When you are creating something, you feed your own daydreams. What would have been something noted in passing with whatever emotion, or drafted as an iPhone note and never returned to, becomes part of a cycle within your body—think, feel, express, refine, mediate. By mediate, I mean drawing or listing or writing or expressing in whatever way that creates something. We call it creativity.
I haven’t practiced creative living in years. Upheaval, pandemic, self-criticism, adjustments. Then, suddenly, here I am again.
A few steps on the ladder:
I re-read Maira Kalman.
I said I wanted to learn to draw so that I could learn how to paint.
Erik made me a sketchbook.
Months later, Claire showed me how to make a relief print with gouache smeared on a clear plastic board.
Months later, I bought the gouache for myself.
Months later, Erik bought me a tabletop easel.
Months later, I set up the easel on a table to create the 4th desk in my studio (FOUR! Imagine how long it took me to accept that I require four surfaces).
The next weekend, Jesse and I attended a zine workshop here in Asheville from Erik’s friend and pop-up collaborator, Lex.
I started making a zine.
I love to note moments of happy acceleration in life, the kind that throttle you a little towards where you want to be. It’s wonderful how most of them involve other people. “Collective movement and music create a larger context for our lives, a meaning beyond our individual fate,” van der Kolk writes in The Body Keeps the Score before going on to describe the healing power of theater for children who’ve experienced trauma.
I over-prepared for the zine workshop—I outlined a graphic novel, essentially telling the story of my life and the conditions necessary for me to be able to write, i.e. so many manifestations of safety & security. But we were making 8-page zines out of a single sheet of printer paper. So I sat there for a while, wondering what to put in the zine, glancing over at Jesse from time to time as she created page after page detailing the miniature grandeur of her dog Moonshine’s sweaters. Using a magazine subscription postcard, the annoying kind that always fall out onto the floor, she crafted a tender micro-collage of his face, and it captured him entirely.
The academic model for inspo
It makes me think of an academic theory that I was required to teach my freshmen & sophomores who were learning to write papers at Florida State University: remediation. They would create a piece of work in one medium, then translate it to other mediums of their choice. When done thoughtfully, remediation activates our minds in this incredible meditative process in which you learn more about what you created in the first place.
As I gazed at the blank, folded page, I decided to start illustrating one image at a time pulled from my notes: Bird feeder. Overflowing grocery bag on counter. Corner of a letter, just received in the mail.
After some time sitting with them, zooming in on these images has helped me to see what the chaotic penciled notes and sketches were about.
Can “dreaming by day” cure us?
I got a wonderful quote when I opened the Goodreads app today:
“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” - Poe, Eleonora
Something to whisper to myself more often: Go forth, friend. Dream and meditate and do not set a standard or a goal. Make things. Experience demonstrates that after far more time passes than you ever thought you’d see, you’ll find you are meeting your “goals” without even trying, that the goal dissolves like mist.
Related reading
Virginia Woolf’s extended essay/book, A Room of One’s Own, was written in response to a request for her to speak about “women and fiction.” I’ve related to this book so hard ever since I just heard of it: you need security to write. I guess that’s what the little zine says, too, but it’s not an essay. It’s a ditty on the feeling.
I read that book in 2016, according to my Goodreads, but I don’t remember the details or if it was really good or what my copy looked like, whether I owned it or got it from the library. I’m not sure I felt a had a room of my own then; I certainly didn’t have enough money for anything beyond rent and some groceries. Perhaps now that I have some security, it is a better time to read it. I just put a hold on the copy at my library—at minimum a good excuse to leave the house and come back with fresh eyes.