The temperature dropped just as the sun was coming up this morning and for about an hour all the windows seemed to have paisley patterns etched upon them.
This semester I am in a writing seminar. The challenge is to take on a large-scale writing project, have it workshopped by the group and end up with a final (awesome) finished piece at the end of three months. It’s completely terrifying. I mean it’s one thing to have an artwork critiqued–I’m used to that. I’ve had eight years of practice at that. But writing? That’s an entirely different beast.
In the last eight years, the only real writing I’ve done is academic stuff and artist statements. 5000 word papers on art movements or Bauhaus weavers. While I’ve always kept a blog of some sort, I’ve totally slacked off in the creative writing department. This morning I was fishing through some boxing of ancient papers and came across a few zines I made about ten years ago. I still have the original flats from all the zines I’ve made and one of these days I will scan them for posterity. Anyway, aside from the exhaustive use of simile I was pretty impressed with myself. I was a half-decent writer when I was twenty–who knew? The most striking thing about rereading this stuff was my infatuation with Newfoundland. It’s amazing how my feelings have not changed in all those years. If anything they’ve stewed in maturity. I’m not caught up in stories about bar hopping or making out in Fort Amherst (every second passage was about smoking or a boy. Oh, to be young again!). I’m caught up in history and myth. Less about George Street and more about shipwrecks.
I want to document visually and verbally everything I love about my home so in the end I will have enough information to create my own history book. A collection of stories, photographs and drawings that illustrate my history the way I see it. So when people ask me where I am from I can show them. So when people ask who I am I will know exactly what to say.
From ‘i’m in love again #2‘ self-published in 2003.
I haven’t decided what kind of writing project I’m going to pursue during this seminar. I’ve thought about extended artist statements but that’s a little boring. I really love the idea of making a new zine, a grown-up kind of thing that will be more polished than simple photocopies with lopsided edges. I’d approach it as the beginning of an artwork. Writing then sketching then making. It would definitely be a challenging way to make art but the payoff would be having a deeper understanding of what I am doing. If everything goes well I’ll finally have the words I’m missing.
For instance, I’ve been thinking a lot about icebergs but I have no idea how to explore them in a visual way. Writing would help ease into drawing and eventually a finished sculptural/wall-based work. And when I am asked about the work I can speak about it with passion. Something even I wouldn’t question.
I’ll let you know how well it goes.
2 Responses to “I’m in love again.”
You’ve always been a wonderful writer! This is exciting! Also, I find I’m incorporating a lot of myth into my writing too, lately, though I’m nervous about it because I worry I’m doing it wrong or something, ha.
ahhhhhhh… that frost picture BLOWS MY MIND! And how great that you are taking a writing course, and will be able to focus on something that you’ve not been immersed in for awhile. Its great to find things from one’s personal archive of the past. When I was younger I was obsessed with the idea that someone would find all my written ephemera one day and try to piece together who I was from it. I even included parenthetical asides to my future biographer/researcher. Its very funny (and oddly informative) to find them now. Good luck with the writing.