struck by the words of celebrated writers and joy experts Julia Baird and Holly Ringland. If the hoots, laughter and tears were anything to go by, the talk was a resounding success.
Going into the talk, I was familiar with both Julia Baird and Holly Ringland as writers, thinkers, and trailblazers in Australia’s cultural scape. Baird is a popular columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, and the ABC, and her two latest books Phosphorescence and Bright Shining were on every bestseller stand in recent years. Ringland’s debut The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart was translated into a TV mini series starring Sigourney Weaver, while her second novel The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding was an instant bestseller.
Despite this, as a student aghast by the horrors unfolding around the world , I must confess my hesitancy towards a talk championing joy at a time when much of the world, human and natural, is dying. Was I about to endure another Westernised spiel encouraging blind faith? Would they encourage me to direct my focus away from global trauma to my own protected life because ‘at least things are good here’?
Instead, the talk offered answers. Ringland, a resilient author informed by her own history of trauma, explained that a cultivation of joy in one’s own life is far from selfish, nor is it out-of-touch. Joy, she explained, is our fuel to keep fighting. It can also take form in, “the connection of our sorrows”. Creativity in writing and a keen appreciation of nature are just some of the ways these authors do so. Ringland and Baird crystallised in my mind how joy, creativity, and grace are all connected, and why they are crucial tools with which to tackle the world.
There is a suffocating public idea that softness is weakness. Grace is a rare quality in today’s world, but vital. On what grace isn’t, Baird said frankly, “often it’s assumed to be a female thing… nice, polite, discrete, and putting up with a lot of crap”. She also noted that “I’ve seen it weaponised in certain communities.” Instead, as she argues throughout Bright Shining, grace is about making the decision every day to live in a way that’s not necessarily easy, but immensely healing. She touched listeners with her likening to the sun; grace may warm us gently from afar but up close it’s blinding, defiant, and loud. In the talk, Baird shared a phenomenon she covers in her book where nurses in Brazil, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, filled rubber gloves with warm water and slipped them over patients hands to simulate the touch of a loved one. “It was pure grace,” said Baird.
Grace also lurks in our creativity. According to Baird and Ringland, it is the reason why, when faced with grim realities, we choose to pick ourselves up and create something joyful, or funny, or meaningful, that wasn’t there before. But creativity is not always about making tangible work; it can be a continual, unbounded act. Ringland said it’s in the way we live, love, dress, act, cook, think, and buy. She shared an anecdote about meeting a candy pink-haired fan with floral tattoos in doubt of her creative abilities. “You’re wearing your creativity,” Ringland exclaimed, “your imagination is on your skin, your hair”. Much laughter ensued.
I couldn’t help but notice the undeniable creativity and joy in the very space we occupied. Pillars were lit with the soft glow of multi-colour, emulating the house on the cover of The House That Joy Built. The joy that the two authors had for each other was palpable on stage as they illuminated the whole hall. Also stealing attention were Julia Baird’s gold sequined ‘hello everyone, I’m Wonderwoman’ boots. Creativity captured.
