KEY POINTS:
When writer Richard Ford walked off the stage the second night of the Auckland Readers & Writers Festival, I was slightly embarrassed I didn't want to leave. As the audience emptied behind me, just two sentences he said held me in my seat.
The moderator commented that the Pulitzer Prize winner once said that without his wife, Ford would never have been a writer.
Ford explained he and his wife had been together since she was 17 and he 19. From that young age, she supported his choice to be a writer. Ford said simply, "Someone has to sanction you. She didn't know it would be worth a life."
His words set off a landslide of memories of work I had done years ago doing one-on-one sessions with executives to work on why their work wasn't working.
Most of them were high functioning, highly successful people with something missing they couldn't name.
Ostensibly they came to talk about some perceived dysfunction - their team was stuck in bad dynamics, or they had begun to lose interest in the very elements that had first attracted them to the job.
Often their innate abilities catapulted them in a direction that the core of the person left behind had now outgrown. In initial sessions, they always expressed that their work wasn't feeding them somehow, but often couldn't articulate why.
Surprisingly, in almost every case, one particular thing would happen in the course of our discussions. At some point, they would usually laugh in slight embarrassment and some buried dream would slip out in conversation.
A successful designer for a worldwide athletic shoe company wanted to design funereal urns and burial objects instead. A diabetic client in business was quietly making art with daily test pinpricks of blood on to pages of an amazing book.
There was always a piece of work within them that had not been given the one gift that Richard Ford was lucky enough to have received; it had not been sanctioned.
The dreams they could act on in their 20s were now tangled up in mortgages, children, and attractive salaries that fed a decade or more of experience deemed too valuable to ditch at age 35 or 50. Or so they said.
I quickly learned I didn't have to be particularly smart to digest the complexities of their field, instead I needed to do two things as well as I could.
I needed to listen hard, and I needed to give them the opportunity to give themselves permission to change their work, to redefine the person they had now become. In Richard Ford's simple parlance, "someone has to sanction you".
For maybe a minute in their lives, I became the parent, or spouse who never quite had the ability to teach us how to see work as an expression of personal dreams.
What Richard Ford said that night in just two sentences does not belong in some soggy lifestyle article or embossed on a yoga mat. What he said belongs more uncomfortably on this very page, among politics and opinion and issues our government needs to translate into working policy.
For a decade Ford's first two novels gathered dust on the shelves. He turned to sports journalism in desperation but ultimately returned to writing what became a body of stunning, internationally recognised work. His dreams were stubborn, disciplined, and ultimately resilient.
How do we mandate that kind of passionate vision into our national psyche, or incorporate teaching risk into public policy - in education, in arts funding, or indeed to foster innovators in any field? When did muttering the word "dream" in a workplace first mean you'd been drinking before lunch?
Even the most cynical among us knows Ford's brand of focused, creative vision pays huge societal and economic dividends.
Work the algorithm. Maybe someone could measure how much Peter Jackson's first New Zealand Film Commission funding of $275,000 has now given back to this country. But there's no spreadsheet for just how many Kiwi children today are doodling on a school pad with some big, untried idea to express because of Jackson's creative vision made real.
Every potential tall poppy this country holds too tightly in its palm just stays a seed. Poet Langston Hughes called it "a dream deferred". I call it a waste.
Quietly, privately - as is our way - look in the mirror tomorrow and ask yourself, or the person you sleep next to, what dreams need to be expressed in your life now?
New Zealand is my home. I have a right, an economic interest, and a cultural investment in what you will envision next.
Richard Ford's wife had no assurances of it then, but looking at the grace that one woman's sanctioning fostered, I am certain of it now; it will be "worth a life".
Tracey.Barnett@xtra.co.nz
