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"Mussel Shells" Faber-Castell Polychromos Pencils on Canson Pastel Paper

The drawing challenge from my color pencil group this month was to draw seashells. As you can see, I tackled four of them including the inside surfaces. Despite my initial resistance (too hard, too repetitive, not my thing, etc., etc.), I learned a lot from this exercise, much of which can be also be applied to my writing life, starting with practice, practice, practice. 

Thanks to my reluctance to start, I procrastinated like a pro. I answered email, cleaned my house, wrote more poetry; anything to avoid drawing. Finally the day came when I either had to get to work or go to my group empty-handed, aka "being a quitter." Not my favorite option. So with deep misgivings I started in with just one. Hmm. Not so bad. So I tried another. And another. And before I knew it I had drawn all four. Hey, I did it! Which made me realize:

1. Repetition is valuable. One of the main things holding me back was fear of boredom: how could I draw four similar shells without losing my mind? The truth, however, was very different: first, the shells were NOT similar, and second, by repeating the process several times my technique improved as I got to the last shell. Practice, practice, practice! Whether you want to improve your drawing, write exciting action scenes or learn the intricacies of arranging a pantoum, it takes more than one attempt to get it right.
2. Don't hide away in your "I can't do it" shell. Rather than setting yourself up for failure by aiming for the most incredible work in the whole of human history, start a dreaded project by drawing or writing in your most basic style: just get some shapes or words down on paper. Once that's done, tweak a little here, add a little there--before you know it your right-brain will be engaged and intrigued with all the possibilities. At this point, I dare you to stop.
3. Shells make great writing and art journal prompts. The first time I wrote about a seashell in my art journal was an entry about playing with my grandmother's collection of shells from the Gulf of Mexico when I was a little girl. I loved holding those shells to my ear and "listening to the sea." You might have a similar memory, or you might want to write about your first trip to the beach, or your own collection of seaside finds. On the fiction side, including a seashell in a short story, poem, or novel could trigger all sorts of themes, associations, and plot twists--especially if the shell is rare and valuable!
4. Artwork isn't always about drawing. How about brushing some ink or paint onto a shell and using it as a stamp in your art journal or mixed-media piece? Or pressing a shell into earthen or polymer clay? Drilling a hole into the top of a shell to add to a jewelry piece? Or simply painting and/or collaging the shell itself for a whole new look? 
5. Using shells for meditation and mindfulness. No matter how small or seemingly insignificant, there's something profound about a seashell. Whether it's the patterning, the colors, or just the fact it once housed and protected some small and distant creature, shells make a good start to pondering life's mysteries. Add them to household altars, your writing room or studio, your garden or any other kind of creative sanctuary you like to visit. Personally I like to keep them all over the house in various nooks and crannies. 

Shells have always fascinated me, but that's no reason to take them literally and hide out inside one of my own. The drawing challenge for July is to draw green leaves. I'm so fired-up by the prospect I'm going to start and base an entire art journal on the subject. No hesitation, no holding back, just going for it. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme! 

Tip of the Day: One of the things I love about drawing is how it relaxes and pulls me into what I could almost call a different dimension. Memories; new ideas for writing; the book I'm currently reading: my mind seems to just float along with the tide. While I was working on my seashell piece I was reminded of one of my favorite books that I hadn't thought of for a long time: Anne Morrow Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea. If you've never read it, or haven't read it for a long time, I can't think of a better text to check out for summer inspiration. Enjoy!

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My calendar said today is World Read Aloud Day. As you can see, it’s wrong. This took place on February 24th. Not sure how I messed this up, but really, can’t any day be a good day to read aloud? If you know a middle grader who is unable to read, even if only for today, …

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It has begun again: the age-old cycle of hate and counter-hate, self-justification and counter-justification, the grim celebrations of righteousness and revenge. In the US, conservative politicians play on it as demagogues always have, projecting strength and patriotism by refusing to take refugees from the lands terrorized by ISIS; my own governor, Chris Christie, tries to outdo his competition by arguing that even five-year-old orphans from Syria should be stopped and sent back, as if they are tainted by being from the same part of the world as the murderers.

The post Hope from Paris: rebuilding trust appeared first on OUPblog.

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 A perfect mother has never existed.
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Several years ago when I first started this blog, one of the first posts I wrote was titled, It's All About Trust. This morning I woke up realizing it still is--creative work really is all about trusting your gut, your instincts, your ability, and especially the work itself.

