Skip to content

May 22

3 Comments

Miranda: The onus of happiness

I just stopped crying. The pile of wet tissues is still right here beside me. In part I’m hormonal, on account of having a baby two weeks ago, but the main reason for weeping is that one of my husband’s remote employees just lost his 3-month-old daughter. Apparently she got tangled up in her blankets during the night, and when her mother checked on her in the morning, she was dead.

We can all imagine what this family is going through, while at the same time we have no real understanding of what that bottomless grief really feels like (unless we’ve been there ourselves, which I have not). I hold my own infant and can’t help but delve into the pain that this family is experiencing.

Such horrific loss finds unhappy company in a larger context, even though it’s overwhelming to extrapolate this pain on a global level. There is so much grief and tragedy around us, every day, parents losing children, children losing parents. The astronomic death tolls in China and Myanmar are growing exponentially. Thousands suffer and die in Iraq–on the battle field and beyond. Our local and national news are filled with grisly tales of the awful things that people do to each other.

The enormity of pain around us is enough to make one shut down, which is of course what many people do. (As a kid, I refused to read books that I knew contained a tragedy or unhappy ending; I stayed away from Where the Red Fern Grows and at all costs avoided watching Bambi.) For those who manage to stay engaged, what kind of change can one person accomplish, after you’ve written out all the checks you can write, signed all the petitions that matter to you, held signs at the side of the road? How can we who are fortunate reconcile the trivialities of our own lives against others’ desperate realities? Sit around watching TV and gloss over the pain of parents in China who lost their governmentally mandated only child?

I recall that Christa once explained how writing horror fiction is one way that she copes with demons, and I imagine that applies to not just the demons in her mind, but the real demons around us. (Correct me on this point as needed, Christa.) I think this kind of therapy-through-art (even if it’s subconscious) is important, but I’m not sure what it looks like for me yet. I’m not brave enough to write about the things that most disturb me (kids in pain or parents losing children, for example); it hurts too much.

While I can’t wrap my arms around a starving, terrified orphan in Myanmar and provide her with food and shelter, perhaps my obligation is to wrap my arms around my own children and love them as well as I possibly can–and then some. Push beyond my previous standards and comfort zone. The fact that my life is not touched by tragedy means that I need to step up and make the absolute most of every moment. Of course, tragedy will likely come my way one day too–it seems to be inevitable–but while I have it so “good,” I have the urge to make up for the “bad” in the lives of others through my own mindful living, like some kind of karmic carbon-credit system. Is this ridiculous?

Maybe this means being the best mother I can be, the best wife, the best artist. Not “best” by some external measure, but best in terms of what I know to be true–following the inner voice that really does have all the answers if I shut up enough to hear it. How can I whine about not having enough writing time in the face of a family who just lost a child? It’s nonsense. There is time. Write. Create something meaningful that may heal someone else’s heart, even just a little bit. Understand creativity at a different level. Share the burden of others’ pain by feeling it and turning it into something good, something mindful, something full of joy. Something that matters.

May 21

4 Comments

5/21 Weekly creativity contest winners & new prompt

Well, this week there was positively no way to chose a winner between two beautiful and highly original pieces of art submitted for the prompt “little black dress.” Instead, they both win (and each will receive a $10 amazon gift certificate). I wouldn’t say that either of these pieces of art are good examples of “keeping the bar low,” but hopefully they won’t intimidate the rest of us! I’m also posting two text entries from Creative Construction commenters–a poem from Cathy Ann Coley and a humorous prose piece from Jenn that we can probably ALL relate to–see those two pieces after the jump. The winners:

From artist Dale Meister, a mixed media piece on watercolor paper (read about Dale’s creative process for this entry at her personal blog):

Nice work, Dale! The second winner is puzzle-maker Juliet Bell, who submitted an extremely intricate, hand-cut wooden puzzle containing three figurals and measuring approximately 14” tall by 4.5” (some of her work is listed at eBay):

litte black dress 2

This week’s prompt: “The last time you kissed me.”
Use the prompt however you like. All media are welcome. Please e-mail your entries to creativereality@live.com by midnight on Tuesday, May 27. 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. For more info, read the original contest blog post.

