Tag: art

Self Portraits

I’ve been on a self portrait kick the last year or so. It started when I was on a panel for the Spirit & Place Festival about identity and naming. I’d been asked to read a piece I’d written that examined some of these themes as so I read the first draft of an essay I recently published in Harpur Palate. The essay is entitled: Self Portrait of a Woman Losing Her Name.

Since then I’ve be writing self portraits as all kinds of things: goldenrod, my mother’s hands, a collector and and orb weaver spider. I think I always start with what I admire or find interesting or provoking about the object or thing I’m identifying and then I think about how I inhabit that space. It’s a weird kind of prompt, but I’m enjoying it.

I’ve also given myself another, short daily writing prompt in the wake of the recent election. Last week was a terrible week on a lot of fronts and when I’m feeling all the feelings, I always turn to writing, so this the prompt I shared on Instagram and have been posting one every day:

Awhile back one of my students introduced me to the idea of “glimmers” when they wrote a poem about them for my class. I loved the idea and ever since I’ve been looking for glimmers every day. This week was hard. Even before the election. I have cried. A lot. I have also been so lucky in the love I’ve received from my my family and friends and colleagues and fellow creatives. And because I am a creative and find comfort in ritual and am desperately trying to find reasons each day to find joy and peace and beauty, while also acknowledging that things are completely fucked, I am going to give myself a writing prompt.

Here’s to the glimmers. May you find yours as well.

Here’s a glimmer & shadow I’ve posted. Head over to Instagram to see others.

Charing Cross Bridge: Making Sense of Brexit

It’s been said that once you’ve lived in a place it never leaves you. It seeps into your blood and stays just beneath your skin in an accumulation of memories that never truly fade.

I suppose this is the argument for travel because with each new place we live, we expand. But this is where it is important to make the distinction between visiting and living. When I was a junior in college, I attended the University of Lancaster for a semester. I lived on campus from January to May and because I was twenty one years old at the time, those five months might as well have been five years in terms of the impact the experience on had on me.

Today, Britain is back on my mind, and yes, it’s specifically Britain because while I visited (there’s that word again) Scotland, Ireland and Wales during my stay in the UK, I didn’t live in any of those places.

While wandering around the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) today, an ocean away from Brexit, I came across the painting Charing Cross Bridge by Claude Monet.

Charing Cross Bridge
Charing Cross Bridge, oil on canvas, 1900

It’s a gorgeous, fluid painting, as is the case with much of Monet’s work. All pastels and swift strokes, it looks as if the the paint is literally moving across the canvas. It’s an impression of something concrete.

It strikes me that Monet’s painting is not unlike a country’s identity also fluid, constantly shifting. Often those shifts are chaotic and messy, but the results of that chaos can be really beautiful.

I know from taking groups of students to the IMA that Monet’s paintings don’t make sense to everyone, and I imagine that at least 46.8% of Brits are thinking the same thing about Brexit.

I’m not an economist or a politician. I’m not even British, but I do deeply admire the country and the people what I can say is this: I don’t completely understand Charing Cross Bridge either, but that doesn’t stop me from looking and it doesn’t stop me from loving.