For the last twelve months I've been avidly editing and preparing my new novel The Abyssal Plain for submission. I'm now in the beginning of those first submissions and initial contacts. There's just been one problem: an irritating, exasperating, and very worrisome question I've had about one of the manuscript's plot points. Midway in the story, one of my female characters suddenly becomes antagonistic toward one of the male characters. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out why, but it seemed the natural way for the narrative to go, so I let it ride. 

That said, I didn't really like the way I left this thing dangling. I couldn't understand why my character became mean, then meaner, then almost unbearable in her hostility toward this other character. I tried to blame it on her moodiness, but that just seemed so unfair to her as well as the poor male character who had to bear the brunt of her anger. Oh, well, I thought. No one will notice (fingers crossed). Keep calm and submit the manuscript anyway. An answer will come. Strangely enough, it did!

This morning I woke up with the answer so loud and clear it made me not only laugh in sheer relief, but sent me running to my office to write down what is basically a small paragraph of insight and explanation that clarifies everything. How, I kept asking myself as I scribbled away, could I not see what the conflict was? After all, it was right there in the manuscript waiting to be seized and expanded upon.

In other words, I'd already done the groundwork, I was just too caught up in other manuscript concerns to see or appreciate it. Thank goodness for my subconscious. Thank goodness for sleep. Because all I had to do was be present, agree to work on the manuscript no matter what, and believe an answer would appear, which it did--in glowing (and logical) technicolor. Having this answer appear at this exact moment has changed my entire attitude toward both the manuscript and submitting it. Let's just call it "increased confidence." Whew.

A few of the things I've learned from this experience are:

• Whenever you're stuck on a plot-glitch or other irritating problem, just keep working past whatever it is. Don't stop and don't give up. Keep moving forward!
• Learn to be comfortable with mystery. If the answer doesn't appear right away, or even a few months later--trust that it will, somehow, somewhere. You may have to wait for some outside help, such as a critique partner or an editor asking, "What does this mean?" Or, "Why is this event happening?" But that could be the perfect time to receive your best and most true answer. 
• Don't be afraid of the extra work weaving your answer into the manuscript may entail. In my case it's just going to take a new paragraph or two, and then some additional dialogue lines and tags. But it also means changing my pagination, printing out new manuscript copy, fresh proofreading, etc. And that's okay--this new info helps my story to make sense and will encourage a reader to keep reading without having to stop and figure out what's going on. (And then forget all about reading my story while they pick up something more coherent to read.)

The next time you're stuck in a manuscript, or any other type of creative endeavor--artwork, beading, house-renovating included--concentrate on trust rather than worry. You'll find a way. I can trust it.

Tip of the Day: "Sleeping on a problem" really does work! I might not have been thoroughly aware of how much I wanted an answer to my manuscript question, but it must have been in my psyche somewhere, ready to appear. 

One good tip I'm reminded of is to write down any question you might have about any life situation, creative or otherwise, and put it under your pillow. Then forget all about it. People who've tried this tell me they wake up with the answer as vividly as I did today. How about you? Any tips on the subject to share? Let me know! Happy dreaming/problem-solving.

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One of the central tasks when reading a mystery novel (or sitting on a jury) is figuring out which of the characters are trustworthy. Someone guilty will of course say they aren’t guilty, just like the innocent – the real question in these situations is whether we believe them.

The guilty party – let’s call her Annette – can try to convince us of her trustworthiness by only saying things that are true, insofar as such truthfulness doesn’t incriminate her (the old adage of making one’s lies as close to the truth as possible applies here). But this is not the only strategy available. In addition, Annette can attempt to deflect suspicion away from herself by questioning the trustworthiness of others – in short, she can say something like:

“I’m not a liar, Betty is!”

However, accusations of untrustworthiness of this sort are peculiar. The point of Annette’s pronouncement is to affirm her innocence, but such protestations rarely increase our overall level of trust. Either we don’t believe Annette, in which case our trust in Annette is likely to drop (without affecting how much we trust Betty), or we do believe Annette, in which case our trust in Betty is likely to decrease (without necessarily increasing our overall trust in Annette).

Thus, accusations of untrustworthiness tend to decrease the overall level of trust we place in those involved. But is this reflective of an actual increase in the number of lies told? In other words, does the logic of such accusations makes it the case that, the higher the number of accusations, the higher the number of characters that must be lying?