Two text entries for “little black dress”: Read more

May 18

4 Comments

Jenn: I’ve Fallen… and I can’t get up…

After going gangbusters on this textbook and meeting and exceeding many of my self-imposed schedule deadlines, I’m in limbo. Kind of. The conference call with my editors ended up going really well. They are incredibly happy with the book. Their main stylistic comment was that it sounds a little too conversational for a textbook, and that the students may like this, but it’s the faculty who will ultimately adopt or not adopt the book, so they want me to clean that up. It makes sense, since my process was to have a student sit in and type as I lectured in class, so I ended up with twenty pages or so of transcribed “conversation.”

They also want me to do all those things I dread. Boldface words and create a glossary. Key terms. End of chapter material. I dislike this stuff intensely, but that’s what people put into textbooks, and that’s what I have to do. I find it restrictive and stifling to have this material at the end of the chapter. I teach what I teach, and it’s misleading to kids to be memorizing a whole bunch of terms and main points that I may or may not cover. This stuff is not low skill enough so that I can farm it out to a student, so it’s on me. My editors also made some formatting changes and the plan now is to send me three chapters at a time, I’ll make the required changes, then they send the book out to 100 reviewers, 3 chapters at a time. Eek.

The thing is, it’s summer. Ask anyone when faculty should be taking a long break, and they’ll of course mention this season. Not us! At my school, we have two intense summer semesters, 100 minutes a day, four days a week, and I made the moronic mistake of teaching THREE classes. That’s nearly six hours straight of lecturing non-stop, EVERY day. The money is incredible, but the effort is deadly. My daughter is now in daycare five days a week, which kills me, but ironically she is thriving and seems very very happy. She no longer cries when I drop her off, she gets dressed happily and without complaint in the AM and when it’s time to go, there is no longer a fight, she gladly walks right over. It’s a shame that others can raise my kid better than I can. Read more

May 16

Betsy: Productive turnabout

I’ve had a huge turnabout since I last posted (which was a while ago) that I am pretty excited about. I think one major trigger for this turnabout has been the writing Fridays I have been spending with Miranda. The other trigger is that I am not working as much, which is why I have time for “writing Fridays.”

I have always had a hard time writing for myself when my job is writing for others. It just doesn’t leave much writing brainspace, if you know what I mean. So I’m glad, in a way, I’ve been a bit short on work so I can focus on some personal writing projects, as I’ve been meaning to for the last several years when I’ve had to work full-time.

My current project definitely got its kickoff when Miranda and I got together for writing. While we do spend some time gabbing, for the most part we are both working intently. I like having a place to go and a “co-worker” in the room. It is a highly productive time.

In any case, I have written a ton and am really excited about getting my new blog off the ground. It is taking up pretty much every minute of my time (I don’t really have time to write this…PhotoShop calls…), but I look forward every day to doing the work, whether it’s writing, designing the page, or dealing with some of the technical issues.

And now, knocking water pipes call… (What is that about?)

May 16

1 Comment

Miranda: That finishing touch

As mentioned in an earlier post, I subscribe to the weekly newsletter of Canadian painter Robert Genn. While Genn writes about painting, his thoughts usually apply to any creative pursuit, including writing. This week’s newsletter is about art that is “overworked”–which relates to how to decide when something is “finished.” Genn’s newsletter is reprinted here in full, by permission.

Yesterday, Rich Woy of Ocala, Florida asked, “How do you know when a painting is overworked? Are there boundaries or clues? Is this judgment left to the artist or the critic?”

Thanks, Rich. Good question. Funnily, at dinner last night a subscriber happened to mention that I habitually overworked the word “overworked.” I had to explain myself.

For sure, it’s a term among artists. “Too many notes,” said the Emperor-composer Joseph II to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Similar thing comes up in painting. Too many strokes. Having said that, you have to know that tight photo-realism is not necessarily overworked. A close-up look at evolved realism can show understated brushwork and strokes in appropriate places. Overworked mainly applies to expressive, impressionist and broad-treatment works where freshness and surface quality are denied.

Overworking takes place when you lose control. As you fail in facility and freshness, you try to save the day with fiddle and fuss. The passage looks laboured.

Overworking happens when you’re overtired, distracted, suffering from desire deficit, and particularly when you’re not paying enough attention to reference material or personal creative vision. More crudely, it happens when you don’t know what you’re doing. The clue comes when you see you’ve gone too far. Work doesn’t look as good as it might. “A painting,” says Harley Brown, “is always finished before the artist thinks it is.”

While the general public may not be so sensitive to overworking, and sophisticated critics may be looking at other criteria, to the actively creative eye, overworking is easily spotted and often spoils the look of otherwise fine work. Artists have ruses, however. The bad areas can sometimes be obfuscated by nearby passages of bravura or other visual distractions, but smoke and mirrors doesn’t always hide the true measure of the artist. The main antidote is to scrape off and start over.

