Posts from the ‘weekly contest’ Category

12/17 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

Wow! After posting yesterday’s contest reminder, I didn’t have to spend much time waiting for entries — six of them! Very tough to select a winner this week, but someone has to receive the $10 amazon.com gift certificate — and it’s Debra Bellon, for her beautiful poem. Congratulations, Debra!

Waiting
She hears something moving in the leaves:
a rustle, like a velvet skirt twisting against itself
in a cold wind. She does not move, not even
to brush away the snow that has gathered
in the tender indentations of her neck.
Another half-season: rain to ice and ice to sleet,
the days grow shorter, the night stretches out
like the path of a thousand hours.
There is nothing there at all; she walks inside,
stunned by the quiet there, longing for the time
(not long ago) when she watched them sleep,
their lips rounding and flattening
in airy soliloquies.
Of all her dreams there were only ever two that mattered:
the one in which she hurries,
and the one in which she waits.

From Jen Johnson: “Had fun thinking about this week’s prompt; kept bringing back memories of my pregnancies and the waiting therein. Didn’t have the time and focus for a new written submission, so instead I tinkered around with one of my favorite pregnancy photos.”

From Karen Winters, a painting entitled “I think it was the Fourth of July.” Karen writes: “I painted this last summer inspired by our visit to Chicago. The question it prompts is…how many minutes of our lives do we spend waiting around?  Waiting for the light to change…waiting for the barista to fix the coffee…waiting for the car to get lubed…waiting for inspiration to hit…waiting for the big opportunity or the special person that will magically transform our lives. Only the clock at Marshall Fields knows…and it’s not telling. In the past few years, I have minimized the annoyance of waiting time by always carrying a sketchbook with me. Even five minutes can be turned into a drawing exercise that helps keep my eye sharp.  Time is the only thing we can’t buy more of. So it’s a good policy to look for ways to use those waiting moments, even if it’s in restorative, restful reverie.”

From Kelly Warren, a double set of poem and image pairings(!):

From Cathy Jennings, an image created in Adobe Illustrator:

From Cathy Coley, a poem and image pairing:

Waiting
December and the geese and leaves
are finally gone from my lake.
One seagull one cormorant
found warm calm waters
a mile inland from the sea.
I am mistaken about the geese.
It’s seventy three degrees.
A honking call echoes
from shoreline to shoreline.
Grey the sky, grey the water,
the bench and branches, all of it grey
waiting for rain whose forecast
lingers from day on to day
but never seems to wet this dry peninsula.
The black dog barks at another walking, both leashed.
I still wait for rain, watch the clouds
cover sky in gunmetal thunderheads,
wish them to snow
I know will never come.

From me (Miranda): I anticipated writing something about waiting for Christmas, but I ended up waiting for life to return to “normal” after an ice storm hit New England and we lost power and heat for 36 hours. The first day we sat at home by the fireplace, waiting. It might have been fun and relaxing, but the baby was fussy and I found myself trying to entertain two small children in the dim chill of my living room without much inspiration. No coffee maker, no computer. No electronic babysitter. As the day wore on, I realized that we were waiting for something that might not show up anytime soon. And it didn’t. There was a lot more waiting in store, and I found it an interesting challenge to try to enjoy the present moment and not just focus on the wait. I did capitalize on the chance to take some photographs of the frozen landscape. Here’s one of my favorites.

This week’s prompt: “Gift”

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 10:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, December 23. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. 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 contest, 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 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point here 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.

12/10 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

A warm glow — and ominous smoke — from this week’s contest entries for the prompt “fire.” Our winner is Juliet Bell, who sent in a beautiful pen-and-ink drawing from her archives. Juliet writes: “I was never happy with the tree reflection, and I can see now there are other things that need fixing, but I did like the way the fire came out.” Totally dreamy, I say. Juliet, your $10 amazon.com gift certificate has been issued.

From Cathy Coley, a poem (glad this particular scenario didn’t turn out differently!):

Fire

Prometheus’s booty set loose amongst us.
Evidence: a match tip burn on my bed.
Who was in my room,
found matches,
and curious,
struck one for the hell of it
and walked away?

Apparently those invisible devils
Huh, Not Me, and I Dunno.

From Karen Winters, a scary take on fire that I hadn’t even considered:

When I was younger, growing up in Southern California, I don’t remember the wildfires becoming such an annual event, like the tornadoes of the midwest or the hurricanes of the gulf coast. Yes, there were the occasional big fires, like the one that swept through Bel-Air, or the Malibu conflagrations. But they weren’t a ‘given’ with the advent of every Santa Ana wind.

Times have changed. With so many more million people living here it only takes one or two small accidents to spark a firestorm. A welder’s spark. A bird landing awkwardly on a power wire and blowing out a transformer. A carelessly put-out cigarette. A car parked on dry grass where the catalytic converter can cause a sudden flame. And those are accidental starts, we’re not even considering the cases of arson.

When the Santa Ana winds blow in October and November, nowadays the smallest error can cause hundreds to lose their homes and even some loss of life.

I don’t see a solution to this problem. We are out of dwelling space as homes are built among chapparal hillsides. Even with a defensible space, embers fly for miles, igniting rooftops far away.

Several years ago there was a big fire in Ojai. I don’t live there, but we were driving up the coast to Santa Barbara and saw the plume soon after it had begun. I painted this in my sketchbook to remember the occasion.

From me (Miranda): My firstborn son, Russell, turned 18 last night. It was hard not to focus on the fact that I probably won’t be seeing him on his birthday again for quite a while — at least for the next four years. A happy birthday evening, but bittersweet.

This week’s prompt: “Waiting”

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 10:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, December 16. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. 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 contest, 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 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point here 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.

12/03 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

Thanksgiving was the prompt for last week’s creativity contest. Our winner is Debra Bellon. Debra writes: “I finally got my internet connection back after moving (took forever!) and I thought I would celebrate by taking part in my first weekly creativity contest.” Lovely poem, Debra. Your $10 amazon.com gift certificate has been issued.

Grace
Suddenly you wanted to say grace
as though it were something you were used to—
ingrained, like the timbre of your mother’s voice, or
the lines imprinted on your long fingers—and not,
as everyone suspected—a kind of mockery,
aimed at unsettling the believers.
When you laid down your head on clasped hands
it was both calm and urgent, your voice
like milk warmed on a low fire
your eyes pressed closed, as though heavy
with visions of something outside—
the tender blackened branches or
the deep soil, turned hard where the frost settled or
the yellow light from distant rooms, where,
bundled in shadows, other people were gathered
to bow their heads and pray, as you did,
for everything and nothing.