Consider a group of people G, and imagine that, simultaneously, each person in the group accuses one, some, or all of the other people in the group of lying right at this minute. For example, if our group consists of three people:

G = {Annette, Betty, Charlotte}

then Betty can make one of three distinct accusations:

“Annette is lying.”

“Charlotte is lying.”

“Both Annette and Charlotte are lying.”

Likewise, Annette and Charlotte each have three choices regarding their accusations. We can then ask which members of the group could be, or which must be, telling the truth, and which could be, or which must be, lying by examining the logical relations between the accusations made by each member of the group. For example, if Annette accuses both Betty and Charlotte of lying, then either (i) Annette is telling the truth, in which case both Betty and Charlotte’s accusations must be false, or (ii) Annette is lying, in which case either Betty is telling the truth or Charlotte is telling the truth (or both).

This set-up allows for cases that are paradoxical. If:

Annette says “Betty is lying.”

Betty says “Charlotte is lying.”

Charlotte says “Annette is lying.”

then there is no coherent way to assign the labels “liar” and “truth-teller” to the three in such a way as to make sense. Since we are here interested in investigating results regarding how many lies are told (rather than scenarios in which the notion of lying versus telling the truth breaks down), we shall restrict our attention to those groups, and their accusations, that are not paradoxical.

The following are two simple results that constraint the number of liars, and the number of truth-tellers, in any such group (I’ll provide proofs of these results in the comments after a few days).

Result 1: If, for some number m, each person in the group accuses at least m other people in the group of lying (and there is no paradox) then there are at least m liars in the group.

Result 2: If, for any two people in the group p₁ and p₂, either p₁ accuses p₂ of lying, or p₂ accuses p₁ of lying (and there is no paradox), then exactly one person in the group is telling the truth, and everyone else is lying.

These results support an affirmative answer to our question: Given a group of people, the more accusations of untrustworthiness (i.e., of lying) are made, the higher the minimum number of people in the group that must be lying. If there are enough accusations to guarantee that each person accuses at least n people, then there are at least n liars, and if there are enough to guarantee that there is an accusation between each pair of people, then all but one person is lying. (Exercise for the reader: show that there is no situation of this sort where everyone is lying).

Of course, the set-up just examined is extremely simple, and rather artificial. Conversations (or mystery novels, or court cases, etc.) in real life develop over time, involve all sorts of claims other than accusations, and can involve accusations of many different forms not included above, including:

“Everything Annette says is a lie!”

“Betty said something false yesterday!”

“What Charlotte is about to say is a lie!”

Nevertheless, with a bit more work (which I won’t do here) we can show that, the more accusations of untrustworthiness are made in a particular situation, the more of the claims made in that situation must be lies (of course, the details will depend both on the number of accusations and the kind of accusations). Thus, it’s as the title says: accusation breeds guilt!

Note: The inspiration for this blog post, as well as the phrase “Accusation breeds guilt” comes from a brief discussion of this phenomenon – in particular, of ‘Result 2′ above – in ‘Propositional Discourse Logic’, by S. Dyrkolbotn & M. Walicki, Synthese 191: 863 – 899.

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The Gorge Zip Line Canopy Tour

      Imagine viewing the beauty of 14,000 acres of protected forestland, at 30-35 miles per hour, while clutching two, small handlebars. 

My Family's Phenomenal Zip Line Adventure

Zip Lining is exhilarating!

Rappelling & Rejoicing

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We would stand on the beach at Montauk, a boy and his father, looking out past the easternmost point on Long Island, and I'd strain to hear my father’s words as the ocean waves broke in front of us, crashing and thundering to reveal their power. “Never turn your back on the ocean,” my father would warn me. “The riptides are treacherous.” Some of the waves were five and six feet tall, and my

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By Geoffrey Hosking

In many countries, including Britain, the Euro-elections in May showed that a substantial minority of voters are disillusioned with mainstream parties of both government and opposition. This result was widely anticipated, and all over Europe media commentators have been proclaiming that the public is losing trust in established politicians. Opinion polls certainly support this view, but what are they measuring when they ask questions about trust? It is a slippery concept which suggests very different things to different people. Social scientists cannot reach any kind of consensus on what it means, let alone on what might be undermining it. Yet most people would agree that some kind of trust in the political process is essential to a stable and prosperous society.

Social scientists have had trouble with the concept of trust because most of them attempt to reach an unambiguous definition of it, distinguishing it from all other concepts, and then apply it to all societies at different times and in different parts of the world. The results are unsatisfactory, and some are tempted to ditch the term altogether. Yet there self-evidently is such a thing as trust, and it plays a major role in our everyday life. Even if the word is often misused, we should not abandon it. My approach is different: I use the word as the focus of a semantic milieu which includes related concepts such as confidence, reliance, faith and belief, and then see how they work in practice in different historical settings.

The original impulse for Trust came from a specific historical setting: Russia during the 1990s. There I observed, at first hand, the impact on ordinary Russians of economic and political reforms inspired by Western example and in some cases directly imposed by the West. Those reforms rested on economic and political precepts derived from Western institutions and practices which dated back decades or even centuries – generating habits of mutual trust which had become so ingrained that we did not notice them anymore. In Russia those institutions and practices instead aroused wariness at first, then distrust, then resentment and even hatred of the West and its policies.

I learnt from that experience that much social solidarity derives from forms of mutual trust which are so unreflective that we are no longer aware of them. Trust does not always spring from conscious choice, as some social scientists affirm. On the contrary, some of its most important manifestations are unconscious. They are nevertheless definitely learned, not an instinctive part of human nature. It follows that forms of trust which we take for granted are not appropriate for all societies.

Despite these differences, human beings are by nature predisposed towards trust. Our ability to participate in society depends on trusting those around us unless there is strong evidence that we should not do so. We all seek to trust someone, even – perhaps especially – in what seem desperate situations. To live without trusting anyone or anything is intolerable; those who seek to mobilise trust are therefore working with the grain of human nature.

We also all need trust as a cognitive tool, to learn about the world around us. In childhood we take what our parents tell us on trust, whereas during adolescence we may well learn that some of it is untrue or inadequate. Learning to discriminate and to moderate both trust and distrust is extraordinarily difficult. The same applies in the natural sciences: we cannot replicate all experiments carried out in the past in order to check whether they are valid. We have trust most of what scientists tell us and integrate it into our world picture.

Because we all need trust so much, it tends to create a kind of herd instinct. We have a strong tendency to place our trust where those around us do so. As a senior figure in the Royal Bank of Scotland commented on the widespread profligacy which generated the 2008 financial crisis: “The problem is that in banks you have this kind of mentality, this kind of group-think, and people just keep going with what they know, and they don’t want to listen to bad news.”

Trust, then, is necessary both to avoid despair and to navigate our way through life, and it cannot always be based on what we know for certain. When we encounter unfamiliar people – and in the modern world this is a frequent experience – we usually begin by exercising an ‘advance’ of trust. If it is reciprocated, we can go on to form a fruitful relationship. But a lot depends on the nature and context of this first encounter. Does the other person speak in a familiar language, look reassuring and make gestures we can easily ‘read’? Trust is closely linked to identity – our sense of our own identity and of that of those around us.

On the whole the reason we tend to trust persons around us is because they are using symbolic systems similar to our own. To trust those whose systems are very different we have to make a conscious effort, and probably to make a tentative ‘advance’ of trust. This is the familiar problem of the ‘other’. Overcoming that initial distrust requires something close to a leap in the dark.

Whether we know it or not, we spend much of our social life as part of a trust network. Such networks can be very strong and supportive, but they also tend to erect around themselves rigid boundaries, across which distrust is projected. When two or more trust networks are in enmity with one another, an ‘advance’ of trust can only work satisfactorily if it proves possible to transform negative-sum games into positive-sum games. However, an outside threat helps two mutually distrusting networks to find common ground, settle at least some of their differences and work together to ward off the threat. When the threat is withdrawn, they may well resume their mutual enmity.

During the twentieth century the social sciences – and following them history – were mostly dominated by theories derived from the study of power and/or rational choice. We still talk glibly of the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, without considering the kinds of social solidarity which underlie both forms of government. I believe we need to supplement political science with a kind of ‘trust science’, which studies people’s mutual sympathy, their lively and apparently ineradicable tendency to seek reciprocal relationships with one another, and also what happens when that tendency breaks down. It is supremely important to analyse forms of social solidarity which do not derive directly from power structures and/or rational choice. Among other things, such an analysis might help us to understand why certain forms of trust have become generally accepted in Western society, and why they are in crisis right now.

