Reweaving the Fabrics of Our Daily Creative Lives

Last night, I went to the Girl's Club Gallery with an Art Appreciation class.  I love going on these kinds of field trips.  I find these exhibitions to be restorative in so many ways.

Last night, the teacher of the Art Appreciation class introduced me as a fiber artist.  I find it interesting that after all these years, my first response to being introduced as any kind of artist is to say, "Oh, I'm not really an artist."  Even as I've been paid for my writing work, I tend to deflect being introduced as a poet or a writer.  Yet anyone who knows me knows that I spend much of my day writing.  I get up at an ungodly hour (in the eyes of most people) so that I have time to do my own writing.  Then I go to work where I write e-mails and documents of all sorts.  When there's time, I take breaks and work on my own writing.  If we're still allowing people to have smoking breaks, then I shall claim my poetry breaks!

I used to think of myself as a fiber artist, back when I was doing more of that kind of art.  Not only did I make quilts, but I made these assemblages out of cloth and fibers and often beads:

Once I made full-size quilts. 

Now it seems to take forever to make a baby quilt.

So, let me think about what I've done since we moved to our new house.  Could I still call myself a fiber artist?

I'm still thrilled by fibers, and I've been helping a friend as she devises cool scarves out of textured yarns, ribbons, and other threads.  But I haven't done any of that myself.

I've finished a baby quilt that I made myself, and I helped with another.  I've also made curtains for the cottage, a project which took several week-ends.  It's not exactly art, but I didn't work from a pattern, so it took a lot of plotting and planning.

In fact, it's important for me to remember that I had two big projects this fall that kept me from returning to other art forms.  I helped my spouse reconstruct the cottage.  And I learned how to teach online and then taught two classes.  Those activities consumed a lot of free time. 

Now that it looks like we'll be mandated to stay in our offices more than we once were, I wonder if there's a way to bring fiber arts into my work day.  The benefit to creating with words is that it looks like I'm working on work projects, no matter what file is open.  If I'm weaving a creation of fibers and beads, hmmm.

I'd like to do assemblage at work.  Later, I'll post more pictures from last night's field trip, but I'm fascinated by the work of Samantha Salzinger who creates small vistas and then photographs them from a very close frame.  So you might end up with this picture that looks like a volcanic explosion but it's actually a creation made of cotton and paint in a shoebox:

Could I do this at work?  Hmmm.

Speaking of work, it's time for me to get ready for spin class and then work.  I will continue to think about how to weave art projects of all sorts into the fabric of my days, regardless of where I spend those days.

Tuesday Tidbits: Collaborations of All Sorts

--I've been thinking about Harold Ramis who died yesterday.  You may think you don't know who he was, but if you were alive and conscious of popular culture in the late '70's and 1980's, you probably know who he was, but you don't know you know.  He was the sidekick in many a Bill Murray movie.  For me, I remember his character in Ghostbusters most deeply; but for many of the rest of us, Groundhog Day will be his signature work.  This NPR article gives a lot of background on the actor, the movies, and the trajectory of his career.

--I love the collaborative nature of the work he did.  I love the fact that he realized that he had skills that would be useful behind the camera too.  If he was ever jealous of his friends who made themselves memorable in front of the camera, he hid it well.

--I've been thinking about collaboration in regular life too, in all the ways we help each other.  Yesterday, my spouse and I helped our artist friend take down her MFA art show.    The friend and I put all the art and podiums and materials in the cars, while my spouse dealt with repairing the walls.  It went very speedily. 

--It was strange to think of all that effort leading up to the show, and suddenly, poof, it's gone.

--Last night my spouse craved milkshakes, after seeing lots of commercials for the Sonic fast food place.  But the nearest one was 10 miles away.  So we went to our local grocery store.

--Our local Publix has a very strange vibe.  For one thing, it's the smallest Publix I've ever seen.  It's near the downtown Hollywood area, so there's an inner city vibe, but it's also near some ritzy neighborhoods and high-end condos.  Last night, it seemed the world had converged on that tiny store--many of them in their pajamas.

--Many of the people wandered around the grocery store as if they'd never been to a grocery store before.  One staggering guy who didn't seem quite altogether-with-us looked at a girl choosing movies out of the Red Box vending machine as if it was a fascinating casino game.  Would she win?  Why were the rest of us walking by, so oblivious to the wonders of the red box?

--Tonight I go to a different struggling neighborhood--downtown Ft. Lauderdale, on a field trip to the Girl's Club gallery.

--If I had plenty of money, what kind of business would I create in a struggling neighborhood?  I'm most drawn to artsy stuff, like galleries.  But a bar would probably be my best bet at making some money back from my investment.

