Letting art help us

Alice Walker was as much a part of my late 20s and early 30s as the pink bass guitar I played badly and long union meetings in the pub discussing pay, equality and solidarity. 

She's a writer I've discovered again and again since the heady 1980s, always with joy. And so with my pension burning a hole in my pocket and a new source of books - NOT AMAZON - I ordered her memoir, The Same River Twice: Honouring the Difficult, because I can rely on her to show me a new view. 

I admit I've been questioning the point of writing, of creating anything. I've been reading, walking aimlessly, trying to write but doubting. Friends have tried to convince me to write for the sake of it and I've resisted that too. But Walker can be relied upon to set me back on track. 

Here it is, in her preface, at the bottom of the first page: "Art is the mirror, perhaps the only one, in which we can see our true collective face. We must honour its sacred function. We must let art help us."