From Kelly Warren, a gorgeous image and prose poem:

Thanksgiving night while my family finishes dinner
I look out the door and see one solitary shrimper.
I wonder if he has a family to share a feast with
or if he’s just taking shelter for the holiday,
looking longingly at the homes along the river,
wondering what it’s like to feel the warmth of kin.

From Cathy Coley, a haiku and image pairing. Cathy writes: “Miranda, there is always more sweet potato pie filling left for ‘souffle’ and the marshmallows are always more burnt b/c it can’t fit on the bottom shelf of the oven w/ the pie. Gotta keep traditions intact!”

Mama Stanley’s Sweet Potato Pie
To her granddaughter
Sweet Southern toasty goodness
Taste is passed — not name.

From me (Miranda):

My Thanksgiving was a little too full of simmer and tang — qualities that were nicely exemplified by my roiling cranberry sauce:

This week’s prompt: “Fire”

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 10:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, December 9. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. 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 contest, 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 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point here 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.

11/26 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

A few lovely “silver” pieces for this week’s creativity contest prompt. Our winner is Karen Winters. Karen writes: “When I really want to challenge myself to paint something in a realistic style, I often select a still life that includes a piece of silver or glass. We only know that something is shiny metal by the presence of reflections. And those reflections require us to look deeper and to notice the subtle color and value changes that lie in the peaks and valleys of the intricate surface. What makes an exercise like this so valuable is the process of close observation, a practice that borders on a meditative experience, and can carry over to other things that we paint as well.” Beautiful work, Karen. Your $10 amazon.com gift certificate is on its way.

From Cathy Coley: “i had no ideas, except for something vague and rather cliche having to do with the moon. then this:”

Silver
This morning, he announces,
“Mom! It’s snowing!”
just after six am.
I roll over in the dark,
see the sky slowly
rising from dark to silver.
Silver drops float, barely visible.

For the bus’s arrival, he is waiting
humming with excitement
over this small miracle,
yet the ground is only glazed
by cold rain.

From Cathy Jennings, a magical image:

From me (Miranda): I had ideas about what to create for this prompt, but as the time slipped away, I settled for photographing one of my favorite possessions — my silver charm bracelet. Each one of the bracelet’s charms represents something — there’s one for each of my children and my husband, as well as reminders of my creative self: a pen, and a cup of paintbrushes. Wearing this bracelet always lifts my spirits (maybe that’s because it jingles softly when I move?)

This week’s prompt: “Thanksgiving”

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 10:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, December 2. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. 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 contest, 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 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point here 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.

11/19 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

Lots of layers for this week’s creativity contest prompt, “quilt.” So wrap yourself up and have a cozy read. Our winner is Cathy Coley, who wrote a personal essay with unfettered honesty. Congratulations, Cathy (defending champion!). Your $10 amazon.com gift certificate has been issued.

Quilt

Quilts are heavy. I love sleeping under them, but for me they are weighted by memories of grief and struggle. One person comes to mind whenever I see a quilt because she was an award-winning master quilter and my late former mother-in-law. Her death is still the most visceral for me, and her son gave me a life’s worth of hope and potential, but ultimately we divorced.

She was a woman whose heart was big enough to fight for a little boy who was born into unimaginable neglect at a time when her marriage was dissolving. She fought to adopt a foster child who was slated to be reunited with the parents who had several children removed from their care because of their inability to cope due to severe alcoholism. At the time, the presiding policy was shifting to try to keep families together against the odds of betterment for the children involved. She went to court and succeeded in her bid to adopt the boy she had been caring for determinedly for three years, and who had begun to thrive.

When our wedding approached, she sat me down and asked me point blank if I was ready for this. If I was going to be able to handle all that may come up for him because of his rough origin. At the time I assured her I could love him enough, no matter what, I could be there to take care of him. I had already for two years, and had been very aware, or so I thought, of the depths of his despair and needs. Aren’t we all a little more optimistic about the powers of love in our mid-twenties? Don’t we all think if I can just love him enough, then all will be well? She promised us a wedding quilt, but was still working on it by the time we were wed, and honeymooning in her cottage on a lake in Maine.

Her father’s many acres of land were a generational home we would eventually take our boys to for summer vacations. She and her brother had grown up romping along the lake, her children and his, and then ours did the same. In the October of our honeymoon, the lake reflected the most glorious patchwork of changing tree colors, filling the spectrum from brightest yellows thru golds, bright and deep oranges and reds, even hues of burgundy and plum. The loons’ mournful cry echoed the sentiment of earth’s shutting down for the winter, across the lake. When the quilt arrived a few months after we were married, it was unusual and beautiful – a Japanese window pane pattern in red, beige, pine greens with strong geometric bands of black giving a three-dimensional effect. The only request I gave her for it was to please use strong colors rather than pastels. I didn’t know of her particular talent and skill in that gift of her hands until I opened it and marveled at each tiny stitch, under an eighth of an inch, precisely and lovingly stitched. Later, she would quilt a baby’s quilt for my oldest son. He was nineteen months when she passed.

By then, she was already twice through battles with breast cancer, to which she eventually succumbed. She flew us down to Florida in her final days. In her house were several examples of her handiwork: a beautiful throw on the sofa, a decorative element on a marble table, a back room with bits and parts of progress, shelves of colors waiting to be sewn, paper plans, wooden rings, loose and taught with fabric. Each piece finished and unfinished was museum quality.

Her son was unable to cope with the loss of someone he always credited for saving his life. The sight of her in such a depleted state was unbearable for her multiple stroked second husband; for her mother, aged ninety, who had had quadruple bypass surgery months before our wedding, and made it from south Florida to the wedding in Boston a few years before; and too much especially for her youngest son.

I had a little remove from the situation, and so was left to care for the others. I won’t go into the excruciating details, but much was too much for me to bear as well. She had worked until the week before and was gone by the following. I was alone with her when she made the decision to die. She looked herself square in the eye in the bathroom mirror, as I bathed her after a traumatic incident. She looked at the state of her self, her family, and knew it was time. She could no longer care for everyone else, now she was unable to do the simplest tasks in self-care. She looked in the mirror and said, “So this is it.”