--I had a Facebook exchange the other day, as we dreamed of designing clothes.  From there I mentioned Thomas Hood's early Victorian poem, "The Song of the Shirt," where the seamstress is sewing a shroud as well as a shirt.  I said, "Our new company name? The Seamstress Shroud? It will appeal to some of our darker sensibilities, but perhaps not the way to sell frocks!"

--We talked about seamstresses and the birth of the modern labor movement with the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.  One friend fell in love with the word "Shirtwaist."

--I offered, "Seamstress and Shirtwaists: Sounds like a cool café where people also sew and have poetry readings.  Like Busboys and Poets in DC."

--Then we talked about bar names and bar drinks.  I said, "Frills and Frocks--that would be the name of our very hip bar where people dance the night away and have fruity drinks that are good for them but also deeply intoxicating."

--Then it was time to sign off.  A neighborhood friend and her daughter came over to have us help with a real-life sewing project.  The daughter has to go to school in the costume of a historic character and we were helping transform a grown-up's black skirt into one the child could wear by taking in the waistband and hemming it up.

--Soon it will be off to work, a place where happily, I have many collaborators whom I truly like.  In my poetry break today, I'm working on a pantoum about sea level rise and neighborhoods declining into high crime areas.  I'm basing it on a pantoum that I wrote years ago.  Here's the first stanza of that pantoum:

We expected mushroom clouds and radiation.

Instead we changed the chemistry of the atmosphere.
Chunks of glaciers break for freedom and sail across the sea.
Ice caps melt, and the sea swallows islands.  --I'm collaborating with myself!

--I wrote that pantoum when a friend in a different city suggested we try our hand at writing a pantoum.  Ah, collaboration of a different sort!


 

Poetry Manuscripts and Classical Music Compositions

Yesterday, after a morning with the poetry manuscript, I went to the Broward Symphony.  This concert was much more traditional than the one in December; is that the reason the audience was so much larger?

Although I don't have the understanding of classical music that my parents do, it's always a delight to get out to hear live music--or live art of any kind, for that matter.  As I watched the second half of the program, a part of the Scheherezade suite by Rimsky-Korsakov, I thought about how similar an orchestral suite is to a manuscript of poems.

At first I tried to make a metaphor wherein each instrument was a poem.  But I quickly moved to thinking about the individual chunks of the music.

Each part of the orchestral piece has to work all by itself.  But by careful repetition, they also link together.  Some orchestral pieces link together fiercely.  Maybe they're tied to an outside story, like Peter and the Wolf.  Maybe it's a story that the composer has made up, like The Nutcracker Suite.

Even with no external scaffolding, we see the same elements holding the suite together; but a composer could choose from a wide variety of possibilities.  There's repetition.  There's the type of composition.  There are all sorts of experimental directions.

I don't have the music vocabulary to continue further, so let me shift to the poetry manuscript.  I've always tried to have a variety of poems in my work.  I could put every single monastery-themed poem into one single work, but I like the way they interact with poems that have a different focus.  Still, I've kept the overarching focus the same:  how our faith in various systems (weapons, religious, medical, Capitalism, science) may doom us or redeem us.

I decided that most of my poems would be in the free verse style.  I have a whole manuscript of formalist poems, but I don't think I conform to those structures as skillfully.  I think it's important to return to the poetry of form (villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets are my favorites) as a good discipline, but I don't often leave that practice with a solid poem.

I have a sonnet in the new manuscript, but I took out the pantoum and there are no sestinas.  My next question:  was having a lone sonnet in a manuscript of free verse too weird?  I decided it was fine, like a hidden treasure.

I read the manuscript to make sure that the themes and imagery swirl around each other without collapsing with the weight of it all or slamming into each other in a destructive way.  I think I've been successful.

I don't have any submissions in mind right now, so I'll let it sit a bit longer.  Then I'll read it one more time to make sure I think it's all in good shape.  And then, once again, out into the world it goes.

In Which I Discover My Poet Self Likes the Word Snug

I'm tired this morning, but it's a pleasant tiredness.  I spent yesterday afternoon organizing a variety of files, copying files from one computer to another so that I could print them.  In the late afternoon/early evening, we walked to our friends' house, where we enjoyed yummy appetizers and good wine.  We talked about our all-time favorite writers, and which presidential candidates seemed most like ones you'd want to have a beer with.  Although I would not want to have a beer with Nixon, I confessed my sympathy for Richard Nixon, the Richard Nixon of 1960, not the one of 1972.  I came home and crashed into sleep, where I dreamed of a huge party I was giving for strangers in our new house, but we were out of food, and the place was lit only by candles, and I was afraid of fire.

What better mindset to read the new manuscript of poems?