The overwork boundary often lies in the grey zone between the intuitive mode and controlled rendering. The fine art is in watching yourself in the act of intuiting. As Ted Smuskiewicz says, “You learn to leave your strokes alone.”

Best regards,

Robert

PS: “Great is the art of beginning, but greater is the art of ending.” (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

Esoterica: The most powerful antidote to overworking is a habitual, timely pause. Work periods need to be laced with both brief and long ones. Lean back, stand back, walk around, move the work to another easel. In my much-celebrated case of Attention Deficit Disorder, long pauses are difficult, so I work on more than one at a time. As Quebec plein air painter Sylvio Gagnon says, “The best way to finish a painting is to start a new one.” In any case, you need to neutralize indecision. “When you’ve just done it, you’re not sure. But when you’ve sat with it for a couple of hours and you don’t want to do anything more to it, that’s a great feeling.” (Damien Hirst)

May 14

2 Comments

5/14 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

The winning entry for last week’s prompt, “a cup of coffee,” is a digital image submitted by Karen Poneris:

Congratulations, Karen! Your $10 amazon.com gift certificate will be arriving shortly.

Contest update: The number of submissions has been lower than I’d hoped for–if you’re holding out for some reason, please lower the bar and participate–especially all you regular Creative Construction bloggers! Set the timer for 15 minutes and see what you can come up with.

I fielded a question from someone about the legitimacy of entering work that was created previously but happens to fit a given prompt. If you have something in your portfolio or filing cabinet that works for the contest prompt, by all means send it in. Simply the process of reviewing something you already created, thinking about it, perhaps tweaking it as needed–that’s all part of the creative process, so it’s legit.

This week’s prompt: “Little black dress.”
Use the prompt however you like. All media are welcome. Please e-mail your entries to creativereality@live.com by midnight on Tuesday, May 20. 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. For more info, read the original contest blog post.

May 10

2 Comments

Kate: Introducing Myself

Thank you, Miranda, for inviting me to be a part of this wonderful community of artist mothers. I’m a writer living and teaching in Minneapolis. I have two daughters, Stella, who is 4 ½, and Zoe, who is two months old. I’m still in the sleep-deprived early months with a new baby, and I’m getting very little writing done these days. (Someone told me that going from one to two children would be challenging, but I didn’t really believe it. I do now.)

I teach a class called Mother Words at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and I blog about teaching and motherhood literature (as well as my life as a mother) at Mother Words: Mothers Who Write. I’ve written a memoir called Ready for Air about Stella’s premature birth. It’s an account of the final weeks of my pregnancy, the “this-was-not-part-of-the-plan” first weeks of my daughter’s life in the hospital, and the isolated, post-NICU world we inhabited after we took her home. It’s a story about the dark side of pregnancy and motherhood—the fear, the irrationality, the psychic disruption—but it’s also about hope and resolve and writing, which ultimately is the thing that helps me heal and move on. The book is currently being “shopped around,” and I’m hopeful that it will find a home—soon.

Motherhood motivates me to write. I have so little time to actually write that when I do get an hour or two, I’m desperate to get words down, to claim that space for myself on the page. I look forward to being inspired by your wonderful work, lovely words, and stories of balancing motherhood and art.

May 9

2 Comments

Jenn: The Conference Call

I’ve been having my little elves work on my book while I took a break from viturally everything except my daughter these past few weeks. But many of my students are graduating, and now it’s back in my hand. I went to the American Association of Geographers (AAG) national convention last week, and both my assistant and my executive editors were there. It was great and encouraging to see them. They haven’t as it turns out, been making a bonfire with the first 10 chapters I sent them, they’re just very very busy. So I’ve put the thing down for a while until I hear from them. I just got an e-mail this AM from the assist. editor scheduling a conference call for Monday, which is perfect timing, as I’m really getting psyched up about the book again. I have the last 10 chapters and 3 appendicies done, in rough draft (ROUGH ROUGH), so the textbook is in it’s first iteration of being complete. I just have to get in and gloss it all up and add the figures and tables, then start sending another batch. My plan is to do 1 chapter a week over the summer, and aim for a complete book by the end of August. One year ahead of schedule, yay!

