Dear Reader,
While I’ve lurked here, all underground-like, I’ve been working at last, slap-dash and pell mell through that very multiplicity of media/genre I blahty-blahed about so acedemiciously, so booooringly theoretically for so long.
[–YAWN–]
I had to, by gum, jump up sooner or later and DO my very utmost to make good one way or another.
And ta-da! Â here I am, have been, doing writing, of sorts. That is, words is tough at times, poetry done wore ’em out a bit, so I’m shaping stories otherwise and elsehow, shifting about contraptions of construction– all of which to me means writing. Or perhaps composing would be a better term.
Ensnared, I navigate a branching network of passageways hatching like roots between bunches of genre: novel, both graphicky and memoirish, comic strip so-called, picture book, cards for greeting.
I’m practicing not taking it all so damn seriously and succeeding, sometimes, in playing as directed: with drawing + coloring + cutting + stitching together stray bits that enchant or perplex. Unintended and serendipitous connections emerge.
I’m making little books. I’m making sewn dolls and quirky embroidered insignias. I’m building inventory and getting set to cut loose on Etsy.
The sooner the better in fact. I need to work and get paid for it. As I haven’t collected a steady paycheck in some time, I’m struggling somewhat with my own sense of self-worth. I’m also weighing some overarching questions about worth and value as I go my skint way thrifting and crafting and–well, it’s a tricky time of year.
At a holiday party I found myself recently arguing a case for guerilla knitters as engaged in executing some kind of craft revolution. In retrospect it sounds a little silly and pretentious to my own ears, but I meant it sincerely at the time. And I guess I mean it still, kind of. I’m sensitive to a DIY groundswell sweeping over many of us.
I’m re-valuing Things as I make things with my hands and eyes and ranging, sometimes rumpusing imagination. I’m experiencing regeneration through craft.
The next logical and necessary step is to make it all pay cash money. Queue Etsy. And I’m fishing for freelance writing and web work, honing skills through projects for the community, wrassling the gnarly beast that will one day emerge a fine, polished portfolio.
Here’s the thing about being a spud: coming out from underground is a strenuous upheaval of a process, preparing for public purview with work of several uncustomary sorts: snipping and buffing off of unseemly bits, tweezing and squeezing what wants to be unshapely and dumpy into snappy and vivid, or at very least -er. It’s tough work for a tater.
Love,
Navelgazer
Last winter my back, usually pretty problem-free, piped up in a fit of pique. The immediate cause was clear:Â a week-long yanking-about by my parents’Â overgrown Lab puppy– one irresistibly adorable beast in that compensatory fashion employed by most difficult critters (babies, spouses) to ensure an otherwise questionable survival.
Several years and countless hours spent straining my gaze toward a computer screen compounded by a bad habit of slinging heavy bags over one shoulder have resulted in an S-curve torque in my neck vertebrae that impacts the median nerve and sends pain and numbness down one arm and, most annoyingly, into my writing hand. For a decade now I’ve contended with this aggravating condition, unable anymore to keep the longhand journals I maintained religiously and waking frequently in the night to pins and needles in an appendage like an inflated blowfish.
Like my several houseplants who greenly rebreathe our apartment’s interior atmosphere, sympathetically respiring our collective exhalations back into fresh oxygen, I inhale purposefully as I incline toward the sun and drink in clear water.
Bending deeply, leaning gently and ever more inexorably into clutched-tight pockets, I can feel the letting go. Inhaling, I relish this sensation of release and push deeper into the curve. Concentrating, I make of myself a shape both vibrant and articulate.
The other evening I hopped the train downtown to meet Chris so we could attend an event at Columbia College. Since the waning day proved cooler than any we’d enjoyed for awhile in this summer’s arid swelter, we agreed to walk what seemed a manageable distance from City Hall to the event.
The silence of a mutually aggrieved trainride home gave me sufficient time, off my feet, to reconsider the wisdom of my snappishness.
What a leaping, piping unpredictable panoply of visual display! What endless files of intrigue peopled by arrays of players in reams of guises, all improvisationally devised by our own “sleeping” selves. O, marvelous complex & confounding geographies & architectures fashioned wholesale on the fly!