That afternoon, I watched by the window for the hospice worker’s arrival. I stopped her outside and said no one else in the house is capable of making this decision. I told the hospice worker that she was ready to go, but couldn’t as long as the others were with her. After a private discussion in the back room between them, arrangements were made, pieces were put in order, and she put her last stitches into the quilt that was her life, neatly, precisely, as in everything she did. We were put on a plane back to Boston while she went into hospice.

At her funeral the following week, so many women, quilters, came to us and spoke of her quilting with such reverence. They said it was a shame she couldn’t be at this last county quilt show. Her last piece was on prominent display, already the winner of the show’s competition, even before her death. They all insisted we should go see it. We arrived at the show, came around the corner. Displayed upon the first of many temporary panel walls, was the most beautiful quilt I have ever seen, even to this day. Not just because of the circumstances, it was genuinely the most exquisitely executed piece of art. A king-size traditional wedding ring quilt — a white background stitched intricately with millions upon millions of stitches, interlocked green rings in the foreground with perfectly puffed borders, meant to be given to the first grandchild to be married, on their wedding day.

From Juliet Bell: “I don’t suppose this qualifies as creative, unless you count the watercolor from which the squares are derived. But…I confess to a compulsive addiction to doing this, and the prompt set me to it again.” I’m pretty sure this qualifies as creative, Juliet!

From Jen Johnson: “I’m going to dust off an old piece to send for this week’s prompt, since it came immediately to mind. This one has actually appeared in print, in an earlier version (in Once Upon a Time, the magazine for children’s writers and illustrators). The file for this draft is dated 2003, before my kids had been born — interesting to look at it now, from the perspective of a mother, especially after making my son’s quilt. (Still working on one for my daughter!)” Jen also sent in a photo of the very first quilt she made: “Machine pieced and hand quilted, put together on a whim without a pattern. It hangs over our bed. (In earthquake country, it is a comfort to have something soft over your head as you go to sleep!) I was working on this at the time of writing my poem.”

The Poet Pieces for Cover

Day after day, the page remains as blank as a bedsheet,
so she puts aside the pen and selects a new between.*
She threads the needle — thinking of it as a dash
worthy of Dickinson —  and she muses upon her material:
a scrap of calico cut from her mother’s apron,
a seersucker square from her father’s summer suit,
a paisley print from her sister’s skirt,
a flannel plaid from her brother’s shirt,
silk velvet from her favorite dress,
the denim from a threadbare pair of jeans.
Several bolts of discount cotton and all manner
of misfits rescued from the remnant bin —
linens, cambrics, rayons, chambrays, corduroys,
damasks, jacquards, jerseys, woolens, organdies….
She takes whatever cloth she can get
and starts another crazy quilt.

There was a time when women did this
of necessity, re-used each scrap of fabric,
put the pieces together as best they could
because the pieces were all they had.
They called it piecing for cover, making blankets for the beds.
Winter was coming, and their children would be cold,
especially at night. They had little time for frivolous things,
no time for wishing that words would come
when they are called, as though words were
obedient children. Perhaps her words
are too well-behaved, she thinks,
for lately they are neither seen nor heard.
Perhaps she’s whipped them into silence
and is an unfit mother. They have taken
all her words away, swaddled babies
stolen from her grasping arms by a barren midwife
and left on some stranger’s stoop in late December.
She could sense their lexical shapes but nothing more
beneath the swaddling bands, yet she is sure
that she would know them if she saw them. She looks
for their faces in novels, in magazines, in skinny books of poetry.

Bending her head, she knots an end of thread and wets the tip
against her tongue, imagining her writer’s block
as an actual block of old fashioned ice —

enormous, opaque, surrounded by sawdust.
The dimples on the familiar thimble
reassure her nearly numbed thumb,
and she tells herself the block will melt.
It always does. Creativity is all about
entropy, and every thought will thaw
to the liquidity of language if given time.
And time she has. Words don’t grow up
and leave home. Her babies will be taken in and cared for
until she can bring all of them home.
and give each one a proper place to live.
For now, she makes a quilt, piecing for cover,
each patch a paragraph, each seam a sentence
in the archaic language of her ancestors’ needles.

* a “between” is a specific type of needle, often used for hand-quilting

From Brittany Vandeputte:

Quilt
The quilt in the closet was given to my great-grandmother by her grandmother when she was born.
And now itʼs mine.
Blue pinwheels dance across bone white. Tiny pinprick stitches by my great-great-great grandmotherʼs hand.
How many times did the needle graze her finger, I wonder?
How many of her loose hairs were woven unseen among the thread?
What dreams did she dream for my great-grandmother as she sewed?
103 years of dreams.
And quilts
Of her very own.
The other quilt is Mamawʼs
Made especially for me.
She knew me well, my great-grandmother.
No staid blue pinwheels blowing across bone.
For me there are stars and flowers, pinks and purples and yellows.
A garden for me, made by her hands, pricked with her blood, tangled in her hair.
And full of dreams
For me.

From me (Miranda): When my firstborn son was about two years old, I made him a quilt. No pattern; I just made it — sewing machine for the piecing; hand tufting when it was all put together. While my quilting skills are entirely amateur (maybe “maverick” is a better word?) and I never did get the batting quite right, I did have a lot of fun in the process. I also included a few scraps of material that my mother had used in a quilt she made for me when I was a child, and I love that continuity. My son’s quilt is now faded, stained, and a little tired, as it’s seen a lot of use in the past 16 years. At some point I told myself that I’d make quilts for all of my kids, but I’ve never made another. Better put that on the “someday” list, with a few underlines. I’ve got a lot of work to do….

This week’s prompt: “Silver”

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 10:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, November 25. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. 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 contest, 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 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point here 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.

11/12 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

I was struck by the depth of the entries for this week’s contest prompt, “self-portrait.” Our winner is Cathy Coley, whose photograph has a striking, unflinching quality. (Anita Davies and Bec Thomas’s images have the same unapologetic strength.) Cathy also earned extra points for her acrostic, and for braving the wilds of Photoshop. Cathy, your $10 amazon.com gift certificate has been issued.

From Anita Davies: “An old sketch I’m afraid but it’s a start, didn’t know about these little weekly prompts you do…Great stuff!”

From Juliet Bell:

Self Portrait
In solitude like
leaves falling upon still water
she finds herself.

From Bec Thomas:

From Jen Johnson: “A half-serious (but true to life) entry this week. An hour past the deadline, too, but I’ll send it in anyway, just for grins.”

Self-portrait
Too harried, this week,
To even set a timer
And smile for the lens.

