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Archive for the category “Creativity”

13 Dec 2012
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doodlin’

Once upon a time, in a life far far away, I came upon the instructions for an activity called creative doodling. Before describing it, though, I have to confess to a tendency I may have been born with to absorb activities like this one and then immediately turn around and teach them to any person or group halfway willing to give them a try. I used to say about myself that I was born to disseminate information. But the complete truth is that I was also born to show you how to do this stuff–whether you want to do it or not. Well, I haven’t actually hogtied anyone yet. That would be kind of counterproductive when it comes to creative doodling.

Creative doodling is an art therapy exercise, but don’t let that put you off. It’s also fun. And so easy to do. Start with your dominant hand.

  1. Get out a couple of pieces of drawing paper (larger is better), masking tape, and some colored markers or crayons.
  2. Tape a piece of paper to a flat surface with masking tape to keep it from moving around.
  3. Choose a marker or crayon.
  4. Close your eyes and run your hand over the page to locate the edges.
  5. With your eyes still closed, start drawing on the page. Don’t lift the marker off the paper; your drawing should be composed of one unbroken line.
  6. Don’t try to draw anything in particular. Just let your hand (and marker) wander all over the page until you feel like you’re done.
  7. Open your eyes and check out your work. Look at it this way and that (sideways, upside down) until you find an image in it. The image can take up most of your drawing or only a portion of it. It can be fairly complete or only hinted at.
  8. Once you’ve found your image, use the rest of your markers to elaborate it.
  9. When you’re done, title your drawing.
  10. Repeat with your non-dominant hand. (You can use your dominant hand to finish the drawing.)

These are examples of two of my creative doodles, the first with my right hand and the second with my left hand.

Right hand: Impossibility Takes Flight

Right hand: Impossibility Takes Flight

Left hand: Turkey-Swan

Left hand: Turkey-Swan

I include them to demonstrate that NO artistic talent whatsoever is required for this activity.

I love color and I enjoy coloring, so sometimes I do this just for fun. But it’s an activity that can also provide a little personal insight if you take the extra step and either journal about the pictures or at least tell yourself their stories. Another thing to do is write down the first five or six words that come to mind when you look at a finished drawing.

This doodle, Bird’s Eye View, is one of my favorites.

Right Hand: Bird's Eye View

My doodles tend to include a lot of critters, among them a one-eyed flying fish and a rather demented frog. That’s just what I see. So now you know.

Posted in Art, Creativity and tagged , , , ,
11 Dec 2012

CDZA: collective cadenza of crazy good music

CDZA is composed of many musicians, some from Julliard School of Music and other music schools such as Manhattan School of Music, Berklee College of Music, and Brooklyn College of Music, along with several Broadway singers. For the past nine months they have been working on a project to create “musical video experiments.” These are some of my favorite results. But there are many more, so check out their website.

What a Wonderful World as you’ve not heard it before:

It’s too late to order fries:

Great singer–and I love the guy in the Elton John glasses:

A little sad; a lot funny:

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15 Nov 2012
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short story envy

Not only is November National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and Poem A Day (PAD) month, this week (12th to 18th) in November happens to be National Short Story Week (no acronym) in the UK. But since the internet is a global village, we can all partake in the celebration.

The short story — how modest in bearing! How unassuming in manner! It sits there quietly, eyes lowered, almost as if trying not to be noticed. And if it should somehow attract your attention, it says quickly, in a brave little self-deprecating voice alive to all the possibilities of disappointment: “I’m not a novel, you know. Not even a short one. If that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t want me.”

Steven Millhauser, The Ambition of the Short Story, New York Times 10/03/08

I really envy people who are able to write good short stories. I’ve tried my hand at writing them several times over the years (or, ahem, decades), but it’s just not something I’m good at. So I generally stick to reading them.*

Some of my favorite sources for short stories are:

Glimmer Train

I’ve been a big fan of Glimmer Train for years. They publish a quarterly short story magazine that is probably the one subscription I wouldn’t give up no matter what. For writers, they also publish Writers Ask, a 16-page quarterly full of info and interviews with published writers. And you can sign up for their online newsletter. I subscribe to everything!

Narrative Magazine

Narrative also has print and online publications. The website publishes fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and interviews. Most are free. Lots of good quality material. Sign up to receive notifications via email.

One Story

One Story mails a single short story to subscribers “about every three weeks.” The magazine is pocket sized so you can carry it around with you. I have taken issues of One Story to the dentist’s office, the eye clinic, and to Jiffy Lube. Occasionally there’s one that doesn’t appeal to me. But the overall quality is excellent.

Tin House

Tin House is a high-quality literary quarterly that publishes all kinds of stuff: fiction, nonfiction, poetry, book reviews, etc. They also publish books and hold writers workshops in the summer.

I also like the short stories published in The New Yorker.

And Daily Lit, which I just got started with, has 122 short stories among its offerings. I subscribed to receive the story Hell-Heaven by Jhumpa Lahiri in 10 installments via email.