I wanted to read the manuscript from beginning to end, in one sitting, and now, I have.  I like the way the poems swirl around some of the same themes and images:  nuclear stuff, the rising seas, the difficulty of modern work, monastery stuff, religious images.  I think I have it all balanced.

I need to re-think one image.  In poem after poem, people return to snug houses, snug cottages, snug condos.  Too much repetition of the word snug.  Now to determine which poem gets the word.  And should I try to develop other ways of suggesting that snugness?  Could I have a tightly tucked cottage? Hmm.  I'll let these ideas percolate.

There's also several times where things rise like incense rising in a chapel, prayers rising in a chapel, like smoke wafting to rafters.  I'm not sure that repetition leaps out the way the adjective "snug" does.

I'm startled by how many typos remain.  I really thought I had caught all of those.

And I would not have thought the word "snug" would be one that I would overuse.

Restorative Friday: A Good Book and a Seat in the Sun

Yesterday was remarkably restorative--all the more remarkable because I woke up feeling sad and slipping downward off the edge of a pit of existential despair.

We had yesterday off, as our school celebrated Presidents Day on Friday rather than Monday.  Our classes meet once a week, so if we celebrated on Monday, the classes that meet on Monday miss two classes, with MLK day and Presidents Day.  And so, unlike the rest of the nation, we celebrated on Friday.

I went to spin class, which was helpful but didn't totally lift my spirits.  I worried that my weariness from 2 weeks of work exhaustion (moving + meetings + more moving + more meetings) would sink my whole week-end, and a 3 day week-end at that.

I got some writing done, but that fact didn't cheer me, the way it usually does.  I felt more apprehensive.  I took care of some chores, like organizing the receipts to get ready to prepare taxes.  I felt even worse.  I knew that I should take the car into the shop, but I just didn't want to deal with that.

I decided to take advantage of the morning sunshine.  I grabbed the book I wanted to start, Anne Patchett's This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage.  I had been so happy to find it at the library.  I opened the book and was hooked from the first page.

What a wonderful collection of essays.  I loved the ones I expected to love, the essays about writing (more on this in a later blog post), but I loved the others too.  I enjoyed sitting in the sun.  I enjoyed the feeling of a good book.  So often, I start a book and weeks go by and I can barely stand the thought of looking at the unfinished book.  It's wonderful to be absorbed.

I loved Patchett's tone too.  It was like sitting in the sun with an old, good friend.  I'd been feeling a bit of self-pity, because all my friends are busy, busy, busy, and they've got book contracts and/or editors who are interested in what they're doing--oh the downward spiral of self-loathing that can result from that line of thinking!  And Patchett's book stopped my sniveling self.

Thus, by mid-afternoon, I was back to my cheerful, optimistic self.  I did some work with my online classes.  I paid bills and looked at our budget--we're not doing as badly as I feared!  I enjoyed one of my favorite late afternoon meals:  wine, cheese, and crackers, finished with a Cadbury Fruit and Nut bar shared with my spouse.  We ended the day by watching 80's movies on some obscure, non-network channel:  Out of Bounds and St. Elmo's Fire.  Oh, how glad I am to be so many years removed from that first year out of college!

I needed the kind of day that reminded me that I do like my house.  My last 2 weeks have felt a bit like I just go to work to be able to afford to do home repairs.  On most days, I've left my house before the sun comes up and not gotten home until long after sunset--the kind of schedule that makes me think I should just move a cot into my office and be done with commuting, for all the time I get to spend away from my office.

I'm lucky, in that I only have those kind of hectic work weeks once in awhile.  I know that some people face that existence year after year.  And I'm lucky that the most effective restorative practices are cheap:  a library book and a seat in the sun.

Writing Processes from Deep Submersion to Pirate Radio Stations

Yesterday, after the morning's meeting about persistence (lots of discussion of the problem, about which we all agree--not much time on problem-solving), I took part in a meeting that was part webinar, part phone conference.  Something was wrong somewhere, which meant that the organizer had us all muted--that meant that when someone wanted to talk, we had to wait several minutes for the organizer to unmute.  Maddening.  At this rate, we will never launch the redesign of the English Composition class.

It's frustrating because I spent the late months of fall participating in a small group where we wrestled with issues and came up with a plan.  Two other teams did that too.  Now we have 3 proposals and we need to achieve some kind of synthesis.

I found it rewarding to work in the small group.  I loved returning to issues of curriculum and student learning.  We've got some cool ideas, and it's frustrating to be stalled at this stage of the process.  We need to synthesize ideas and move forward with a plan.  We've had a meeting where the plans are presented; we're now trying to discuss them.  But the technology is working against discussion.  Sigh.

By the time I got to mid-afternoon, I felt frazzled in multiple ways.  I turned to blog posts to refresh me.  I came across several blog posts that talked about the writing process. 