From Kelly Warren:

When I look in the mirror,
I see my mother.
When I look at my children,
I see my self.
My green eyes turned blue,
my blonde hair turned red,
yet the same little twinkle,
the same little spunk,
the same great wonder,
the same boundless spirit.
building the courage to become…my self.

From me (Miranda): A pencil drawing from 20 years ago — back when I habitually drew eyes larger than they should be — and a photograph from yesterday. I admit that I was already moved by the honesty of this week’s entries when I began contemplating my own. I wanted to accomplish the same starkness. I’m not sure I did, but the photo I ended up selecting was the only one I could stomach. It was an oddly interesting exercise — and I felt very adolescent, photographing myself in the bathroom — but I’m glad for the experience. (Unfortunately, my new red hair doesn’t look very red here. I’m going to have to go a shade brighter, next trip to the salon!)

This week’s prompt: “Quilt”

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 10:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, November 18. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. 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 contest, 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 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point here 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.

11/05 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

A nice show of hands for this week’s creativity contest prompt. Our two-time defending champion is on a streak! Jen Johnson wins again. Go, Jen! (Is this like that dude on Jeopardy, or what?) Your $10 amazon.com gift certificate has been sent. Jen writes: “I’d thought I knew what I wanted to write as soon as I saw the new prompt last Tuesday, but the week got in the way with no writing at all. So here we are, Election Day, and this morning I found myself scribbling lines on scrap paper while running around after the toddler. The poem below is the result of about an hour’s much-interrupted scribbling. And given my Mama’s Magic Studio motto –- ‘Where Handmade Magic Happens!’ — I just couldn’t resist sending you my ‘avatar’ photo.” Just goes to show what you can do with an hour. I appreciate that Jen used a rhyming pattern without veering into cuteness, which is difficult — and I like the timely election reference.

Hands (The Personal is Political)
Tap the keyboard,
Knead the bread,
Paint the canvas,
Make the bed,

Knit the sweater,
Wrap the gift,
Braid the tresses,
Mend the rift,

Wield the hammer,
Sweep the rug,
Tend the bruises,
Squeeze the hug,

Push the stroller,
Mold the clay,
Burp the baby,
Show the way,

Cast the ballot,
Skip the rope,
Thread the needle,
Pray for hope.

From Cathy Coley, a lovely pairing of past and present: “A new poem and an old drawing exercise from high school: 3 views of my own hand. 25 years apart.”

mother’s hands
in many pots, but most
importantly rubbing backs,
smoothing tears,
running through
baby fine and thicker hair
lifetime source of comfort.

From Juliet Bell, a treat for everyone! “Hands -– now there’s an interesting prompt. I’m a palmist. Hands are far more than magnificent tools; they are an encapsulation of who we are, our personalities, our foibles, our talents, our ups and downs, and so much more. They are a window through which we can see our unique magnificence. I thought I would use this prompt to diagram and highlight some of the features that creative people will most likely find in their hands. As you read, please note that this is very general, and as in astrology, it is the full combination of all in your hand that fills out the picture of just who you are as a unique individual. You will want primarily to look at your dominant hand as this is the one which shows what you are doing with the talents you brought into the world with you (shown in the non-dominant hand).” [Click on the image for a larger view.]

1. The head line will likely curve down toward the moon area (blue). The farther down it slopes, the more you draw on your unconscious, the more creative you are likely to be. The more horizontal the head line, the more you will want your creativity to have a practical application (make money, for instance).
2. The Apollo or Sun finger (ring finger) will be significant. This is the finger of self expression, love of beauty, and artistic endeavors. It will likely extend beyond the halfway point of the top phalange of the middle finger; there may be a line or lines on the hand extending toward the mount (base) of the finger. The longer the line, the more that artistic self-expression is part of your personal destiny. Many shorter lines above the heart line indicate a lover of the arts.
3. The Mercury finger (little finger) will show the role communication plays in your life, and the degree to which you may have commercial success. If it extends into the top phalange (top crease) of the ring finger, then it is long. This indicates that communication is a vital component of your creativity. This will often be demonstrated by a need or desire to put your work out there for the world.
4. The Jupiter finger (index) will indicate ambition and leadership (among other things). If this finger is as long as Apollo or longer, then you are very ambitious, and will show much drive toward accomplishing your goals.
5. The will portion of the thumb (top section) will show your ability to accomplish your goals as opposed to just thinking about them. If it is in good proportion to the rest of the thumb, or longer, then you have the will power to do what you need to make things happen.
6. The finger tips will show the way in which you attack most of what you do. The more pointed the finger tips and nails are, the more you rely on gut feelings; your ideas and feelings come to you and you act on them. The more squared your finger tips and nails are, the more reasoning your approach will be, and the more practicality will flavor what you do.
7. The fingers themselves indicate your orientation to the world. The smoother the fingers, the more spontaneous you will be; knotted joints will slow you down, cause you to ponder before taking action. The length of your fingers in relation to the palm is significant. Fingers longer than the length of the palm indicates a love of detail and minutia, a thinker, slow to speak and act. Short fingers indicate a talent for seeing the big picture, and a quick mind — quick in thought and action.

I hope you found this fun and validating.

From Kelly Warren: “This is my first attempt playing around with Adobe Illustrator. The words in the background are the lyrics to one of my favorite Sugarland songs. I’ll leave the rest up to interpretation.”

From me (Miranda): I got so carried away with Election Day that I forgot my own advice to create a contest entry before the eleventh hour! After a moment of panic, I came up with an idea that I was able to execute on my laptop while watching the election returns last night.

This week’s prompt: “Self-portrait”

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 10:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, November 11. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. 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 contest, 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 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point here 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.

10/29 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

The dreamy entries for this week’s creativity contest were irresistible. I found myself utterly paralyzed and unable to select a winner — and this post might have been eternally delayed if I hadn’t had a visit this morning from a dear friend and colleague who came by to drop off a new project. You can credit her for the new prompt, as well as for tipping the scales toward our defending champion (aka last week’s winner), Jen Johnson. Jen writes: “Fun prompt! Got me thinking about how my mom always swore one shouldn’t talk about dreams before breakfast, and it took off from there.” Beautiful work, Jen — your repeat $10 amazon.com gift certificate is on its way. For my part, clearly it’s time to line up more of my guest judges. This is hard work!

Love Charm
You are the endless dream
told before breakfast,
shared with deliberate intent
of it all coming true.

You are petals from daisies
plucked one at a time,
an apple skin peeled all at once
and tossed over the shoulder.

