“I like the way we make our dreams happen.” Lori Richards
I’m delighting in the astonishing culmination of a collaborative art venture with my friend, artist, Lori Richards. Our creative works—Lori’s paintings and my writing—are exhibiting together for a short time at Wall Space Gallery in Ottawa. She generously invited me to write prose poem (like) pieces towards her paintings and I leapt at the opportunity[1].
The vernissage (new word for me, it means a preview of an art exhibition) was last weekend but we dreamed the idea—a wish—to combine and show our art works many many years ago. The exhibit is called Seedbed.
Lori and I walk together almost every week. As our feet pound the leaf and petalled paths, the sidewalks, the pavement or the snow, we recount, gesturing to the winds, drawing models in the air with our fingers, the celebrations, the frustrations, the lamentations and the longings of creative process. Despite working in different mediums, our practices are very much aligned. Lori is a professional artist. She has been, and continues to be, a steady champion of my creative writing as I squeeze it in as best I can round my day job[2].
Leaping is the right description for the approach I used for Seedbed. I’ve written ad nauseum (emphasis on nausea) about how crippled I am when it comes to pushing my creative writing out into the world (submitting for publication). I didn’t have this issue in the past…it developed over the last few years …I don’t really know what it’s about, but I feel like I’m about to break through my own barriers[3]. I think I’ve been saying that for a year or so. Sigh.
For this project, writing prose poem-ish pieces for each of Lori’s seventeen different paintings, I wanted to practice less preciousness with my writing. And I wanted to experience (force myself) to let go of themas is. I created a few rules for myself to keep the creativity light and fun:
Gaze at the painting, but only for a short time
Use stream of consciousness writing (I wrote freehand for most of these in my notebook, and the pieces, as they were being written, often included arrows and connecting lines)
Adhere to first instincts (as in, whatever words or images pop up, write them down and don’t tinker very much or at all)
As soon as a piece feels finished, send it to Lori as “done”
This phase of development and creation worked relatively well, though I was surprised by the writing emerging. The pieces are whimsical and, in several cases, nonsensical. But, adhering to my own rules, I let them be.
Do look at the paintings at the gallery website – my reproduction here fails (dreadfully) to capture the vibrancy of colours.
There was only one pairing of works where the process was reversed, where my writing inspired Lori’s painting. Interestingly, (or maybe the better word is fortuitously), this became the title pairing in the exhibition: Lori’s seedbed painting and a breathy paragraph of my own that floated to me the week I made the decision to leave my marriage. Though Lori thinks of the Seedbed series as beginning January 2024, I feel it began closer to the creation of that garden focused paragraph in the fall of 2023. It was then Lori created her first “bed painting” (several paintings in Seedbed include an image of a bed). This first painting felt (feels) emblematic for me, for what I was/am moving through. That painting now hangs in my bedroom.
It has been wonderful experiencing the generative iterations of the series since. There have been additional bed paintings created beyond the exhibition submissions…they continue. I feel magically connected—in a way I can’t articulate—with each painting as they appear. The closest I can come to explaining my feelings is with the word blossoming.
And I wasn’t nervous in the days or hours leading up to the vernissage. The gallery’s curator displayed the works beautifully. She and the staff also produced a lovely brochure of a selection of paintings with their ekphrastic accompaniments. Both Lori and I were expected to speak briefly about our process and collaboration, and I planned to read two very short pieces[4]. But when I arrived at the gallery a cold panic sloshed in my stomach[5]. The gallery space filled quickly, bodies tumbling inside from the frozen February afternoon. I’m told there were 80 people but they all sort of blurred together blobbing round while I smiled and nodded and prayed the wine I was drinking would kick in. It didn’t.
When it was my turn to speak, I accepted the microphone with grace. I stumbled on the word ekphrastic (it is very hard to say)….garbled gravel in my mouth…my heart thrashed against my rib cage and leapt the base of my throat, but then, deep breath, pause. Reading my own words, my body calmed and settled from the very first sentence. My voice steadied and held. I’m told I was poised. I wish I could say I recovered soon after the short performance, but I felt rather sick with the adrenalin hangover for the remainder of the day and into the evening.
Still, it has been an accomplishment. And a progression. In the days since, I’ve felt delighted with the experience. And (perhaps?) even a little awe for the courage it took to leap.
[1]Ekphrasis is a written description, real or imagined, of a work of art. Another dear friend, Barbara Ponomareff, who I met years ago when I offered to carpool us to a wonderful (and remote) writer’s retreat, has published several exquisite ekphrastic works in The Ekphrastic Review.
[2] I’m blessed with continuing encouragement from so many people; you know who you are, I sing your adorations for sticking around, thank you.
[3] Intend to write about “next level writing” in the March blog post, so, stay tuned. Also, I promise to curtail the whining and actually get some pieces submitted.
[4] Another dear friend, also a weekly creative-conversation-while-walking companion, Carolyn Smart, very kindly suggested which work to read. And I’m tickled to learn that painting, Pink Room with Moon, sold to another Canadian poet on the strength of an Instagram promotional post even before the show was launched. So many collaborators throughout the whole process… why do we ever believe we work in isolation?
[5] Threatened a colonic…wholly inelegant I know. Vomiting might have been preferable. But the body chooses its own exit strategies. I managed to keep uh everything intact (emphasis on in).
Seedbed introduction (Lori in the background and Tiffany, gallery curator, to the let).
This fear of the blank page, this fear of not having the skill to translate one’s communications between inner world to outward presentation, this fear of lacking creative ability to express beauty, this fear, this paralyzing fear of inadequacy, does it ever go away?
It doesn’t. At least for me.
I was going to erase that first sentence/paragraph…it wasn’t what I intended to write about today. The whining, it’s tiresome, no? But I would be leaving out one of the more difficult aspects of my writing practice if I did. And here, with these posts, I’ve promised authenticity.
So, my writing process becomes a matter of forcing myself through the exercises of creativity, forcing myself to the habit. The routine feels the same way one feels dressing for the gym: snapping spandex to the waist (a paradox of constriction and freedom of movement), flattening my breasts with a sports bar (not giving in to the inevitable rise of claustrophobia), rooting round for a sweat wicking tank (a clean one), short socks slipped over the toes, the heel, to hug the ankles, bending, crouching, gathering then looping the laces on my sneakers, and finally, the deep (resigned) inhale, then exhale, stepping onto the gym’s rubberized floor, heading toward the weights beneath the coach’s patient gaze. And after the workout? Euphoria.
All that to say, it takes a lot of energy (and time fiddling round “getting dressed”) to do creative work. I think this is why I dance round so many different creative projects…to keep my head in the creative game. When one project seems insurmountable, another can feel feasible. The dangling addiction to euphoria (in writing, it’s when things—words, metaphors, ideas, images, sounds, etc.—come together, surprise me; in drawing or painting or sculpting, it’s when forms, colours, lights, shadows, etc., come together, create something beautiful)[1].
But there’s also an issue of commitment…it seems I have one[2]. Fear of inadequacy is one thing; fear of sharing my creative work with the wider world is something different. (Though, I suspect, related.) I know I’m resisting. I know I’m avoiding. I haven’t been sending my work out for publication[3]. What I don’t understand (yet) is why[4].
So, I’m studying my fear. Not just to understand its origins but to understand how the development of belief systems shade behaviours to come[5]. I suppose we could call belief systems the stories we tell ourselves. I’m studying how those belief systems move, crossing space and time, forming our lives.
I know it’s my own thinking holding me back. Knowing the issue doesn’t solve the issue. I’m working on it. Working through it is going to take more than spandex. Love helps. Love, really, is the answer to all of it. Loving attention and a devotion to loving attention. Love bends belief systems to become better, beautiful. I’m not being trite here…love is what shapes…art, yes, but also, us. Love shapes humans. And, I imagine, the more than human world too[6]. The betweenness, the relationality, the reciprocity, is important.
And this put to mind a thought I had recently, a floaty thought, connecting the actions of drawing/colouring with recent paragraph development work with Nina Schuyler. One of the things (of many) that I love about Nina’s breakdown and discussion of sentences is her systematic illumination of how the techniques achieve emotional impact for the reader. I realized the layering approach of sentence structures, both within a sentence, and sentences in relation to one another in a paragraph, is akin to the layering of colours, light and shade, when painting or drawing. The idea brought home for me how a paragraph creates an emotional resonance …a translation of complex emotion(s) layered and transferred to the page. Words, as symbols, representations of “things”, are inadequate in and of themselves to render the emotion… “joy” for example, is too abstract, too far removed from the body-mind sensations and experiences, disconnected from the cascade of memories, desires, wishes, instincts associated with the word, but the sentences and the paragraphs build in tandem to create that wonderful harmonious effect and impact with text.
This is the same way a song is layered with longing or love and attained through tempo, melody, harmony, lyrics, tone, volume, instrument variety etc. Art, including literary art with its intentional, architecturally constructed intercourse, I’m only now appreciating, enables exploration and expression of interiority and exteriority when language might so easily lead us astray. The foundation of such architecture is loving attention to the heart’s desires, the heart’s revelations…whether that be focusing the beauty of a pomegranate or a pear, or a surprising word, metaphor, or image generated using stream of consciousness writing. Some thoughts anyway…
[1] Cooking, while also creative, follows a shorter, more predictably satisfying arc. At least I get to savour the efforts. Also, sharing them with others remains, despite years of practice and repetition, a magical joy.
[2] A little about me [and married]; I will never allow myself to be owned again.
[3] I have one piece, the introduction section of my longer project, submitted at one literary magazine…I am working to WILL an acceptance there.
