Loose Leaf Notes

Having just come off a dizzying roller coaster ride of the written word, I went to an open house art day at Rosemary's house to play in the world of non-verbal fairytale, to tell a deeper story with image and color. There was sunlight shining in on the dining room table, strawberry rhubarb pie and blueberry muffins, scissors and glue stick, and wise woman talk.

It turns out that making a soul collage card is a lot like writing poetry. It's an intuitive process that when you get it right feels like hitting the nail on the head, like finding an antidote for the over-rush of days, a ticket for the psyche to travel. Some make a whole deck of soul collage cards with suits for readings. I was happy today just to make one.

I don't remember looking for the pieces or the parts that make up my first soul collage. It started with a sage green sheet of letters brought by another budding soul collage artist. The rest just seemed to appear before me. It manifested like a doodle I was hardly aware I was working on.

I love gazing at it. I love the 5X8 card size. I love not interpreting it into words, but knowing on some level exactly what it means and knowing that the meaning can change with the tiniest shift of perception. Have her roller skates been underused or overused? Is that Van Gogh's sunflower, the same one that hung for years on my fridge with the words of Rumi printed on it: Let yourself be silently drawn to the stronger pull of what you really love?

Posted by Colleen at 8:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

AKA – I know the post that should be here, but I haven’t written it yet, so in the meantime, here are some collages to look at.

Death by Computer

Dancing on Wall Street’s Grave

Stop in the Name of Love

Trees Don’t Grow on Money Either

When I was a girl I had a dream that when I grew up I would travel around in a big black car and pass sandwiches out to all the people who were hungry. The picture in the left hand corner is of me with my brothers Jim and Dan in 2001. Jim died two weeks after it was taken. We sang Let it Be to Dan in the hospital a month later before he died.

Post note: The above photos were taken from my collage journal that I was keeping around the time of the run up to the Iraq Invasion and just after the Enron scandal.

Posted by Colleen at 6:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

I suspect that some of my friends are planning an intervention. I've recently had to cancel a few dates with them because I've been so busy covering stories, taking pictures and writing, and generally getting so wound up that I have to rest in between each activity and every chance I get.

Excitement can be a form of stress, which makes me wonder if the stories I've recently worked on had been boring would I be in better shape now? In the past week I've covered Tour de Floyd, the Young Actors Coop's new play, and best selling environmental author Bill Mckibben's visit to Floyd (story in the Floyd Press this Thursday), back-to-back. All are events that are personally exciting to me, ones that I want to cover, ones that make me forget while I'm covering them that my ability to function is compromised by a longstanding case Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

It's not that I've been working too much; it's that I've been working too much for me. I've taken to sleeping with wrist braces to stave off early signs of carpal tunnel, to eating peanut butter out of the jar on the run, and to noticing how one day of not doing kitchen chores gives the appearance that I live in squalor. I've been using my laptop more, reclining in my bed while typing and thinking about how the author of Sea Biscuit, who also has Chronic Fatigue, wrote her best selling book that way.

A few years ago when I was still on dial-up, two of my girlfriends had been trying to reach me on the phone for a couple of hours when I was online, so they walked over my house to personally pull the plug. I eventually convinced them to stop asking me how many hours I've spent on the computer and to ask instead, 'how many hours of work did you get done today?'

But it's not that I need to get off the computer because writing by hand hurts my wrist too (and so does weeding in the garden, chopping vegetables and everything else). Writing can be fun and relaxing or hard work. Either way involves occupational hazard. Even so, as I type this, feeling burned out and ragged, I can't help imaging that my girlfriends are on their way over to help me set some limits.

Posted by Colleen at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

I write poetry by ear like a musician who doesn't read notes can still play music. ~ Colleen

Some people make quilts, stitch blocks of designed fabric together. Others mix colors and paint. The theme of my creative life has been finding my voice and using it through speech and the written word. Considering that, it was no surprise that my recent series of collages have been about finding voice, with captions over my head or scrabble letters, cookie fortunes, crossword puzzles, and magnetic poetry flying from where the top of my head has been cut with scissors from my face.

