Just Making

From award-winning author Mitali Perkins comes an essential companion for writers, artists, and other creatives who long for a more just world.

Why should we make art while injustice and suffering wreak havoc? How can we justify making beautiful things? Author Mitali Perkins isn't afraid of hard questions about justice and art. She knows that the creative life can seem selfish. As the daughter of immigrants, she studied toward a career of eradicating poverty and knows the internal voice that challenges: "How dare you retreat to your studio to create?"

Yet Perkins learned that writing fiction wasn't setting aside her passion for a better world but pursuing it. In Just Making, she offers a justice-driven perspective unique among books on creativity. "My ancestors are village Bengali women who made beautiful things but didn't dare to dream of art as a career," she writes. Women across the globe have crafted beauty and order amid chaos, war, and deprivation, and Perkins turns our attention to what we learn from them.

Just Making introduces us to strategies such as forgetfulness in flow, tenderness in trauma, and crossing borders. In conversation with creative guides like Nikki Grimes, Chad Somers, and Carol Aust, Perkins offers ten practices that help creatives keep making. Persevering through pushback from within and without, we can keep making art that heals human suffering, transmits truth, and confronts the oppressor.

Here are dispatches for young and not-so-young creatives, crafted by a writer committed to shalom: the flourishing of all. We must keep making art infused with truth, beauty, and goodness, not to ignore a world in distress but for the sake of loving it. With vivid stories, practical ideas, and reflection and discussion questions, Just Making will inspire you to keep making beauty in a broken world.