When the police put the bear in Ed’s truck, Maria climbed up on the tailgate, she held the bear’s paw in one hand and said a silent goodbye. I could see the sadness in her eyes. We were both grateful that Ed was claiming the body and would do useful things with it – saving the head, the hide, any meat.
I don’t know anyone else close to us who knows how to skin a bear, another amazing facet of Ed’s life. He said he had done it many times before. So dust to dust, our encounter with this bear was short and amazing, this kind of thing still is eye-popping to us.
Maria is a deep and sweet soul, she honors the spirit of every living thing. She said she had to get to know the bear a bit, before letting him go.
There are bears around us, but we rarely see them. They are generally private and peaceful souls, the deputies said there was a 400 pound bear wreaking havoc with the garbage cans and bird feeders of nearby Cambridge. We’d never seen this one before, even though he must have walked past our farm fence every day.
We live side by side with nature, but we have not figured out a way to live around nature without killing so much of it, animal bodies – deer, sometimes bears, hedgehogs, squirrels, raccoons, barn cats – line the road. We don’t think much of all this carnage, it is part of life, but I will think a while on the image of that big and beautiful bear getting hit by the big truck.
This evening, after dinner, Ed Gulley came over to pick up his sculptures from the Open House, as we were loading his truck we all heard a sickening thud from the road in front of the house. I saw a big black Ford truck lurch and pull over, and then I saw a beautiful black bear dragging his hind legs and crawling towards our pasture fence.
The people in the truck pulled over and got out, saw the bear suddenly get up, and they rushed back to their truck and left. They told the police who pulled them over up the road that they had no cell phone and were terrified of the bear. They were elderly, they didn’t know what to do.
It was a pitiful and wrenching sight, that bear dragging himself away from the road, I could see what a beautiful creature he was. He somehow pulled himself over the fence and crawled into the marsh behind the farmhouse, and then collapse in the tall weeds. We could only see his head reaching up to the sky, and heard some cries of pain, they echoed through the pasture.
The animals were going wild, Chloe raced back and force along the fence – fortunately, that pasture had been closed off, and Lulu and Fanny, guard donkeys both, moved forward in front of the sheep and watched the bear. We got the dogs into the house and I called 911, only the second time in 15 years I have ever done that up here.
Maria and Ed Gulley stayed with the animals. Ed is a farmer and a hunter, and he wanted to stay.
Two sheriff’s deputies responded quickly, the walked out to the pasture and walked through the marsh until they found the bear, they said he looked to be in awful shape unable to stand up, walk, or move much. Wounded animal, especially bears, can be dangerous when wounded, the deputies called for ENCON, the state’s environmental and wildlife police. They said they thought the bear could not be saved or helped, but that was up to ENCON.
They said it was dangerous to get too close, they asked us to stay on the other side of the fence. Ed said if the bear had to be killed, he would take him home, and skin him, salvage any meat, and treat the hide. He said he would keep the feet and the head. It was nothing short of amazing for Ed to be here at that time, and to want to take the bear home in his pickup.
The ENCON officer came and walked out through the tall grass and found the bear. He was, he said, a beautiful young bear, more than 200 pounds, he was trying to make it back to the deep woods. But he couldn’t stand or get up. He was dying. We saw the officer point his shotgun at the bear and fired twice. The bear uttered what biologists call a “death howl,” a kind of goodbye, and then was still. He was killed almost instantly.
It was a poignant, painful sound to hear. Lots of animals have died on our farm, but this was different, a very beautiful young and healthy bear crippled by a big truck.
A car pulled up with people saying they saw the accident, they were animal rights people, they rushed home to get their children. They said they were animal lovers and protectors and were convinced that the bear would be shot for no reason and the children were pleading for his life to be spared, shouting at us and the police to save him.
Farmers go through this all of the time, it was, said the police, almost commonplace. A deputy went over to the car and explained the bear’s injuries and the car sped off. It was troubling to both of us that these people went home and brought their young children to see the bear die.
We got Red out and moved the animals into the side pasture. We kept Fate in her crate. Ed drove his pickup into the pasture and he and the officers pulled the bear out with a rope, and everyone lifted him up into Ed’s truck. Ed said goodbye and headed home. We are having dinner with the Gulley’s Thursday night and we will have a lot to talk about.
Maria climbed into the truck bed to be with the bear and said goodbye to him. She sat silently and held his paw. The farm is all about life and death, we accept this as part of our lives and the natural world. It was difficult to see this beautiful animal die in such a painful and frightening way. I am haunted by the thought of him crawling through our pasture trying to get back to the woods, the same woods we walk through every morning.
We were grateful for many things.
The deputies handled the incident efficiently and with feeling and care.
The ENCON officer said it was the part of his job he hated the most. We were glad the dogs were not out in the pasture, or the sheep and equines. We were grateful that we had seen the accident and knew that the bear had crawled into the marsh grass, we would not have seen him.