Geoffrey Hosking is Emeritus Professor of Russian History at University College London. A Fellow of the British Academy and an Honorary Doctor of the Russian Academy of Sciences, he was BBC Reith Lecturer in 1988. He has written numerous books on Russian history and culture, including Russian History: A Very Short Introduction and Trust: A History.

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Image credit: David Cameron, by Valsts kanceleja. CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The post Why study trust? appeared first on OUPblog.

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It’s easy to assume that we know what pain is. We’ve all experienced pain, from scraped knees and toothaches to migraines and heart attacks. When people suffer around us, or we witness a loved one in pain, we can also begin to ‘feel’ with them. But is this the end of the story?

In the three videos below Joanna Bourke, author of The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers, talks about her fascination with pain from a historical perspective. She argues that the ways in which people respond to what they describe as ‘painful’ have changed drastically since the eighteenth century, moving from a belief that it served a specific (and positive) function to seeing pain as an unremitting evil to be ‘fought’. She also looks at the interesting attitudes towards women and pain relief, and how they still exist today.

On the history of pain

Click here to view the embedded video.

How have our attitudes to pain changed?

Click here to view the embedded video.

On women and pain relief

Click here to view the embedded video.

Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the prize-winning author of nine books, including histories of modern warfare, military medicine, psychology and psychiatry, the emotions, and rape. Her book An Intimate History of Killing (1999) won the Wolfson Prize and the Fraenkel Prize, and ‘Eyewitness’. She is also a frequent contributor to TV and radio shows, and a regular newspaper correspondent. Her latest book is The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers.

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4 Stars Chasing Watermelons Kevin White Rex White 32 Pages     Ages: 3 to 6 ……………… Press Release: When Duck opens a crate of watermelons for a watermelon feast, they begin to roll. Duck chases after them. One by one, Duck invites Goat, Pig, Chicken, and Cow to join the chase by promising, “If you help, [...]

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Yay! Our first question from the first winner of my blog birthday giveaway:
Diana asks: "How do you deal with writer's block?" A great question, especially now that Nanowrimo has finished and some of us may be feeling completely burnt-out.

To answer Diana, I think it's important to define "writer's block." For me, it's whatever makes me want to run away from my writing:

• Perfectionism.
• Fear that my words won't match my vision.
• Fear of not making the right choices.
• Fear that I'm going too slow.
• Fear of submission.
• Fear of my own voice.
• The WIP is just too big and ambitious.

Grrr! So how to burst through those blocks? How about:

 1. Collage. A stack of old magazines, a glue stick, a damp clean-up cloth, and some kind of paper or journal can keep me happy and "writing" for hours. There's something so dreamy and magical about the process, I could almost say it's the answer for every life problem in existence! Whether it's a scene, a character's wardrobe, or the solution to a plot-hole, collage can save the day.

2. Change genres. It's good advice to "write what you love to read," but sometimes you can too easily compare yourself to your favorite writers, and bingo--you're blocked. Try reading and/or writing in a genre you've never met before.

3. Make an appointment to meet yourself somewhere outside the house or usual work place. I particularly like bookstore cafes, but laundromats, hotel lobbies, and waiting rooms make great places to sit down and "just write" without the need to explain myself.

4. Take an old manuscript and tackle it from a different approach . An old,  unsold manuscript can feel like a millstone, one that's sapping your energy for fresh work. So start over: maybe the wrong character is telling the story. Or maybe you need several points of view. Perhaps present tense will add a new tension. Experiment.

5. Write with a friend. Writing with a buddy or a writer's group is a great way to stay productive. Go for at least an hour (no talking!); read your work to each other, then write for another hour.

6. Use a book of prompts such as A Writer's Book of Days by Judith Reeves for a month. Decide how many pages to write per day (5 is a good number), but don't re-read any of your writing until the end of the month.

7. At the end of the month, find the connections between your entries. The mind loves to create order out of chaos. Reading through a month's worth of freewriting is an excellent way to find a theme, a character, or a setting you want to explore more deeply.

8. What's on your mind? Try some letters to the editor, or concentrate on writing blog comments as a daily writing exercise.

9. Start a new blog on a topic you love, but don't usually write about. Save and print out your entries--submit them as articles, or turn them into a complete book!