I first started using my poetic voice writing poems in my bedroom as a teenager. My awakening to language had less to do with school and more to do with popular music and maybe the discovery of pot. At the close of the 60's, I experimented with psychedelics. My first (and only) trip revolved around words. Whatever I thought appeared as words to be read over my head.

If a singer overuses her voice without training, her voice can be damaged. I wonder if the same could be said for poets.

I got a late start. For a variety of reasons - as a female, as a sibling of nine from a blue collar family - for too much of my life I didn't know how to use my own power to make things happen and I wasn't even aware of the truth of that.

It's too late for me to start using punctuation in poetry now, I tell my poet friend Mara. When Mara was accepted to go to Hollins University for creative writing, she suggested that I might like to go back to school as well. "What? And spoil my self-taught reputation?" I answered.

My sister Kathy is a master seamstress, something she inherited from our grandmother and I did not. Kathy taught herself rug braiding (and then hooking). After a couple of years of making rugs and because she wanted to solve a rug making problem, she took a class. She learned what she needed to know about braiding but also ended up teaching the teacher and the class some rug-braiding tips and techniques that they didn't know. She went on to later teach her own class.

Since those days in my bedroom when I would spend hours writing poems and reading them aloud to my sister Sherry, I haven't been able to NOT write. I keep plugging away at what I do by instinct and with perseverance. I may have had to take the long way around more than once, but eventually I discover what I need to know. Eventually I do arrive.

Post note: Click and scroll HERE for more "Say So" collages.

Posted by Colleen at 7:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

My intention is to immerse myself in the experience of aging in a similar way that I immersed myself in the experience of losing my brothers when they died in 2001. Aging and loss are inevitable life events that I can’t change or avoid. The best I can do is approach them with an inquiring and contemplative mind, as a life adventure, and ask ‘What can I learn?’ and ‘How can I make meaning out fear or pain?’

I’ve been reading a book that was gifted to me, Goddesses in Older Women, written by Jungian analyst Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen. Initially the book’s subtitle “Becoming a Juicy Crone” irritated me. For decades women are expected to be juicy, and we are. Are crones supposed to be juicy too? When will we be let off that hook?

Juicy is not the way that I would typically describe an older woman. Aren’t elder women striving to stay juicy just a reflection of our youth-obsessed culture, which is no better than and an offshoot of patriarchal culture, I wondered? It seems to me that striving to be a juicy crone only feeds into our cultural obsession with plastic surgery, fat collagen lips, and denial of impermanence.

Women are living longer these days and the “Maiden, Mother, Crone (post-menopausal woman)” phases of a woman’s life no longer fit. I and others see this triad more as Maiden, Mother, Matriarch (or mature), and Crone. A lot happens between motherhood and being a crone, and the mature woman today has time to prepare for what Sinoda describes as the “third trimester” of life.

In the active years after fifty, you may become more visible in the world than ever before, or you may develop your inner life and pursue creative interests, or you may be the centering influence in a family constellation. Far from being a non-entity, it is in the third trimester that it is possible to be more defined and substantial a person than ever. In the Native American tradition, a woman becomes fully grown at the age of fifty-two.

I like to let my life be informed by the natural world, and recently I began to think of the stages of life like fruit. As women, don’t we bud, bloom, ripen, and eventually dry up. Isn’t that the nature of life? I wondered and then realized, No! A fruit only dries up if it hangs uneaten on the vine. Life, like fruit, should be used, which I think is what’s meant by “giving back.” I think staying juicy means to let ourselves be consumed by what we were made to do. When we do that our efforts will eventually come to fruition. Our ripening can be enjoyed by all around us and, hopefully the sweetness of that will be long remembered. That’s a juicy idea that appeals to me as I head down the far side of fifty.

Posted by Colleen at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (15)

If I were writing a fairytale about my life it would be one about a heroine princess who goes off to be alone. In the quiet of time spent alone she would discover special fruits with special powers, winds that talk, and stars that sing. At night she would sit by the fire and wonder. Her days would be filled with happy activity, making creations of words and color.