You are pennies saved
and flipped into a fountain,
an eyelash wish
blown from my fingertip —

it floats there, between us,
between dream and waking,
caught on the current of breath
before it falls.

From Karen Winters:
There are day dreams, night dreams, “dreams” that are heartfelt wishes and many other kinds to explore. And even our pets, it seems, have dreams. If you’ve had a dog as a member of your family no doubt you’ve seen them making running motions or even small vocalizations as their eyes dart back and forth beneath closed eyelids.

So, my entry this week is a page from my Moleskine sketchbook, entitled “Dog Dreams” — which features an imaginary interpretation of what my American bulldog (girl), “Ripley” sees when she slumbers.

Dreaming can be a powerful tool in our creative life, which I learned when I interviewed Patricia Garfield (author of Creative Dreaming) for shows on Dreams and Nightmares on ABC’s 20/20 newsmagazine.

It was Garfield’s influence that prompted me to start keeping dream journals, a practice that I’ve carried out for decades, with varying degrees of devotion. These days, my dreams are my nighttime studio in which I work out solutions. I let my unconscious do the work while my body rests. It’s not uncommon for me to wake up with a picture in my mind that I have “seen” in a dream. So if someone asks me how much time a day I spend on art, I can actually say “practically 24/7.” However, unlike Ripley I do not dream of bones, gophers and kibbles. At least not yet.

This sketch was painted with a Japanese ink brush pen, which gives a wonderful thick and thin line that is as responsive as a paint brush.

From Cathy Coley:

Dreams
You slept between us,
little warm breath before dawn,
a tiny cry, so unusual from my happy baby.
Heart breaking, I considered waking you.
Another whimper and cry, a few more,
I imagined what may be going on
in your mind, so complex already.
Were you frightened, pulled suddenly from my arms?
Did you miss the dog, your dearest companion?
Was something happening to your big brothers
you felt helpless to do anything about?
Something about daddy?
He patted your belly and shush’d.
Waking you to comfort kept crossing my drowsy heart.
I thought, you’ll learn to deal with worse than this:
a night cry you’ll soon forget, if you knew at all.
Maybe you will be wiser than I,
resolve the problems of your dreams before waking.
You quieted and settled.
Furrowed brow smoothed back to round innocence
as the sun slowly rose, bluing the window from black,
Better without my intrusion to your sleep.

From Kelly Warren:
I’ve been thinking about this week’s creativity challenge ever since it was posted. I’ve thought about my dreams, the slumber-wrapped type, usually full length films in my case; I’ve thought about writing a bit of poetry or verse talking about what dreams I’ve dreamt or have yet to dream; I’ve thought about old loves that still haunt my dreams and wonder how and where they are; and I’ve thought about dreams I had in my younger days and paused to consider if they’ve come to be. But in sitting here tonight, working on jewelry for my show this weekend, listening to the girls’ laughter as DH gives them their evening bath, it hit me: I’m living my dream. Sure, I’m strapped for time….always have been, always will be. If it’s not the current things I have going on, I’d undoubtedly come up with something else. My plate is simply designed to be overflowing; I’m starting to accept that now. But really, what have I to complain about? I live in a beautiful home on the water, I have a very patient and supportive husband who puts up with all my hair-brained schemes, and I have two beautiful little red-headed daughters who light up my world every day. And while I may complain about the daily grind from time to time, I have a good job and a rewarding career that most of the time I enjoy, while others are losing their jobs left and right in these times of stock market crashes and dwindling state funds. I’ve certainly been through my share of sadness, maybe even more than the average, but who hasn’t had a touch of tragedy in their lives? Maybe I’ve been blessed with a happy spirit, I don’t know, but I’ve always been able to find a tiny bit of sunlight in every storm cloud. So I choose to believe that, yes, I am living my dream. It’s all in how you look at it, don’t you think?

From me (Miranda):

For the past 15 years or so, I’ve had a recurring dream. I call it the House Dream. The theme is always the same: I am visiting a new house that I’ve just bought or am about to buy. In each dream, the house is completely different and utterly concrete to its last detail. As I tour the house, I discover that there is a huge section of the house that I didn’t know about — a bonus wing, or a massive underground living space, or that an upstairs bedroom opens out onto a shopping mall — and that the previous owners have left behind things of value that are ours for the taking: useful clothes, jewelry, books, or furniture.

In the process of exploring the house, I can’t believe my good fortune. I’m in awe of this incredible place that I’m going to be living in. It’s really too good to be true, I tell myself — I must be dreaming again. But no, this time it’s real. The dream is so vivid that I always fall for it: the design of the faucet in the kitchen sink, the pattern of the carpet in the dining room (there was that one where the dining room was the size of a modest restaurant and the pope was coming for dinner; staff were preparing for the visit and setting all the tables with cream-colored linens, pale gold utensils, and large ornate plate chargers — meanwhile the carpeting was dark green and printed with a floral pattern; perhaps not worthy of His Holiness); the pattern of a lace curtain in a bathroom window, the wood grain of a child’s bunk bed built into the wall. And then, always before actually moving in, I wake up. It takes me a moment to realize that yet again, the House Dream was just a dream, and I am back in my own boring bedroom.

Naturally, I’ve thought a lot about what the House Dream means. At one point I decided it was a metaphor for my own creativity — that I have everything I need right now in order to create; I just need to find it (that “bonus wing”). I’m not sure if that’s right. In the meantime, I look forward to my next nocturnal house tour — although I don’t look forward to the crash of re-entry, and the sucker punch of knowing that I fell for my own fantasy yet again.

This week’s prompt: “Hands”

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 10:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, November 4. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. 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 contest, 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 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point here 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.

10/22 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

The best way to describe the “apples” entries for this week’s creativity contest? Try this: BUMPER CROP. Our winner is Jen Johnson, who submitted two poems. “It’s been such a joy to read the weekly entries!” Jen wrote. “I have the best of intentions about entering every week — well, most weeks anyway; as I mentioned in my [recent] comment, last week’s [‘tears’] just was too overwhelming to contemplate given where things were. Ah well. Anyway, I couldn’t resist the temptation to dust off two old poems to submit for this week’s ‘apples’ prompt. I’ve had a longtime fascination with the Eden story in all its manifestations, and over the years it has prompted many poems and scraps of writing. Here are two very different pieces.” (You can get to know Jen a little better over Breakfast.)

What Adam Never Knew
No one has blamed the gentle pull
of dappled light on ruddy skin
suspended; even one small apple
has attraction, sure as sin —
we reach for what we are denied.