The sucky thing is that I just had to increase my daughter’s (HAD?) hours in daycare due to my summer class schedule, and I’m really regretting it. I’m a teacher, I should have the summers OFF to do NOTHING. And going through a divorce soon means I should look as shabby on paper, financially, as I can. But instead, I’ve signed up to teach 5 classes this summer, the money is too incredible to say no to. I’m wistfully thinking about a leisurely summer up in Maine, which I COULD have done. Which I SHOULD have done, living off my savings, and not paying collosal amounts of money to daycare, and since she’s switching to a new daycare in the fall, this is really the only time I could have taken the whole summer off and not have had to spend thousands “saving my space” for the fall. I blew it. I suck.

This month, the Atlantic Monthly’s back page vocabulary/pun feature was about what to call your ex. Very funny. Whatever you call them, mine has been coming around again, and things are going very well, though I will never trust him and never believe him, so I’m not really sure what I’m doing letting him in. I say I do it for my daughter, but I do it because I love him – in the way an addict loves a drug that’s killing her. All of the time I’ve spent with him and with our daughter, I could have had a break, which is what we all desperately need, isn’t it? Laying around doing nothing? Or I could have turned in 3 – 5 more chapters on my book.

Life is not perfect, but it’s pretty darned good right now. I’m so excited to be working on the book again, and teaching Natural Disasters this summer WILL help me to do a better job on the last chapters. It will be sad to see the project end, I’ve really enjoyed working on it. Do any of you have that sad, wistful feeling when your creative project is finished?

May 8

2 Comments

Christa: My life, my work

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working on an article for one of the trade magazines I worked for before I had children. I don’t do much of this anymore. I learned early on that I could only write articles when I could be sure that sources would be patient with the possibility of hearing little voices in the background, and for the most part, I couldn’t be sure of that at all.

Last December, I did manage to write a strong article using two sources that had no problem hearing little voices. (It helped that my in-laws were available to watch the boys one of the days, and that my husband had a 10-day school vacation.) The experience was so good that I thought maybe I could write more articles. So when a friendly source emailed at the end of February to ask if I’d work with him again, I jumped at the chance.

And it went great, as I expected. He’s a great source. He’s fun to talk to (even a little flirtatious, which does wonders for my self-image even underneath the kid-crusts and unwashed hair). And he’s incredibly well-connected and helpful. This time around, in fact, he set me up with all the sources I needed. I didn’t even have to make first contact, and I didn’t have to wait on people. He forwarded my emails. He stayed on top of them.

Which turned out to be absolutely critical to my being on time. By the time my husband’s April school vacation rolled around, I realized I’d hardly started this article. (The source’s schedule was as much to blame as mine.) But he honored my request to wrap it up that week, while I had childcare, and so did his contacts. The weekend after I completed his and another interview (and got two emailed replies to my questions), Puck came down with a 103F fever, and I had a house showing two days before the article was due. One of my last interviews was done in the car while Hamlet stood outside, drenching my window with water from the hose.

Yet I got it done on time. And realized that in general, I cannot write any more articles until both children are in school.

Which is a damn shame. Along with the kick I get from being flirted with (not the first time this has happened with a source, though rare), I really do get a charge from writing articles on public safety, a subject that is near and dear to my heart. I recognized this today especially, when I woke up out of gas, moved through the day like frozen molasses (much to my older boy’s chagrin), and then–at the end of the day, my worst time–magically improved as I spoke to one of my editors on a different topic.

I need to work. I need to interact with adults on very specific topics–I need to feel competent as a human being before I can feel competent as a mother. And I need to create. Would that my sons were both happy to hang out on their own while I talk on the phone for an hour, but they aren’t. It will be at least another year before I can find that fulfillment. But at least now I know it isn’t completely dead.

May 7

1 Comment

5/7 Weekly creativity contest winner & new prompt

The winning entry for last week’s prompt, “view from the window,” is an untitled poem submitted by Elizabeth Campbell:

I come late
to nature
I am not
a climber of mountains
a spelunker of caves
a diver of oceans
except within these walls,
where I weave webs that
keep me close to home
watching through windows
with wanting
the wind, the dark, the leaves
familiar and foreign, alive.

Congratulations, Elizabeth! Your $10 amazon.com gift certificate will be arriving shortly. Don’t spend it all at once! 🙂

This week, I am also posting two other entries (both short prose pieces), one from a regular blog contributor (Jenn), and one from an occasional commenter (Juliet Bell). Click on “continue reading” below to read those entries.

This week’s prompt: “A cup of coffee.”
Use the prompt however you like. All media are welcome. Please e-mail your entries to creativereality@live.com by midnight on Tuesday, May 13. 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. For more info, read the original contest blog post.

