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Go Play Project: Day 8 | Under the “X” in Texas

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Go Play Project – Day 8

I don’t have many rules about my collage process, but one that I stick to pretty hard and fast is that I don’t use words. Words are what I wrestle with in my “real” job, and this Go Play Project is meant to be just that… playing. My lofty ideal is that anyone who looks at one of my collage pieces should be able to interpret it however the heck they want to. And, well, once you slap down a word, there’s no ambiguity. Bam. There it is.

But I found this image, and it was just too damn perfect. Moving to Texas has been, in a way, coming full circle for me. My father was born in El Paso. His mom crossed the Rio Grande so he could be born in the States, and then crossed back over where he grew up in Mexico. He never actually knew he was a U.S. citizen until it was time to enlist for the military. True story.

Now I’m back in Texas, and far away from El Paso, but for the Mexican in me, it does feel a little like coming home. As for the rest of me… I’m not quite sure how I feel. And that’s what’s been great about these daily collage exercises. I get to sort through some of those feelings, stretch myself a teeny bit creatively and then step back and say, “I wonder what the hell that means.”

Have a wonderful weekend, y’all!

 

 

 

Go Play Project: Day 6 | Nowhere, Massachusetts

 

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Go Play Project – Day 6

If yesterday was all about Miami, my birthplace, today I’m feeling wistful for my second home, Massachusetts. I went to college in Western Mass and loved every minute of it (well, except for a few blizzards), and spent another four years honing my craft as a publicist and writer at a PR agency in Boston. You know the story: it was the best of times; it was the worst of times. I fell hard for someone, got unceremoniously dumped and headed back home to Miami. I’m a die-hard Smith volunteer, which on occasion brings me back to Northampton and all its wonders: Paradise Pond, the greenhouse (which was a much needed refuge for this Florida girl in the dead of winter) and the art museum.

“Nowhere, Massachusetts” is a song by Black Prairie, which is kinda sorta a side project of the Decemberists, and it was the inspiration for today’s collage, the background of which is an image of the Northern Lights.

It was wintertime, I was watching the boys shoot rockets at the girls.

January, New Year and I’m watching the northern lights swirl.

Enjoy the song, and I hope you like the piece I created.

 

 

Go Play Project: Day 5 | Six Months in a Leaky Boat

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Go Play Project – Day 5

A Split Enz song and an avocado. That’s what inspired today’s collage.

I’ve been in Austin for six years now, and while there’s much that I love about my adopted city, for a girl who’s always lived on a coast, there is a sense of being landlocked that I can’t seem to shake.

I heard a cover of “Six Months in a Leaky Boat” by Ted Leo and the Pharmacists that I’ve had stuck in my head for a while. And that of course led to me thinking about all the coastal waters I’ve lived near and loved—my hometown of Miami and my years spent in Boston.

Today in the grocery store, I found a Florida avocado, and while it pained me to actually pay money for it, because after all, what self-respecting South Floridian pays for avocados—I did, and I was immediately transported to memories of lush fruit-bearing trees, tropical breezes and, of course, all the water—driving over the Causeway to Fisher Island, days spent at Matheson Hammock and on Key Biscayne—I miss them all. But not the hurricanes… I don’t miss those!

Go Play Project: Day 2 | On Killing the Butterfly

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Go Play. Day 2. Killing the Butterfly

I’m reading Ann Patchett’s collection of her non-fiction works, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, a gift from my ever-so-thoughtful friend Ellen Kanner. In “The Getaway Car,” Ann writes one of the most uncannily accurate descriptions of the writing process I’ve read, and since this Go Play Project about exercising those creative muscles in new, somewhat painful ways, this seemed particularly apt:

During the months (or years) it takes me to put my ideas together, I don’t take notes or make outlines; I’m figuring things out, and all the while the book makes a breeze around my head like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. This book I have not written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.

And so I do. When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down on my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure that the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing—all the color, the light and the movement—is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book.

No wonder I was drawn to butterflies for today’s collage. Things of beauty, but ready to be killed off, one by one. For those of you who write, or paint, or draw—or any other creative pursuit— what’s your process like?