10. Forget about publication. Get a special journal, pens, whatever makes you happy, and just write--anything. It's your writing, written for yourself and nobody else.

11. Write about your resistance to writing. What's stopping you from writing? Let it all out. Interview your writing and your characters. Ask them what the problem is. The answers may surprise you--and get you writing again.

12. Keep a "still-life" journal or notebook. Instead of worrying about transitions, plots, and character arcs, spend some time just writing descriptions. Take a cue from still-life paintings: what objects are included? What's the setting? Mood? Why? What is the artist trying to say? Keep adding entries even on the days you're writing full steam ahead.

Tip of the Day: As lofty as "write every day" may sound, the truth is you don't always HAVE to write to be a writer. Enjoying and participating in the world around you can be just as important, and necessary, as a daily word count. Read, draw, travel, visit antique or thrift stores, go for a walk, observe and play. Taking regular time-outs goes a long way to preventing creative block. And be sure to pay a visit to LadyDBooks--rest and renewal guaranteed!

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When I was little, I could play all day. ALL DAY. From the minute I woke up to the second I fell into bed, I was in play mode. For weeks on end I could live in a world of my own, a fantastic landscape filled with talking animals, altered realities, and pith helmets. (I always had to wear my imaginary pith helmet.) Not that I didn't get into trouble; I don't think a single report card ever went home without "Too much daydreaming" scrawled across the bottom. Sigh.

Report cards aside, I still managed to grow up into a fairly disciplined person, so much so that when I made the comment in my writer's group that "life was a school," I was somewhat surprised when another member countered with, "Actually, life is a playground."


The best way, I realized, to get back to the playground is to examine what is so much creative fun we're embarrassed to admit it. It can be anything:  from crayons to mud pies aka ceramics. It can even be an obsession with cats.

Some of the benefits of returning to a playful mindset can include:

• Play is infectious. Editors and readers will pick up on, and appreciate, your ability to entertain.
• Constantly marketing or submitting work for publication or other venues can be depressing if you're not seeing the results you want. It's good to take time off from relentless social networking and always being "on."
• You can withstand rejection and negative critiquing better when you remember that you started all this to have fun. (They don't call 'em "screenplays" for nothing!)

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5 Stars Meet Chanda.  She is the catalyst for today’s review of Chained, a smart, well-written, and engrossing novel by Lynne Kelly.  Chanda is a young girl bitten by fever mosquitoes and now carries a dangerously high temperature.  She needs medical help now.  With the help of a neighbor, Amma, her mother, takes Chanda to [...]

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4.5 Stars From Inside Jacket:  Ellie believes she will live in her little village on the coast of Scotia for always.  But when her father gets a job on Sable Island, she must say farewell to her beloved home and her mother’s final resting place.  Not even the idea of seeing wild horses that roam [...]

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5 STARS From the back cover: Through the life and death of her grandfather, 12-year-old Oli receives a pouch that holds the lives of abandoned,  but unique coins, coins adopted by her grandfather—and now hers.  Bearing their mint inscription, In God We Trust, Oli’s coins entrust their lives with hers as she searches for the [...]

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 4 Stars At the Wrens’ new place, things are very different. The name of the street—East 213th—has absolutely zero magic. And there’s no Mrs. Petrone to cut her hair, no Pi Baggott to teach her how to skateboard, no Green Kingdom to explore. She’s having trouble fitting in at her new school and spending a [...]

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On Tuesday night my experimental drawing class came to an end.  It was both sad (no more Tuesday night socializing with like-minded new friends) and liberating:  "Okay, you've learned all about mixed media--now go make art!  You can do it!"

Besides acquiring a whole arena of fresh knowledge regarding techniques and materials (I absolutely fell in love with Pan Pastels and Stonehenge paper) I feel I learned several important lessons that can apply not only to drawing and painting, but to the way we approach any creative pursuit--including the art of living!  Here's my top twelve:

1. Be patient.  There is no magic button.  Life—and especially creativity—is not a foot race.  Take your time; trust that the process will work--it will.  Eventually!
2. Work on several pieces at once.  While you’re waiting and deciding about how to continue or enhance a piece, start working on something new.  Ideas will seed each other, bringing inspiration and giving you a strong sense of productivity.
3. Start.  Stop.  Wait.  Start.  Then stop again.  It’s a good idea to break your work into segments.  Once you’ve added a new element to a piece, let it sit for awhile before you rush to the next “improvement.”
   2 Comments on Life Lessons From a Drawing Class, last added: 8/8/2011
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   Crowing Crone Joss said, on 8/6/2011 1:11:00 PM
   

   wise life lessons you shared with us. and if THAT image is the result of you throwing caution to the wind - oh my, do it more often. You and your world will be blessed for it.
   walk in beauty.