Read more

May 6

3 Comments

Christa: Scare people for a good cause

Folks, my apologies for being quiet lately. I have honestly been so busy that I haven’t had time to think much about being creative, though I’ve spent plenty of time doing it. (Upshot: I still miss writing articles, but these kids at these ages make it nigh on impossible.) But this post isn’t about me. It’s about something far more important.

Shroud Publishing (where I am assistant editor) has a new anthology in the works. Proceeds from the sales of Northern Chill (tentative): 100 Terrifying New England Tales to Tell Around a Campfire will go to the American Cancer Society. Why? At the Shroud forum, an email from author Nate Kenyon discussed the impact of cancer on his life. His words have all the more impact as we approach Mother’s Day:

When I was eight years old, my mother was diagnosed with an advanced stage of ovarian cancer. A short time later, my father was killed in a freak automobile accident, leaving my mother alone to care for two young children and battle a terrifying disease, with no hope for a cure.

My mother never let anything destroy her remarkable spirit. When I was only 4, she and my father left a comfortable life in Seattle and drove to Maine with nothing but a Volkswagen full of their personal belongings. My father set up shop as a small-town lawyer while my mother, a former teacher, learned to build passive solar houses. Then she built our home, from the ground up, with her own two hands.

I tell you this to illustrate her incredible strength and determination. She lived another five years after my father’s death, four years longer than her doctors predicted, astonishing everyone. But even she could not beat this disease forever, and when I was thirteen, she passed away peacefully with her family at her side.

I cannot express how devastating this was to me. It has taken me many years to begin to face those days from an adult’s perspective. The simple fact is, an experience like this damages a child in ways that are permanent and life-changing.

My mother loved the arts, and always encouraged me to draw and write as much as possible. Her enthusiasm and support made me want to become a writer, which brings me to where I stand today. Bloodstone, my first published novel, was released this week in paperback by Leisure Books. It is (I hope) a fun, scary read full of ghosts and demons and possession and old, long-buried family secrets. But there are also many references to cancer in the novel. I didn’t do this intentionally, but it crept in from my subconscious all the same. I guess it was also an exorcism of sorts for me.

The guidelines are as follows:

Flash fiction (no more than 700 words) told in the FIRST person (to allow readers to re-tell the story) set in a New England location. The anthology will be separated into 4 sections (tentative titles):

  • Haunts- Stories of ghosts, specters, and phantoms
  • Beasts- Stories of monsters, critters, and wild animals
  • Humans- Stories of eccentric people, serial killers, mad men
  • Other Oddities- everything else

Format: Submit as a Word .doc or .rtf attachment. SUBJECT LINE MUST SAY: “SUBMISSION–NORTH–TITLE”

Contact: via http://www.shroudmagazine.com/info.html

Multiple submissions allowed and encouraged.

No reprints

No simultaneous subs

Payment: (.01 cent a word or you can donate your stories)

I donated mine, a story right at the 700-word mark about a sailor, a werewolf, and what happens when you let your loins make the decisions. Who wants to join me?

May 4

1 Comment

Online Inspiration: Creative Every Day

Periodically, we post reviews of online sources of inspiration: websites and blogs that encourage creativity and connect creative souls. If you’d like to suggest a favorite site for a future profile, please e-mail your pick to creativereality@live.com.

Creative Every DaySome of you may have noticed the Creative Every Day icon in our sidebar. This site was created by Leah Piken Kolidas, an artist and blogger. Part of the site is dedicated to the Creative Every Day 2008 challenge, which encourages daily creativity regardless of media or creative outlet.  Leah writes:

“Here are the basics first! Creative Every Day 2008 is a new challenge I’ve started to help infuse my life and lives of others with daily creativity….Creativity is meant in the broadest sense, so it doesn’t have to be something art related. Your creative acts could be in cooking, taking pictures, knitting, doodling, writing, dancing, decorating, or making art in the form of collage, paint, or clay or whatever!”

Every time I visit this site, I am impressed by the wealth of what others are creating. I like Leah’s broad application of creativity, because it helps me to be more mindful of what creativity really means. All of those “other” creative outlets serve to bolster my “real” art, if I let the edges blur together. For me, blending creativity into the mundane parts of domesticity that I can’t escape (cooking, cleaning, driving, etc.) make me feel less like a drone and more like a creative person who lives in the moment, taking in the beauty even if it’s just lying quietly in a bowl of perfect tangerines.

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →