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In 1693, Lars Nilsson of Lapland was executed by the court of Sweden for performing blasphemous “pagan rituals”: praying over the dead body of his grandson according to the customs of his Sámi people, a native culture the Swedish government was trying to Christianize (or eradicate).

I watched Lars, standing resolute in the snow in the town square, defend his actions and receive the sentencing in a visit to the Nordiska Museet (Nordic Museum) on a recent trip to Stockholm.

The video reenactment was part of a revamp of the museum completed a few years ago, intended to bring history to life for contemporary visitors through the power of individual story:

Swaddled in furs in the snowy Scandi countryside, young Samuel Kiechel, son of a wealthy German craftsman and merchant, related his astonishment at the lands and people and cultures of Scandinavia as he traveled it in his grand European backpacking tour in the late 1500s, an unusual destination for adventurers of the time, and he documented his travels in a meticulous diary I watched him read from.

I saw noblewoman and entrepreneur Maria Sofia de la Gardie huddle against the biting cold of her castle in Sweden, face lined with her concerns as she managed her estates and the many businesses she ran across Scandinavia in the late 17th century: textile manufacturing, shipbuilding, timber and grain exports, papermills, and more.

In 1870 servant girl Mathilda’s excitement shone through as she hid in an outhouse to read a letter from her cousin Lovisa, who’d migrated to a place called Iowa in America, where treats like wheat bread, butter, and syrup were plentiful. Mathilda rhapsodized about joining her there with her love, Nils Karlsson, living like gentlefolk and tasting the “cake” her cousin told her about, a delicacy that looked like bread but was made with sugar.

The museum was spectacular, walking visitors through more than five centuries of Nordic history, but I spent hours there because the stories brought the artifacts to life for me (you can watch some of the videos yourself here). I could imagine each individual using the items, creating them, could picture them and their surroundings from the many portraits and paintings hung throughout the exhibits. And the videos—all based on real historical figures and documents and records—made them feel even more real and tangible. That human connection brought history to life for me.

That’s the power of story—so much more evocative than mere dry facts—and it’s why I always say that character is the root of every story, regardless of genre. It’s our gateway into another world, another reality.

The personal power of art

On the second leg of our trip, as I toured Rosenbørg Castle in Copenhagen, (as you can do virtually here), looking at the toilet of one king and the “erotica room” of another, I thought about how much I love to travel and why.

In the early 1600s King Christian IV wanted an en suite bathroom much as any homeowner might; in the early 1700s King Frederik IV collected porn and stashed it in a private retreat in his castle as surely as one might squirrel away their most personal interests now. The details of the lives these figures led offered me a window into their stories, their personalities, brought them to real, vivid life.

How similar they must have been to me—to any of us—in their universal desires and longings, fears and hopes. Yet how different their circumstances and daily existence.

But it’s not just historical figures that engender my empathic imaginings when I travel. In Copenhagen’s famed Freetown Christiania, an independent zone created by hippies and artists and activists who squatted in an abandoned military base in the early 1970s and formed a self-governing community of their own that still thrives today, I wondered at what brought each of the denizens to this communal enclave in Denmark. What made them abandon the previous lives they may have lived, to want something independent and freer? What are their lives like there now on the daily?

Every morning and every afternoon in Copenhagen we watched fleets of cyclists wheel to work in crowded bike lanes in the city, and I wondered what jobs they were going to, what it was like to commute via bicycle even in the chill of Denmark winters, what they each went home to.

Through the power of story, we get to share other people’s experiences and perspectives. We live a piece of each of their lives, broadening our own.

At the Stockholm Writers Festival that had brought us to the area I talked with countless people—the organizers and the attending authors—who each had stories of their own. I asked what brought the immigrants among them to Scandinavia and what their lives there were like, what they left behind when they moved and how they felt about it. I queried those who were from the area about what it was like to have grown up there, and the cultural traditions and norms of Sweden. I talked to many writers about what they wrote and why and what their writing journey had been.

For a moment, as they told me their stories, I got to share their experiences and perspectives. I lived a piece of each of their lives, broadening my own.

That, too, is the power of story.

And it’s also the power of what storytellers create with our art.

Art as window, art as bridge

So often in our imaginings about the lives of so many others in the world, it’s artists who bring the people and their worlds to life.