How could I kiss him then, or speak
of what I knew? No. I was meek:
I made him bite from my own hands,
I cowered at his sharp demands,
and, knowing that I should, I cried.

He said to blame it on the snake;
I needed help before I’d take
such swollen fruit, he said. Of course
an explanation meant divorce,
or death, or worse. And so I lied.

As any woman knows, or should,
these little lies can change the world.
Would I explain now if I could?
The bitter salt of God’s own sex unfurled
with apple’s taste. I thought I’d died.

And so they blame me for a fall
that never fell. I cannot tell:
can’t speak of hunger’s throaty call,
can’t say that fruit seduced me well,
my belly full of God and pride.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Divination
Before she ate the apple,
she pinched the twiggy stem
between her grubby thumb
and two slender fingers.

It dangled from her hand
as if her arm were branch,
her body tree, bare feet
rooted to the ground.

Before she took a bite,
one hand cradled the fruit
while fingers held the stem,
twisting it around.

She said the alphabet,
a letter for each turn —
was Eve astonished to keep
twisting after “A”?

Click on any image in this blog post to view larger.

From Cathy Jennings, a brilliant digital image created in Adobe Illustrator:

From Brittany Vandeputte, an evocative prose piece with two photographs:

In Western North Carolina, where I was raised, fall meant apples. In October, the burgeoning red and yellow leaves stood like road signs, both marking our way and beckoning us to the orchard. My family has grown apples for as long as anyone can remember. First, a few trees were planted at the Homeplace when the land was settled in the 18th century. And then when the Homeplace was lost to a cunning in-law in a civil war poker match, the farm land became a commercial apple orchard.

We were fortunate that the apple growing relatives never forgot that we were kin. Every year, when the apples were ripe, my grandfather and I would climb into his bright red pickup truck and bump along the backroads to Edneyville and the cousins’ orchard. My grandfather had an open invitation to pick the apples there and some of my earliest memories are of him driving the bed of the truck under a pair of shady branches where I would sit while he procured me that first Golden Delicious of the season.

My grandfather was a simple man, and apples his connection to those he loved. You couldn’t visit without one being offered. Jesus had loaves and fishes, and my grandfather had Red and Yellow Delicious. They seemed to multiply in his care.

It has been more than twenty years since my last visit to the orchard. On Saturday, I felt its call once again. Instead of the orchard of my childhood, we visited a nearby farm that opens to the public every fall, drawing tourists with pumpkin patches, hayrides, and a corn maze. Picking apples was an afterthought.

But from the moment we stepped into the orchard, Sam’s expression changed. He has always loved apples, but he’d never seen them in such abundance. He was awestruck. And then I handed him that first freshly picked apple. As his face broadened into a smile, I marveled how something so small could be so important.

From Cathy Coley, a bushel and a peck!

Apples

It has been about a hundred years since I sketched, but listening to all the visual artists on the freeing quality their arts add to their lives, I began to miss doing so myself. So here is a sketch of my forlorn love. Not bad for an exercise in recalling the stickiness of pastels. I loved rush-layering the colors during baby c’s nap.

I have a complicated relationship with apples. As a kid, I wasn’t a great fan of them, but red delicious were always in the fruit bowl on my mother’s orange counter. Mealy, but pleasant, usually, and a very tough skin. Just don’t let them sit too long in the bowl. Yuck. As a college student in western Massachusetts, I began a tradition of annual apple-picking and pie-baking, MacIntoshes and other thin skinned varieties were the perfect complement to the plain homey crust and cinnamon, allspice, cloves, maple syrup, molasses and sometimes oatmeal fillings. Throw in a Granny Smith for extra snap in the flavor. I baked them for breakfast, made veggie chili with apples, put them in everything and crunched them like crazy until the bags from the orchards were gone. My kitchen scented the neighborhood.

After I moved from Boston out into the far suburbs northwest with kids, I found myself living in a valley known as Apple Country. Autumn, always a well anticipated season, became like Eden. The yellows and reds and oranges bloomed magical in the hilly wooded landscape. Turn a corner, and there’s an orchard. Sudden open green with craggy old trees bursting in ripe red and gold, so laden with apples the branches dragged to the ground. Perfect for bringing the boys apple picking. It was a favorite event mid-late October, and sometimes even in September for our family, with loads of picture taking and freshest apple crunching, right from the trees.

By my mid-late thirties, hiking through the orchard sent me coughing and blaming the probable use of pesticides for my discomfort. Then, one afternoon, as I sliced apples for a pie, I began coughing in earnest. That was the last pie I baked. Almost overnight, or so it seemed, every apple became a worse threat to me than the witch’s for Snow White. No kiss from my fiancé would rescue me from this throat closing sleep.

Jump ahead a few years to the present. We have moved from Apple Country to coastal Virginia, and I’ve chalked up apples as a strictly New England experience. Occasionally we buy bags of apples in the grocery, for the bowl on the kitchen counter, but I have to stay clear of them. I water down baby bottles of apple juice with my head turned far away, and don’t allow my boys within 4 feet of my face when they have a glass or have just had one. It’s very sad. My husband and mother-in-law are big pie fans. Come the pie baking rounds beginning at Thanksgiving, when the apple ones are in the oven, I am cloistered upstairs and all the downstairs windows are open and fans blasting a hurricane wind of apple, cinnamon, cloves and allspice out into the neighborhood. I really miss the wholesome apply bounty of this season. My wish is that someday soon, my fruit allergies go out the way they came in, and shut the door behind them.

From Bec Thomas, a photograph: “Here is my selection, I actually had time to send one in, yay me!” And yay for us, that we get to see Bec’s great photograph!

A beautiful poem from Jennie Johnston (not to be confused with Jen Johnson, above!): “I’m so glad that I have finally been able to enter. Apples just filled my mind for a few days and out came this poem.” Great to see you here, Jennie!

Our World in an Apple
My son, it is the time of apples
as you sleep, curled
rosy cheeks, round and full
the dishes sit in dissolving suds
leaves fall,
cold rain pounds the ground
and I think of you
how you have changed me
how you have opened every part
the nooks and crannies of my soul
how with this opening
I am fuller,
better
deeper
than before
inside apples are five pointed stars
your smile, your temper, your laughter, your hands and your eyes
yes I am open
I am susceptible
I am vulnerable
I care more
about everything
my maiden could be withdrawn
she could turn away
she could stay inside her dream
as mother I love in the raw
my heart pulsing in one of your hands
while in the other you hold our world
reflected on an apple

From Juliet Bell: “I’m busy making ornaments for the Christmas season. This apple is made from a watercolor I painted some time ago. Prints are mounted on both sides of Birch plywood, then cut out, and varnished. Only after I finished the ornament did I remember the prompt for this week.”

