Kindness Towards Readers

 1. As Billy Collins said (??), keep the mystery mystery and the real real. This is something like what he said, anyhow. Basically, do not describe in great metaphor or imagery tying a shoelace. 

2. Begin in Kansas, end in Oz. Is also something Billy Collins says. That is, start in the mundane/ordinary and you can lead them to the magical/zany/wondrous.

3. Imagine someone is not committed to reading yet. You are their initial entry. Make it welcoming.

4. Imagine you are waking someone up by what you are writing. Don't turn the lights on all at once. Be gentle. Use simple sentences. Use words that make sense.

5. Tell them the truth. We all deserve it.

6. Don't waste their time. Don't tell them things they already know. Tell them things that are interesting.

and more.

5 Lessons in Writing??

 2025!

I first had an essay published in Notre Dame Magazine in 2020. So, maybe it's an opportunity to reflect, 5 years later on things I think I'd like to learn / am learning / have learned since being given the opportunity to write. What an opportunity! Why don't I try?

1) Sitting with things & having multiple projects at once. 

    I hear writers talk about the discipline of writing, showing up when you don't want to, putting your bottom in the seat, making a commitment to a time and place. Weekend mornings have been that for me. Place - usually bed, and I have a few hours on a weekend morning. What a gift. I Do like following the wisps & whims of inspiration so have found having multiple essays to work on, flit between, has been helpful.

2) One topic for one page. 

    I think I've come to this recently. It's a gift & blessing to be granted One Page! Like a poem! I like poems that exist on One Page. That's a poem. So, too, I think for an essay on 1 Page, 1 topic is likely sufficient. Enough. Not that it can't go somewhere. But probably circling back to the Big Idea. Or staying with the Big Idea and that's enough. People are just waking up. Don't make them too dizzy. Just like when they are just standing. Let them get their bearings.

3) Exact details are funny.

    People like funniness. But oftentimes I think funniness is the truth, when we're willing to look at it. Anne La Mott likes index cards (?) to record things. Brian Doyle likes writing things down immediately. There is a call for immediacy sometimes because otherwise the details slip out, and the details are life! The details! like in a photograph, we can zoom in and see the little things. And writing about it because there are also details of our emotional experience that become smoothed and blurred out later.

4) I have tended to write about things that happen to me 500x rather than 1x.

    Tupperware. Walking in my neighborhood. Thoughts about babies in church. I tend to write about things I can gather data about, and continue gathering data about. A once-in-a-lifetime experience is something worth writing about! And they all are, but experiences that repeat allow me to gather data (details) and develop an emotional response to them. They allow the collecting experience to be ongoing. Also, watching Brian Doyle as a writer, a "normal guy in a normal life,"--to be so prolific, how can you do it? Except to try to capture the everyday.

5) Writing as practice of co-creation.

    I have just written a prayer (start-of). I have considered my art practice a way to show glory to God. Writing? Sometimes I dive in. What about intentionally asking God to help guide it? God is the Creator of the Universe. God is the Word of Life. God creates the things we notice, the receptacles through which we notice. "Martyr" means witness. I consider my art-making as witness-bearing.

In the next 5 years, I pray God may guide, call attention to, help me to bear witness to truth & beauty.

Amen.

Illustration & Children's Artwork

 I love illustrations of certain books. I just discovered a new one this week: Robert Ingpen, an Australian who illustrates a Classics series. The one I'm reading is Wizard of Oz. Why am I drawn to his illustrations? There's a softness to them. They appear a bit fuzzy around the edges. I like the brushstrokes. I like the emotion of the characters. I see some munchkins and the Good witch with a hunched back. His characters have spindly legs.

I also like the illustrations of Blair Thornley. Hers are simple, ink drawings of people. Also soft I might say in the sense that their backs are sloped. I guess the illustrations I'm drawn to show people in poor posture--maybe that's a subtle element of reality some people aren't capturing. She likes shoes. Her characters are doing something.

I'm thinking about, kind of daunted by, illustration, because I never feel I've been able to capture the human form adequately or do it justice. I'm more of an aiming-for realism drawer. But with this, I'll be challenged to capture an emotion, be simplified. Maybe I could think about the underlying tone/emotion of the whole piece and think about how that tone manifests in a human body. Hm.

Some things I'd like to think about if I dabble more this way: Consider details. Consider texture. I can still do it by hand, I think. Consider a human form/model I like. Remember details to make it interesting/fun--they are a little treat.

bubbling cresting breads

 I just discovered a new added instagram favorite, (new genre?): cook_as_you_feel_it. High drama, French, jazz, instrumental music played along to timelapse videos of baked goods baking. Camera in the toaster oven/oven(?) Breads liquid centers breaking, cresting, toppings growing apart. A loaf in a bread pan enlarging, center splitting, the Center cannot hold, liquifying parts of it sprouting upward, growing up, sending themselves up. Croissants wobbling, off-kilter, kneeling toward one side, disability as beauty. Parts of ourselves: seeds, toppings, growing at different rates, off center. Liquid parts of us becoming solid, as our life bends or sprouts or takes or gives air, bulging in one way, then another. Under heat, growing. Not only up but out and in all directions, growth. Cracks forming, the center like 2 hands drawing apart, gradually separating. Parts of us bubbly, fretting and quaking all over from the excitement of it. Browning, glowing as we're cresting. Many of us on the tray, growing into one another, burbling outward toward one another, little fits and spits and different bulges. Quivering with excitement.

