Chimamanda Adichie said fiction is magic and craft. This sums up not only fiction (and indeed all of art) but also the Festival of Faith and Writing.

I attended because I think Jonathan Safran Foer takes risks with the form of fiction that few take and because I’m slightly in love with Chimamanda Adichie. I couldn’t wait to hear them speak about their writing and, specifically, their writing process. I was not disappointed.

They challenged me and encouraged me to play, experiment, take risks, and yes, fail. Art reflects life, and since life changes, so should art. We have freedom in this. We have freedom in the stories we tell and how we choose to tell the stories. Once we learn and understand the rules, we have freedom to bend and even break them, to see what works in this global yet fragmented society. Safran Foer quoted John Ashbury’s famous essay, “The Invisible Avant-Garde”: “Most reckless things are beautiful in some way, and recklessness is what makes experimental art beautiful.”

As a music major, I fell in love with experimental and modern music, sometimes with the beauty of the project itself, and sometimes just with the risk and the ideas and, yes, even the failings of the attempts. Over the past several years, I’ve learned more about avant-garde and experimental art through a friend sharing her love of it with me, through reading books about it, such as God in the Gallery by Daniel A. Siedell, and, most of all, through going to museums and immersing myself in the art. And the more I’ve learned about this and other forms of modern art, the more I’ve come to understand its relationship to life, and the more I’ve come to understand it, the more I’ve come to love it. I’ve also wondered–and it was gratifying to hear Safran Foer chat about this very thing–why does literature seem behind visual art and music when it comes to experimentation in order to reflect life?

Now, I leave this conference excited about the possibilities of experimentation, not for the sake of experimentation, but for the sake of stretching myself and my readers. For we do this in the service of humanity. As Adichie reminded us, we create meaning and radical truth to remind ourselves and others of what it means to be human. We enter into the conversation of humanity through literature because life is always changing and yet unchanging.

I don’t know how experimental I’ll be. Heck, I don’t even know what experimentation means for me yet. But I want to see what I can do. I want to see what magic I can conjure while playing with craft. Perhaps playing for me will be a minor thing, or perhaps it will be drastic. But I hope it means something that is both personal and global (meaning, reflecting my love of cultural studies, not necessarily something that will resonate with the whole world–I’m not that delusional yet), something that holds together tension and resolution, something that is intimate and small and echoing.

I confess: I am afraid. I fear failure. I fear not being good enough for the grand ideas in my head. I fear looking the fool. But I remember what someone once said about Miles Davis when he was a rookie, that he was brilliant but he didn’t yet have the chops. Or what Picasso said: “I am always doing that which I cannot do in order that I may learn how to do it.”

I do not claim the brilliance of Davis or Picasso, but I can pattern my artistic endeavors after them, striving, striving, striving, in the face of failure.