a moment in the day: delivery

Nicholas is barking in the hysterical way he barks when there's a knock on the door, and I follow him quick down the stairs, hoping to pick him up before Stephen answers the door.

Normally these pandemic days, I'd be afraid to answer the door, but I did order some Vegemite, and I got a confirmation email that it was on its way. They'd just knock and leave it on the porch.

Still, doggy in arms, now, I stop. Stephen and I hesitate, neither touching the knob.

"It's probably just my Vegemite," I say.

When Stephen opens the door and we peak out, there's a small box sitting on the porch. On the top it says, "Fat Cupcake."

I say, "Kathleen!"

Now I understand the cryptic text my friend sent me about a "delivery" a little earlier in the evening. Cupcakes from her and from my writing group. For my birthday.

In these fraught times, the gesture gives me a slug of pure joy in my belly.

In the street, a house and a half down, a car is making a U-turn. What kind of car does Kathleen drive? Neither Stephen nor I have our glasses on. I wave big as the car makes its turn and comes back to pass in front of our house. Stephen tells me the driver is waving so I wave bigger, making thank you gestures, and then they're gone.

I take my cupcakes inside.

"I think that was a man," Stephen says.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure I just blew a kiss at the delivery man.

Anxiety Society pin

I recently had a design job that was very close to my heart. I was asked to design a pin for one of my favorite organizations, Create More, Fear Less. I can't say enough about Create More, Fear Less. It was inspired by Kathleen Lane's experience with anxiety and the connections she made with kids she met while visiting schools with her book The Best Worst Thing. Through workshops both in-person and remote as well as through projects kids can do on their own, Create More, Fear Less inspires kids to explore, create, share, and find their way through fear.

Check it out. It's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

The pin I designed is a limited-edition membership pin for members of the Anxiety Society, a community of supporters who help fund the great things Create More, Fear Less does.

I knew this would be a simple design, mostly text arranged within a shape, but sometimes the simple stuff can take some doing. How can you get the most out of the smallest space, the barest of elements?

Graphic novelist Jonathan Hill, one of the many artists and writers who have designed and executed workshops for Create More, Fear Less, suggested that the pin be reminiscent of old secret society pins or decoder rings. I loved that idea.

We looked at symbols that might suggest this type of thing. The eye of Horus, stars, radiating lines, hands, triangles, keys, wings... We liked the idea of an eye because it might symbolize imagination, the mind, vision. I thought radiating lines would be a great visual element and also communicate light, growth, something positive coming from something else. Kathleen suggested an icon that might look like both a paintbrush and a torch. Maybe emerging from the eye.

It was really fun collaborating with Kathleen on this design, lobbing ideas back and forth and refining as we went. I started by spacing out the words Create More, Fear Less in a ring around the outside and placing the main text Anxiety Society in the middle. Seeing that the words Anxiety and Society each have the letter I at their centers, I tried lining those up and connecting them, turning them together into the torch/paintbrush. It took some work because the letter Is were not dead center and did not exactly line up. In the font I was using, some letters, like X were wider than others, like E and T. I had to convert the letters from live font into shape and then tweak them. Then I decided to go with a different font and started that process over again.

As is not uncommon in my design work, the idea got more and more distilled as I tinkered. The icons were looking too clunky and getting in the way of the important message of the words. It was hard to make the paintbrush/eye combo read. In the end both the paintbrush and the eye went away and just the radiating lines remained, with a few stars as accents. We'd started with a concept that was embedded in the past and ended up with something modern that still has a hint of its secret society roots.

Some samples along the journey from beginning to end.

After a lot of discussion on color, we settled on our design.

These babies are now newly-minted and ready to go out to members of the Anxiety Society in thanks for their support of Create More, Fear Less. I'm so honored to have been able to contribute a little something of my own. If you're interested in being part of the Anxiety Society and helping Create More, Fear Less do the wonderful things they do (and getting one of these pins to boot), there's more information here.

thing collection

Many writers use prompts to get their writing started. It might be a word, a theme, a picture - any small thing to get the creative energies flowing, to use as a seed for story. Writer Kathleen Lane has a cool set of visual prompts over on the blog of her new website. She calls it a "thing collection" - and she has this to say about it...

An interesting thing happened when I tried writing off of a prompt from Kathleen's thing collection. This is the picture I chose:

But after a while of freewriting where nothing grabbed me, I gave that picture up and went back to her blog and found another.

It's not a pineapple, but it looked like a pineapple to me, and that's what I ran with. It took until I was halfway into the piece I was writing that I realized I was actually utilizing that first prompt after all. Here's the story that came out of the exercise.

*

PINEAPPLE

You’re not going to believe me, but I can stick a whole pineapple up my nose.

I’m serious.

Shut up, I’m serious.

OK, it’s not like it’s a gigantic pineapple, like the size of my head or anything, it’s a small pineapple, but I bet you can’t fit anything up your nose, like probably not even a pea.

Shut up, I’m serious, I can do it, look.

Ow.

OK, it’s not a real pineapple, it’s just a charm from my mom’s charm bracelet, but that doesn’t mean I lied, it just means there’s more to the story. That’s what makes a story interesting. That’s what Mom says.

Mom has all sorts of charms I can fit up my nose. This gold apple, this little shoe, this tiny rose. Not the one shaped like the Space Needle, I don’t stick that one up my nose, at least not very far.

Mom keeps her charm bracelet hidden in a box in the back of her closet inside the empty binoculars case, and she only wears it when Dad’s out of town. She doesn’t think I notice when she’s wearing it. She thinks that bracelet is her secret, but I have secrets too. How I stick her charms up my nose is my secret. Sometimes when I see that gold all sparkling on her wrist, my nose itches, and sometimes I sneeze, but I pretend it’s because I’m allergic to milk.

