Letting go & letting a four-year-old do her thing

Love this story about artist Mica Angela Hendricks collaborating with her daughter on some pretty fantastic illustrations. Hendricks started with faces of old movie actors & actresses, and upon seeing her mother's beautiful new sketchbook, insisted that she get to draw in it, too. So Hendricks' daughter drew dinosaur and bug bodies to go with the heads. The result is whimsical and astounding. Hendricks is selling prints & cards here.

Ghosts in the walls

My flash fiction story "When Flowers Bloom at Night" grew out of a collaborative challenge with another artist, my uncle Curt Schroeder, an abstract painter from Milwaukee, who along with my young cousin developed a list of 32 titles and challenged me to write short stories for each of them. I'm not quite at 32, but I've written a few including "Flowers," which was honorably mentioned at the Lakefly Literary Conference in Oshkosh. So I reversed the challenge. I came up with a list of titles for my uncle, challenging him to paint art to match the titles (any interpretation). The titles included "Food Fight," (cats scrapping over a bowl of food, top) "Gutter Ball," (a man has a one-man party to scoop out his gutters) "Ghosts in the Walls," (a swath of paint on drywall) and "Bus Stop Circa 1953" (bottom). My uncle flipped the challenge yet again -- I'm supposed to write a short story to go with one of the paintings. I'm leaning toward the moodiness of "Bus Stop." We'll see what kind of trip we go on...

Bloom

Earlier this summer I was honorably mentioned for my flash fiction story, "When Flowers Bloom at Night" as a part of the Lakefly Literary Conference contest. Scroll down to the bottom to read this short shorty.

Collision & collaboration

So my friend Ellen the poet and I have decided to have another collision. Today I sent her what I imagine to be a challenging pre-apocalyptic genre chapter with the plan that she will respond with a poem, and I'll continue the story with another chapter, and so on. One of the positives about the proliferation of self-publishing options is that we won't have to worry about publishers not knowing what to do with this strange hybrid, should we carry it to completion. Takes a lot of pressure off, allowing us just to let it become its lovely mutant self.

What we can and cannot do

Inevitably when I talk about Goddard College, I talk about one of my favorite workshops ever.
Port Townsend campus director Erin Fristad offered a session based on the film The Five Obstructions. In the documentary, filmmaker Lars Von Trier (Melancholia, Dogville, Dancer in the Dark) challenged his creative mentor Jorgen Leth to remake his 1967 avant garde short film The Perfect Human (video) five different ways. The catch was Von Trier chose the difficult parameters: the film had to be remade as a cartoon, for example. Another was Leth had to relinquish control over his creation: Von Trier remade one version himself and Leth had to put his name on it and do the voiceover for the film. For artists, relinquishing control is huge. Monstrous, scary.

Sometime scary is good.

For Fristad's workshop, we were to bring along a section of our work that was giving us trouble. I wasn't sure how much of a role my protagonist's mother should play throughout my post-apocalyptic novel -- I had killed off the mother but it felt like she should still be present somehow. We each discussed what we had brought and then Erin made her decisions.

I was to be paired with my friend Ellen, a poet, who was working on a long poem concerning the unnatural evolution of the world food supply and its impact on human rights. We were to trade our work. Ellen was to write a poem based on the section of novel I had brought with me. I was to write a short science fiction story about Ellen's section of poetry. We had twenty minutes to finish.

Ellen and I have a great respect for each other and our work, but were essentially coming from completely different directions on the literary road -- a poet and a genre fiction writer? We kind of smiled nervously and thought, well. Hmm.

Ellen wrote a poem in the voice of my protagonist's dead mother. I wrote a story from the perspective of a genetically engineered grain of rice.

What happened was a marvelous collision of art and inspiration.

She helped me to see what role my character's mother could play even though she was gone physically. Ellen said my story helped her to let her poem, Rice, evolve naturally. The exercise worked beautifully for us.

Art is perspective and the exercise helped us to see our work through the eyes of the other. Exploration is key to developing our own creativity -- we can be inspired and shaped by works in other genres. Ellen's poem and subsequent work, The Botanical Garden, undoubtedly freed me to try non-traditional forms in my own writing.

The Five Obstructions trailer says: We want to see what he can and he cannot do.

What can you do? What can't you do? Are you sure?

Moody Monday

Some moody Metric on a misty Monday.

Meteor strike

So, I had cancer. One of those things that shoots out of the sky, destroys your idea of what your life is and leaves you wondering what the hell just happened. Add to it a surprise reveal that I carry one of the Big Bad Genes, the patented ones. (Does this mean my DNA is infringing on a copyright?)

I'm still absorbing what this all means for me. How it will affect my writing. The important thing is the cancer is gone.

Getting cancer is definitely not a "gift," and I shudder when I hear that or some variation of it. Cancer is a menace, a killer, a red flag that something is going wrong in our world. Forget the gene -- the gene was always there; now it's getting triggered by something. But to the point --  I will say that this experience offered up some other surprise reveals: Stronger connections. A sharpening of focus. A brightening of senses and emotion. Would I change it if I could? Of course I would. I would choose to not get cancer, I would choose to not go through this hell. But I did go through it, and I'll take what I can from it.

One day, maybe I'll even make some kind of sense out of it.