The Void Screamers

It’s never been easier to create, and it’s never been harder to get your creations seen. If the 2020s had a patron saint, it would be someone furiously, breathlessly, relentlessly making art, only for no one to see it.

Publishers, critics, reviewers, and editors – they were the wyrms of old and they have been slain, slashed to ribbons by an age of infinite content and infinite connections. But in a way those gatekeepers were easier to keep track of, easier to assail, than the current chaotic stew. Blogs and bumps, tweets and tumbls, all of them registering barely a shrug unless money changes hands or the Almighty Algorithm just happens to smile. For people who have been taught that feedback is the only true currency, it feels a bit like drowning. Screaming into the void, receiving no answer in return.

I want to create a group in response. We will call ourselves the Void Screamers, and we will howl our creations into existence not because we want to but because we have to. We will make art because it is too great a thing to keep pent-up inside us. It may need to be done in snatches, here and there, as life on this dying world demands more from those who can give the least.

But we will scream our works into the void all the same. We will sew patches of a screaming mouth onto our leather jackets, if we have them, and anyone who cares to look will know. That is a Void Screamer, they will think. That is a person who has to create, because they have to.

Money is welcome, recognition accepted, retweets appreciated,please like comment and subscribe and be sure to hit that bell for notifications. But we’ll make the art even as engagement hovers at zero, as post reach stays in the single digits, as analytics crater and burn. We’ll make art no one can see, simply because we have to.

A story that is never told, a drawing that is never sketched, those are weights upon the soul, Marley’s chains wrought not from misdeeds but from ideas. Cast them off, fire them like darts into the inky blackness, for even if no one knows, we will know.

The Void Screamers will know. And maybe, just maybe, that will be enough.

  • Like what you see? Purchase a print or ebook version!
Advertisement