Tinker Mountain

Three years ago I went to the Tinker Mountain Writers Workshop at Hollins Univesity in Virginia. (Annie Dillard wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek about that river!) After attending a Saturday writing class in New York four years ago, I spent time working on pieces at home, but I wanted to spend some time with other writers again. I never felt that a traditional “writing workshop” was for me — all the horror stories of personality conflicts and people tearing each other’s work apart — why pay money for that? For someone just starting out at this, what a creativity killer.

Tinker Mountain’s programs, though, sounded so much more supportive, and I loved my week there. Plenty of quiet time to write but also a great group of people to share work with. Covid shut down the program for the next two years, and I might have been the first person to sign up when they opened it up again this June. Due to the cancellation of the creative non-fiction class I’d signed up for, I wound up in a fiction one that turned out to be exactly where I needed to be. I suppose that regardless of what genre you’re working in, the things that make good fiction also make good writing in general, and it was all relevant. I felt so inspired listening to classmates read their writing, and was absolutely honored when someone said that the piece I read felt like a magic carpet ride (thanks, Jane!)

The fields at sunset.

After a day of writing and class and reading and talking to people at dinner, exploring campus was my favorite thing to do. It filled up my well. The Hollins grounds were summer-lush, with soup bowl sized magnolia flowers and rocking chairs on shady verandas, a tucked away garden and a full moon (Margaret Wise Brown wrote Goodnight Moon here!) I found a piano in a dance studio and played in the middle of the night, I went for sunset-moonrise walks. I found a bird’s nest made of pine needle mulch and strips of crepe myrtle bark.

I found an inch-high ceramic ghost that some pay-it-forward soul left on a trash can for me to find — a handful of these friendly spirits turned up around campus and all I can say is: THANK YOU, I was not having the best day that day due to some worries at home, but finding this little ghost turned it all around. I carried that tiny guy in my pocket for the entire rest of the week.

Bird’s nest

My dorm room.

Tiny ghost.

I made new friends whom I know I will see again, and I’ve been smiling as I write this whole thing. This spring I was pin-focused on finishing up the blind school project (which I still need to post about), but Tinker marked the start of my switch to summer, to writing. I’m back at the page, and I thank Tinker Mountain and the Greater Columbus Arts Council, who generously provided funding to help make it happen.

100 Days Project

There are so many projects like this— photo a day, poem a day, drawing a day, etc etc. I wind up quitting all of them because they end up feeling forced. I understand the concept of pushing yourself through to the other side— the idea that sometimes, the thing we feel like doing the least is the thing we need to do the most, but part of me says, life is short…why spend time doing something you just don’t feel like doing anymore?

In fifth grade English class we were assigned the reading of different genres of books. While the titles could be my choice, I couldn't just read pony books or Judy Blume novels. I had to read poetry, a biography, something from the science fiction shelf, etc. I’d gotten through everything except the sci-fi and still nothing caught my eye at the library. My teacher handed me a classic: Have Spacesuit Will Travel, but with sincerest apologies to Robert Heinlein, 10 year old me just dreaded it. The only way I could get started was by dividing the number of pages by the number of days until my book report was due. By the end though, interestingly enough, I didn’t totally hate it. Was it my favorite book ever? No. But it must have taught me something or I wouldn’t remember the title decades later.

100-day projects bring up sort of the same feeling of dread. While the idea of honoring creativity in a small way every day sounds sparkly and wonderful, inevitably it seems to turn into a have-to, not a want-to, and I feel doomed soon after I start.

Next month though, with great optimism, I am trying again thanks to Suleika Jaouad. Suleika is a writer, musician, and artist who survived leukemia as a young adult, chronicling her experience in a column for The New York Times. She then went on a road trip around the country with her dog Oscar, meeting up with friends and people who wrote to her during her time in the hospital. The journey became her memoir, Between Two Kingdoms.

She since founded the Isolation Journals, an online writers group I joined that’s turned into an inspiration for creatives of all kinds. Sadly, Suleika recently relapsed, and after undergoing a bone marrow transplant, she’s marking her wait to find out if if the transplant was a success by engaging in a 100-days project of her own. She’s asking Isolation Journals followers to join her on April 1 and begin their own 100-day projects, and because she’s the person who inspired me to get off my duff and blog again, I thought I would give it a go.

