luminous debris

Pay attention

Day 7

I need to pay more attention to my own reactions.

When I got home today, the 2006 course catalog for Penland School of Crafts was waiting for me. I dropped everything and ran, excited like a child, to read through it.

Perhaps that reaction is telling me something?

Penland was the place for a big revelation for me several years ago. It's only fitting that I go back there again, a nod to the circularity of things, don't you think?

Update: I am enrolled! Polaroid Materials & Their Creative Applications: Polaroid image transfers, emulsion transfer, image reworking. Art, more art, a solid week of art, studios-open-24-hours-a-day-kind-of-art.

Make sense

Day 6

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What i want and what I fear." - Joan Didion

"Writing is making sense of life. You work your whole life and perhaps you've made sense of one small area." - Nadine Gordimer

I wonder what small area I'm working on.

Perhaps I already know.

What light am I allowing in to illuminate that luminous debris?

 

Sign up

Day 5

Today's morning pages will be afternoon pages. Actually, they will be Nap Pages, accomplished while little Tess naps, should she decide to do so this afternoon.

But progress on other fronts: I'll go to a beautiful artist's gallery in Black Mountain on Thursday for my Artist's Date--they have a show on soil, which is serendipitous because of a project I'm doing right now.

Yesterday, I enlisted myself in a writing course, "Give up and Write: An Advanced Creative Prose Workshop" that begins on February 14th and that will put me in the company of writers. Already the fear of comparison arises, seconded by the self challenge that it presents. Belly up to the bar, sign up, enlist, put it out there in the universe--write.

Also this week is the residency program for the Warren Wilson College MFA program, bringing writers to town for readings and lectures that are open to the public, so I'm going to several of them. Writing all around, a nice start, a week with intention about writing.

Write three

Day 4

“A lot of disappointed people have been left standing on the street corner waiting for the bus marked Perfection.” - Donald Kennedy

Yes, the morning pages began today. And not in ideal conditions--up too late for solitude, so surrounded by children, dogs, cartoons. And in a cheap notebook--all important pieces of the puzzle for me, having delaying writing (in life) until the conditions were just right, which they never are. Perfection is a Censor. The desire to please and make nice and avoid conflict and truth are others. So I imagine that these three pages every morning will become important measures of escape from those Censors, and more. Things emerged even today, just one day into it, even with just three pages done, that are important for me, that will emerge again, those themes we constantly work through in our lives until we find the kernel, the crux, the fulcrum, the turning point.

 

Reject perfection

Day 3

I am methodically preparing myself for doing The Artist's Way, beginning tomorrow. It feels like a dance of some sort - get the book, read the opening sections, prepare myself, get my notebook and pens. Somehow it feels like the steps you go through to prepare for a funeral - not negative or sad, but perhaps the realization that something is done and over (the hesitation, the reduction, fear, procrastination, avoidance?), and a new thing is beginning.

At M'Press, a wonderful store full of beautiful papers and journals, I longingly touched the journals yesterday, caressing their covers--some just wouldn't do, immediately: too rough, too something--others, I tried to imagine my pen in, and couldn't--those words and thoughts and notes not right for that book. The lines too close, too distant, the paper too white, too beige, too slick. A few felt so wonderful--yes, this is it! I would say to myself, but stopped.

And then I realized, as I stood there entranced by these empty vessels, that one of the barriers to my being creative is perfectionism. And these journals would place so much focus on the perfection - the absolute beauty of the thing - so as to continue, not break, that compulsion for perfection, to re-do, to re-write, to make nice, all those beautiful journals either not begun because they were so beautiful and I was not worthy or written in for a few pages and abandoned, the futility of it all rising to the surface of each blank page, as if the holder were more important than the words being held. Writing books that are empty for me, but look good.

But now it's different: there are real words and work, wanderings through language that matter, not play-acting. And so the vessel doesn't matter. In fact, getting one of the artsy, fantastic, gorgeous books was a symptom of the disease, so I stepped away.

Instead, I'll do my morning pages in a bright purple $1.29 1 Subject Notebook that has 70 college ruled sheets. My smallest daughter, Tess, picked it out at the Ingle's Supermarket this morning. It is the first step to recovery: I've rejected perfection in favor of the truth, gone beyond the package to the process, the content, the meaning.

 

Art and Fear

Day 2

Today I went downtown - just me, no kids - and bought a new copy of The Artist's Way to start this process on Saturday. I lent my copy to someone who needed it and evidently still needs it, so I'll start anew.

Hidden in the corner of the same shelf was also a copy of Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland - a fantastic little book about the perils of artmaking--and the rewards. Having sent mine to a friend, it also came home with me. It's a book that addresses three main questions:  What is your art really about? Where is it going? What stands in the way of getting it there? It explores the way art gets made--and why it doesn't get made.

I'll add my own questions - What fear keeps me from committing fully to my creative impulse? Why do I constantly hold back my full measure of expansive self? What reduces me?  How do I reduce myself?

This will be, for me, a perfect companion to this journey through The Artist's Way. As Bayles and Orland write: "it is about finding your own work." Your own voice. Your own ground.

Begin today

Day 1

I've joined an online group of people I've never met to blog our way through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way.

I've started and stopped this process (on my own) many times before, so am looking forward to an external accountability to keep me going. I'm also in a very different place now than I have been in the past when I attempted this focus on creativity, so am ready for the daily challenge and looking forward to the community of learners that gathers around this process.

For the moment, my assignment is to find my copy of The Artist's Way and read all the material up to chapter one. The group conversation will begin on January 7th with chapter one.

I can't think of a nicer way to start a whole new year: new notebook, full fountainpen, fresh paper, blank screen and some sturdy raspberries to snack on.