February 2026 Newsletter: The Need for Sadness in Art
When my girls were young, they often heard me listening to Jann Arden’s music. If you’re unfamiliar, her lyrics are a poetic observation of what it means to be a human. She is an observer, a storyteller, a witness.
One of the songs that I have always gravitated to is Everybody’s Broken. As the title suggests, this is not an uplifting song, but rather a recognition of pain – a small boy who is bullied, an elderly woman abandoned, a mother grieving a child. As children, my girls could not understand my occasional need to hear this song, to live within these stories. But it’s so sad! They exclaimed. Yes, it was. Truth be told, I struggled to explain it to them. It was not logical, as they needed it to be at that age, but primal. It did not speak to my mind, but rather to the knowledge of injustice and heartache and pain that lived in my bones and veins and cartilage.
It helped me process these truths, as stories do.
My voice is simply one of millions when I say the world is a hard place to be right now. The injustices are too many to count, too many for one person even to know, never mind process. Minneapolis. Government-sanctioned murder. Children abducted. Tear-gas. Cruelty. Division. Fear. Annexation. Protection of abusers and desertion of victims. Abandonment of the rule of law. And violence. So much violence.
While much of this is happening in the US, not to mention many other parts of the world that are not so directly on my doorstep, violence does not remain loyal to certain flags. In my youth, a female-targeted mass shooting occurred at École Polytechnique, killing 14 women. It is known as the Montreal Massacre. In 2020, a Nova Scotian man dressed as a police officer killed 22 people before he was finally stopped. In 2025, almost one year ago, there was a deadly car attack in Vancouver at the Lapu-Lapu Festival where families were celebrating Filipino heritage. It killed 11 and left many more injured. This tragedy happened quite literally in front of my daughter’s apartment building and her ground floor window. She and her friends, all in their early twenties, ran out to help, witnessing things most of us will never have to face. Leaving them, and all who were present, with a before and an after.
And then yesterday, a school shooting in Tumbler Ridge, BC. Nine are dead, including the shooter. Today my heart screams for those victims; for the lost lives of children, for the howling pain of mothers and fathers, for the injured, for every surviving student, for teachers and school staff, and for the residual fear and trauma that will live in every resident after such a horrific event.
The town of Tumbler Ridge is small, only about 2500 people, a population in line with the town where I went to high school. Although we have two full provinces between us and I have never visited that part of BC, it feels remarkably close to home. It takes little imagination to set myself in that school’s classrooms or hallways or gym. To know the feeling of recognition approaching students and staff, knowing most people’s names and likely their grade. That feeling of it all being close to home is only amplified with the news that a school here in my city was closed on Monday due to an online threat. Not the first time I’ve woken to that kind of news.
There have been so many more tragedies than the ones I mention here. Too many. Too much to process. Too much to bear.
And so, I seek art. Music, fiction, poetry, and visual representations that combine pain and sorrow with hope and resilience. Is it sad? Yes. Sometimes an artist’s interpretation of sadness is needed to be in conversation with the sorrows that live in our bodies, otherwise so often unreachable. Sometimes, like Arden’s lyrics do for me, we need music to set our tears free.
As a writer, my stories are frequently about grief. It’s a theme I keep coming back to again and again. The most obvious reason is that I lost my mother in my early twenties, when I was no longer a child, but not really a full adult yet either. But then it’s also true that the town where I grew up had a lot of early death. By the time I graduated, there were at least five people in my grade, or the grades directly above or below, that had lost a parent. That’s a lot considering how small of a population we were.
So grief, whether I liked it or not, made itself at home.
In 2014, my father passed away in a palliative care room. He was elderly and his passing, although difficult, felt less cruel than my mother’s, who was taken by an undiagnosed cancer in her early sixties. It was in my father’s palliative care room that the concept of Fault Lines solidified. There I was, in a tiny bubble of time and space, surrounded by my siblings and rotating extended family visits, completely separated from the rest of the world. It was a time of waiting and reflecting and remembering. In Fault Lines, the protagonist also spends much of her time waiting for a death (in this case her stepmother), while reluctantly acting as a caregiver for her estranged father with dementia, forcing her to face memories she might otherwise have been successful in blocking. It’s an internal story, one woman’s fight to come to terms with her past, and to accept her present within the truth of her family legacy.
In my second novel, still an early work-in-progress, the characters also face a loss, but this time within the context of social and political change. As I’ve tried to understand the why of everything that’s happening in our world on a societal level (an impossible task), it’s not so impossible to draw lines between the individual and the world events that touch them. In that vein, the novel focuses on one family, specifically three generations of women whose experiences span decades of societal change that shape them each in ways both tragic and hopeful.
In both cases, and in many of my shorter pieces of fiction, there is sadness, but there is also promise and hope. Hope is the thing most necessary. Not only does it dampen our worries, it speaks truth about the world. Yes, there is a lot of bad. But there are also so many grassroots efforts to fight all that is wrong. The people of Minneapolis are a shining star of this, as are so many that will never move into the light. But my heart sees you. Acknowledges you. Celebrates you.
And thanks you.
Jann Arden sings of sorrow, but also of good. As we process all the injustices, let’s leave a crack in the door for hope as well.
From Everybody’s Broken (Jann Arden, FREE, released 2009)
“She lost her son on february one of two thousand and four / Wrong place, wrong time, yeah life became a landmine right outside her door / There used to be kites and strings of lights to decorate her skies / Now clouds of smoke just shroud the hope and all she can do is cry”
From Good Mother (Jann Arden, LIVING UNDER JUNE, released 1994)
“I’ve got a good mother / And her voice is what keeps me here / Feet on ground, heart in hand / Facing forward, be yourself”
Love & Best Wishes,
Shirley
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