But it would also be a story about the perils of solitude because solitude is a double edged sword. A few slips, sharp wrong turns, and sweet solitude transforms into isolation. The heroine forgets her verbal language, how to speak, how to be with other people. Her hair grows longer. She is older. There is never enough solitude. The more she gets the more she wants. Day and night come and go and she forgets there is a difference between them.

Her prince hero returns. She remembers him but has forgotten how to talk. They gaze at each other. He knows the well she lives in. She breathes deeply, comes up for air. She blinks in the sunlight, feels a nearly forgotten sensation in her body. Moved by the power of being seen by another, her eyes fill with tears. And then she finds her voice and speaks.

"If I were writing a fairytale of my life it would be one about a heroine princess who goes off to be alone ..."

Posted by Colleen at 6:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

“The words seem to be pronounced in my head, but with no one speaking them.” Amy Lowell

My mother and I have an ongoing conversation through the clipped newspaper articles we send each other. It’s the only comfortable way we can “talk” about politics because our views are so vastly different. She also sends me clippings about writers like me who have written family stories. Last week she sent one from the Patriot Ledger on Isabelle Allende’s latest book, The Sum of Our Days.

Did you know that Allende starts all her books on January 8, the date she wrote her first book, House of Spirits? For me, that small fact was the most intriguing part of the full page newspaper interview. Do writers have certain rituals like sports players before a big game? Do they wear lucky socks at the typewriter or say a favorite prayer or mantra before starting a novel? My curiosity sent me to the computer to hunt down some answers.

Isabelle Allende is a fine writer, but it was Diane Ackerman’s name I wrote down on piece of paper for my next trip to the library or bookstore. Described by the New York Times as an “intellectual sensualist,” she has written a poetic exploration of the mind, a natural history of the garden, poetry, children’s literature, and more. My google search for “habits of writers” hit the jackpot when I came across her essay for the New York Times, “O Muse! You Do Make Things Difficult!” It was adapted from her book A Natural History of the Senses and the entire eight page print out dealt with quirky habits of writers and the things they do to coax the muse.

Certain music, certain food; it’s all true. Some writers like to write in the nude, while walking or while smoking a cigar. One writer cited liked to climb out on the limb of a tree. Others, like me, don’t need much of a push; on most days I just fall out of bed and start writing. For political commentaries, I use my mother as an imaginary silent audience, knowing that an opposing view is an opportunity to better clarify my own.

According to Ackerman, the nineteenth century French writer Stendhal read two or three pages of the French civil code every morning before working on his book, The Charter House of Parma – in order to set the right tone. Willa Cather liked to read the Bible to stimulate writing. Ben Franklin wrote in the bath. Alexandre Dumas wrote his non-fiction on rose-colored paper, his fiction on blue, and his poetry on yellow.

My favorite example of a writing habit, described by Ackerman, was one of 16th century German poet Friedrich Schiller. He kept rotten apples in his desk and inhaled their pungent aroma when searching for just the right word. As someone who is in the habit of cocking my head slightly back and squinting my eyes when looking for the right word while writing, Schiller’s habit doesn’t seem at all odd to me, especially considering that researchers have discovered that the smell of spiced apples “has a powerful effect on people and can even stave of a panic attack,” Ackerman reports.

Writers tend to be an eccentric lot. Anyone who spends hours at a time fiddling with a line or sentence with no promise or fame or gain could also be someone who lies in a coffin before beginning a day’s writing, as Edith Sitwell was reported to do.

Ackerman ended her article with a lovely description of her own muse. “My muse is male, has the radiant silver complexion of the moon and never speaks to me directly,” she wrote.

Up until reading Ackerman’s description of her muse I hadn’t thought much about what my muse might look like, but I’m sure I’ll be paying more attention now. This is what I know so far: My muse likes the moon, to be steeped in its indirect light. She speaks to me directly in an authoritative voice.

But sometimes my muse can be as fickle as a well fed cat. When too quiet for too long, I write a formal complaint, usually in the form of a poem, such as this one, titled "Lost: the Muse."