My Hindu writing friend blogs sparingly, so it's always a treat to discover that she's posted something.  And this post mentions me!  She compares her writing process to that of others.  Her writing process submerges her completely.  She starts writing during broad daylight and looks up to realize that it's 3 a.m.

She says, "I wonder at all who write for the love of it. One of my best friends writes in the wee hours of the morning and is disciplined enough to command her pen. She, along with a lot of people whose writing habits I read about, can write for a couple of hours a day and not miss time. She can have normal appointments, meet people for lunch, attend and contribute meaningfully to meetings, and do the same thing the following day! She has amassed a formidable body of varied genres, all because she has the discipline to write a little everyday."

Yep, that's me, writing at 3 or 4 a.m. or even earlier, if I'm having trouble sleeping.  But it's often blogging or e-mailing.  I need discipline of a different sort.  This morning, I began my writing day by working on a short story.  Not surprisingly, I got more done on that short story than I do when I start off working on a blog post.  When I begin by blogging, I often have no time for other writing before it's time to get ready for work.

I envy my friend's ability to dive deep.  She envies my very different situation.  Of course, I can't write the way that she does; I've got a boss that would frown on me losing myself to my writing that way.  We do what we can with the circumstances that we have.

I also came across Kelli's blog post on her writing process, which led me to a different post on the writing process--that post describes a writing process that's like a pirate radio station:  "But when I am writing I have no special time of day to write. My writing is like a pirate radio station, always shifting time and location—from a sunny chair in my apartment, to a noisy tea shop in my city, to my desk at DePaul, to my phone while riding the El."

Yesterday I tried to shift location.  I had every intention of writing a poem before the big meeting in the morning.  I didn't get that done, but I did figure out the last stanza, how to end the poem.  At least when I get it written down, I'm more likely to have a finished poem.

I will need to be adaptable.  I've been lucky to have a very flexible schedule.  Yesterday we learned of a new rule that demands that administrators be at their desks no later than 10.

On the one hand, it's still pretty flexible.  On the other hand, it wipes out the mornings that feel like they could last forever, when my spouse is away at class and the whole morning is mine to do with what I wish.  I'm trying not to feel upset.

Kelli gives great advice:  "So my advice for other writers, is to write daily if you can, and find what creates the spark in you? Is it something you do-- light a candle, do yoga before, meditate?  Is it something you taste, drink?  A certain scent? Something you hear?"  
I will need to learn to find those sparks at work, in addition to other locations.  Here's an idea that I will try.  Just before the new year, I bought this book, a book of daily prompts that Kelli Russell Agodon and Martha Silano created.  Of course, I have yet to use it.  I don't need that kind of inspiration when I'm at home.

So, I will take the book to work.  I will work my way through the prompts.  I will close the door and write a poem just as often as I close the door and listen to a teleconference.  If we're still allowed to take a smoking break, and we are, I will take a poetry break!

Prayers in Pottery; Perspective in Poetry

Today is a day of meetings, some of which may be ugly and filled with bad news.  Our morning meeting is about the numbers, which are not where the people in charge would like them to be.  The afternoon meeting is about the redesign of the English Composition class.  Maybe there will be contentious disagreement about how to do it. Or maybe not.

In any case, it seems a good day to post this picture.  I took it at Mepkin Abbey.  It's a sign made of pottery.  Or should I say a pottery prayer?

You might be asking, haven't you already had these kinds of meetings?  Yes, yes we have.  In fact, I was remembering a post that I wrote; imagine my surprise to see the date of 2010.  This post has a prayer that I wrote for meetings that I faced that day.  I'll be praying it again today.

And maybe it's a good day for a poem, a poem that takes place on another day of bad news.  I'm not sure it works as a poem, but it helps me keep perspective.  It's a true story; on the day that the DOW tumbled into the 7000-8000 range back in 2008, we went downtown with our suburban church to serve dinner to the homeless at the urban church.  I was struck by all the contrasts of the day.  What is wealth?  How much is enough?

I suspect I'll be thinking about some of the same questions today.  I suspect today will be a day when I think about social justice in ways that others might not be.

In any case, here's the poem.

In the Soup

 

While we drove to the downtown church,
the DOW closes
at its lowest
since 2002 or 1987
or some year during
The Great Depression;
who can keep track
of this bad news?

 We prepare peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,

and I think of you and long
car trips, PBJs and a thermos of hot coffee
driving through the darkness
with only our singing voices to light the way.

We dish out soup and sliced

bread.  I think of my shrinking retirement fund.
I watch the men with shaking hands slather
margarine on the bread:  cheap calories.

After dinner, we gather in the chapel.

The pastor collects our prayers.
I think about poems and promotions,
while a homeless man mutters,
“May we find food tomorrow.”