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Inspiration
Great essay by Susannah Felts for the Book Notes series at Largehearted Boy. In this long-running series, authors write about the music that influenced and inspired their books. Felts discusses the music that impacted the writing of her novel This Will Go Down on Your Permanent Record. I have not yet read the book — it’s been on my radar for a while now, and due to my reading of this Book Notes essay, it has moved up to the top of my “To Read” list.
You might recognize that the book’s title is a lyric from the song “Kiss Off” by the Violent Femmes. If you came of age in the 80s, then you defnitely know it’s a lyric, and you probably have vivid memories of flinging yourself around in someone’s living room at midnight (at that friend’s house whose parents regularly went out of town), super drunk off of Schafer Beer or California Cooler, and screaming out the lyrics, word for enunciated word, at the top of your lungs while the song, excuse me, the anthem, blasted from the stereo.
Ah, in the words of Eddie Money, “I wanna go back, go back, and do it all over, but I can’t go back, I know.”
Felts discusses several other musical inspirations — Love and Rockets, for example. I haven’t thought about that band in ages, and was immediately reminded of how the song “Haunted When the Minutes Drag” haunted me… and no doubt, for all the wrong reasons, all those girls who I made mix tapes for as well.
Anyway, the book is published by Featherproof Books, and is available at Amazon. I can’t wait to read it.
My blog is about my creative process and what makes me happy in life. I write about my creative friends and moments of bliss. I document the progress of my art journal, crafts, knitting, sewing, making collages and recycling materials. I also include tutorials, inspiration I find in nature, in books, blogs and magazines. It’s filled with my thoughts on a good life and what it should contain.
One of my dreams has always been to write a book and publish it, but I’ve found that I hardly ever write the kind of fiction I think my book should contain. Then in the beginning of this year I was copying all my blog entries into a Word document as a backup and a way to read through what I’d written in a year.
All the entries from 2006 put together became a huge document and I noticed that it was already an entity, a whole. I had written a whole book without noticing what I was doing!
What I had was a text in diary form with a beginning, middle and an end. The text had a clear theme, the narrative of the days gone by and all the words were already written… It’s a document of a year in my life. A good year with lots of great days, days I wanted to tell about and remember.
I wanted to hold it physically in my hand and share it with the world, so I decided to make a book out of the texts.
I started to edit it, and it took my nine months (!) to spell check, rewrite and correct it until it felt finished. I worked on the layout (as best as I could in Word) because I wanted it to look and feel good too. I wanted to illustrate my words with colour photos I’d taken and keep the feel of a diary. I added a note of introduction and a register, some quotes that I like and made a new chapter from the 12 months. Voila! It actually started to look like a publishable book. I named my project A Creative Year and designed the book cover using Photoshop.
The book has more than 240 pages, it is full colour and it is filled with crafty tutorials, creativity, inspiration, photos and encouragement. Do the best of each day! Create beauty in your life! In the book I talk about projects and what they mean to me, about setting goals, finding inspiration and there is also a couple of mixed media tutorials (and more).
I have experience in layout for both web and magazines, but this is the first book project I’ve ever done. I think anyone could do it though, but remember it takes a lot more time than you could ever imagine!
My book A Creative Year is now available as a print on demand book at Lulu and I feel so great that I took on a big project like this and finished it on my own!
Hanna Andersson (aka iHanna), Sweden
iHanna’s blog
More about A Creative Year
Buy it at Lulu.com
The above is a picture of a fantastic zine from Summer Pierre — The Artist in the Office. I read my copy while on the clock, of course! You can find out more about Summer’s inspiring project here. (and I’m honored that a project from the 52 Projects book was included in this wonderful zine — Thanks Summer!)
Venus Magazine’s Indie Giver Guide For the Baby Mama | For Your Mr. Man
In the Sexy Department:
Fleshbot’s Sexy Holiday Gift Guide
Rachel Kramer Bussel’s Sexy Gift Guide
Tristan Taormino’s Sexy Gift Guide
Check out Christine Miller’s 52 Figments project — a weekly creative exercise for 2006. Each week, Christine — also known as Swirly Girl — posts a question, and you create your own personal answer in any form that you want (adhering to the specs on the downloadable PDF). Details on how to send in your "answer" — a photo, a drawing, a collage, however you decide to respond — are on the site. Be sure to check out the amazing gallery of submissions.
The winners of the first annual Plummy Awards for excellence in crafting have been announced. (Found via the Craftzine blog.)
This contest was established by the folks who run the Plum of the Month Club, a very cool project that puts a "juicy handmade item in your mailbox each month." Subscription information is here. I like how the project supports handmade DIY craft-makers, and involves getting a little surprise in the mail. I also really like the graphic in the top right corner of the site: "Here you go!"… "Aww, thanks, dude!"