The animals would have grazed in that pasture in the morning, we wouldn’t have known a dying, grievously injured – potentially dangerous – animal was lying out there just a few feet away from them. He would have been very hungry if he had survived until morning.
It was a remarkable thing that Ed was here, that he wanted to take the bear home. As darkness fell, the police and the ENCON officer left, along with Ed, and Maria and I sat down and had a cup of tea and wondered that we had had another quite remarkable experience.
And we talked about the sadness of the night, we thought of the bear lying in Ed’s truck bed he looked so proud and his coat so black and shiny. We both touched and noticed his big and soft paws. We wondered that an animal who lived in the woods could look so shiny and clean, almost like a big stuffed animal.
I told Maria I was sorry he never made it back to the woods, and had to die in a strange pasture.
We smiled and toasted one another with out tea cups. This is our life, we said. This is the life we chose.
Took my second monochrome photo with the red filter, I noticed the strong contrast in the clouds, and on the ground. It is simply a straight shot to the south of the farmhouse. Later I’ll try the yellow.
I suppose I’m an ideologue about creative feedback. I believe thoughtful feedback is the fuel of creativity, the engine that drives us to grow and learn and change. Feedback is the oxygen in the room, without it, creativity often withers and dies.
How we understand and respond to feedback so often corresponds with the ways in which we respond to life itself. To how we can grow and change.
Feedback is essential to me, from my editors, from my wife and friends, from readers and other people online.
I don’t always like it, but I always need it. Feedback is how I have grown in every way that I have grown. And almost every way in which I have not grown corresponds to the feedback I didn’t get or didn’t want to hear.
Feedback is the mystical essential to the creative process, any professional writer or artist grasps its importance and struggles to figure out how to deal with it.
I am a professional writer, I have written 29 books, and every one of them, good and bad, has been shaped by the honest and sometimes ruthless ethos of my editors, who are merciless in the pursuit of my improvement and success.
Feedback is misunderstood and often misapplied.
It is not about praise or criticism, it is about improvement and growth. It is not about making people feel badly about their work, it is about helping people to do better work. No one’s work is perfect, any work can be improved. Feedback gives us a mirror in which to see the reality of our work, without it, we are talking only to ourselves and to people who are not detached or objective.
In the past few years, I have just begun to become a good writer in my own mind, I am drinking in the old ways of feedback – my editors and friends – and the new ways – e-mail, Facebook posts, letters, text messages. I get a lot of feedback, it has informed my writing and helped me understand how my work affects the outlook and emotions of people.
Put simply, feedback is information about reactions to a product, a person’s art or performance of a task, feedback is used as a basis for improvement and ideally, encouragement.
Feedback, once mastered, can be applied to almost every aspect of life, from marriage, to work, to the parent-child relationship, to the human-animal bond.
In my marriage, feedback has been essential to building trust and communication. If you cannot speak the truth to someone you love, you cannot truly love. If you cannot hear the truth from people who read and follow your work, they you will wither and calcify.
A few years ago, I started a Facebook group called the Creative Group At Bedlam Farm. It is gathering of more than 250 creative people of all different kinds – writers, artists, painters, bloggers, poets and photographers. It’s a wonderful place, but like all online places, it has a history of struggle.
The Creative Group is a collection of gifted people, sharing their work and creativity in a safe and an encouraging environment. It is one of the joys of my life, seeing the wonderful work they do every day, and the ways in which they support one another. But feedback is still a delicate and sensitive matter, sometimes, I learned, even explosive.
In fact, the group was nearly destroyed over feedback last year.
Many different issues cropped up in many different ways, but my increasingly urgent, even hectoring, requests for thoughtful feedback were met with confusion, anger and resentment. They led to politicking and drama, an unraveling and disenchantment, so much so that a gifted and increasingly closely-knit group of members stormed out one day without anyone – even good friends – saying goodbye.
“Now you know what it is like to be a girl in middle school,” one of them messaged me weeks later. It was my comments about feedback, she wrote, “that made us feel unsafe.” She thought I was telling her what to say.
Ah, I thought, safe zones. But there are no safe zones for creative people, every day, they rip open their hearts and souls and put their work out there into the world, where it will live or die. There are no safe zones out there for people who wish to live creative lives.
It was the ugliest moment in the three-year history of the group, and the most upsetting for me as well as others. I am grateful that we have moved so rapidly beyond it. The remaining and new members of the group seem to enjoy feedback, they ask for it all the time, from me, from one another. It has simply stopped being an issue.
It is not always easy to explain who people react.
Feedback is a difficult thing to explain.
I remember one day one member of the group took a cute photo of her dog in her back yard. The post was not memorable or especially creative, it was just a cute photo of a beautiful dog with some sappy text about how wonderful the dog was.