[4] I read today, an inspirational maxim (normally I’d eschew), attributed to William Ward (though, chasing these quotes from social media proves an erratic, enigmatic, time swallowing quest), “To place your ideas and dreams before a crowd is to risk their loss” …is this what I’m afraid of, losing my dream? No longer having a dream? An interesting thought…
[5] This study, which, thankfully, dovetails day job research, integrates stunning intersections across disciplines: epigenetics, early childhood development, neurochemistry, physics, philosophy, psychology, history, anthropology, biology, sociology…
[6] This time last year I read Bruce Chatwin’s The Songlines. It had been part of my sister’s Indigenous Studies curriculum, and I stumbled across it while packing up my own books preparing to move. An interesting read as a window into the sociocultural attitudes re: women and First Nations peoples in the 1980s, an aspect which, unfortunately, may prevent a contemporary reader diving in…I think, all the more reason to read it, but that’s not what I want to highlight. What sticks with me is the belief system described in the book, how Aboriginal Australians maintain songlines, pathways of knowledge crisscrossing Australia, the sky and the water, also called dreaming tracks, that link stories with features in the environment, by continuing to sing the world into existence through loving attention. (I am paraphrasing a super complex and fascinating world view.) Here’s a short video describing songlines and the links on the subject beneath the video are excellent.
I didn’t quite get this post to come together the way I thought it might. I’m interested how my subconscious thoughts—thoughts that take my conscious mind so long to catch on, catch up—drive my writing[1] ….I’m learning to relax enough to draw it out, I’m learning to “see” it, and somehow, in my mind, this process puzzles together with world views…
When I visited Venice last month, top of my list was to stand in front of the Fra Mauro version of the Mappa Mundi at the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana. This world map, completed in 1460, created using a southern orientation requiring me to flip and stretch my own perceptions of the world, is considered one of the most visionary cosmographical works of all time. I love that word, cosmographical…like, drawings guided by the stars. It’s a large hand-drawn map, almost 2 meters in diameter, of what was believed the world looked like in 1460. Belief is what I’m interested in…how it changes and shapes our thinking. What fascinates me about the Mappa Mundi, in addition to its gorgeously detailed hand-drawn beauty[2], is that Fra Mauro created his world view without ever moving beyond the shores of his Venetian island[3]. There’s heaps of fantastic information about the Mappa Mundi I won’t synthesize here, but well worth checking out; the AI project associated with the map is, in a word, dazzling[4].
A recent Saturday I woke, galvanized myself, and emailed a friend[5] in the writing community to request one of the two open mic spots at a public reading at the library in Picton. I left volunteering almost to the last minute to decide, yes, today (today!), I have the courage to read one of my creative works.
Then, I spent a quick hour editing the piece, changing the title and furnishing it with a deeper history. I ran out of time (is it ridiculous to think I would have that time?) and I knew the piece wasn’t “finished”. But I’m discovering no creative conversation seems to end…the writing continues to communicate beyond whenever I assume “I’m done”.
In my mind, I imagined the public library reading might attract 8 to 10 people. In my mind, they’d be milling about the stacks listening half-heartedly to the readings while they pulled random books from the shelves, splitting them open by their spines. So, imagine my surprise when I showed up, just as the event began, and discovered a far more formal arrangement: perhaps fifty people seated in rows and rows of chairs (none empty…when my daughter, Willa, and her partner, Nadine, arrived slightly after me, having parked the car, they sat on the floor against the wall), a podium, a mic, speakers and a video set up, aimed and recording.
I have not read my work publicly in many years[6]. Certainly, it was pre-pandemic. When I moved to the podium, the adrenalin kicked up from my stomach and pummelled my heart. The first paragraph was breathy. I lacked air to project my words. So thankful for the mic. In my mind, I kept repeating just read what’s in front of you Suzanne, it’s right there. Take a breath at the next period, you have time. Good. Next period, take a breath, take a deeper breath. By the time I reached the second paragraph, my breathing evened, and I managed to settle into the rhythm of inhaling and exhaling with the sentences.
And I edited on the go. I decided to drop a whole paragraph, suddenly seeing there was no need for it. I started to look up at the audience, interpreting their expressions (in my mind, this seemed like…confusion?). Three quarters of the way through, I realised I was enjoying myself, sharing my work aloud. The piece is dark, I know, but it turns toward the light by the end. But I felt when I’d finished, the audience hadn’t followed me through the turn. Ah well.
In the spirit of blind map making a la Fra Mauro style…I’m tracing the contours of subconscious thought, surfacing new meaning from those watery shorelines…this seems a translation made possible only by passing words through the chambers of the heart as opposed to catching in the net of the mind.
Here is the recording of the event. My reading begins at the 54-minute mark. Following the video, I’ve pasted the work in progress with some of my thoughts, marked using orange coloured text, that have arisen since (also during ha ha) the reading.
Measures (the original title of the piece was Just Math and the original draft focused on the mathematical aspects or logic that we [mis]apply to situations that are …less mechanical, more human…’Measures’ as a title got slapped on the piece the morning of the reading …I was thinking it might be a riff on the math aspects, but didn’t think too deeply…but now I’m discovering subconscious intentions, what this piece might be trying to communicate, exploring the choice to end one’s life, perhaps the most weighty decision one might make …so will likely keep this title)
I visit my father in hospital every Saturday. It’s not a real hospital, it’s a step-down unit, a retirement home repurposed to ease the burden of bodies (during the reading – why not before? I don’t know – I noticed how frequently the reference to “bodies” comes up in this piece…6 times…considering this because it signals some sort of corporeal versus what? spiritual? maybe…there’s a nod to religion in the piece…but no, it’s my subconscious circling the deeper meaning I am only seeing now: when is it time to depart a body, a body at odds with an ability to negotiate this world?) competing for limited hospital bed space. The patients here patiently await death. Or they wait to pass a test called Activities of Daily Living so they might score a return to former lives. It’s all about patient to nurse ratios and patient proximity to death. Just math.
In the lobby, plastic plants droop. A young woman sits behind a reception desk, her face blue with the glow of the computer screen. She says hello, but only when I say hello first. (during the reading, I dropped this paragraph thinking it didn’t add anything to the piece….now I’m wondering about the reference to blue here (the word shimmers for me), its multi-dimensional reference to depression…hopelessness…but also its vastness, its possibilities (open sky, open water, universe etc.).
The room my father is in, 316, is a small, one bedroom apartment designed to shelter a couple who really get along, or a solo senior citizen. Now it holds three aged men in three hospital beds and no chairs to sit on when visiting.
A man named Victor has the bedroom. He is tiny and more and more yellow each time I visit. He is skeletal, though his stomach balloons from his body. His belly button is definitely an outie. It probably wasn’t always.
My father smiles, caged in his hospital bed. A welcome. (when I wrote this, I intended to describe my father’s smile as a welcome one…except that word “caged” practically leaps from the sentence and grabs my throat so I notice there’s more going on ….the syntax here, laid down completely unintentionally, even an error if I compare it to what I had actually thought I had written, introduces sly ambiguity attached to the word “welcome” – do I mean his smile is welcome, or that he is [safely] caged (connotations of threat)? And the ambiguity provides a subtle warning for readers (and me ha ha) that there’s something not quite right between the narrator and the father…and shunts the transition from this paragraph to the next, where, their relationship, as well as the deeper history that shapes their relationship, is revealed.)
As a kid, his smile was a peculiar twisting of his lips, holding, like a cup, cruelty and condescension about to spill forth. We distanced ourselves from the inevitable poison, his words arrowing the air to the gut. We learned to excuse his smile. He, a refugee after all. A Canadian through revolution. His 13-year-old body a witness to other bodies strung up along the boulevards of the old city. Tanks rolling in. Molotov cocktails and body parts made kites. (‘kites’ in this sentence shimmers for me….it is only now that I am seeing any link between this word and perhaps the deeper exploration of this piece….is my brain getting too involved in meaning making here? Maybe. I wonder about the associated movement in relation to the violence depicted here, an upward flying movement….could it be departure of the spirit once a life is gone?) His smile, back then, did not seem a part of him, as it does now. Still, conversation’s an effort raised beneath such rain, beneath an umbrella of pain. (readers of earlier drafts of this piece were confused by the relationship between the narrator and the father: why is the narrator so interested in the Vic character, why are the narrator and the father not talking to each other? So I added this in…this paragraph was originally drafted as a breezy response to a writing prompt about remembering a smile.)
In room 316 of this not hospital, a glass door opens to a fake balcony. From there, looking down on the statue of Jesus I feel benevolence drain. I can only look out the window if the man my father calls “Lump of Lard” isn’t in the hospital bed beside it. A prosthetic leg furnishes the corner beneath a TV screen angled from the wall.
My father’s railed bed is in the kitchenette. (this was interesting, editing that morning, I did catch that several of my tweaks included variations on the word “railed”, a strange, if apt, description here…looking it up now, I discover its multiple meanings. In addition to “enclosure”, it also means “protest strongly”, “blame in violent language”, “object about something”…is this my subconscious wrestling with the idea of taking one’s life? I don’t know. Maybe.) If he wants a glass of water, he rolls to his right. Blue fabric curtains suspend from railings mounted to the ceiling. The fabric separates everything: Lump of Lard from my father’s radio tuned too loudly to the opera station, the angles of sunlight from reaching my father’s bed, the sorrows and longings of three different men.
Every week I visit there is less and less of Victor. His yellow skin droops from the sticks of his bones. His brown pupils bulge from sunken sockets shadowing his forehead. He often cries out in pain. “I know Vic! We’re here. We hear you!” my dad says, explaining it’s important to cheer him on. Vic is proud. He was given 4 months to live and that was 7 months ago. In my mind I wrestle with Victor’s decision to forego MAID, medical assistance in dying. His yellow death is inevitable; why wait? (this is the heart of the question this piece is exploring….I even phrased it in the form of a question…but it is only now, after the reading, that I start to piece this together...and realise the contours of this exploration need to be mapped into the piece to better guide the reader (including me!) through this question.)
