Inspiration and "Brutal honesty. At our own expense."

Last night I went out to the Heartland Studio Theater to see two of the Fillet of Solo shows. Every time I take the Red Line up north I am reminded how long it takes. Worth the travel though and it gave me some good things to think about in terms of my own writing.

The first show I saw was EnSOLO,"An enSEMBLE of solo performers who write together and perform alone. A little bit of non-fiction, story telling, performance art. No 4th wall. enSOLO strives to find Universal truth through brutal honesty and specificity."

The second show was a longer solo performance by Kim Morris. I've seen Kim perform other pieces through 2nd Story and she was the curator for the short piece I did before Julie Ganey's piece at the Choosing to be Here storytelling festival in the fall.

Both shows were great and I was left thinking a lot about something I have struggled with over the past few years:

When is revealing yourself in story telling brave and in service of helping listeners relate and share common experiences and when is it still too self-indulgent, too personal and specific?

When is it still the stuff of journals, blogs, drinks with friends, and therapist office verses being shaped enough into a still very personal story that is meaningful to the audience?

When is brutal honesty not just at our own expense but also "at the expense" of a listener because it is too much about us and not enough interested in the audience's role?

While these questions are phrased as "when" I don't think there is a time-based answer. Some people can artfully shape raw emotions as they feel them, they can bring perspective, they can think about a listener and a bigger meaning. Sometimes 30 years is not enough time to process in way that is ready to share.

The answers are different for each story, each talent, each person.

I should say that this train of thought is not a criticism of any of the work I saw last night. Those pieces (in addition to being wonderful to watch) simply inspired me to think harder about something already on my mind. And, it turned out that my good friend B. has actor friends who are in EnSOLO, so he was at the show too. We started a conversation about this late last night on the phone and I'm looking forward to talking with him about it more soon.

For my Museum of Round issues, I don't think any of my ideas so far push my buttons in the way of "Am I Ready/Able to Tell This in a Way that is brave not self-obsessed." All delays in getting this together are pure procrastination and the need to develop some art skills (or delegate tasks to a collaborator!)

Eye Can't Start this Project...

I've been writing and planning out my first Museum of Round issue for a couple (few?) years now. My favorite doodles and ideas surround the page that I am struggling to make. My giant eyeballs with moving part sketches always look like boobs: I've gotten strange looks from other bar patrons who look over at what I'm doing.

Since my Saturday sewing plans have been cancelled due to flu, my goal is to conquer this page and come up with a working model that doesn't freak me out and make me think of Gothic.

Little Feet: Holiday Cheerfully to Cheers

What can I say, I love lists and I love little games with myself. In addition to the "word a page that I read lists, I do lots of stream-of-conscious word association. This one came out of a Top Flight Composition Book with the name "Rem. of Things Past" (more on that one later):

cheerfully
full of cheer
Christmas
stocking
fishnet
sardines
too small
full through
all done
burnt
sunburn
red
rosacea
roses
lillies
valley
how green is
envy
sloth
Jabba
fat
Rubenesque
body art
piercing
noses
pig
swine
flu
Kleenex
Xerox
copies
originals
one and only
true love
young love
'til death do us part
bangs
mash
monster
Frankenstein
Chloris Leachman
Bea Arthur
abortion
religious right
civil right
MLK
Boulevard
Deroit
train station
travel
Japan
little feet
babies
American Girl
creepy doll
baby nubbins
amputee
pin ball wizard
Merlin
owl
Mrs Soulliere
Red
again?
repetitive
procrastinating
not cheerful
cheers
toasts
roast

Next to this list I jotted some story ideas, inspired by the phrase "little feet." I remember it clearly. I was going to write a story about a woman visiting Japan who buys a Japanese pin that I used to have. A pin that was stolen in break in 3 of 3. I still have the box for the pin.

-tall woman
tan, large feet

-how would it feel to be small and delicate?
-what would she wear it with?
-how would it feel to stand on tip toe and lean your face up to be kissed?
-women say they would like long legs but they never say they want ugly mannish shoes.

Right now, little feet just makes me think of Little Feat though:

Crazy Stuff from my notebooks: Post No. 1

It's hard to read my own handwriting and most of the insane scribbles are lost to me, but I love coming across things years later and wondering what in the world my idea was. What was I supposed to do with this stuff? What was I thinking?


Here are a few favorites from a blue Mead Composition book with teal, orange and white stripe, based on the boring food logs, not fully dated but with things like July 18 (Sunday, I think most of the entries are from 2004. But then again, I am filling in pages now in 2013, so I might have grabbed it on any day or year in between:

Stupid Elton John
"House of Celine Dion"
"Cheesy graphics video for Paul."

