The Minnesota Branch of the
National League of American Pen Women
welcomes you.

We are a group of professional artists of all faculties, music, poetry, novelists, painters, sculptors, publishers, promoters, photographers and performers.

For us, art is energy, shaped by a human being into a means of communicating a truth of human experience in a moment of time. It can take any form: writing, dancing, sculpture, painting, weaving, cooking, composing, singing, etc. It takes one into the whole realm of consciousness.

Two necessary attributes of art are individuality and universality. Individuality is one's personal voice, one's way of expressing the wisdom developed through experience, the emotional truths gleaned from one's lived experience, and the sensitivity shaped by all one's relationships, triumphs, and traumas.

Universality is that moment in time in experiencing the work of art when the reader (or viewer or listener) gains the insight that this work of art expresses a truth about all human experience, and that he or she has lived some part of that experience.

Mary Joan Meagher
State President 2007

Picture by Gail Speckman
"The Labyrinth Within"