Photographing the Sealey Challenge

 On the first day of the Sealey Challenge, I saw several people post selfies of themselves and the volume of poetry that they had finished reading for the day.  I don't have a smart phone, so I knew that I wouldn't be posting a selfie.  I decided I would try to do something artful with each photograph.

For the first day, I noticed a pillow that would be a colorful backdrop to the book cover, so I went with that:

Here's something similar, using my spouse's collage as backdrop:

But as the days progressed, I tried to do something that would reflect on the subject matter of the book.  Here I used a statue of the Buddha for Luisa Igloria's The Buddha Wonders if She is Having a Mid-Life Crisis:

Some photos were a bit of an inside joke (Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in Switzerland):

Some photos delighted me in the way they came together:

I even pulled a photo because I worried I was being unintentionally offensive in some way, since Blanco is a gay male poet.  At first, I posted this photo:

Then I decided to go safer, even though I doubt anyone is paying much attention to my photos:

I wasn't anticipating the benefits of taking these photographs beyond the fun of it all.  But the thinking through of a photograph helped me to consider the essence of a volume of poems, the meaning of it all, and how to translate it into a picture.  It tapped into a different part of my brain, and I want to believe that I was a better reader because of it.  

It was an additional way I fed my soul, and that alone made it worthwhile.