Cut open: Blessed and broken. The beautiful intricate web of holes inside, the croissant's chocolate jeweled core, the thin veins of line holding us together, we who have burbled, blessed, squelched, grown under fire, reached toward our neighbor, bust at our seams, bubbled upward and outward at inconsistent rates, burbling, besting, becoming, blessed and broken.

Again.

5/31:

Weeping as necessary part of the process, our wet innards cresting upward toward warmth to become solidified. How we topple into our neighbor, are conformed by them. How we inflate, and then deflate. Parts of us growing at disparate rates. The beauty in the airiness, cut open at the end to find it was not us, but the airy pockets that allowed us to take our final space. Where we allowed space.

Videos made to be universal, at the end, pulling the product close to our face and wripping it over to reveal its texture.

And yet.

Eucharistic bread as unleavened bread. Flat, necessarily, Containing none of this beauty.

But Flat because of what it was not. Jesus' Last Supper, our Eucharistic meal, a Thanksgiving, a call. A gathering spot And a reminder of what's to come.

If you hear my voice, you're breaking bread, do not wait for the bread to rise. Instant obedience. Children of Israel had to leave Egypt in haste, could not wait for bread to rise. As soon as you hear God's voice.

Jesus at the Last Supper was celebrating Passover.

the Lord's prayer: Give us this day our daily bread.

Bread that has been given time to rise. The great blessing of what is to come. The Last Supper. Bread with sustenance. Bread with community. We eat of the Lord, unleavened bread.

These videos are also in haste: they are time lapsed, change does not. Change does not always feel beautiful. About being made. About being called upward. About being warmed by something that necessarily penetrates all the way to our core.

disability and the other

Disability. Re-reading About Us, collection of essays from the Disability Series of the NYT. What about disability intrigues? Is so articulable? Embodied experience that is truly other. Minority status that unlike race, we could be on the other side of tomorrow. only so many different ways to see the world but living with a sensory or physical disability a unique mindset, a truly different perspective. Essays clearly articulated, solidified, hardened, confident, because lives have spent so long forming, hardening their perspectives around it, living in it, it is solidified, it is hard, it is their reality. The social form, the outside, the environment as that which is disabling. That which we see as soft and fluffy kind party sphere as that which can be naive, blind, not twist an eye toward them. The need to be perceived with dignity. The need for inherent goodness, the ways in which disability comprise essential parts and also bring pain. Isn't it all stories? Our painful parts also defining us, sculpting us in ways uniquely us. About Us. Nothing About Us Without Us. Necessary Voices. Book could not include all voices. Could not include those whose disability prevents them from talking.

Hopefully if we live long enough we'll have a disability (idea somewhere in Chloe Cooper Jones' book, or an Ezra Klein podcast on disability). An inevitable part, often, of a long-lived life. John Altmann, "I Don't Want to be 'Inspiring.'" John Michael Reynolds, philosopher of disability, says the world is essential disabled. Remove an elevator or stairs and a man couldn't make it to the second floor. It would be absurd to accentuate this inability to the point where it's all the man was. John: "So too is it absurd to boil me down to my needing crutches to traverse the world. I am John Altmann, I am not my cerebral palsy. When this becomes common sense to the world, then I will have effectively escaped my disability, even though I will always use my crutches to do so."

Disability as seeable and unseeable. How do we converse about it. How do we ask about an otherness yet ground in sameness. How do we see uniqueness, how what is interesting/constituent to another may be accessory to a self.

La Mer

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zEiokliXzs

Popespeed productions: On Lake Time

remembering...2021 (?) Love this slow moving, hair-rolling-in-the breeze, "Voyeux" (??) look at Mom lifting her hand, looking up, parents, siblings on the sea, slow reel laughter

free flowers

Were I Ross Gay, I would say,

my delight of the day: a jar of flowers upon my kitchen table, found "Free" item from a neighbor's curb, a few blocks away. Flowers I know not the name of, taken from a bush, I discerned upon a second walk-by within the week. Labelled "free" with a sign --one of two jars, Sunday early afternoon. I am not want to take free sidewalk goods, but flowers. 

Free, I realize as they are sitting, jarred, cut off from their life source, in fact the least free in fact they have ever been. Fated with their clipping. Their date to decay ticking from that point onward. Free? Jarred, not growing--subsisting, now, only, on a 3rd floor kitchen table, far from the earth from which they came.

Free: Without cost, the meaning of the sign, the indicator that they were mine for the taking. Though I saw, during the second passing, the second free-flower-picker left the glass there on the curb. I took mine: a roasted red pepper and artichoke tapenade stout jar--headed for the recycling anyhow, I gathered.

Free: without cost they were given to the homeowner, without cost given to me. Fragranced my rooms this week, of unknown name, from unknown person. Free. Emancipated? Liberated? No, but made or given spontaneously. Not bound by force. Having no trade restrictions, yes. Not fastened, except nesting in the jar. Frank and open in their own way, yes, their fragrance having something to say. Licentious? Favorable. Not allowing slavery? They are captured, now--but their open nameless buds' scent speaking of something not easily captured.