May, 2003

“Here it is,” says poet, writer, and activist Marilyn Krysl in her typically firm but reflective tone. “Here's what I think: Art is really important because the imagination is crucial to the whole issue of justice and injustice. Because only if you can imagine what the life of another person is like, really see yourself in that body, on those streets, subject to those forces, can you feel compassion. Our whole ability to address injustice depends on our imagination. Everyone needs to be encouraged to use imagination for compassion. That's how suffering will be reduced.”

To say suffering, injustice, and compassion are forces that find eloquence in Krysl's writing would be an understatement. To say they find a place in her life would miss the point entirely. A short list of her recent activism includes time at Mother Theresa's Kalighat Home for the Destitute and Dying in Calcutta, accompanying election monitors in Sri Lanka with Peace Brigade International, and assisting famine workers and refugees in Sudan and Kenya. Art and action are the subject and predicate of Krysl's personal mission statement, and for May, MacDowell Downtown will showcase both in a reading Krysl will give at the Mariposa Museum on Friday, May 2nd, at 8 pm.

“It seems to me that if you're a writer, it's not good to stay in a life that can be rich but limiting,” she says. “I've always felt the need to do challenging things that make me grow as a person.” Growth is a theme that comes up often with Krysl: personal development, insisting on the reach that may exhaust but ultimately fulfill an individual, ignoring fear to reap the rewards of courage all sound like choices Krysl has forced herself to make over and over again. When she smiles and says, “Actually, I'm a coward,” it's easy to laugh, too, because her admission underscores just how serious those choices were. And also how serious her passion must be. After all, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Calcutta…these are not places for the faint of heart.

“When I had children, I became much more aware of my own fears and how limiting they are, and suddenly I wanted to become a better person for my children.” When talking with Krysl, it's important to translate the personal to the universal. In other words, while she does mean her children in the literal sense, one gets the idea that she could be referring to children on a global scale. Her mind seems to function this way: mining the personal to spearhead the universal has kept Krysl growing. And producing. For example, it was seeing a newspaper photograph of a Sudanese mother with her starving child that inspired her to take up refugee work. The same photograph also inspired a first novel about aid workers that she is currently writing at MacDowell. And it seems to always be this one-two punch that keeps the fighting words flowing from the 61-year-old writer.

“I stopped caring about a 'literary' career,” she says about her work now. “I wanted a bigger life. We are not separate from the world. The world is always pushing us, but we can push back.”