I came around the turn like I always do, having just descended the shaded steps from the tallest point in the park, and I was feeling so good, I was covered in sweat and smiling and glad to be at my little secret spot in the park, a wooded path that’s tucked away and rarely frequented by most park goers, just other runners and bird watchers, old men walking their dogs, couples holding hands, but usually no one, just me, and the path, and all that beautiful nature in this cement city, and this one tree, this one glorious tree with a split trunk, one length of it running straight up to the sky, the other on a slant, leaning over the path, as if to provide this place with a monumental arch, a purposeful sharing of its shade, and for me, a friendly hello, a welcome to its solitude and strength and its beauty. Except on this day, August 26, 2006, this one special tree was no longer there.
No, no, no NO!
I stopped cold and started making calculations — yes, I am where I think I am, this is the path, and I just turned the corner and from where I am standing right now the tree should be there, right there, right in front of me. It should be there, and it is not.
Saw dust splotches on the path. One half of the tree’s trunk lying there, as if it had been run down and just left on the side of a desolate road. All those years in the wind, all those stars and the nights, all those leaves come and gone and falling all around, sun beating, beating, beating down, rain drops slipping on the green, the swaying of the branches, and now, just gone, cut down.
Gray day, on the verge of a rain, an unseasonably cool breeze for this August day rustling the branches all around and striking a bitter chill along my sweat drenched backside. I stood there and held on to the disbelief — better to not believe then to let it sink in. But it does sink in and I started running again, to shake it off, to wrap my head around it, to get away from the tree that was looming so large but was no longer there.
There are the fixtures in our life, and they help connect the dots of who we are, help us remember, show us how to forget, get us to bend over and pick up the pieces, help us close our eyes at night and finally, finally, at last, fall asleep.
Running is a way to keep the pounds off my mid-riff, to keep me from screaming because the TV volume is up too loud or some other stupid thing that I shouldn’t be losing my temper over, to keep my blood pressure down, to do some thinking or to do no thinking at all, to help clear my mind, to be alone, to move forward, faster and faster and faster. And throughout and within all of the running, that tree was my fixture: to reach the tree, to see the tree, to think back on it as I walked into my apartment, winded, soar and soaked in sweat, but smiling down to my core.
Fixtures can be monuments in the here and now, but they can also be fleeting memories, things from our past that are gone forever. It’s hard to see them transition from one to the other. There is sadness and there is shock, and anger. In the long run, though, I think what makes these fixtures important to us, what makes them truly meaningful, is knowing deep down that this transition will happen. Once it does happen, and the immediate emotions run their course, the fixture’s roots have been laid into the core of who you were, who you were, and who you will become.
So I will keep running, to the tree. To the tree. I’ll keep running to the tree.
Summer Pierre has got a very cool project going on at her site, an inspiring challenge to herself: A Something, An Anything for 30 Days. She’s creating an image a day (featuring wonderful stories) on an 8.5 X 11 piece of paper with a felt-tip pen. You can see the gallery of images here, but be sure to read through the blog as well, because each posted entry also features excellent commentary on both the image and the overall project by Summer.
Saw the documentary on Charles Bukowski the other day — Born Into This. Can’t recommend it enough, especially for those writers out there. Here’s a guy who lived a pretty fucked up life, and drank way too much much too often, and boom, from all that, and most incredibly, in the midst of all of it, he wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. I was fascinated by the way his writing career began — publishing in tiny journals and weekly rags, the rejection notes piling up all around. And yet, slowly, slowly, his words start having an impact on a person here and a person there, and one person in particular, John Martin, a printer — not a publisher, makes a deal with Bukowski to pay him $100 a month for life if he quits his day job and devotes himself to writing full-time. Martin then creates a publishing house — now famously known as Black Sparrow Press, just to publish Bukowski. And the rest is history, and more importantly, an incredible body of work, both in its depth and its size.
Bukowski is the kind of writer that makes you feel sort of guilty and slightly uncomfortable for laughing, but there you are, busting a gut on the subway, having to put the book down and try to stifle your laughter on a crowded train, people wondering what the hell is wrong with you and cursing themselves for sitting next to a crazy person.
One amazing little tidbit from the documentary is the how Martin, after striking this $100 a month deal with Bukowski, asks him if maybe he might try writing a novel, because it would be easier to sell than a collection of poetry. Martin says it was just a suggestion, but less than a month later Bukowski calls him and tells him to come by to pick something up. What is it? asks Martin, and Bukowski tells him it’s the novel he requested. That novel is Post Office. It’s my favorite Bukowski book. I have a bias towards work stories, but if you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. It is raw, cuts to the core of a dead end job and a terrible boss, and it is freaking hilarious.
This documentary was a nice little kick in the pants for me. I watched it, then flipped open the laptop and finished a story I’ve been mostly avoiding for about a month. (I’ll be posting on Wednesday here at 52projects.com — very different from what I normally post. I hope you’ll come back and give it a read.)
There’s also a new movie out right now starring Matt Dillon — Factotum — based on a Bukowski novel of the same name. I haven’t read the book, but I plan to, and I’d also like to see the movie. I already recommended reading Post Office, as well as seeing the Bukowski documentary. And for you writers out there, track down a copy of the Bukowski poem "So You Want to Be A Writer?" in the book Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way. Worth a read not just once, but whenever you need it, like all the great poems.