I always sneak into her closet to see if she got a new charm. After her thirtieth birthday, she got this tiny butterfly, see? Once when she had the flu so bad she got this little gold teddy bear. She got the Space Needle one after a trip she took where she said she was visiting Aunt Tammy but when she came home she acted all dreamy and I don’t think there are any Space Needles in Omaha.

Here’s a heart with an M on it, except Mom’s real name is Christy. It’s too big to fit up my nose and has a ruby in it and it’s probably fourteen carrots or eighteen carrots or even a hundred and fifty carrots. More carrots make your jewelry better. I learned that from Mom’s friend the jeweler who lives down the block and has a barbecue for neighborhood parties and a pool table.

One time, when I was home sick, he came to our house. When I went to the kitchen, they were there talking quiet at the table, and Mom had her charm bracelet on. He was holding her hand. As soon as he saw me, he pulled his hand away fast, but Mom said, “Oh, sweetie!” Like she was glad to see me. Like she’d forgot I was home. “Mike’s here to appraise my jewelry!”

She put her hand back out to him and he took it. “Twenty-four carrots,” he said. He looked at Mom, not her ring. “Beautiful,” he said.

Mom laughed.

He has black hair and a long nose and a face like a wiener dog, and I hate him. He smiled at me and said, “Hey, partner, did I ever tell you what carrots mean?”

Whenever Mike the jeweler calls me partner, Mom makes dreamy eyes at me like she always makes dreamy eyes at him. I went out into the hall where everyone takes off our shoes so we don’t track dirt all over Mom’s white carpets. I could tell which shoes were Mike’s because they were big and black and not Dad’s. Quick, I shoved his shoelace up my nose.

I don’t care how many times he calls me partner and tries to get me to sit on his lap—I’m not his partner.

Mom has so many charms that if Mike the jeweler keeps giving her more, she’ll need to get a new bracelet. Here’s one shaped like a tiny typewriter. Here’s one shaped like a miniature diamond ring. Here’s the one shaped like a baby. I don’t know where that one came from—Mom’s had it a long time. Plus, the only baby Mom ever had is me.

*

I'll be reading alongside Kathleen Lane and a whole host of great writers at Crush Bar on Saturday night. You can check out the event page for that here. And check out Kathleen's website and her thing collection here. If you write a story off of one of her prompts, let me know!

share

Last week I was part of the second gathering of SHARE, a project started by my friend and fellow writer Kathleen Lane. Here's the description from the blog, which you can peruse here: "SHARE is a monthly gathering of artists. For two hours we work independently on the same prompt, then share what we've made." SHARE is managed by Kathleen and another friend and writer, Margaret Malone. Two smart, fabulously talented women who've put together something really unique and enriching.

One thing that makes it unique is the variety of art involved. This time around we had four writers, one musician, one sculptor, one screen printer, one illustrator, one painter, one artist who works with graffiti, and one woman described as an interdisciplinary domestic artist. You'd think it would be impossible to organize a workshop of all these different types of creativity, but it went really smoothly. Everyone worked independently for two hours - Chad, the musician, worked by computer with headphones on - and in the end the variety of art that came out of one little word prompt was amazing.

The prompt was TEMPORARY. It was texted to me two hours in advance like a secret password to a speakeasy. (Except that texting wasn't so possible in the time of the speakeasy and you weren't likely to find one hidden in a loft next to something called a 24-Hour Church of Elvis.)

Thing is, when I got the prompt, I was busy writing an email to the editor of the Pacific Northwest Reader and then going through my essay to take out the double spacing between the sentences - something he thought he'd asked for but hadn't, so I wanted to take care of it right away - which means I didn't really have a chance to roll the prompt around in my head before arriving at SHARE late because I also had the time wrong. Consequently, and not so consequently, I spent almost the entire creating period writing stray bits of rubbish and wondering why I ever thought I had the brain power to do anything creative in my life and why don't I just jump out this window right now.

Until something I wrote down clicked and I was fine again.

I'll let the SHARE blog speak for the great and varied pieces that came out of the evening, but I wanted to mention one element that was very particular. Shawn, the interdisciplinary domestic artist, brought a huge bowl of goldfish, from which she spooned two or three fish into a glass or jar for each one of us. She said these were to be ours temporarily. In the end, we could decide whether to keep the fish or give them back.

I had three - one completely gold, one a golden sort of white, and one mostly gold but with white at the bottom of the mouth. I remember this because I spent a lot of time throughout the evening picking up the jar and looking at them. Even writing about them a bit before I got a hold of what I was going to really write about that night. One of the interesting things that happened to me because of these fish was that I started to notice I had a lot of ownership attached to them even though they were only temporarily mine. For these few hours, they were mine. And as such, they were the best ones and lived in the best glass. I pitied everyone else for their inferior fish. Well maybe not, but mine were hands down the prettiest and did the best things. I watched one of mine hang in space, fins going hummingbird fast, and make tiny, jerky movements backward as if finding its own way to pretend it was moving forward, to own great distance, while it was confined. From this, I concluded that mine was an extra-intelligent, I daresay creative, goldfish. And poor Kathleen's three just bonked their faces against the glass like little fishy doofuses. There, I've said it.

But thinking about temporary while you have your temporary goldfish on the table in front of you does remind you of how temporary ownership really is. We hang a lot of security on ownership, yet in a way, every bit of it is temporary. Our ownership of our homes, our books and CDs and stacks of plates, the gardens we plant, the old letters we save, our relationships, our memories - all temporary in one way or another. The very cells of us, dying and regenerating so we're not even physically the same us in the end that we were in the beginning.

The other thing that happens to you if you have a glass of goldfish is that somewhere along the line you're going to almost drink it.