The Art-Writing Connection: Part 1

I spent this summer immersed in teaching children the process of creating art. I taught them how to observe the things around them and work with different materials and imagination through a series of steps to produce their own unique visual art. The projects has now specific "end" product as the activities were open ended allowing the children to create pieces which were truly theirs, but the process was what took them from beginning to end.

I began drawing around the same time I began writing, around the age of 7, and soon began experimenting with creating things in 3D as well as dabbling in paint. But drawing was always at the centre. In the past few years as I've begun getting back into creative visual pieces (very slowly)I have noticed that the different use of my creativity spills over into my writing and kind of spurs it forward a little. However, it wasn't until I took a workshop with Maria Lousia through the LLAMA Project that I began from her description of process to wonder if artists, like writer's get epiphanies about their work and what that looked like. Click here for the post I wrote about my experience.

This summer, even though I myself created little work as I taught and worked with the children attending my program, Adventures in Art. I began to get a glimpse of this epiphany because I gave leash to myself to explore without bounds what I could do and I'd have to say the most exciting epiphany I got was from a shirt I created for someone else that took on a second and third layer of meaning which related to culture and stories.

This shirt was to be a gift for a baby one of my partner's co-workers had given birth to. He told me he wanted it to be dyed black and orange and to have some kind of print on it - the suggestion was hockey sticks. My response to that was that I would dye the shirt and if I was printing it I wanted a design I was going to use again. So I got out all my dyes, tied it and died it - imagining in my head how the colours may turn out. Then I got out the block cutters and the vinyl printing blocks and draw a design of a young Raven, or it was supposed to be. Then it hit me. Black, orange, Raven, Sun. The shirt, if it turned out would be "How Raven Stole the Sun," which is a very well known aboriginal story told in the Yukon. I was on air. The shirt, like all first attempts needs some work, but the process was a journey I'll never forget.

About the pictures: Top - I began this one almost 3 years ago and am slowly working on it. It hasn't really spoken to me about what it's about yet - I have a few ideas that's all. My mother asked if it was a self portrait and it might be.... Bottom - the experimental shirt. I'm still trying to find a way to make the printing ink adhere better so it's darker and there are many other flaws I'm not happy with, but that's what happens... it's all part of the process :) 

The Hidden Life of the Story

The more I look back at my writing the more I am constantly surprised. 

If you ever have the opportunity to write a novel in a month I would suggest you at least give it a shot. It is amazing what can happen when one spends every waking hour possible eating, sleeping and breathing in the story. In November 2008 I wrote a novel in one month. It is to date such a raw draft I need to write another couple drafts before it will be what one might consider a normally thought out first draft, never mind a finished polished piece ready for submitting anywhere. However, because I wrote it so furiously and in such an uncensored way in order to get it out, it's raw emotion and chunkily drafted scenes have a flow and unity of plot and character it may not have had otherwise. I also got to experience the rush which happens at about 36000- 40000 words when all of a sudden the book pulls together and the ideas solidify, snowballing breathlessly to the climax and denouement. That truly was awe inspiring.

In that month my creative energy didn't just flow.... it boiled and, aside from the novel, I wrote a poem I'd been trying to write for months. Now anyone who knows me knows poetry is not my forté, but I managed to capture a feeling which had been alluding me in my prose and sprang to life on the paper as I listened to "KIng of Pain," by The Police, over and over again - freezing my thoughts and point of view in that one moment in time. I titled it "Strangers In a Coffee Shop."

Here we sit, the table between us,

Uncomfortable silence, an invisible wall, 

Separating us as we look at each other,

There’s nothing more to say,

Or is there….

How, can there be nothing?

When the time that fills the space,

The very air it takes up is fraught,

Our every breath, our every thought,

Ripped with inner tension….

How can one fein to ignore it?

What are these unspoken feelings?

So many words, there’s not

the voice, for which to say

all the things, untold….

Should we have been by birth-right

sisters? Siblings, mistakenly born

into separate families, our lives

like lines written across the page

forever drifting….

Our souls cut from one fabric,

Binding us, inexplicably drawing

us together in some mysterious 

and unexplainable way, or is it simply,

Fear…

Fear of the unknown,

Fear of what we both don’t understand,

Thinking we’re unnatural, weird, or somehow

different? Each rejecting ourselves,

Afraid to try….

It’s simply easier to ignore the words 

as they hang, left unsaid, within the air

that surrounds our beings and to run, 

To hide, and make-believe, there’s nothing there

to say….

And to wonder if, perhaps someday,

When the past has somehow been erased, 

These words will cease to come, and should we meet

by chance, we’ll go our separate ways

with grace.

As I read it over today I realize how much it lacks in describing what I'd intended, how much I didn't know,  and how I disagree with the conclusion and would wish for something else - something better, more human. And yet, it is but a reflection of one moment in time... a moment from which my perspective has shifted, changed and matured. And I'm undecided on whether I'm going to revise it or not.

It's interesting the things which jump out at me when I look over some of the things I wrote. Sometimes when I think I know what a story is about I will discover, months later, it was about something totally different. I was working on my story Memory Files last week. At one point Simon asks Mindy, "Do you love Frank?" (Frank is Simon's brother). Mindy, Frank's wife, says, "Yes, but I love you too. I love both of you." In that moment I suddenly realized where the story had come from, what it was about and why I wrote it. It was like getting kicked in the head... awe inspiring and painful at the same time. 

It is these things, these pieces of genuine emotion, experience and momentary reality  which provide the life giving pulse to any story fiction or non-fiction and allow the reader to connect with the character, to laugh, to cry, and to be one on the journey together. And it was my experiences in Banff which solidified for me the ability to take several unrelated moments in my life and blend them into a story with fictional characters and events in such a way that fiction and reality become one and the story takes on a life of it's own.