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Jul 27

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7/27 Weekly Creativity Challenge and New Prompt

Two last minute “rushed” entries for this week’s challenge…I think we can probably all relate to Miranda Hersey Helin’s feelings behind her picture below.  Maybe it’s a message for everyone to take a moment, slow down and breathe deeply.

“The past few months have kept me in a nearly perpetual state of being ‘rushed.’ It’s an awful feeling — and over an extended period of time, definitely results in burn-out. Last weekend, I had a long and leisurely walk with my littlest child in the stroller. We stopped for photos, snacks, and smelling the roses, as it were. (The current photo header of clouds was taken that same day.) This waterscape–taken of a stream right near my house — captures for me the peace and beauty of living in the moment that afternoon, and is a reminder of how I really want to live.”

rushed-miranda

From me (Kelly Warren): Miranda’s photo commentary hit a chord with me.  I, too, go through phases where I constantly feel rushed with so much to be done that, at times, I completely lose my words.  Literally.  I remind myself of my grandmother going down the list of grandkids’ names until she finally stumbled on the right one.  Nana had Alzheimer’s, and I’ve often read that one of the ways to stave off the disease is to keep your mind sharp.  Yet sometimes, my mind is so scattered that the only thing that becomes sharpened is my sense of helplessness as I throw my hands up in the air and walk out of the room, having forgotten what I came in there for.  I’m certain the constant rushing and the amount of things on my plate is the cause of that.  It’s a vicious cycle, isn’t it?  As mothers, whether creative or not, juggling is one of the constants of our lives.

I took this picture in Times Square Saturday night about 1:30am.  Rushed.  All those people. All those cars.  All that noise.  At 1:30am.  Where are they all rushing to?

Rushed

This week’s prompt: “fly”
Use the prompt however you like – literally, or a tangential theme. All media are welcome. Please e-mail your entries to creativereality@live.com by midnight eastern time on Sunday, August 2, 2009. Writers should include their submission directly in the body text of their e-mail. Visual artists and photographers should attach an image of their work as a jpeg. Enter as often as you like; multiple submissions for a single prompt are welcome. There is no limit to how many times you can win the weekly challenge, either. (You do not have to be a contributor to this blog in order to enter. All are invited to participate.) All submissions are acknowledged when received; if you do not receive e-mail confirmation of receipt within 48 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point is to stimulate your output, not to create a masterpiece. Keep the bar low and see what happens. Dusting off work you created previously is OK too. For more info, read the original contest blog post.

Jul 27

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Writers changed by motherhood

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, highly recommended reading on writing and motherhood, including finding the time, missing the kids, and integrating the experience of being a mother. A brief excerpt from the article, written by Geeta Sharma-Jensen:

When Milwaukee poet laureate Susan Firer’s son was young, she’d often determine the length of her poems by his fingers.

Holed up alone in her writing room, she’d look up to see his fingers running back and forth in the space beneath her door. From the other side of the closed door, she says, he was wordlessly signaling that “it was time to come out and play.”

Her poems, then, were necessarily short; she never knew how long it’d be before the little fingers would slip under her door.

“I tend to be pretty obsessive about my writing, so my children have brought more balance to how I live,” Firer says. “Both my life and, consequently, my poems would be something very different, in fact unimaginable, without my children, who have greatly impacted both what I write about and how I write.”

Writing moms, like all writers, take life in all its aspects and use their imaginations to transform it into art. But motherhood does things to writers – from stealing their time to swelling their emotions to making them silly and dizzy with this strange, overwhelming protective love for another human. They’d often rather be with this human who’s taken over their life, their thoughts, their fears. And yet, there is their artistic impulse, a call so strong they cannot go long without yielding to its siren song.

Somehow, then, they have made time for their work, and the children are there, too – in their art, the result of the twinning of maternal instinct and artistic impulse.

The full article is here. Whatever you do, don’t miss reading this essay by novelist Alice Mattison (opens as a PDF), which is linked within the article. It’s an absolute gem.