Loyal but shy
Last seen on Friday
Her middle name is moon
but she answers to music

She sounds like the ocean
with a shell to your ear
and can sometimes be viewed
at the Rocky Knob look-out

She’s never been married
She talks in her sleep
Call 745-2554
if you know where she is

Then I cock my head, squint my eyes, and wait for the call.

How about you?

Posted by Colleen at 8:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

My introduction into the world of archetypes came when I was a girl by way of fairytales and nursery rhymes. To this day Rumplestilskin and the Snow Queen repeatedly show up in my poetry. When I first saw the kiln at the university where my potter son was a student, memories were stirred of Hansel and Gretel pushing the witch that had imprisoned them into the oven. When I'm in the garden, I watch rabbits and wonder which one is Peter. Because of the story of Cinderella, a pumpkin will always be magical to me.

In all native cultures there are stories and creation myths to illustrate truths that can't easily be grasped directly. Jesus used parables to teach. Professor of Mythology, Joseph Campbell said, "A myth is a lie that tells the truth."

Growing up in a working class family, the literature available to me was How Now Brown Cow and the stories of Hans Christian Anderson. All summer long I tested the meter of language with jump rope and bouncing ball songs. My mostly Irish father spouted nursery rhymes, both traditional and made up. Ours was an oral tradition of reading, reciting, and singing out loud.

As a girl I always held out hope that I would hear the nightingale's song in the woods. I guarded myself against adults who could have been the Snow Queen in disguise. Whenever I went out walking, I had the urge to drop bread crumbs to mark the way. Rhymes like Hey Diddle Diddle the cat and the Fiddle fostered an early love of sound and world play.

Fairytales and nursery rhymes also gave me access into an inner life. They provided a context of meaning for the unexplained mysteries. Themes played out in fairytales - fate, survival, temptation, loss, courage, fear, and perseverance - are all the ingredients that make for good storytelling. Stories mirror life and give insight into the underpinnings of it.

Posted by Colleen at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

A collage works in the same way a dream does. It’s a visual snapshot of various symbolic images that can bypass the brain’s process time and convey a lot of information at once. ~ Colleen

1. The above and the following are a few selected photos of my Asheville Potter son’s collage journal. Josh has had to work with others to design specially made books to accommodate his collaged journal pages. The books expand as he adds to them.

2. I’ve been drawn to collage art for as long as I can remember. I had been doing rudimentary collages for many years, while putting together photo albums and baby books for my sons, but I wasn’t really inspired and didn’t recognize the potential of collage as a creative way to record one’s life until I saw Josh’s journals.

3. My first attempt at collage journaling myself was done as I approached the age of 50. It was a chronicle of my life thus far in colorful bits and pieces. Some photos of that are HERE.

4. Neither Josh nor I tend to buy special items for collage. We prefer to use found items and recycled scraps of our lives. The story of how Josh first became a collage journal artist is HERE.

5. One can work through personal issues by creating art, collage included. Some of Josh’s pages are too personal to post here. Some are almost too personal for me to look at, but I love reviewing his latest work and so far he still lets me. But doesn’t all art come with the risk of having the personal exposed? Doesn’t all art reflect what is deeply inside the artist who made it? (The above is an early collage, one I have always loved.)

6. Josh is a hard worker and an inspired artist. I think he has over a dozen collage journals. He usually weaves the creative work of making them into all parts of his life. But lately building the Community Temple wood-fired kiln, making pots, and having two firings back-to-back has been his full time art. You can see that art HERE. This collage conversation started HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 5:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

I can’t find my working notebook or an available empty one, so I started this on the back of a used envelope. Now at the keyboard, I’m wearing a bright orange Halloween cat cap with black ears that stick up because having it on helps me to keep my sense of humor. My office has unraveled, as if I pulled an imaginary string and all the stacks of paper fell from the counters and spilled out of the filing cabinet onto the floor. Not only am I navigating through piles of junk in my office, my living room is a mine field of strewn newspaper clippings, photos, glue sticks, scissors, colored paper, and more.

