Dreaming In Color

I’ve been immersing myself in Kaffe Fassett’s Autobiography Dreaming in Color. He’s an artist and textile designer who plays with colour the way I’d like to be able to. I’m bathing in the lusciousness of his images and language, a wonderful winter dive into garden colours.

When a friend he was working with asked for a pat on the back, Kaffe wrote, about his need for reassurance, “…I realized at once that I needed the same…. I forgot how lost we creative-flow people can get if we don’t have constant reassurance. Mind you, we can work against someone else’s doubts, and often have to, but the team of believers is a very necessary part of what makes us able to produce so much and as quickly as we do.”

I realize that I need that team of believers, too. I suspect we all do. I try to be there for my daughters, and for writer friends. I have people who are there for me ­– and some of you know who you are. I want to add a couple to my team, in supportive working relationships, and I hope that will come to pass over the next few years. I need my team.

Maureen

Spinning My Wheels

I feel like I’ve been spinning my wheels for the last few months, working between innumerable distractions and interruptions and slow days. I soldiered on, working anyway, but I’ve been frustrated and dissatisfied with my lack of progress.

Well, I completely made up for it this week. I’ve completed a whole wack of things – something major every day – and I feel incredibly satisfied. Ha!

Next week will be, in essence, my new year, as I begin work on a whole new round of projects.

Maureen

Clothesline Editing

In The Artful Edit, Susan Bell recommends a variety of ways to see a story with fresh eyes, by editing pages stuck to a wall, spread across the floor, or hung on a clothes line. Something about hanging a story on a line like laundry appealed to me, so I hung a string across my bedroom (the only room with enough space to walk around it.) Then I pinned short stories to the line with wooden clothespins.

I have a collection of picture book stories, and I pulled out my favorites to take a look at. I worked on them one by one, editing them as they hung on the line, reading them and stepping back and pacing, seeing how the story flowed across the pages. There’s something organic and tactile about this, that makes me long for a large studio where I could always have a story line, instead of needing to tuck it away every night so we don’t get tangled in it in the dark. Caught in a story line. That would be a story.

Maureen