Louisa Castner

Dear Edina writers:

As I sit here, I am recalling our wonderful experience together last year, in the Edina Library, as we gathered to celebrate the winners of the 2021 Edina Reads Writing Contest. I got to read the third-to-fifth grade writers last year, and I remember listening to the wide range of writers of all ages and backgrounds.

My words to you today aren’t specific to any kind or age of writer: I speak to you all. I simply want to encourage you to follow your passions. For reading, for writing, for any kind of artistic expression, actually.

Don’t be worried if you find yourself yearning to try any and all kinds of art. Once you have the inclination—and you are lucky: you’ve been tapped on the shoulder early in your life!—follow your curiosity.

Maybe as well as writing poems or stories you play trombone in the school band. Or maybe you love to tap dance or pirouette in your room all by yourself. Maybe you draw and make comic books to get your friends to laugh at your heroes’ antics. Maybe you and your siblings write plays on holidays to entertain your parents.

I am here to tell you that all artistic kinds of things inform each other. It’s like the writer in you will have conversations with the painter in you, who will discuss things with the musician in you. These talks will happen sometimes in your dreams, sometimes in your head, sometimes way back in the back of your mind, where you’re not really sure what they are saying, but it will feel magical anyway.

Or you may just be laser-focused on words, language, writing. And that’s perfectly fine too.

I think what you may find out is that this passion, or set of passions, will persist. Other things will come into focus, like school, sports, college, friends, but for many of you, there will be this pullback to that thing you quietly get really excited about. You might even go weeks or months or years without writing anything, and yet there will be a little voice that stays with you, saying, “You should write that down.”

A lot of years ago, I ran across this quote from a favorite writer of mine, Annie Dillard. She wrote this in a wise book called The Writing Life. I have never forgotten it:

Why do you never find anything written about that idiosyncratic thought you advert to, about your fascination with something no one else understands? Because it is up to you. There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin. You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

It is my gift to you. Pass it on.

And remember: you will always have your own astonishment to draw upon, like a deep well of undiscovered treasures.