Writing Outside the Lines
no_boundaries on Flickr – Photo Sharing! A few years ago, the lead editor of a small magazine asked me to do some graphic layouts that would break the magazine out of it’s design rut. She pulled a couple of envelopes from the slush pile — this was a few wheelbarrow-sized loads of manila envelopes, heaped in the middle of the office floor — and said, “Show us what you’ve got.” What I had was no experience in magazine layout. A week later, when the editor called me into a meeting about my submission, her first comment was, “This not what I expected. You didn’t just color outside the lines, you…
Creative Jailbreak
“Before embarking on his life as an artist, Vincent Van Gogh wrote of his yearning to be creative, which caused him to feel like “the man…whose heart is…imprisoned in something. Because he hasn’t got what he needs to be creative…Such a man often doesn’t know himself what he might do, but he feels instinctively: yet I am good for something, yet I am aware of some reason for existing!…something is alive in me: what can it be!” Quoted in Brewster Ghiselin, ed. The Creative Process, 1952. Van Gogh’s words resonate with me. So often I sit at the keyboard with only an awareness of something there, something imprisoned that needs to…
Blocks and Blues
You can see a punch coming from a long way off. You think you’re tough enough to take it. You brace yourself. It knocks you flat. I knew my Dad was dying before he went into hospice care. I was fighting to get the family to stop torturing him with medical procedures and let him die with some dignity. A couple of weeks ago I got my wish and they stopped all support. Those last few days of him clinging to life were hell. I wanted his suffering over and now it is. So now that he’s at peace, I should think I would have some peace. I don’t. I…