   Ania said, on 8/8/2011 11:04:00 AM
   

   Great tips!

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For the last five weeks I've been taking an art class:  Experimental Drawing.  And what an experiment it's been!  The best way I can describe what we're doing is by calling it "free painting," the visual equivalent of "freewriting." 

Personally I've found the approach both difficult and oddly liberating--a constant struggle between wanting to create the "picture in my mind" and then having to give in to what the images dictate.  It's a lot like wanting to write a contemporary romance only to have it turn into a Norse saga in iambic pentameter with science fiction elements.  All you can do is stand back and say:  "Oooh-kaaay..."

On a more technical note, the materials we are using for this grand experiment include:

• Stonehenge and watercolor papers, as well as Bristol board.
• Acrylic paints.
• Watercolor paints.
• Pastels in both stick and loose, powdered forms.
• Acrylic mediums/grounds/gels.
• Fixative.  (Lots of fixative between each layer of pastel or paint.)
• Ink.
• Collage papers.
• Graphite pencils.
• And just about anything else that makes, or takes, a mark.

So here's my small gallery of works to date (including the picture at the top.  I like that one in particular because I threw in some words: "The Art of Placing."  I love combining text with visuals.)





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*Dear readers, you have inspired me to continue with one more year of questions. Thanks for the new subscriptions and the encouragement. The next year of questions starts tomorrow. Here’s this year’s last answer*

The skeleton was real.

One fearless thing. That’s all I wanted. One crazy-ass thing.

But I never thought it would happen the way it did. I never thought I’d jump. And the real kicker is? I know the real reason why and I’ll never tell. I guess you could say I took it with me to the grave. But I’m totally claustrophobic so it was more like taking it to the crematorium which is a way creepier sounding word than grave, but just doesn’t have the same ring to it. Since the world’s running out of places to bury people maybe it’ll catch on.

It all started at a football game. There was this guy. And there was my lying boyfriend. And, there was my sister’s raised eyebrows. For the first time in my college life something started that wouldn’t stop. It would follow me and put a smile on my face. And would have followed me until I was old and gray because when your jumpmaster is a red-headed, Irish, politically-incorrect joke cracker named Angus and his company mascot is a full-scale [whispered to be real] human skeleton named Winston, well, that crap sticks with you. I think of it every time I eat Giordano’s.

“Look. look. check. check. Pull.”

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In the chill of this morning I drove to church and sat among people whom I consider to be dear and good friends—people whose lives and children I admire, people who make me laugh.  I had been thinking, quietly, about the people who walk away from our lives, who no longer need what we have offered, who have found themselves moving past us toward something bigger, more enticing.  I had been thinking, too, about the work I do for others, and how it can sometimes leave me feeling small, and I was sitting in the pews, my thoughts moving in and out, when Victor Wilson, our minister, began his sermon.

There, within his narrative about trust, were words I'd written years ago for a story in Science and Spirit magazine. He'd mentioned, months ago, that he had found the piece, but I had no firm recollection of it, and so was surprised to sit within this echo of myself—the young me talking to the now me, saying these words:

It is so primal, this thing called trust.  So basic to our survival.  Without trust could we attach to one another, could we love?  Could we forge societies and build institutions?  Speak and believe that we’ve been heard?  Would we set up housekeeping?  Trade one thing for another?  Lie in another person’s arms?  Dare to procreate?  Freely slip away to conjecture, to be curious, to dream? We’d be at war every day of our lives if we didn’t trust.  We’d be anxious, jumpy people.   We’d be on-guard, fenced-in solitaires — withered souls with narrowed eyes.

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When is the last time you trusted your gut?

Related Articles

• Trust your gut … but only sometimes (physorg.com)
• What’s Your Superpower? (jeffkorhan.com)

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The fear you greet at every major threshold of your life is simply based on a fantasy of a danger that has not happened. Rather than stay frozen on the future, get out of your head. Stay in your body. Seize this moment and write something, anything. Keep moving. Write through the fear. 

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