My friend and fellow Writer’s Circle member, Rosemary, spent many hours working on a collage for the Hotel Floyd. The hotel owners invited local groups to decorate themed rooms, and a small group of us have been working on the Floyd Writer’s Room since the start of the summer. The idea for the collage was to create a piece of art using the photographs and stories I’ve been collecting that would show our group’s presence in the community.
Along with stories and images from our Spoken Word Open Mic nights and our past performances at FloydFest, Rosemary and I collected magnetic poetry words, Scrabble board spellings, scraps, flyers, and special paper to include in the mix.

Even with a full time job and her daughter’s wedding in August, Rosemary found enough time to come up with a whimsical creation the size of a poster. She was happy with the final composition, but in the end the materials failed her. A decoupage liquid caused the whole thing to wrinkle and buckle. After many hours and expense invested, she was disheartened enough to want to abandon the project. The word “landfill” was uttered.

With the hotel under construction, Rosemary’s collage ended up in my living room with the rest of the purchased art for the Writer’s Room. Throughout the month of September, I and others in our writing circle brainstormed ideas on how to salvage it. Everything from a creating a graffiti-like poster, a portable poet’s standing sign, or scanning and photo-shopping it section by section were considered, but each idea seemed to involve sinking even more time and money into a project already in the red. And no one seemed to have any time.

In late September, Fellow blogger David St. Lawrence and I both took photos of the collage, zeroing in on different sections. I picked out some favorites and got them professionally color copied. The copying cost much more than I had expected, which meant that professional framing wasn’t an option if I was going to at least recoup Rosemary’s and my material and copying expenses. I wanted to do that as well as find a way to honor the work.

I awoke one recent morning with the idea of a Floyd writer’s scrapbook on my mind, a book that could incorporate prints of sections of Rosemary’s collage and also have room for full newspapers clippings about our events and a sampling of writer’s poetry and prose. Although I’m more comfortable collaging in a book than for something to frame and hang on the wall, I didn’t want to take on all the work. A writer’s scrapbooking party was scheduled, so that each writer in the group of nine would have the opportunity to create a page or two of their own, but on the night of the scheduled get-together no one was free to attend.

So I took the plunge and now it’s almost done. Searching down poems in old Museletters and FloydFest programs, finding just the right photo to cut into just the right shape, copying and pasting newspaper articles together has taken its toll on me and my house. But I’m happy that Rosemary’s collage, the inspiration behind the scrapbook, is getting the mileage it deserves and that our efforts as a group to bring spoken word to our community will have a visual history one can follow. Rosemary’s collage has provided some ready-made 8x10 scrapbook pages, but most of those have been clipped or added to. It’s been fun to mix the original photographs that Rosemary altered back into her work in an Alice Wonderland fashion.

Update: Not only that, but I’ve been using the prints of parts the original collage (photos # 2 and 3) to make flyers for our spoken word events (see last photo of Mara). There are two long narrow framed pictures with three 3x7 openings which hold six prints of views of the collage hanging in the writer’s room. Soon there will a writer’s scrapbook to add to the bookcase in what we have been calling the "writer’s study." I’ll bring it to the pre-opening open house this Sunday for all who worked on decorating the themed rooms. More about the green designed, themed room Hotel Floyd HERE. Their website is HERE.

Posted by Colleen at 9:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

In the spring of 2000 when my Asheville potter son, Josh was 20 years old, he came across an old journal he had kept when he was 16.

“Everything in it was silly. I hated it,” he said, in answer to the question I posed ‘when did you start journal collaging and why?’

“I wondered who was writing all this ridiculous stuff,” he continued, “but I also knew it was an important part of my history that I couldn’t just throw away.”

That first journal became Josh’s prototype to so many others. He explained how he covered up its contents with collage, in an attempt to disguise what was embarrassing, leaving only little snippets of the original text as hints into that time.

“At that point, I had a sketchpad, was keeping a photo album, and a journal. I combined them all into only one book to carry around,” he explained.

“What a relief to put everything in one place!” I responded.

Josh went on to describe other details that fostered his interest in collage journal art. One particularly striking experience was when he discovered Dan Eldon’s published collage journal (Dan was a young photo-journalist who was killed tragically in Africa). Josh was at a friend’s college graduation party when he spotted the book and immediately became was transfixed.