Art spills over every surface of Freetown as if it can’t be contained, from the murals splashed onto building walls from the entrance and throughout as if to signal to visitors that they’ve entered another realm to the jewelry and textiles and crafts for sale by vendors peppered throughout the community for tourists and other visitors to buy and take home, a piece of this world and a memento of their time in it. They offer a window into life within the community and for its denizens, and for the uninitiated, a visual, tangible way to share the residents’ world.

At Stockholm’s Fotografiska Museet (Photography Museum) we took in an exhibit of photographer Martin Parr that spanned five decades of his career documenting human behavior and ordinary life of the times, and of various socioeconomic classes across communities around the globe.

In his images he captures a leathery woman literally tanning her hide on a dirty, overcrowded beach in England past its prime even in the sixties. Tourists around the world crowd attractions and gape, waving or wearing cheap souvenirs. Close-ups of ordinary relics of life like condiment bottles and junk food, cheap toys and décor, nail polish and jewelry and fashion document the detritus of decades.

Parr’s photos document and glorify and satirize society, people, lives across generations, giving me a panoramic glimpse into countless other people’s realities beyond my own.

At the lovely Louisiana Museum in Denmark we saw an exhibit of French conceptual artist Sophie Calle’s work spanning five decades. Her 1986 series of interviews with people born blind about what they imagined to be beautiful were accompanied by Calle’s portraits of each and her photographs representing what they described. For those moments I looked at each one it let me inside the perception of the person who had inspired the photo, imagining what they “saw” within their own imagination, what their reality was like, how their mental image might differ from what Calle had interpreted, how it might dovetail.

At the Nordiska I looked at enormous shoes made of birch bark and imagined what life must have been like for the giant Swede who wore them, or the one who wove them. I wondered how the stiff shoes stayed on, whether they chafed, whether they grew softer with wear, what they felt like when they were wet. I pictured the peregrinations and the tasks that their owners might have been undertaking while wearing them.

These were more than artifacts, objects retrieved and preserved from history. They were windows into lives, into worlds made real and immediate through the creation of some soul long dead by the time I was captured by their work centuries later, wearing my own mass-produced, comfort-engineered walking shoes. A connection between us unlikely but for the link of that crafted object.

The power of what artists and creators generate can bring people and worlds to life and let them linger beyond our own limited ones. It forms a bridge between humans, no matter how disparate or distant our realities may be.

That is the power of creation: what we as artists and creators generate that can bring people and worlds to life and let them linger beyond our own limited ones. What forms a bridge between humans, no matter how disparate or distant our realities may be.

In a recent newsletter, author Laurie Frankel—a favorite of mine—wrote about the long and winding evolution of each of her stories, the extensive, exhaustive passes she makes in editing and revision. She, too, reflected on how viewing art throughout history affects her view of her own, and the care she takes with her craft: “I’m not claiming that anyone’s going to be reading Enormous Wings in 2,000 years,” she admits of her latest novel, “but paying this level of attention to later and to getting the details as right as you can feels less like madness when you’re surrounded by examples of [art] standing the slings and arrows of time.”

She shared photos of a stone tablet chiseled with what appeared to be an ancient bill of lading: “Probably no one realized anyone was going to read this request for info about textiles and travel garments…4,000 years later either, but if they had, might they not have sweated a little harder over whether ‘Pepper said’ or ‘said Pepper’ sounded better in any particular sentence? And if they did, would that not seem an eminently reasonable expenditure of time, all things considered?”

Our work may not reach thousands of people over the course of time. It may not outlive us.

But it can create a connection between human souls, between diverse lives and realities. It may allow someone to experience a moment of empathy and understanding, to discover something new about themselves. It might shorten the distance between one person’s reality and another’s, perhaps bring us closer together in a world that seems at the moment to be bent on driving us apart.

And if it does—if you forge that moment of connection to even a single soul with your work—might that not, as Frankel says, seem an eminently reasonable expenditure of time, all things considered?

Authors, I’m feeling contemplative this week with this post, and I’d love to hear what these musings might have you contemplating. Are there artworks that have touched you or inspired your own art? Places you’ve visited or people you’ve met who have broadened your world in unexpected or delightful ways? Historical figures or details or documents that have sparked something in you, or made you consider the purpose or legacy of your creative work?

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