Four people posted that the post was “brilliant” and the poster was showered with heart emoticons (which I confess, I have always hated and never used. They are a poor replacement for real thoughts.) I posted a comment saying that the word “brilliant,” which has never once been applied to me or my work by any editor or publisher in 29 different books, is not a compliment, when it is used in so slip shod a way.
I remember my heart sinking when I read that post.
I knew if this talented writer kept getting comments like that, she would stop growing. Her well-meaning friends were not serving her well. Who can do better than “brilliant?” And she did stop growing, at least then. The people who posted those comments were angry over my comments, and eventually left the group.
They saw their role as to support, not challenge. And that is the feedback trap, the issue that recurs and recurs. It’s all about love, they said. But it isn’t all about love, I replied. It’s about honesty and growth.
People often equate feedback with criticism.
We all want to hear the same thing, that we are wonderful and “brilliant.” But I know the pitfalls of that. I love praise, but I need criticism. If I am told I am brilliant when I am not, or told I am brilliant routinely, the very word loses all of its meaning, feedback loses it’s power to challenge or inspire.
As much as I would love to be called brilliant, I dread the idea even more. It would be the end of me if I thought for one second I was brilliant, and the people who might say so would not be doing me any favors.
A number of people who left the group had been working with me on various and exciting projects – books, e-books, essays, blogs. We spent a lot of time discussing and planning these projects, many came to me for feedback on their work.
Some had become close friends, they loved one another as much or more than they loved creativity. That happens on many online groups. In a different context, it is a great thing.
I love creativity as much or more as I love anything, and that may be my problem, my disconnection from many others. We all have the right to want creativity in whatever way we wish. It may be arrogant, but I think I know what it takes to be successful and good in a creative sense, and insofar as I am and have been, it is honest feedback that has gotten me there.
It is difficult to give honest feedback to someone you love, that is why my editors are not my friends. Feedback is best applied when used in “me” terms and words. This is how I felt about your piece, your painting.. These are the emotions it touched in me, or didn’t. These are the ideas I had about the piece might have been even better. And these are the wonderful things about what you have done.
Feedback fails when it is relayed in excessive or false or reflexive praise, or only in a heart-shaped emoticon, which communities nothing of use to the creator and is a poor excuse for words. Writing this, I hear and see in myself a rigidity, almost an authoritarian tone, one former member of the group said I was a Maoist. This is worth reflecting on, but so far, I am committed to feedback as the salvation of people who wish to grow and change, and for me, creativity is all about growth and change. When you stop changing, you die the first death.
I am sorry to learn that the ones I am still in touch with have almost all abandoned or postponed their projects, some of which were highly promising. They are too busy, they will get to it one day, when their kids graduate, when their husbands aren’t so busy, when work lightens up when their mother or father aren’t sick.
When life isn’t happening so much. For me, that moment has never come.
Feedback is the string that holds it together for me, the rocket fuel that gets me up and moving.
So I am doing better, learning more. The group is in a very good place.
I am working one-on-one with people more, so that we can establish the trust and communication that makes feedback easier to accept and less threatening. I communicate more feedback in private than in public. I talk on the phone when there is any confusion or hint of misunderstanding.
I am sharing my honest reactions to posts. I am working to be especially patient and careful with people who are putting their work out there for the first time. They are special, and need special attention.
And the members of the group are learning to live with feedback and offer it.
What is good feedback?:
It is honest, never cutting.
It is affirming, not diminishing.
It emphasizes what is good, not just what it is not.
It sets goals for change and improvement.
It helps the creator understand the audience (my online readers tell me every day how I am doing, and what works and does it, I can see it from their posts and visits.)
Good feedback is never about being “brilliant,” “loved,” “dumb” or inadequate. That is feedback run aground.
When I offer feedback, it is not my job to tell anyone if they are good or not or worthy. Only the artist and their audience can determine that. My role is to offer my visceral and emotional response to the work and hopefully, any ideas I can offer to make it better.
I tell my students every single that there is not such thing as a perfect work, it is the job of others to suggest how a work struck them and how it could better. The writer or artist takes it from there.
I believe that people who do not seek feedback and cannot absorb and consider are crippling themselves and limiting how far they can possibly go. If you don’t wish to go anywhere, it doesn’t matter.
For me, the fuel analogy for feedback is apt. Feedback is the fuel in the tank, the propellant that tells those of us who wish to lead creative lives how far we can go and what it would take for us to get there. It motivates us.
If you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.
All I’ve ever wanted to hear is that every word I write is brilliant, and it is the one word I have never heard and perhaps will never hear. Because I am not brilliant, even when I am very good.
My editors do not ever tell me that I am good or bad, they tell me every single time how I can make my work better, even when it is very good. I wince and groan, and am exhilarated and uplifted.
So I will keep struggling to define and encourage feedback, it is the boundary between who we are and who we wish to be. It is important.