And this great list, probably made while I was playing the "write a word down from each page/column/paragraph read":

crocodiles
perspicuously
cloudy impression
wax-candle
buttons
corkindills
gauntlet
disfigure myself
aspersion
infer
mangy
hoisted
coverlet
famous geranium
black whiskers
snorting
pawing
He had that kind of shallow black eye -- I want a better word to express an eye that has no depth in it to be looked into.
boat-cloaks
incumbrance
favorable
knife and fork
broached
morsel
expostulate
supposititions
Hidee Hidee Hidee hi
fish and pitch and oakum and tar
supp
superannuated
Dutch clock
Sarah Jane
lugger
eked
lobsters, crabs and crawfish
fortnut
rubicund

More Pens

I told you there were more than one hundred pens, so clearly there will be several posts about my pen collection!



One subset is the dry erase pens for the dry erase calendar board that is currently at work. I once had a big idea that I'd plan out my workouts on a changing calendar. Never happened but, these days, I am putting stickers in my regular calendar for every day I go to yoga class.



I think my favorite collection is the Arlington Park Race Course set of pens and pencils. All of these were found in either my orange or black "travel" purses that go diagonally over a shoulder and settle flat against my body. Every time I go to Arlington (or Dairyland before they closed)I use one of these purses. Don't know why. I never win, I always choose horses or dogs based on name and a complete lack of wins in their history.



I love mechanical pencils but I write like a ham-fisted first grader. really, I should have those big fatty pencils and huge pieces of paper for everything I do. I have never been able to use a mechanical pencil without breaking the lead every 4 or 5 words.

How Many Pens Does One Woman Need?

I have a favorite fork.
A back up fork.
And lots of other forks that disappointment me every single time I pull them out of the drawer.
I was raised right: when I have company, I let my guest use my favorite fork ... but I secretly want it for myself.




I also have a favorite kind of pen to use.
I hate using other types of pens.
And yet, a couple weeks ago, I cleaned out my office and cleaned out my book bags and cleaned out my purses and I had more than 100 pens.


My sister has a legitimate pen collection.
She collects floaty pens.
In the process of buying her pens when I've been out an about, I have also picked some up for myself.
I don't like using them, they are not good pens.
I have an Alamo pen and a Liberace pen and a roaming buffalo pen.
I also have the sperm meets egg pen from my sister's baby shower.

Archives

"My special problem was with archivists. The University Library, not content with the promise of a splendid haul of manuscripts and rare books, wanted all Cornish’s papers. The National Library in Ottawa, which had been left nothing, put in a courteous but determined request for Cornish’s letters, records, papers, everything that could be found relating to his career as a collector and patron. The two libraries squared off and began, politely but intensely, to fight it out. Cornish had never, I suppose, thought that his old letters and junk might be of any interest to anyone; he kept no records, his method of filing was to throw stuff into cardboard cartons in whatever order came to hand; his notebooks—preserved simply because he never threw anything away—were a muddle of scribbled reminders of appointments, notes of unspecified sums of money, addresses, and occasional words and phrases that had meant something to him at some time ...

There were treasures, too, and nobody knew about them except myself, because I would not permit the librarians to snoop. There were letters from painters who had subsequently become celebrated, but who wrote to Cornish when they were young and poor, letters of friendship and often of touching need. They illustrated their letters with sketches and scribbles that were funny and delightful, and sometimes of beauty. When I explained all of this to Arthur Cornish, he said: “I leave it up to you; Uncle Frank trusted you and that’s quite good enough for me.” Which was complimentary but unhelpful, because the librarians were tough.

The National Library’s case was that Cornish had been a Great Canadian (how he would have laughed, for he had as little vanity as any man I ever knew) and everything about him that could be preserved should be given the archival treatment, catalogued, cross-indexed, and preserved in acid-free containers so that it would never perish. But the University Library saw Cornish as a great benefactor of the University who had shown his esteem for its Library by leaving it a splendid collection of fine books and manuscripts; his memory should repose, so far as possible, in their hands.

Why? I asked. Were not the treasures themselves sufficient without all the rubbish, much of which seemed to me to be good for nothing but the incinerator? No, said the archivists, in controlled voices beneath which I could hear suppressed shrieks of rage and horror at my ignorance and obtuseness. Surely I was not forgetting Research, that giant scholarly industry? Students of art, students of history, students of God knows what else, would want to know everything about Cornish that could be recovered. How did I expect that the official biography of Cornish could be written if all his papers were not in responsible hands, forever?"