“I sat down with it. People wandered over to see what I was doing, looked at it some, and then went back to the party. I never got up. I looked at it for hours,” Josh said.

“But you know, mom,” he added, “the books that you made helped …”

“What books? The homemade ones we used to make?” I interrupted. I had forgotten for a moment that I kept scrapbooks and baby books that both my boys grew up looking at.

“I was fascinated looking at the baby books you made for me and Dylan. A lot of those pages were done in collage. You were definitely outside the box. And you told us more than once about the importance of keeping a journal.” Josh reminded me.

As he spoke, I began to remember. Indeed, when Josh was 11, he and a friend traveled around the country with alternative education pioneer Jerry Mintz, and the only academic practice I demanded of him was that he keep a journal of his experiences.

“Even a shopping list is interesting to me once it’s a year or two old." Who said that? You did, mom! And now I’m always picking stuff up to use in my journals, scraps of garbage that other people don’t even notice,” Josh said.

Like mother like son? It’s true, except for the fact that when it comes to making art, Josh surpasses me by miles.

Post Notes: Collaging runs in our family here. View pages from my collage journal here. That's Josh's brother Dylan in the forefront with him looking at Josh's art scrapbook sometime in the mid 80s. Some pages from Josh's collage journals were recently featured in an art show in Winston Salem, NC.

Mid Day Update: There is an effort by local Southwestern Virginia bloggers, headed up by Marty Martin in Roanoke, to collect used ink jet cartridges and old cell phones in order to raise money for an infant who is in need a life-saving transplant. Visit Marty’s site "HERE" to learn more about it, or call him (397-0014) or John Herndon in the New River Valley (800-277-3077) to find out where you can drop these items off. I kid you not; I just finished changing an ink cartridge when I got Marty's email.

Posted by Colleen at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)

AKA: I call it The Magical History Tour.
I haven’t made a collage since I started blogging. And what is a blog, but a blank page to fill up with images and words that tell a story?

Some pages from my eldest son Josh’s collage journals were exhibited in an art show this past March in Winston Salem., N.C. My youngest son, Dylan, on the other hand, is not an open book. His art is made with electrical wire, plumbing pipe, and lumber.

A collage works in the same way a dream does. It’s a visual snapshot of various symbolic images that can bypass the brain’s slow process time and convey a lot of information at once. It’s like a window into a large house of many stories.

I write because I hate to lose anything and writing something down is a way of keeping it. Cutting and pasting things onto paper does the same.

Post Note: The above are photos of the collage journal I made to sum up my life when I turned 50. I'm planning to post some of Josh's pages soon. Caught in the act: here.

Posted by Colleen at 8:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Warning: One house isn’t big enough for 3 collage artists.

All forms of record keeping interest me. Since receiving my first “Dear Diary” when I was 10 years old, I’ve gone on to keep photo albums, dream journals, baby books, and scrapbooks.

I’ve always enjoyed making collages, but when my Asheville potter son, Josh, began doing collage journals about 6 years ago, he inspired me to a new level.

Josh has been a mad artist since the time he could hold a crayon. His collage journals have gotten so extensive that he has had to hire someone to design books that expand with use, in order to hold all the pages of his prolific and multi-media art, which on any given day might include a fortune cookie fortune, paint, photographs of photographs, receipts, or pieces of mail.

I made my first collage journal when I turned 50 as a way to consolidate a visual review of my first 50 years. Not long after that my husband made one of his own as part of an assignment for his masters in counseling program.
Now were all hooked, but Josh more than the rest of us. In his studio warehouse apartment, he has 4 desks to accommodate his art. When visiting us in Virginia, he's been known to pick us his journal and start collaging whenever the muse strikes him. When he leaves, there are always traces of his art making left behind. Besides various scraps and interesting scraps of paper, fabric or cardboard on our floors, there are drops of frozen clear epoxy on our cellar floor, and a yellow outline on our back doorstep of something Josh spray painted last year.

Photos: Me, Joe, and Josh. Notice that I am the messiest of the group. I hope to post a few pages of each of our journals in a future entry.

Posted by Colleen at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)