From me (Miranda), a painting. I had a nice, fat, gallery-wrapped canvas (gift from my mother) and knew I wanted to paint it lime green. Then I used an apple half as a stamp with several layers of acrylic paint. I needed some texture, so I used some green tissue paper to build up the apples. I’m pleased with the result, but especially the process. I had some ideas, but I really didn’t know where I was going — and that was just fine.

This week’s prompt: “Dream” [prompt provided by 17-year-old son]

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 8:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, October 28. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. 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 contest, 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 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point here 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.

10/15 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

An interesting collection came in for this week’s contest prompt: “tears.” The winner is Cathy Coley, who noted: “Boy did i not want to write for this one. But close to tears from sleep deprivation…. ” Maybe that’s partly why her poem has such merit?

Tears
If I allow it, the full banks of my eyelids
would overflow, flood a room, then the house,
burst out the front door into the neighborhood,
and solve these past drought seasons.
Cars would float away to the sea
and the world would fill with my tears.
No more land in sight, we’d adapt,
grow gills and become one with the fishes,
swim free and never have to worry about the tears.
Who would see them in the watery world?

If I allow it, all the heartbreaking things would kill me.
But what use is feeling sorry for myself,
I have a job to do.
I have to raise good men in a childhood under war.
My second son raises the bar because every moment
amidst the peopled world is a struggle to cope
in a thousand streams of stimuli his mind can’t sort.
Everyday, I ask
how can I make the world bend to him?
How can I make him fit in this world
when he is clearly a puzzle piece from a different box.

The other day he told me,
I act mean so people won’t know I’m really nice.
What is more heartbreaking than that?
He’s already so separate from the world,
and forming a harder shell around his big loving heart.
My first son, a sensitive heart from early on is doing the same.

I have to raise a daughter protected against the odds.
I have to give her a sense of strength of self,
not just against the tide of what the world will thrust at her,
but truly her own vision:
Joan of Arc,
without the crazy and the pyre.

So what use are my tears, except to flood?
Maybe wash away the hard lines accruing on my face,
heave sobs to break apart the muscle tension from my temples
through my neck and shoulders?
Sounds like a needed welcome relief
and a completely selfish act,
if I allow it.

From Karen Winters: “I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to paint anything new for the prompt, so I’m using an older one from my archives. This painting was in the 2007 National Watercolor Society all member show and it is titled ‘As the Parade Passed By.’ I saw this older gentleman watching a parade, and his eyes were shiny, as though we was on the the verge of tears. I can only imagine what was going through his thoughts. The National Watercolor society member show is a national juried show and I was very happy that my painting was one of about 80 chosen out of the hundreds and hundreds of entries they receive. Although this painting is precious to me and not for sale I take a print of it to some of my shows as an example of the kind of watercolor portraiture I can do on commission. There is no white paint in this picture — the white in his hair is the white of the paper and you just paint around it (very carefully).”

From Betsy G., a prose piece. Betsy worked in a lightning round — she gave herself just one hour for the exercise:

She recognized the handwriting right off, could almost see the Bic pen in his hand scratching at the front of the envelope, forming the letters—all capitals, all the time, not with bold aggressive strokes but a light and graceful slant. It was a plain, white number 10 business envelope; he’d never written her using anything but that.

Finding his letter amid the bills and catalogs had of course surprised her and at first sent a thrill though her. A letter! Each day when she went collected her mail, she hoped to see her name hand scrawled on an envelope as she used to sometimes daily, now essentially never. But she could never fight her childish optimism that a letter would be waiting for her, a shiny red wagon on Christmas morning. But after she finished processing the idea that she’d received a letter at all and understood that the letter was from him, the thrill turned to chill.

And now it sat in front of her on the kitchen table, unopened, a padded package stuffed with white-lined notebook pages. It was surely multi-paged; she could tell by its bulk. She tried to ordain from its weight what it might say, if it was simply a history of all that had transpired since they’d last seen each other eight years ago, or if he might have retraced the circuitous map of his feelings and followed it to the reason why they had not arrived at the anticipated proposal but to his sudden withdrawal from her life at the realization that those feelings did not amount to love. She could still hear his voice that day, the gall that he would he utter the words: “I love you, I’m just not…” She’d had to stop him there to prevent him from completing the clichéd lover’s ending, to stop him from emblazing the full phrase, in his voice, in her head and forever be disgraced for embracing the trite kiss-off.

Or perhaps it was the letter she’d written for him over and over: what was I thinking, of course, what a fool, how could I have, and to you, my pearl. Perhaps he’d realized… That word—“realized”—the delusional verb that she’d finally let go of, and not as long ago as she would have wished; she never again wanted to think this word and of him.

The envelope and its mysteries on the kitchen table, next to the plate of corner bread crusts from her lunch and the glass with its wading pool of Diet Coke, beg her to take action. She is at odds with herself and sits a long time at her place at the table. There will be long-term ramifications, she knows, and probably regret that she will revisit obsessively, but a vision comes to her and starts to solidify. She begins to know—to realize—that she will bring that vision to life despite its obvious flaws.
She takes the letter from the table and presses it to her cheek, the moist blue of the ink on her warm skin. And then she watches her hands, as if they are someone else’s. They are hands on TV or in a movie and she watches with rapt interest as they tear the envelope in half, and half again, and again and again.

From Juliet Bell: “I don’t remember why my daughter was so upset in this picture. We were in the English Garden in Munich, Germany. I do recall that she was truly upset. This isn’t one of my favorite pictures.”

From me (Miranda): As an adult, I don’t always know how to process extreme conflict. On one occasion several years ago, I was overwhelmed by anxiety and emotional upset; totally adrift. To anchor myself, I drew the doodle below, making lines through vision blurred by tears. The notebook paper is 5″ x 8″ — and the lines are tiny. (For a better view, click on the image.) The exercise worked in that I got to a place of being able to function again, after the hour or two that I spent working at the page.

This week’s prompt: “Apples”

Use the prompt however you like — literally, a hint for colors, or a tangential theme. All media are welcome. Please e-mail your entries to creativereality@live.com by 8:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, October 21. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. 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 contest, 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 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point here 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.

10/8 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

Ah, the colors of autumn. The winner of this week’s contest is Karen Winters. Karen writes: “Coincidentally, this was the painting I was going to post today, so it’s good timing. It represents a small bridge over a stream not far from where I live. The California sycamores put on quite a show when the time is right.” A beautiful and dreamy painting, Karen! Your $10 amazon.com gift certificate is on the way.

From Cathy Jennings: “Here is something for autumn. I made these with my son for his kindergarten class this week. They are gluten-free sugar cookie mix, with currants for eyes and fruit leather for the mouth….All the little monsters like them.” LOL — nice work, Cathy!

From Elizabeth Beck: “i just finished this painting this week….leaves are gone…birds have flown away…it is autumn…almost winter…almost spring again….”

From Cathy Coley, two poems selected from her archives:

No matter the sorrows, still
the yellow tree trembles.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
September

Time does not slip from my fingers.
It runs roaring from the grip
Humanity places on everything.
We’ve wrestled the lion into the measured cage
Of years, months, weeks, days, hours, minutes,
Seconds on down to nanoseconds.

But time is no circus lion under the whip
To whom an open door is a forlorn vision of freedom;
Who lays swatting flies with his magnificent tail,
As his trainer waltzes through the creaking iron door,
Steak in hand.

Time is not contained by our definitions.
The Time/Space Continuum does not hold
Its butterflies in the net.

My small attempts to keep Time at bay:
My lists and schedules; I would rather be
forming yoga postures, swimming,
Sitting in the grass smelling starlight,
Running down the beach, sand curling
Between my toes in the shallows of the waves,
Making love, playing cards, talking of dreams,
Listening to friends’ woes, loving my children,
Laughing, laughing, and watching them grow
While wishing they’d hold this moment a little longer
Before losing another tooth or stretching the soft curve
Of their cheeks across a jawbone.

I feel like an ass
Baying against Time.
The moon looks down and shines a gaze
For me to consider her cycles around earth;
Her endless shift of seasons,
Her veils of tides.
The sun doesn’t care but to dry us up.
And the two pass this blue ball between them
In a game we can only imagine because its time is
Too big to consider from our few measured days.

And Time, stalwart, waits and watches
Us grow from buds to fall like leaves,
As we watch now the red and gold
Flip, float and curl in the wind
Toward a pile, wrap in and around:
The tail of a lion
With no flies to swat.

From me (Miranda): A photograph. No poem this week! Just the photo. I drive by this spot every Monday and had been wanting to shoot it for weeks. I was disappointed that this Monday was overcast, because I’d been looking forward to bright sun on red leaves, but I was thrilled with what I got instead.

This week’s prompt: “Tears”

Use the prompt however you like — literally, a hint for colors, or a tangential theme. All media are welcome. Please e-mail your entries to creativereality@live.com by 8:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, October 14. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. 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 contest, 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 24 hours, please post a comment here. Remember, the point here 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.

10/1 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

Lots of great stuff for the weekly creativity contest prompt “the notebook.” Our winner is Brittany Vandeputte, who pulled a selection of snippets from her notebook and created a poem. Below, she shows us the snippets in the first list; after, the finished poem. It’s so satisfying to see snippets woven into a new life. (I know you have a collection of snippets too!) Brittany, your $10 amazon.com gift certificate has been sent.

12:01 airlines
Tuesday groceries
summer electronics
fall appliances
winter exercise equipment

no stalking no amorous advances
revise well
write fast
read constantly
be open to suggestions
submit to the right people
be gentle with publishers

Rome really looked like it was being sacked.
Who was the woman supposed to be?
I don’t remember her character.

Eyes like Ireland after storm. Blue-green dotted with rocks.

Fix carseat
organize
install toilet lock
swif bathroom
work on porch
install baby gates

peaches
grapefruit

provolone or muenster

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Husband, Read Her Mind

12:01
Eyes like Ireland after storm. Blue-green dotted with rocks.
Who was the woman supposed to be?
Her character really looked like it was being sacked.

No amorous advances summer fall winter.

Remember groceries.

Peaches
Grapefruit
Provolone or muenster

Fix carseat
Organize
Install toilet lock
Swif bathroom
Work on porch
Install baby gates.

Be open to suggestions.
Be gentle.

From Aimee Dolich, a series of beautiful notebook pages. Aimee writes: “i loved your notebook prompt for this week, so i thought i’d join the fun. these pages are my contribution to a traveling journal project. we were permitted to write on any theme we chose, so i decided to write/draw a few bits about the history and the quirks of the crazy little college town that i live in. i’ve so enjoyed reading the creative construction blog. it’s wonderful to hear from other mothers that balance the delights and demands of creativity and parenting.” Thanks, Aimee! It’s wonderful to have you here. (Don’t miss Aimee’s full entry at the link above.)

From Lisa Worthington-Brown, a prose poem. (I love the immediacy, Lisa!)

The Notebook
A tattered red cover with a heavy crease along the spine. A coffee ring on the right hand corner from last Wednesday’s use as a coaster. Stray ink marks along the pages from the pen-twirling that signifies thinking. The outside is worn and faded. The casual observer might think that it is unimportant or uncared for. Flipping through the unlined pages one might assume that the writer was bored — with all of those doodles — and messy — with uneven lines of prose, incomplete (and sometimes incomprehensible) sentences, poor grammar and spelling, and even made up words. But to the writer the book is a treasure. A place where dreams exist and ideas are born. A place where anything is possible — or even likely. A place where the world makes sense — or the chaotic nature of it is celebrated. A place to live. A place to be. A home. A haven. Me.

From Cathy Jennings, a digital image created in Twisted Brush:

From Cathy Coley, a haiku and image pairing:

The notebook
We may disagree
what constitutes art at least
my son makes his own

From me (Miranda), an image and free-form poem:

An Unexpected Parallel

Notebooks are full of possibility
smelling faintly of hope and dreams.
A notebook in my hands reminds me of who I am.

Babies are full of possibility
smelling faintly of hope and dreams.
A baby in my hands reminds me of who I am.

No wonder I seem to collect them both.

This week’s prompt: “Autumn”

Use the prompt however you like — literally, a hint for colors, or a tangential theme. All media are welcome. Please e-mail your entries to creativereality@live.com by 8:00 p.m. eastern time (GMT -5) on Tuesday, October 7. The winning entry receives a $10 gift certificate to amazon.com. 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 contest, either. (You do not have to be a contributor to this blog in order to enter. All are invited to participate.) Remember, the point here 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.