Month: August 2013

Hovering over a lake of words

/ jelizabeth / 4 Comments

We gave ourselves an assignment: write every day for a week, minimum two minutes each time with an ideal goal of 30 or more. This was in response to our constant wailing, in our weekly chats, about how work and life get in the way of writing.

James will have to report on his own results, but mine showed that, even though I write for work many hours every day, I don’t write for the creative projects I claim to be longing to do. Words are all around me — they are the stuff of how I make my living — but I am not immersed right now in any creative project even though I often feel as though I am on the verge of one. Ironically, instead of using this self-imposed writing week to dive into a creative project, I felt compelled to interrogate myself daily with the question that could be boiled down to this: With all the writing I do, why am I not ‘writing’?

tree branch, Jamaica Pond, August 27 2013, photo by Lydia and editing by Grace

tree branch, Jamaica Pond, August 27 2013, photo by Lydia and editing by Grace

Below the jump I have published an excerpt from each of those seven days. Even though these reflections and rants are not necessarily essay-worthy, I did enjoy seeing how my unpolished, unstudied writing could yield some straightforward insights in unfussy language. Too often I feel my prose is the product of too much crafting. My free writing is free of my cool pose, and I like that in places.

Next assignment? If we are to continue with the daily writing, James and I will put aside the fretting about not writing and, instead, do the writing. My topic this week is anger. My hope is to jump start an essay I started and put aside a couple of years ago.

Continue reading →

Thinking and sewing

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Lydia took this photograph of me as I paused during some sewing on Thursday night. I was making a curtain for Eli’s new apartment and trying to solve some problems as I went. I’m guessing that, at this moment, I was thinking something through.

Jane_sewing&thinkingI like how the folds of my hand and the folds of the fabric seem to merge. I also like the presence of the word “Singer” in the image while at the same time my fist is scrunched up over my mouth.

 

Alone time and its treats

/ jelizabeth / 1 Comment

ice creamToday’s post, in lieu of an essay, is a set of notes I took during a two-hour lunch break last Saturday in the middle of the Children’s Literature Summer Institute (blog post here). It was sunny, after days of clouds and rain, and I wandered over to Jersey Street for Thai food, wine, dessert, and the solitude that happens on city streets and in restaurants. I sat alone at one of the three tables with umbrellas on the sidewalk out front, and the waiter did not rush me. I wrote — about the conference and what was going on around me. It looks like I made some thought or section breaks as I wrote, by inserting horizontal lines; I kept them in this transcript:

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Everyone [speaking at the conference] seems fully to make their living from art — only Yee even used words having to do with money + employment.

I surmise though that speaking at these conferences helps writers/illustrators connect with school librarians who hire them to speak at their schools. In fact, the school librarians I met mentioned specifically that they were hoping to bring some of their artists to their schools. There seems esp. to be budgets for this in K-8.

For me, this kind of environment is really inspiring — gets me wanting to do this, to value it as important.

The YA novelists talk about themes in their novels that were themes in their teen years. They keep trying to work them out. How did I stop my YA novel so easily, worrying about neurosis? This is the territory — maybe writing is not the way of mental health. Continue reading →