What are your favorite sources for short stories?

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*However, just so you’re warned, I plan to post one of my few completed short stories next time.

Posted in Creativity, Writing and tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,
13 Nov 2012

don’t you want to be Maria Popova?

Maria Popova

How about Curator of Interestingness, then? So cool! And I’m a little jealous. Even if Popova made up the title and gave it to herself, take a look through her website (Brain Pickings) and I think you’ll agree the title is pretty accurate. It’s a website you can get lost in, full of all kinds of interesting (of course) and creativity related information, material, and links.

My favorite part of Brain Pickings so far is literary jukebox, which features a “quote from a favorite book, thematically matched with a song.” Some of the quotes are long; others are quite short. I like the pairing of this short quote about change from Henry Miller with the song “Change is Hard,” by She and Him.

You can sign up to receive Brain Pickings’ free weekly newsletter. One recent issue features an article about why writers write, composed of excerpts from an essay by Joy Williams. Nicely timed with National Novel Writing Month. The current issue includes a piece titled What Will Survive of Us Is Love: Helen Dunmore’s 9 Rules of Writing. Rule No. 1: Finish the day’s writing when you still want to continue.

Popova was named one of the top 100 creative people in business in 2012 by Fast Company. She also writes for Wired UK, The Atlantic, and several other publications and edits Explore, “a discovery engine for meaningful knowledge, fueled by cross-disciplinary curiosity.”

The Brain Pickings and Explore websites each have an entirely different look and feel, but both are appealing and very nicely designed.

Sadly, although I would love to be Maria Popova and to have invented a career as Curator of Interestingness, I would not love to take on her daily work schedule, which is a real bear. So I’ll continue stumbling around in the world of interestingness, keep tuning in to the literary jukebox, and admire Ms. Popova from afar. Or from Twitter or Facebook. Maybe both.

Who would you like to be?

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06 Nov 2012
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a collaborative adventure

This is a guest post by my friend Sylvia Davis, a very creative quilt artist. She graciously agreed to undertake making something to hang on a wall in my living room. I love the resulting piece.

A group of friends was at my house for dinner, and as often happens, we all gravitated to my workroom to discuss my current quilting projects. Silent amongst them stood Joycelyn, who was looking thoughtfully at each of the wall hangings in the room. These were predominantly modern abstract stained glass-like patterns in bright colors using bias tape and sometimes beading. They had been created over many years sans any formal training other than an occasional quilting class and around working full time and raising teenagers; they were just for fun. Later she asked if I could make one like these for her, as she had a space in her living room that called out for something interesting. And with that, our collaborative adventure began.

Soon I put together many of my design books for stained glass (mostly Dover) and a notebook of my own projects and went over to Joycelyn’s place. We looked around at her living room, noting the design elements and colors that already existed (heavily Southwest), looked at the space above some bookcases where the wall hanging would be hung, and determined a size of 46 x 18 inches. We went through all the idea books, putting Post-Its on all the pages that showed something she liked. Then we went back to each Post-It page one by one and discussed which details she liked, pulling graceful lines from one, circles from another, and placement from yet another as well as the idea of having one design element go outside the basic rectangle. We made a rough drawing of what we had in mind…

…and set off for the quilting shops for fabric. Two stores later, voila! We found a Southwest abstract in several color schemes. There we sat on the floor of a fortunately empty store, bolts all around us and two store cats wending their way in between us, and we made our decisions.

As I drove home after our purchase, I was utterly amazed that in one short afternoon we had both designed the wall hanging and bought the fabric! I had expected a much more laborious process. Our success lay in Joycelyn’s innate design sense, which meant that, even without the element of color, she knew immediately what she liked and didn’t like. Combined with my experience in which details would likely work and which presented too many problems or conflicted with the overall design, we had made short work of the whole designing process.

Then began several weeks of communication with each other whenever there were decisions to be made about colors and other details, sometimes in person and sometimes via photographs and e-mails. We were both startled at the number of times we had been independently thinking of the same change. We progressed through the paper true-to-size layout…

…transfer of the layout to the background light teal fabric, grid quilting of the background…

…placement and sewing of the curving lines, and assembly and attachment of the circles without a hitch.

I couldn’t find the right color of cording for some of the circles, but found crocheting thread and braided it into two sizes, and we both liked the texture the braiding added and the tie-off of the threads that created some draped detail.

When the wall hanging was nearly complete, we met in a gemstone shop to choose the final embellishments. Then, only two months later, her new wall hanging was proudly in place, a bold statement that pulls many elements of her living room together satisfyingly.

What a delightful adventure!

NOTE: I couldn’t agree more. Collaborating with Sylvia was great fun, and after just over six months, I can’t imagine not having this piece hanging on the wall of my living room.  It just seems to belong there. Thank you, Sylvia! Looking forward to our next project together.

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03 Nov 2012

all is not lost

Found on Radiolab. Wow!

 

Posted in Art, Creativity, Dance, Music, Video and tagged , , , | Leave a comment
03 Nov 2012

this november life (3 poems)

November

November (Photo credit: Cape Cod Cyclist)

enough

Jeffrey Harrison

It’s a gift, this cloudless November morning
warm enough for you to walk without a jacket
along your favorite path. The rhythmic shushing
of your feet through fallen leaves should be
enough to quiet the mind, so it surprises you
when you catch yourself telling off your boss
for a decade of accumulated injustices,
all the things you’ve never said circling inside you.
It’s the rising wind that pulls you out of it,
and you look up to see a cloud of leaves
swirling in sunlight, flickering against the blue
and rising above the treetops, as if the whole day
were sighing, Let it go, let it go,
for this moment at least, let it all go.

~ ~ ~

november night

Adelaide Crapsey

Listen. . .
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp’d, break from the trees
And fall.

~ ~ ~

reasons to survive november

Tony Hoagland
(you can listen to him recite the poem here)

November like a train wreck—
as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.

The sky is a thick, cold gauze—
but there’s a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.

—Or maybe I’ll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.

I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself

with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.

But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,

and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over

and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.

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01 Nov 2012
4 Comments

word surge: can’t stop tapping those keys

English: Emma Thompson at the César awards cer...

English: Emma Thompson at the César awards ceremony. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Writer’s block has some upsides, believe it or not. When you have it, you’re compelled to finish all those nagging household chores, return all your phone calls, and maybe even tackle some exotic project that has been on your to-do list for the past five years. You will also find yourself on the receiving end of a great deal of empathy from other writers and from the entire industry of workshops, websites, books, and writing gurus devoted to making you productive once again. You can even watch movies about not writing, such as Stranger than Fiction, in which Queen Latifah’s character shows up to assist Emma Thompson’s character in overcoming her writer’s block so she can kill off Will Ferrell’s character. You don’t need to look quite so happy about finding a way to kill Will, Emma.

But what happens when you have the opposite of writer’s block? When you can’t tear yourself away from your computer or legal pads and your household falls apart around you? You know you need to ration your writing time, but you’re at least secretly pleased to have this dilemma to deal with. Of course, you can’t tell anyone about it. It’s like finally being able to fit into that pair of skinny jeans. No matter how much you’ve sweated to get to that point; no one wants to hear it. It just annoys everyone.

There isn’t really any support out there to speak of. If you search the internet, you’ll find the compulsion to write characterized as an impulse-control disorder called hypergraphia, which is on a par with other disorders like pyromania. Exactly how is being on fire, metaphorically, the equivalent of setting fires?

I found this list of “famous hypergraphics” in a Psychology Today article:

  • Danielle Steel
  • Edgar Allan Poe
  • Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Sylvia Plath
  • Joyce Carol Oates
  • Stephen King
  • Isaac Asimov

I want what they’re having (well…what most of them are having).

The drive to write is also referred to, quite dramatically, as the midnight disease, which makes it sound sort of disgusting and perverted. But why view the situation in so sinister a light? If the goal of a writer is to write, shouldn’t this surge of words be cause for celebration? As long as your pets, plants, kids, and other family members are still alive, you don’t really have a problem. Right?

This is Louise Erdrich‘s Advice to Myself:

Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.
Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.
Don’t even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.

~ ~ ~

This seems like especially good advice for everyone who’s participating in NaNoWriMo 2012–which is, by the way, a great antidote for writer’s block. Best of luck to all those who are participating this year. I hope to be back in the fold next go around.

Related articles
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27 Oct 2012
7 Comments

putting some pieces together

These are a few of the quilted wall hangings created by my friend Sylvia. She bases many of them on designs from Dover books she’s collected over the years, adding whatever embellishments come to mind in the moment–beads, sequins, ribbon, shells, etc. I really admire her color and design choices.

The two of us collaborated on the design of a piece to hang over the bookcases in my living room. After we chose the fabric, she then did an amazing job of putting everything together. But I’ll let her tell that story–with pictures–in another post.

collage in progress

I don’t quilt, but I really enjoy arranging pieces in unusual or unexpected juxtapositions, which is kind of the definition of collage. I haven’t worked on one in several years, but I never stopped collecting material. A few weeks ago, I started this one, which is still in progress:

collage detail

Collage is a great way to create visual art if you’re like me and don’t consider yourself to be especially artistic. All you need are a stack of magazines, a pair of scissors, a glue stick, a piece of cardboard or poster board, and your imagination.

Posted in Art, Creativity and tagged , , ,
25 Oct 2012
1 Comment

the rhythm of evolution

The Bead Game

A short stop-motion animation film by Ishu Patel, 1977. The fantastic music is by Jnan Prakash Ghosh.

The film was nominated for an Oscar in 1978 and won six other awards.

Posted in Art, Creativity, Movies and tagged , ,

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