I've wanted to get back to putting my hand on paper. Sometimes I am just tired of photography. It is so everywhere. Even having mostly abandoned Instagram and Facebook I still feel bombarded with images. It wasn't much more than a decade ago that I still had a querty keyboard cell phone and carried around an actual camera if I wanted a photo of something. Anyway, I’m thinking that my 100-day project might be about drawing,but there's all this internal pressure to not make bad art. Getting some kind of special sketchbook for it sets me up for failure before I even start— why would I want to mess up a beautiful book with crappy drawings? So I've raided my stash of unused stationery and notepads that I've collected since—er—high school and I am folding up pages, stapling them together, and calling it my sketchbook. I will use a pen so I can’t spend time second-guessing and erasing, and it doesn’t matter what I draw. It can be what’s in front of me, something from a photo, or if I’m feeling particularly uninspired, stick figures and smiley faces.

I think so many of us fight with ourselves over needing to be good at something inorder to make it feel “worth” doing. My brain will try to trick me into thinking that sketching is something I don’t really want to do, but I know that if I liked the end result I’d probably be carrying around a sketchbook all the time! So then I think, well, you don’t get good at something if you don’t practice. But then I think, that’s not the point of the 100-days project at all. The point is to gently nudge yourself past caring whether what you do is “good” or not, or whether you do or don’t get “better” at it— the point is to show up for your creative self for even the smallest amount of time. The tiniest mark on the page.

Wish me luck!
(Or better yet, join me— Pick a 100-day project and let’s keep in touch about it!)

Blind School Update

I thought it might be time for a little update on my work with the Ohio State School for the Blind. Thanks to a TeachArts Ohio grant from the Ohio Arts Council, I’m at the school once a week, working on creating a timeline of the school’s history depicted on a series of banners.

These first couple months have been about deciding what events to choose, finding imagery to go along with them, making a banner mockup, and working with students on image transfer experiments so that we can decide what method to use for the final project. While it would be easy to just use an inkjet iron-on transfer, we wanted to get a little more creative, so we’re using gel medium (basically glue) to transfer a color copy to fabric, letting it dry, then wetting the back of the paper and peeling it off. The color copy pigments are embedded in the dried glue, leaving the image intact, but with a lovely, not-so-perfect end result. For their own personal projects using this technique, students can then embellish the image however they want using pastel, marker, crayon— anything really. (see Jana’s beach image overlaid with pastel above)

Peeling off the paper…

Getting creative…

What’s been interesting is that everyone wants a perfectly transferred photo and that never happens. It amazes me how quickly some students “give up” when they don’t like what they first see.

Jaden’s photo of a clay bowl he made didn’t turn out like he thought it would. Somehow most of the image peeled away and you couldn’t tell what it was anymore. He seemed thoroughly discouraged. But I said, hey wait a minute, forget this was ever supposed to be a bowl. Just use it as a starting place for an abstract piece— it doesn’t have to BE anything. Didn’t you guys just finish a unit on abstract expressionism? He added color, glued on some string he took from the frayed edges of his canvas, and voila! (He has titled it Not a Bowl, lol.)

Jaden’s abstract

Maya didn’t like that the image of her dog didn’t look “real,” so she just started coloring over the whole thing and painting a big purple border— she likes how it looks more like a cartoon now.

Maya’s dog

It’s so hard to let go of expectations! Good grief, I can certainly relate, but what I’d forgotten is how early in life this starts, the thinking that we’ve failed at something because we don’t like how it’s turned out after the first try. I think of my own work, how “stuck” I feel not knowing how I want to print photographs anymore. I don’t even give myself the chance to play around with ideas. Maybe I need to be a student in my own class :-P

---

** The question I am asked most about my work at OSSB is “How do blind kids make art?” and the first part of my answer is that the students there have a wide range of visual ability. Some have blurred vision while others can see shapes or colors or varying degrees of brightness. Fully blind students might need a little extra guidance or a different way of showing them how to do something, but everyone has a good time in art class (and, yes, they all have Instagram accounts).