Today, when I exit the stair well and enter the third floor, Vic sits in a wheelchair in the centre of the hallway. There is so little of his body. He seems only a distended stomach with a yellow head thrown back and a mouth agape at the ceiling. I’m frightened he’s dead. Closer inspection reveals his yolk-coloured bird cage chest expands and contracts round a fluttering heart.
Today, my father’s welcome smile from behind the rails. Today the opera is La Traviata conducted by Toscanini. An orderly wheels Vic past into the bedroom. Eventually, Vic shuffles by me to the microwave. “Is that your sister’s soup?” my father asks him. It is. While it heats, my father and Vic argue over the green leaves in the soup. Vic calls it by its Portuguese name; my father insists it’s kale. Toscanini chimes in. I imagine the Maple keys on the trees outside shiver-whisper and lean against a kitchen cabinet not interjecting. I understand—now–it’s joy arguing a position.
Vic lifts the bowl of soup from the microwave then raises it to his face, closes his eyes to concentrate inhaling the steam, the spice swirls of Portuguese sausage. I hear his eyelids when they snap open. A light dances in his eyes. He raises the bowl, wafts the steam towards my face. Its gloriousness travels from the tips of his yellow fingers to grace my nostrils. I smell chicken stock and chilies, the green of leaves, the orange of coriander seeds. (here, I think, a missed opportunity, but must be executed (oohhh bad word choice in this context, ha ha), delicately – the food description here with colours, orange, green, needs to be enhanced better, after all, it is this pleasure that is highlighted here, a pleasure that keeps one tethered to a life in this world, even when the body disintegrates…so it deserves special attention, this sentence….but not go over the top. I have a habit of going over the top…so, Suzanne, don’t rush this). I think anyone would give a life to taste such cooked-in love. (a strange sentence…and only now I’m seeing it differently, changing my view of meaning …it’s a reference to the relationship between the narrator and the father ….how “cooked in love” contains multiplicities, and how sometimes, it takes one’s lifetime to learn compassion and forgive. Or maybe I have now gone far too meta here…does it matter? No. But I find this analysis fun, so continue.) Suddenly, I understand not only the pleasure of choice, but how infinity might be measured. I pull the blue curtain (note repetition of blue curtain, not sure what it means, if anything) to the wall. Sun splashes in. My father is up and walking with the aid of a walker. His test score improves. I reconsider MAID, its balance. I instruct my father to stand by the window. (these two sentences, “reconsidering MAID” and “instruct my father to stand by the window” come too close in proximity so their meanings get hooked together when they shouldn’t be. As they are placed now, it leads a reader to think that maybe the narrator is going to push the father out the window, save his decision to take his own life and do the deed quick….so, this needs fixing). The fake balcony door opens easily. Sunlit wind rushes in. Below, seed keys on a Maple tree twirl the grey twiggy ends of all its branches. It sparkles. It winks. Alive. So beautiful it can only be a miracle. Sweet air of outside too. Toscanini’s violins.
So, the trick to writing that connects—offering one’s hand in the dark—is to catch oneself in the act of sharing an open heart …the subconscious is not so shy of dialogue there …surprising words (or vibrating ones…a shimmering…this is often how I experience it) or phrases, or images, offer clues of deeper emotion, deeper intelligences of the body, an energy moving through. Somehow, authenticity must be rendered on the page without a cage of words but through a window of words instead. The techniques of syntax and rhetoric …they are ways to lead a reader through a writer’s thoughts so they follow the pathway the writer has mapped to communicate…they are clever ways to amplify meaning and entertain. But, fundamentally, a writer must be authentic to themselves and express that authenticity through love, gifting one’s deepest self to the world. So, I continue this eternal pursuit for the song of myself, to quote Whitman, and share a voice that sings.
This peace making with my slow subconscious writing process, waves away all my jagged edges, the way the sea softens stone shores, crest after crest after crushing crest, until I rise, battered, sopping wet, but smiling.
[1] Subconscious thought…unquestionably the most essential tool in my own writer’s toolbox …but I wield it with juvenile dexterity, a lazy magician with performance anxiety.
[2] The ocean, lake and river waves are drawn using ultramarine ink created from crushed lapis lazuli, one of the most expensive semi-precious stones before a synthetic version was invented. Because of its value, the pigment was often reserved for painting the Virgin Mary’s robes….I love this kind of information. Colour, by Victoria Finlay, provides a comprehensive overview of pigments…it’s a dense read, but fascinating. On the Mappa Mundi, there are little drawings of fish and sea monsters and castles and dome topped turrets. The calligraphy is neat and tight. There are drawings of the heavens and the garden of Eden.
[3] He consulted ancient and contemporary sources and triangulated the information to create his own…but it still fascinates me how he mastered translating three dimensional navigational and topographical information into a two dimensional work of art from behind a desk.
[4] This AI project mirrors the methods originally used to create the map in that it collates historical and contemporary interpretations of information to write new ones…it’s also worrying, the ease and speed new stories, gathered by machines, supplant old ones (the website name is ‘engineering historical memory’). But then I think, isn’t this what we all do? Even the act of remembering shifts and changes an event; the actual experience is never fully recovered…I guess we try to repeat and create experiences of beauty and love and eschew painful ones…and those interpretations shape the contours of our choices…and ultimately, our own story.
[5] Thank you, Nora-Lynn, your smile provided warmth and encouragement when most needed. I also appreciate you put my name to the task that day, thank you to both you and Jane for hosting a lovely event.
[6] I have read in virtual settings, always with smaller groups. Currently facilitating virtual writing sessions with the Writer’s Collective of Canada and we share our reading as part of each session. It has been wonderfully inspiring to listen to others’ voices. It’s also good practice for speaking my own.
For a few years, I wrote food columns for community newspapers. Pique Newsmagazine, when we lived in Whistler; the Napanee Guide and Kingston This Week when we moved back to Ontario. A handful of one-off Canadian publications. Never for the money[i]. Food writing was a lifeline tethering me to taste and flavour and scent and colour and texture, life’s glorious pleasures, at a time when I struggled so deeply with postpartum …was it depression? Certainly severe sleep deprivation, but also the punishing suddenness and baffling inflexibility of a body assuming the mechanistic form of lactation on demand[ii].
In Whistler, Food Columnist came with some perks. A paid pass into restaurants I would never have been able to afford, then, or now. A few foodie special events. And because the food column was really just filler between real estate ads, the editor gave me carte blanche on content and word count[iii].
Once, I got a call on a drizzly weekday afternoon to cover a foie gras tasting. When I arrived, I was stunned to discover the corner of the elegant French-styled dining room was transformed into a buffet (a buffet!!!) of foie gras prepared every way imaginable (pate, parfait, terrine, torchon, melted into risotto, layered atop quince cheese, whipped into mousse and even frozen into ice cream).
At that time, a pound (think the size of a pound—four sticks—of butter) of such richly diseased (forced large) Moulard[iv] duck liver cost a hundred dollars. The table, accented with crystal glasses of honey-coloured Sauternes and goblets of amber Armagnac, groaned beneath the weight of thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of duck liver. When I think of the word obscene, this is the image that pops in my mind every time. Lifting a glass of Sauternes from the table, I swung my focus to the chef, a classically trained, tall, slim man, transplanted from France, and whispered my fascination-horror. He bowed to me, his expression bursting into a grin of absolute delight, his elegant hands arcing the air above the buffet in the style of Vanna White, and said, “I know! And I didn’t have to pay for any of it!” I spent the afternoon exercising my French with the farmer couple from Quebec who raised the ducks (and fed their livers) to perfection. Apparently, the ducks will eat whatever you place in front of them, in this case a special diet to imbue the livers with the buttery texture and a golden hue, so it’s not really torturing their livers into a diseased state? And yeah, I sampled as much of the stuff, prepared with textbook precision, I could cram into my mouth.
Another time, another top restaurant, wine pairing dinner. It was the first time I’d left the house solo following baby number two (five months old). I still think I deserve a prize for negotiation skills getting their dad to babysit that evening, but I digress. There were many other food writers twittering the patio when I arrived. I knew none of them (such a bumpkin). I did snag a flute of champagne when a silver tray walked by. I was trying to quell the screaming anxiety I felt entering a social situation after months of babied isolation, the fast-descending realisation, like a burning 747, I’d just entered a scene waaaaayyyy out of my league.
While attempting to hold my purse, a clutch (stupid choice, they make purses with straps for a reason), balance my glass of bubbly, ignore the crushing sensation of my toes in heels long neglected, snap my too tight bra into a comfortable position (impossible), a man, quite good looking, gorgeous pale linen oxford button-down, sauntered over and introduced himself. He shook my hand with dry confidence. I always pay attention to handshakes – you can glean a tremendous amount of information about a person from their handshake[v]. He detected my ignorance instantly when he explained he was the editor of Nuvo Magazine. (When one pronounces the word nuvo, one has to draw out the vowels and the finishing ‘w’, layering a hint of upper-class pretention, Neeeeeewwwwww Vooooooowwwww.)
Flustered, I snatched an oyster on the half shell from a silver tray heavied with shaved ice and pearl glistening mollusks. Only then did I perceive I was holding too many things in my hands to parley: champagne, purse, notebook, pen, and now, oyster. Keep in mind, we’re still standing on a patio, glorious soft pink sunset reflecting the mountains’ glaciers. I quickly placed the opalescent shell to my lips and tipped my head back[vi] to deliver the gourmet tid bit to my mouth. Unfortunately, (most unfortunately), the oyster had been shucked improperly and did not release. The long moment that saw the oyster dangling the air like a blob of snot, my tongue diddling its flesh obscenely, lewdly, before it loosened its shell, was sufficient time for the Nuvo Editor to melt and disappear into the crowd.
Again, unfortunately, this was not the worst of the evening’s events. Between course five and six (spectacular food btw), I turned to the woman at my left, laughed, and explained how normally, at that exact time, I’d be breastfeeding. This signalled an immediate let down and my milk pooled the front of the exquisite baby blue silk blouse I’d chosen to wear without the foresight to insert protective breast pads. My editor gave me shit for leaving the dinner early.
A fond memory. On assignment to interview an organic potato farmer, I drove the flat, fertile, Pemberton valley towards his fields. Jagged walls of granite, rough new mountains, rose dramatically from the valley floor, their snow-capped peaks spearing a cerulean sky. Both babies were with me (a detail I felt my editor needn’t know). Willa, a few months old in her bucket seat, and Lillian two and a half, strapped in a car seat. Lillian pointed her pudgy toddler finger out the window and said, “Boootiful mumma.”
I will never be able to adequately articulate the sensation of gratitude that washed over me at that moment, hearing her words, understanding, witnessing the wonder such a little person recognises and delights in the encompassing beauties of the world.
And when I sat at the long pine harvest table in the potato farmer’s kitchen, my left arm cradling Willa to breastfeed while my right transcribed notes, Lillian, her little shoulders level with the table top, fisting crayons to paper beside me, the farmer looking rather annoyed I’d brought children with me. I understood then how often the story one is assigned to write is not the story that ought be written. His own young children screamed and giggled, running in and out of the kitchen. His wife hovered in a dark corner and listened attentively to our interview, a toddler hitched to her hips. I was struck by her. She had grey shadows beneath her eyes and her exhaustion stretched her skin shiny at her cheekbones. She looked haunted. And her expression, I knew, matched my own. The farmer’s transition to organic production had come at her urging. It was clear the strain of a circular, balanced agricultural practice and environmental stewardship significantly decreased the economic productivity of their business. One of their children had been diagnosed with autism. The farmer’s wife believed their son’s behaviour far more manageable on a diet free of pesticides. I wanted to interview her, pursue the revealed vein of story, follow it to where it bled, delve deep into the sorrows I detected so clearly, translucent beneath her skin. But I didn’t. I didn’t follow my heart.
Why these memories today? I’ve been working with a dear friend, helping him to realise his own passion project by exercising my food writing muscles to support the production of his cookbook. Another sideline project I’ve taken on these last months, working as part of a small team (two photographers, a designer, a handful of recipe testers). I’ve discovered my food writing muscles are a little soft …what I had thought would be simple exercise is not. It’s work. I’m struggling to grasp the tone, the angle, my friend, a professional chef and restauranteur six times over, seeks to impart the book. I’m supposed to be ghost writing. I’m supposed to be imbuing the writing with his voice, through his eyes, his sensory experiences. So far, I’m failing.
Necessary to stop and appreciate the joy of spontaneous street art.
Tuesday last, I interviewed him again and delighted listening to him speak about food preparation, watching his hands fly and finger the air as he gestured the creation of invisible dishes before him at my own dining table. I wondered, aloud, whether it might be easier if I wrote the content as a witness, imparting my own thoughts regarding his process, his approach. We discussed how my voice would, inevitably, infuse and change the work. It remains undecided. I worry. Next month we all travel to Italy together. To cook. To drink wine. To see great works of art and architecture. To move in the rosemary and bonfire scented mellow gold air and splendour of Tuscan autumn. I must believe the writing will come to me.
Writing this post, I realise what always tugged the edges of all my food writing: it’s less about the food; it’s all about the experience. The experience of sensual pleasures, but also the joy sharing deliciousness with others. It’s about relationships. Relationships between the land and the weather and the hands that nurture, tend, harvest, wash, prepare, and cook the food. Most importantly, it’s about the relationships between people. This is what matters. This is what is most beautiful.
A final side observation for today: I am so sad when peach season ends. Their fuzzy, sunset-blushed fade from market stalls signals the season’s shifting light. But I’ll no longer deny any potent persuasion to sink into the sublime sensual pleasures this world has to offer. Here. Now. Follow where my heart leads. Write it down. Embody my dreams.
[i] I was paid 80 bucks for the weekly column in Whistler, and $25 for the Guide, and nothing for the Kingston This Week because both papers used the same publisher, and I signed print syndication.
[ii] I breastfed each child 18 months. Have to say, I wasn’t ready to wean Willa when I did but succumbed to social pressures and necessity when I returned to part time work. She wasn’t ready either and toddled around with a baby bottle upended at the corner of her lips, looking like a drunken one-handed sailor with everything she did.
[iii] The editor did insist titling my pieces…headlines I would have chosen differently, but not worth a battle. Or apparently a phone call? I never asked him to change them (eye roll).
[v] I taught the skill of hand shaking to my girls very early on. By eight years of age, they were pros.
[vi] Orgasm style. I know oysters themselves are supposed to be an aphrodisiac, but on writing this little vignette here, I think instead it must be witnessing the gestures with which they are eaten that becomes the real turn on. A thought anyway….a delightful one.
I lifted these dinner plate dahlias from the soil last summer. Boxed them up and stored them in a dark cellar through the winter. In the spring, I planted them on the beautiful terrace garden at my new place and battled the squirrels all summer who continued to believe the tubers would be most delicious each time they dug them up, sampled a tiny bite and spat it out. It’s a small miracle they survived and a massive miracle they live and bloom again. The blossoms are delicate and compact compared with last summer’s riotous overtaking, but retain all their soft, pink petalled beauty. I love them so.
My mum, a New Zealander, always referred to the game of tic-tac-toe as noughts and crosses. She allowed (encouraged) us kids to draw the 3×3 grids with a blue ball point pen on the soles of her bare feet (size 9, ample space). An aside: the ubiquitous Bic pens of North America are called biros in NZ and the UK (No relation on my Hungarian side, unfortunately. Though my relatives had owned vineyards in Hungary and vacation homes in Trieste, all was lost in WWII. I digress…I’ve been reading Nabokov’s glorious memoir Speak Memory—its White Russian émigrée-ness, a crude comparison to my own father’s flight to freedom following the Hungarian uprising, I know, but I make it anyway, romantic that I am—is rubbing off on me, chalk powder lifted from the pale wing of a lambent moth).
Our ball point pen plays afforded mum a relatively undisturbed, albeit tickly toed, mug of tea (tankard shaped, insides furred with tannin scales the way she preferred, “don’t wash my cup!”), with a cigarette we eyed as the orange embered ring sucked ever closer toward its filter, horizontal ash cylinder elongating and sagging before she flicked it, a moment before gravity might claim it, into a dusky glass ashtray. Likely she was reading the latest library copy of a true crime book. Not aloud. Though I longed for her to read to us, she rarely did. Once I learned to read—late, I admit to my mortification (my maternal grandmother berated my incompetence, publicly)—I read all sorts of picture books and novels to my younger siblings, delighting how my affected accents, particularly the ‘v’ pronunciation of any ‘w’ (mimicking our Hungarian Nana’s voice) in Roald Dahl’s Witches, transfixed them. Through the dining room’s picture window, we listened to the lake waves heaving ice sheets to hills along the limestone shore, the scrapes and wind moans as the water worked its way, churning through its six-year replenishment cycle. (There is an explanatory purpose to this dendritic pathway of recollections, I promise.) Inside, we vied to place our O and X marks in a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal row on the pink spongey under pads of mum’s feet and be crowned ‘the winner’ (an additive aspiration as opposed to elimination rounds: three strikes and you’re out[1]).
It often happens the book I most need to read winds its way to me at exactly the right moment. And so it has been with Speak Memory. I had (again) tied myself in knots and was very cross indeed, attempting to force my long project (book length work) into a structure that just wasn’t working. Maybe I’ve posted the disconnected threads of this creative work here already, too lazy to check, so here it is again: a series of pop culture refences used to hang two different story lines on, weaved (somehow? this part was really screwing with my head), periodically interjected with commentary from a cast of [internal] characters (who seem to keep growing in number). The first storyline, a recollection of past events relayed chronologically, wasn’t working at all – how the hell do I narrow down which scenes to relay? The second storyline, recent events relayed with reverse chronology (and totally taking over the narrative) also wasn’t working because the cinematic renderings felt puerile. Mountains of frustration and angst. Flip flop to working on other things. Flip flop. Flip flop.
Reading grounds me. And I read this elegant passage from Chapter One of Speak Memory that must be transcribed here—lengthy, I know, but any attempted summary would cheapen it. I’ve highlighted the last sentence because it was this line that launched an epiphany regarding my own project and what I’ll try to convey with the remainder of this post:
“But let me see. I had an even earlier association with that war. One afternoon at the beginning of the same year, in our St. Petersburg house, I was led down from the nursery into my father’s study to say how-do-you-do to a friend of the family, General Kuropatkin. His thickset, uniform-encased body creaking slightly, he spread out to amuse me a handful of matches, on the divan where he was sitting, placed ten of them end to end to make a horizontal line, and said, “This is the sea in calm weather.” Then he tipped up each pair so as to turn the straight line into a zigzag—and that was “a stormy sea.” He scrambled the matches and was about to do, I hoped, a better trick when we were interrupted. His aide-de-camp was shown in and said something to him. With a Russian, flustered grunt, Kuropatkin heavily rose from his seat, the loose matches jumping off the divan as his weight left it. That day, he had been ordered to assume supreme command of the Russian Army in the Far East.
This incident had a special sequel fifteen years later, when at a certain point of my father’s flight from Bolshevik-held St. Petersburg to southern Russia he was accosted while crossing a bridge, by an old man who looked like a gray-bearded peasant in a sheepskin coat. He asked my father for a light. The next moment each recognized the other. I hope old Kuropatkin, in his rustic disguise, managed to evade Soviet imprisonment, but that is not the point. What pleases me is the evolution of the match theme: those magic ones he had shown me had been trifled with and mislaid, and his armies had also vanished, and everything had fallen through, like my toy trains that, in the winter of 1904-05, in Wiesbaden, I tried to run over frozen puddles in the grounds of the Hotel Oranien. The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”
Reading the two scenes at two points of time hinged (beautifully balanced) on a matchstick …how do I explain this? It gave me permission (and a concrete example) to think about my own family stories in a completely different way, approaching the writing through connections and associations without a need to be nailed to chronology (more cosmology).
Then I went for a walk with a friend, windmilling my arms ecstatically as I explained (she’s very patient) my intention to (re)enter my writings with this Nabokovian lens to search for thematic emblems or symbols connecting my memories across space and time. She stopped walking, turned toward me with trance-like calm, placed her palms on my shoulders, and with uncanny clairvoyance, suggested the theme I might be chasing[2]. Of course. Yes! Of course. I felt the knowing satisfaction one gets having accomplished a particularly tricky play in a game or solving a riddle or a math equation or when an errant puzzle piece clicks into place[3].
With a deeper understanding of what I’m exploring and using an associative approach I re-wrote the introduction of the long-form project (the 12th time? more?). And it unfolded easily. The writing slipped into place[4]. Naturally. Organically. The “story” skips across space and time, mimicking, I imagine, connections between neurons and the way sensory information shunts emotional layers in and out of memory. It’s a natural shape—neuronal axon connections between dendrites in the brain—the same shape as tree branches or root systems, the same shape as alveoli and bronchioles in the lungs, the same shape of tributaries and rivers, the same shape the wind carves rock into canyons.
And then, writing the introduction by following associations and matching up different thoughts and experiences across time and space (match!), I felt the appearance and associated meaning of the (yet to be written) closing section. And voila, a “frame’, two goal posts materialising from the mind’s mists with a great wide-open field of play ripe for exploration and elucidation between.
The writing of the intro also handed, like the passing of a baton to the next runner in a relay, an associative anchor to serve for the next section. Then a second anchor followed that…the blossoming orientation reveals itself faster than my writing can keep up. And I’m suddenly cautious, mindful I don’t want to trip into the trap of crushing ideas to shape what I think might be the meaning (I too often do). I want to relax into the magic of associative process…which is almost all feeling…a pleasurable groping in the dark. Instead of checking boxes in a tic-tac-toe line, it’s necessary to transcend the grid and attend to the curvy swervy intersections as they sift loose the matrix and settle into place. A long game to be sure, more adventure I’d say. But a deep pleasure chasing after nebulous meanings and satisfaction when they unite, wet inked, pen in hand.
I note, writing…the actual act of writing, is the only way to journey there[5].
Here’s a diagram of the structure I’m feeling my way through (it looks more complicated than it is).
It’s like a spiral of discrete associative sections, circling a central axis of a theme. I think of it as less of a spiral though, more like a spring (coiled in tension…it’s the emotional tensions that will pull a reader through…at least, that’s my thought process at the moment).
The thing is, there are so many ways one moves back through the coffers of memory. Teasing experiences from the mind…the events shimmer and change, scuttling light and shadow through the prism (prison?) of one’s mood. The whole adventure requires slow and curious study to progress the writing with a cool (and open) (and loving) mind.
I would have written it’s serendipitous Nick Cave’s missive today hits a parallel mark, but I suspect there’s less coincidence[6] in these things than we believe: “To write a song requires a reckoning. We roll up our sleeves and through rigorous application encounter the disastrous and mortifying condition of our interior selves. We exert poetic order upon the turmoil and chaos. We hew and hone and bring structure to the stricken heart; we codify our weary souls, giving form to the blues.”[7]
I’ll close by plucking my own curated associations from Nabokov’s closing paragraphs and lines in Speak Memory, found poem-like, manipulating his words into a malleable sculpture to meet my mind’s own bends[8]:
“Laid out on the last limit of the past and on the verge of the present, it remains in my memory merely as a geometrical design…what I really remember about this neutrally blooming design, is its clever thematic connection…it was most satisfying to make out…something in a scrambled picture…that the finder cannot unsee once it has been seen.”
It’s hard to believe in magic. No, that’s not quite right. It’s hard to maintain faith in magic. But it’s there. It requires a practiced (and constantly practicing) eye (and the writing hand(s)) to feel it, coax it forth, recognise it. And though I trip often, injure myself repeatedly in the never-to-be-won plays of this writing game, it’s no fun sulking on the bench. Put me in coach, it’s all fun and games, until I lose an eye. Play on.
[1] An empty threat; I’ll never extend a third feeler.
[2] She’s done this before on at least one other crisis occasion, becoming a human divining rod to deliver the universe’s elegant solution when I’ve missed its crystal clear, often repeating, simple message.
[3] Carolyn, you’re right, I do tend to write the same things three or more times in a row. But I can’t cut them. I just can’t. Sigh.
[4] I can’t help but relay the observation that when I’m writing this way, I completely fall outside time (disastrously sometimes, arriving to work late and later, and, more recently, as I’m transitioning into writing more at nighttime to avoid this, discovering hours have slipped me by. Hours!)
[5] Filtering, almost entirely it seems, through the subconscious.
[6] I mean, the word coincidence alone hints at the associative pattern with the nuance of a ball-peen hammer striking one’s thumb numb.
[8] Sorry Nabokov, hope you’re not rolling in your grave.
Diagramming process, here’s a drawing of the dendritic (associative) pathway of this blog post. Importantly, I drew this AFTER I wrote this post, not before. For writing this post, I came up with the title first (this is often the case….a single line to begin the writing) and wrote from there, the images and memories and my recent readings all being pulled into place around the vague theme of “games”. This was, no doubt, spurred on by another quote of Nabokov’s I’ve been wrestling with (having trouble with his word deception) about his observation related to the way insects use mimicry to avoid detection and how this relates to art: “I discovered in nature the nonutilitarian delights that I sought in art. Both were a form of magic, both were a game of intricate enchantment and deception.”
I’ve been working on a particular short story for a little over a year[1]. The generative draft, written last June, was in response to a prompt to create a flash work[2] centered around a haunting without mentioning the haunting itself. The haunting was not to be an entity but a manifestation of a pain.
My first draft was 449 words. I was delighted with it, despite a threatening tension, a shadow I could feel but not quite understand. The story was, and continues to be, set on a cold beach point where a stranger died by suicide (the haunting, a driver who launched his car into the winter lake), and where, two days later, a couple stand. It’s the couple’s anniversary yet the wife decides it’s the time and place to end their strained marriage. The story’s initial title was Eagle-Eyed[3].
Before I launch into the exploration of the most recent feedback for this evolving short story, I thought it might be interesting to provide a breakdown of the various iterations it has moved through since[4]. This, I hope, will provide readers (and remind myself!) a sense of how a story might be shaped and reshaped towards a state where it may enter the world of publications[5]. It also serves as a pathway I’m following into self-confidence with my own writing. I won’t share the actual work in progress here because it negates publication elsewhere…hopefully this won’t stultify this post; I’d loath to be thought of as boring.
I know, the chart is tiny tiny. Formatting is an issue. I’ve reposted the same chart below with the ugly formatting at the very end of this post for easier reading if clicking on this pic doesn’t enlarge the text sufficiently.
The most recent draft of this story was completed earlier this month, July 2nd. It has lengthened to 741-words. I felt good about the piece. What I mean when I say this is that I felt my way through understanding what the story was trying to tell me it was about, waiting for meaning to reveal itself instead of shoehorning it into “an idea”. I also worked (and played) to apply technical devices to illuminate the layers of meaning as I came to understand them. More often than not, the writing already held these hints, I just hadn’t “seen” it…it really has been a process of feeling my way as opposed to knowing or thinking my way through the crafting. I’m following instinct more than anything else.
I shared the story with a dear writer friend of mine, B, requesting she let me know what feelings came up for her when she read the piece. Also, whether there were any points in the story she found confusing or made her lift out of reading. The same morning, I submitted the story for formal post-workshop feedback with a writer/editor, Matt, in the UK.
I received generous feedback from both writers. Both indulged line by line attention and considerations. Both suggested places to cut (B, always sharp, pinpoints my rococo tendencies and gently asks whether they are needed). Both were encouraging. But here’s the thing…each interpreted the story differently: B understood the story as I had intended, reading the layered resonance in the piece, and most importantly, feeling it (she described the story as a bomb about to go off); Matt responded to the surface level of the piece.
A few observations upon receiving discordant feedback. Instead of descending into the pits of despair and not knowing what steps to take next (a year ago, I would have crumpled), I received the feedback with genuine curiosity. This alone is massive progress in my own creative development. I’m confident in this particular story and I’m comfortable knowing it isn’t quite there yet[6]. Also, I’m better at accepting the idea that I don’t have control about how others read my work. It’s likely a good thing there are multiple interpretations. It keeps it interesting. I know my writing won’t appeal to everybody. Nor should it. It’s enough to know it succeeds touching even just one person.
All feedback is helpful for stretching the brain and provoking multiplicities. It’s probably best to remove my pretension: words like inveiglement, my grammar gaffs, my chicken-livered metaphors[7].
I respect honesty above all else. Even when it confirms one’s greatest fears about character (or any other aspects of story: dialogue, silent spaces, conflict, emotional resonance, imagery, setting, sensory elements…the list is endless. Magical-fantasy-surrealistic-dream. Endless!). And, you know, for one who reads me so deeply, intimately, I’d jump into the burning lava throat of a volcano[8]. I’ll take what I can get.
[1] I’m sure these posts confirm my shambolic writing practice, but in case they don’t, I admit I’m usually working on several pieces in parallel, flip flopping between them the way a hook landed fish jumps to stay alive.
[2] A fiction or nonfiction narrative under 1000 words.
[3] Sometimes I feel like marching up to my past self, gripping her by the shoulders and shaking her violently to wake up! For the benefit of readers who don’t know details of my personal life, I left my own marriage last October, the week of our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary (note: this story was written 4-5 months before then). Instead of being angry with my past self, I’m learning to be kinder, gentler. Learning takes so many forms, and I don’t know how to read them all. All I can be is committed to learning, operating from the point I am, in any moment, with the limited toolbox I carry and an open heart. I’m stunned to discover my body’s prescient talents …and how long it takes my mind to catch up…this is only one instance of many. I think about this a lot…
[4] May 2023-May 2024 I participated in the SmokeLong community workshop, generating 64 unique flash pieces. I’ve attempted to revise only a few of the pieces due to lack of time and yes, personal resistance-to-revision issues I continue to wrestle with. I made the difficult decision to withdraw from the community because I need to focus time on the writings I’ve already created, the works awaiting my attention (and devotion).
[5] And the state of publication is simply one point in time, catching a flying fluttering work and nailing the specimen to a velvety spot to keep it still (or dead)…I’m beginning to sense that all works continue in dynamic states and might be changed or altered or built upon over and over and over again…interpretation alone splinters the smashed glass casing of any publication and the work travels on and on through the hearts and minds of others…wow, a little too artsy Biro, reel it in.
[6] In answer to my request for points of confusion, B was curious about this question and hadn’t considered it before, but once posed she entered the work with this lens. And yes, she pointed out the story was quite confusing with time, shifting back and forth (through 5 shifts in time!). In a 750-word work this demands (taxes?) a lot of cognitive effort for the reader. So, the questions I’m now working through: is this expectation for the reader to follow the complex time shifts worth it? Does the time shift add another level of meaning to the story? If yes, what is that meaning? I don’t know…still thinking. If no, I need to rework the piece and remove some time shifts and support a smoother reading.
[7] Almost resisted the urge to write chicken liveried, but, alas, there it is, coddled in a footnote because the image of chickens dressed up in royal red and gold uniforms makes me laugh. I’m a cheap thrill.
In drawing this series of maple seeds, I coloured in from top to bottom and the same process of moving from thinking to feeling can be seen here. The colouring of the top seed is more clunky, more self-conscious…by the time I got to colouring the bottom seed, I’d moved through the (somewhat ineffective) attempt to copy what I was looking at and instead coloured in the way I was feeling, with the result that the final seed looks (to me) to be more relaxed and natural. And representative of its subject. Maybe I’m overthinking this. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Date and a few details
Number of reviewers providing feedback with flavour of feedback
My own thoughts and feelings at the time
Focus of revision as a result
June 25, 2023 449 words Title: Eagle-Eyed
• 5 reviewers •Consensus on excellent use of dialogue to depict tension-filled relationship between husband and wife characters. •Confusion about the setting and story as a crime scene – readers interpret the story as a wife preparing to murder her husband by the lake
I actually thought the piece was pretty clever and then when I got the feedback I realised I had almost completely buried the suicide so the story was confusing to readers. Readers are picking up on some buried anger which is…interesting.
Need to layer the suicide aspects in with less subtlety. Need to layer in the wife character’s contemplation about marital relationship with more clarity.
August 8, 2023 495 words Title changed to Point of Departure – this remains the working title in subsequent iterations
huh – send it out and see what happens, crapshoot but whatevs Submitted to two publications: Vestal Review and Had Most writers in the flash community carpet bomb submissions, sending a single work to thirty or even fifty publications at once, praying for a hit and fluffing their bylines along the way…for me, this defeats the purpose and makes me feel like the whole publication enterprise is a waste of time (I mean, are these writers reading all those literary publications? Not possible). Feeling demoralised. And yet, when I read others’ works in publications I respect, I’m inspired and awed in a way I would love my work to be counted among them.
Submissions rejected – not at publishing level (that matters to me). Yet. Shelved. Then, in the ensuing months, thinking about the story tucked safely in the back of my mind, I come to realise what it was trying to tell me. The blunt life events I’m moving through illuminate this of course. I start to piece the concepts of suicide and marriage together…but nascent, vague, shadowy and disorganised thoughts… I don’t get it. Revisions attempt to tease these thoughts apart and layer them in the story somehow.
January 16, 2024 587 words
•7 reviewers •Consensus on beauty of language, along with the need to rearrange sentence structures (shorten them). •Readers agree about the reason for tension in relationship (this was added in this revision), they interpret this as valid and feels real •Readers understand the wife character intends to end her marriage, but reviewers concerned it is too subtle and might be mistaken for her character contemplating her own suicide…lots of suggestions for how to fix this. •Suggestion to remove a jarring image of car sex between husband and wife •
I’m really committed to keeping the subtlety in the piece ….I like its feeling of ambiguity…I’m pleased most reviewers (6 of the 7) “get” what I’m trying to communicate: the wife decides to leave the marriage (as opposed to thinking about taking her own life). I have to think more about this…I’m also really attached to the last line that I feel resonates: ”a good place to end a life.” Agree about removing the sex image. Makes me contemplate what deeper aspect the story is trying to tell me …I don’t know.
Came back to revising this piece in June 2024…thinking more deliberately about the “ending a life” pattern in the story. Redrafted with intention to submit for formal feedback from Matt Kendrick following a workshop with him. Worked at the sentence level to play with tempo and insert rhythmic variation.
Poems float to me again. This hasn’t happened in a number of years. I’ve had phrases arrive but then it’s like the valve shuts off and word flow stops. If I force a phrase toward a poem, I butcher it. Poems feel ethereal, fragile. I choose the word float intentionally…it’s as if the words butterfly by, out the corner of my eye, or rather, my ear. I think I hear them instead of see them. Perhaps this varies because sometimes I visualize an image. I’ll have to pay closer attention to this experience to describe the process accurately here. Regardless, if not caught and written to the page the poem keeps moving and leaves me behind.
So, three poems in the last two weeks or so. The relief accompanying them, that they float to me at all, is palpable; I hadn’t realised how much I miss them. These latest poems arrived when I felt most depleted, when I was most physically and emotionally exhausted…not so much in a state that I’d given up, more that I’d given in…surrendered. I worry about this. How to invite the conditions of open receiving without the physical and emotional exhaustion[1]? I don’t know.
The following poem arrived during a lunch break last week…the first lines always feel the strongest, the most tangible, then I wrote the lines spooling from there until I could tell I was twisting my own meaning into them. Instead of forcing my own thoughts into the piece, and because I needed to return to the office, I left it alone. A couple of days later, an image, tangentially related, kept entering my mind when I thought about the piece. I interpreted this as a sign the two aspects/concepts wanted to be woven together in the one poem. I completed the following draft over the weekend[2].
Here’s where it gets interesting. This poem, I discovered, also communicates information about my long form writing project (and process) I hadn’t quite understood prior to writing the poem. I’ll try to explain. Last month I printed out the long form project (a book length work, very much in progress) and promised myself I’d read it. I haven’t. Instead, energized by the idea of working physically with pen and highlighters and paper instead of messing around in digital files on my computer, I used index cards to list different scenes associated with different characters. One side of each card listed scenes from the distant past, the other side listed scenes from a recent past. The long form project is, for the most part, creative nonfiction with several people. Sitting there, looking at all the characters on the desk in front in me, I realised I don’t have a card for myself[3]. One could (I have) dismiss this discovery, subsume the idea I’m the persona, the narrator, in this work, so, naturally, I’ll find my way into each of the scenes…somehow. But I’m fooling myself. Sitting there with all the cards on the desk I realised (duh) two things. One, this project is more about my own experiences and thoughts and reflections, and these aspects aren’t integrated (much) in the current draft[4]. Two, the voice I wish to narrate this project requires what I refer to as my audacious voice …and that voice my friends has taken a fucking vacation. And despair, despondency, desperation—all the dis- words of negation—set in fast. I put the project aside. Again.
Then this poem floated to the page with its battle cry of a title and emphatic last line to confirm, with a flood of relief, my audacious self will revive.
[1] I’ve also received poems in states of extreme emotion.
[2] It’s important to express my gratitude here. In my last blog post I’d lamented missing the spring chorus of frogs I don’t hear living in the city. A few days after publishing that post, a friend messaged to offer me his cottage for the weekend. Serendipity. I spent the glorious gift of a solo weekend in the woods reading (The Forty Rules of Love by Eilf Shafak, a romance toggling back and forth between Rumi, a chorus of characters, multiple POVs, in the 1200s, and a current day woman who falls in love with a writer (who is writing about the relationship between Rumi and Shams of Tabriz, also Sufism) then leaves her “perfect” marriage of twenty years for true love.) It rained most of the weekend which was also a gift because it provided the excuse to lounge in the screened in porch (which felt like a treehouse) and just read (and sleep) instead of canoeing my way round the lake. Unfortunately, I only heard a single peeper and a bullfrog; mating season suspended at this point of spring becoming summer. Instead, I endured the chainsaw to the eardrum that is the “song” Waterloo by ABBA blasting from a cottage across the lake. The universe does have a sense of humour. I prefer this song. I did enjoy the loons and the whip-poor-will night calls and the rose-breasted grosbeak’s day song. I did not manage to see those birds (I really wanted to see the rose-breasted grosbeak as I haven’t before) but did trace the phoebes and vireos amidst the wet leaves.
[3] When I first wrote this sentence I inadvertently wrote “cared” instead of “card”.
[4] The crazy thing is, I know I’ve discovered this before and even written about it here…and here…and then, I guess, I just…forget? Frustrating …and embarrassing…but also, human. Process is not linear and, apparently, the learning doesn’t build upwards from any previous achieved foundation….the whole thing seems more like dancing across quicksand.
Sometimes I must be dropped in the Marshall Islands to realise I’m in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It often takes me a long time to see things.
Pencil ~ 1992
I went through a phase in my late teens and early twenties painting figures with no eyes – the two pieces here date from that era. Most of the artworks I produce are given away as gifts[1]. I can’t imagine many recipients of these screaming figures with their eyeballs floating in space might still grace their walls with my works. These two pieces might be the only ones left. They hang on the walls beside my writing desk.
I know they look scary. They aren’t meant to be. My high school art teacher disliked them. At the time of their creation, they didn’t reflect a mood I was in (I was quite happy and content, not dark or brooding). At the time of creation, I simply followed where my paintbrush or my pencils took me, delighting in the creaminess of oil paints, their tree-sap scent, and the ease with which pencil marks shadow contrasts between light and dark. Perhaps it was a way to work through an earlier terror, I don’t know. I never had an explanation for why I painted these subjects, I just did.
Decades later, hanging on new walls in a new space, staring at these works above my desk, they spark curiosity. And reflection. Looking back upon the intervening years of marriage and raising[2] a family, I can’t help but interpret their imagery as an almost wilful blindness. A warning for what it would take for me to manage my life choices diverting my path from art.
More context. I was flattened after completing my undergrad. In those days, the degree required a written thesis, complete with ethics review submission, primary data (raw) collection, analysis, interpretation and synthesis. Mine explored how child development influences a child’s ability to draw emotions. I went into three different schools and multiple classrooms of kindergarten to grade three students and collected their drawings of “a person who is ‘sad’, ‘angry’ and ‘happy’”. My supervisor, a new to the department prof, studied the tools with which child welfare court cases might be helping or hindering child testimonies. I won’t get into the Pandora’s Box of issues this research illuminates with our justice system and the rights of children. My thesis work was a departure from the neurophysiology and neurochemistry I’d focused on through the science degree, deliberately engaging with a creative and developmental approach I was craving. Conducting the thesis work on top of finishing all the other fourth year courses and working part time as a waitress was punishing[3]. I resolved never to do research again[4].
I adored those child drawings, their stick figured innocence, their genius beauty. After graduating, I pivoted my sights to art school and began to piece together a portfolio for submission. Waitressing, I couldn’t afford to apply to more than one school[5]. I chose Emily Carr. There, portfolio submissions required works using three different mediums exploring an artist chosen theme AND encased within a container constructed by the artist that expanded, or at least aligned, on that theme. Shipment costs, of course, were the responsibility of the artist. Why am I recalling these stories? Hindsight explorations. For the constructed container, the most challenging aspect of the portfolio package, I chose to create…wait for it…a liquor store box-sized ceramic eyeball.
At the time I was working with a friend’s mum in her pottery studio, and I explained my approach and plan for the eyeball—it would be two separate ovals (bowls), constructed using clay slabs with holes on the sides near the lip where I would attach metal hinges and a latch after the two halves were fired. This seemed simple to me, but L. refused, explaining it just wouldn’t work, it couldn’t be done. Looking back, I realise my mistake was using the word ‘eyeball’ – I should have simplified the concept to “two bowls that hinge together” or even, “two oval slab bowls, a top and a bottom”. Full stop on the construction of a container for my portfolio submission. No eyeballs in her kiln. I spent that summer trying to puzzle other ways to make a large eyeball that would hold multiple pieces of art. I couldn’t figure it out. And the portfolio gathered dust. I laugh now, wondering why I didn’t consider a different object, a different container (even the liquor store box would have done the trick!). But I (eye) didn’t. And that same summer I met the man who would become my husband and I shelved the idea (eye-dea) of art school[6].
Its’s twenty-eight years later and it’s only now I’m learning to really see. And I recognise a wilful blindness with my writing too. I’ve returned to working on what I call my “long form project”[7]. I have years of writing around the same themes, writing that I have refused to re-read or explore for fear of what I will discover there, what I didn’t want to see. To raise the girls the way I wanted them to experience “family” I kept myself blind[8].
This post is too long. This month has been wretched[9]. I decided to print out the pieces I’ve written as part of the long form project, “to see” the extent of material I have. I was stunned to discover it’s 208 pages, 74, 385 words long. This doesn’t include more recent writings towards this project, nor does it include parts written into ten plus years of notebook writing. Initially, I felt proudly amazed I have so much material to work with…then I spiralled …I can’t see where it’s going, how to piece it together…I am floating blind again. Still.
But …I will read what I have written, use my hindsight and my insight, my nascent ability to see the layers and sift the meanings from my own words. I know I have returned to a path of art, following a decades long detour. I wish it was not so painful.
[1]Blue Salamander, a symbol of moving between worlds, transitions and an ability to regenerate, went to the incredibly generous couple who gifted me their riverside house for the winter after I left my marriage. A friend coined it The Glass Chalet. The couple joke, calling their place a home for wayward women. I am not their first.
[2] Razing? This is exactly what I have done by choosing a life of independence…what I have committed through decommitment.
[3] Because my prof was new to the department, he pushed the project to a level worthy of publication, research far beyond the expectations for an undergrad. I fought with the departmental panel, assuring them I could complete the work. The panel pushed back, insisting it was PhD level, too much even for a Masters student. I ended up presenting eleven iterations of my research proposal to the departmental panel before getting the go ahead for ethics submission and beginning the project.
[4] Ha ha …the universe has a sense of humour doesn’t it? Research features heavy in much of my professional career. Interestingly, when I doodle in my work notes during meetings, I have always drawn…eyeballs.
[6] Later that summer, L. rushed into the lobby of the restaurant during one of my shifts, her hair a zany mess and her arms waving the air with her eureka moment. She shouted at me over the din of the restaurant in full summer swing: “I know how you can do it! It will work!!!”. I’ll never forget her despondency when I explained I’d met a man, that I wouldn’t be going to art school. I was 23, the same age my eldest daughter is now. This horrifies me. Maybe it shouldn’t. But it does.
[7] When I referred to a “long form project” during a recent online writing session, one woman pressed me to define my project more specifically. Was it a memoir? It must be a memoir. No, I explained, it’s creative non-fiction, collage work, a series of vignettes, but along various narrative throughlines (four), and the vignettes are kind of veering into fiction. It’s a memoir she repeated, then went on to explain she’d just finished her PhD in literary criticism. Well, that explains it, I thought, but didn’t say anything more. Days later, when I was doing the dishes, I came up with the right category for my work: it’s a memoir with wings. Stick that up your store bookshelf.
[8] This is incredibly hard to write here, to admit. I suspect my self-suppression, the shame in that, is what my long form project explores…I don’t know. I feel lost. Untethered.
[9] My mum suffered two falls, one where I needed to take her shockingly bruised body to the hospital for a wrist x-ray (not broken); my ex-husband (first time calling him this) is dating …I am told about the women through our children, pasting an expression of impassiveness to my face to offer the support they need to process this news (I make myself beige); I’m fielding daily tear-filled calls from my eldest daughter who broke off with her partner of three years…both of us cry on the phone…I try to be the strong and supportive mum I need to be…I fail; I visit my father in his subsidized housing apartment, taking any leftover protein from my own meals because I know he sustains himself on honeynut cheerios; his interest in the world is fast dissolving, his memory, like my mother’s, with it; I long for the sounds of spring peepers, chorus frogs and wood frogs I no longer hear living in the city, and I weep about the loss of the garden; I refuse to attend to world news because I know it will break me; I float through my workdays, convincing my colleagues I am indeed a senior policy advisor, I’m amazed by my own performance; I have separated the muse from the man, the divine from the human, a painful yet necessary separation, for how else to cultivate different ways of knowing, practice other ways of seeing?
long form project printed – a surprising pilenotebooks date back to 2012
I think the best sound in the whole wide world is laughter. I was going to narrow down to toddler laughter which bubbles up and out of little people bodies as the best of champagnes, but really, it’s any laughter expressing unreserved joy.
I’ve been crying a lot. I used to worry that if I ever started crying, I wouldn’t be able to stop. If I opened the sluice gate, an ocean of tears might wash me away. So, I didn’t cry. At least, not often and never deeply. But now I do. Grief feels soggy. Heavy. The way a body feels waterlogged after a full day of lake swimming, skin sponging the tang of seaweed, fish scales. I’ve felt, at times, as I move through these days, that I’m sunk beneath a wobbly surface. Laughter pulls me up splashing. Up and down; the way life moves.
Grief, like creativity, is a process. Six months post leaving my marriage I’m …still processing. But the grief—which doesn’t erupt a monstrous geyser in the way I feared, instead[1], it’s discreet weepings I indulge then pack up and away, get on with the day—has illuminated my writings. Allowing myself to cry has also allowed myself to see and understand some of the reasons I’ve resisted revising my own pieces…I wasn’t ready to see the pain I (unknowingly) layered there. By pain I guess I mean sorrow…regret…shame. Seeing it now feels…embarrassing. It’s so obvious. Like, decades of obvious.
Crying improved my (re)vision; laughter, goddammit, is gonna help me process embarrassment. Kind of feels like answering the front door in the nude. Would I do this? Maybe. It’s important to push my creative practice from its pillowed comfort towards the perilous shadows. The only way I’ll learn and grow.
A recent Saturday afternoon found me staring down the barrel of a good cry. I was going to write too…I seem to be able to do both these things at the same time, a curious dexterity that won’t earn me any trophies. A friend texted she was running a creativity workshop, something to do with comedy. Few people showed up, would I join her? I read the text through watery shimmers and worked to compose a polite decline. But my hands refused to send the message. My fingers deleted my crafted decline three times before I twigged I wasn’t entering the right response. So, I typed I’d put a game face on and be there.
The workshop included drama and improv games, the kind of theatrical exercises that involve the whole body and breath work and screaming out your chosen name[2]. The kind of exercises that, had the bartender offered to give me a public enema instead, I would have enthusiastically accepted[3]. I will say that I traded an afternoon of crying for laughter (and embarrassment) and I had a lot of fun. Unfortunately, some of this was caught on camera, which I leave here for your enjoyment with the caveat that I look much better when I let my hair down and sport moonbeams. I even ended the afternoon singing a karaoke song[4]. Invitations: can’t fault an old broad for sounding boundaries[5][6].
It started as a low laugh, skipped stones tingling my throat, expanding rings with every exhalation, a laughter that brought the rain clouds down, had me surfing the troughs to the crests[7].
Keen eyes will note I am the ONLY one laughing in this most bizarre of situations. For context: the woman with the tambourine is performing interpretive dance while the woman on stage sings a parody of Snow White’s (in Snow White’s voice) feelings of oppression from society just because she leads a polyamorous life living with seven very short men. The workshop was in the Royal Tavern, one of Ontario’s oldest bars, dating back to before Confederation, once owned, for a short time, by Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald, a man purported to drink from a water glass filled with spirits when he stood to speak in Parliament. Having stood on the stage, I kinda get his methods.
[1] Ok. Not entirely true. I did experience some epic wailing sessions. Interestingly, the worst of them brought on by reading a most beautiful passage in the novel Foster, written by Claire Keegan, where the little girl protagonist gazes across a field topped with dozens of flitting white butterflies. The scene hauled up an image of my own (no longer) vegetable garden, the golden light of late August lighting up the cabbage moths like confetti, hovering the flower blossoms, circling the globes of fire red tomatoes. The grief took me then, a clenched fist to the stomach that had me gasping for breath and buckled my body. I mourn losing the garden.
[2] Aloura. I have no idea why that one popped from my mouth. Desperation I assume.
[3] Probably exactly what you need Biro, such a tight ass.
[4] Yes, of course this was after two IPAs, the only way to really get the pickle out of Miss Stress’s bum. I sang Journey’s song, Lovin’, Touchin’, Squeezin’, which I must assure you retains only surface significance with its glancing reference to crying. This was the first time I sang karaoke…I hit a few flat notes in the first phrases (dreadful, but the show must go on) and managed to warm up and belt out the sense of revenge the song requires to really hit it home. I dislike the too many na-na-na-na-nas at the end and left the stage long before those were completed. People had more patience in the 70s.
[7] I’ve returned to working on my longer form project, pulling out old sections of writings, collaging them together, stitching in some humour and even exploring my dark. Feels good to be moving again. Recent epiphany: I’m actually living the life I’ve always dreamed of …like, right now. So, resolve to stop crying and get on with shit. Embrace joy.
Collage I created March 16, 2024 in an art workshop facilitated by hiba ali at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.
My favourite professor in undergrad taught neurophysiology, biological psychology and behavioural neuroscience of motivation. I have a distinct memory of his explaining how the size of the human brain is governed by the restricted size of the birth canal (technically, it’s referred to as the obstetrical dilemma) . Surprise, turns out it’s a little more complicated than that. Much neurodevelopment continues during the postnatal period and neuroplasticity is lifelong. But beyond this, our brains sufficiently evolved to invent machines with super-fast processing speeds and computational abilities. At this point, most of us have adopted palm-sized prosthetic brains in the form of cell phones, and with them, we have access to more information we could filter, sort or ever hope to synthesize, especially across diverse subjects.
This is what I was thinking about last week when I attended a webinar providing an overview of Google’s Notebook LM, a new AI application launched in December 2023, that basically functions as a virtual research assistant. Let’s call it an(other) extra brain [1].
Yes, I’ll be one of the early adopters, especially for my day job. But I’m also interested in how the technology could become a tool to support creative process. Though, to be sure, a tool used with caution.
A swift summary: LM stands for language model and the application uses the conversational question functionalities of ChatGPT, BUT allows you to curate a discrete library of your own source documents for the AI to search through. So, any question you ask will draw an answer from ONLY the documents you have provided, personalizing sources to a particular project, erecting a knowledge barrier you can control and thus greatly reducing inaccuracies and hallucinations [2].
The application currently integrates Docs, PDFs, txt, and pasted text using the cut and paste function. There’s promise websites will be able to be imported soon. Likely, the import of images, PowerPoint and even Excel sheets will be functional in the not-so-distant future.
An older collage I created December 2022.
I often use the search and find function in documents to locate phrases and key words. This is especially important when reviewing legislation and evidence reports under tight timelines, but I also use the function in creative writing to locate word repetitions, check misplaced homonyms, homophones, homographs, get rid of weasel words[3] etc. But this function has only been possible in one document at a time. I’ve used qualitative analysis software to support analyses and syntheses across interview and focus group transcripts, as well as multiple word documents. Using qualitative software, a considerable amount of time (time in which your brain actually feels like it’s turning to mush) is used to manually “tag” words and phrases in every source transcript or document to a category in order to code the text data. This can take weeks or even months, depending on how much text makes up the project and the theoretical approach you have chosen to apply. Once all of the text data is coded, THEN you can go in and query the dataset for analysis using your coding structure. The capabilities promised by Notebook LM will (almost) eliminate the coding step, allowing a researcher to jump right into querying the data for patterns and moving forward from a super advanced starting line.
Imagine this application for:
summarizing systematic research reviews (practically this is very similar to conducting qualitative analysis)
understanding legislation changes over time or creating a bylaws database that could be posted to municipal websites to support citizen Q & A
referencing medical symptoms and best practice guidelines – could this replace a visit to a family physician, linking a person directly to a pharmacist or triaging a health issue to an allied health care worker for virtual assessment and confirmation, at least for common non-emergency ailments?
Discovering patterns across historical documents or novels or essays or groups of poems or across all these different types of documents
Bringing disparate subjects together to spark different ideas, say climate resilience strategies, poetry, child development, hip hop song lyrics and how long to cook an egg [4].
My daughter Willa made this collage last week procrastinating school assignments. She is much better at collage than I am and has created some truly stunning combination of images. I love the mum and child flower heads in this one. This collage inspired me to sign up for the workshop, a welcome oasis of calm following the move into my new (to me) physical space. Another one of Willa’s at the end of this post. Thanks Willa!
The collage at the top of this post is a good analogy for the possible repercussions Notebook LM threatens related to creative licensing and copyright. I pasted the collage together from bits of cut out magazines and art books as part of a fantastic afternoon workshop facilitated by hiba ali, The Studio x Open Secret: Activating Dreamscapes. The images I used came from artists’ works and photographs from books and National Geographic magazines and I’ve cut and reassembled them without any credit to create my own artwork. Where should the line of creative appropriation, cultural appropriation, or plagiarism be drawn in these new digital spaces and the “new” creative works produced using these tools? [5]
Attending this collage workshop in the same week as the webinar kind of blew my mind – an ocean of virtual playgrounds to swim in. It’s also a little frightening, the control to create frames of knowledge that might hold sway an illusion of authority for many. I’m (somewhat) comforted to learn (also this week! my goodness) the word set boasts a Guinness World Record with the most senses of meaning (430!) of any other word. Other sources award this honour to run with more than 600 senses. Perhaps the english language will retain sufficient nuance an AI might never master (wishful thinking). BUT, language combined with gesture, intonation, facial expression, raw instinct etc. may give AI a run for its money (I hope).
Once we created our collages in the art workshop, we uploaded them to a digital art exhibition “world” space where we co-created together and were able to manipulate the images, integrate a variety of additional media (sound, text, links, gifs etc.). This application is New Art City. It reminds me of the game Minecraft my kids used to play when they were younger. Here’s a link to what I created playing [6] in the New Art City application with my own collage and the virtual gallery space: https://newart.city/show/souxs-virtual-creative-space-space-1.
All this virtual creativity at your fingertips for a song. To be sure, what we create as our real world is built from layers of many worlds—perceptual, spiritual, cultural, relational, linguistic, so many others—and, of course, virtual [7]. Jouer le jeu as they say in French, play the game. But the digital space is really an out of body experience; sometimes we might just have to communicate the old-fashioned way, you know, via email or phone or (gasp!) face to face. Especially when virtual platforms are an invitation to experiment interacting multidimensionally. Like I said, you’re welcome.
[1] Sorry Canadian peeps, the experimental version is only available to those living in the US. Canucks are still waiting to test drive the application.
[2] The information returned is less likely to be made up by the machine… hallucinations are complicated, I’m not going to try to explain them.
[3] From Matt Bell’s Substack, No failure, Only Practice, Exercise #14: Hunting Weasel Words.
[4] I know, weird, but you get what I’m suggesting.
[5] I don’t know the answer to this at all but it’s an interesting question and I would value a discussion.
[6] Other applications that I didn’t use but leave here as reference: Photopea, a free online photo editor; Free3D, free three dimensional models; Creative Commons, “an international nonprofit organization dedicated to helping build and sustain a thriving commons of shared knowledge and culture. Together with an extensive member network and multiple partners, we build capacity, we develop practical solutions, and we advocate for better open sharing of knowledge and culture that serves the public interest.”
Serendipitously, when I texted Willa to get her permission to insert her flower head collage in this post, she was working on this larger collage as part of a school assignment (not procrastinating this time ha ha, it’s for a final project about the mutual oppression of women and nature, although she had intended a textile applique but ran out of time). The photos in this work are from a woman’s beauty guide book from the 1980s, The Complete Beauty Book, an interesting, admittedly sexy visual commentary to be sure.
Process Peace 