Happy Moonday! The Moonday Experiment Continues on MLK Day

Happy Moonday!   This marks week 3 of the Moonday Experiment, designed to help me, and whoever wants to play with me, to take a little time out on Mondays to celebrate the moon by doing something creative and/or wild despite the dominant culture's referendum on Monday wildness.

Today is the U.S.A.'s observation of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, and a holiday from work for many.  What Dr. King has in common with celebrating the moon is simple.  He had a dream.   Dreams are by their very nature wild, uninhibited, from the place of the intuition and the heart. 

In his great book, The 3 'only' Things: Tapping the Power of Dreams, Coincidence, and Imagination, Robert Moss writes, "We dismiss dreams, yet the word dream has magic.  We use it to describe experiences that are hugely important, things that stir the soul and can change the world.  I have a dream.  Martin Luther King may or may not have been inspired by a night dream; by his earliest account, the numinous moment came when he was leaning over a kitchen sink in the middle of the night, close to despair, and felt the presence of a greater power blessing him and propelling him forward.  But we all know what he meant.  The phrase still sends shivers of recognition through us."

I love all dreams, be they silly, strange, terrifying, or illuminating.  Daydreams and night dreams compel me equally.  Dreams are doorways.

            Dream door collage I made this summer.

In the comments, I'd love it if you want to share your own poem, links to your poetry, someone else's poetry that you adore, art, photography, links to videos, to stories of wildness, or just answer this question: What is one of your wildest dreams?  This could be a night dream, or a day dream.

  

A Book That Will Get You In The Mood... to Birth Freaky Brilliant Brain Children, a.k.a. Lynda Barry Rocks!

Last fall my fantastic friend Simone and I went to the New Yorker Festival and listened to Matt Groening and Lynda Barry chat about the artistic process. Simone and I walked away high on ideas, clutching our newly signed copies of Lynda Barry's book, WHAT IT IS, to our chests, clicking our heels all the way home.

Barry is an acclaimed comic strip writer and novelist, best known for Marlys from Ernie Pook's Comeek, as well as a playwright. I hope that sooner or later she will be just as well known for What IT IS, because it is one of those rare books I want to give to everyone I meet.

What excites me about the book is Barry's understanding of the interplay between visual creativity and writing. Like other mammals, humans tend to think, imagine, and remember in images, and yet when we write, we often forget about that. Playing with images helps us remember. The book is part graphic memoir, part creativity workbook, part exploration of the nature of art. It is impossible to read the book and not feel inspired.

After reading it for a bit I wanted to pick up a glue stick and some images and dance a little jig and then do some writing. It reminded me just how much fun the creative process can be. Whenever I open it, it feeds my desire for stories and fresh ideas while my eyes feast on Barry's deceptively simple ('I can do that too!') artwork.

It feels wrong to flatly state the shimmery ideas inside the book, presented like treasure in a child's pirate game. Here is something from my journal that I was inspired to write in watercolor, without stopping to think, on Barry's suggestion.

'I bought a blue rose on Avenue A today with Eve.
It was expensive, but I was thinking about...making friends with death.
How to do that?
'Blue roses' reminds me of Tennessee Williams, of course,
and my grandmother
who lit her hedges with blue lights
in honor of Mary, goddess of the sea, at Christmastime.
It is clearly unnatural, this blue rose.
I carried it with me,
poking out the top of my green shopping bag
unconcerned, like it was somehow tougher than other roses.'


Here are some of the questions Barry asks in the book:

When images come to us, where do they come from?

Does your imagination know what year it is?

What is the past made of?

When we imagine things we don't want to imagine, why can't we stop ourselves?

She expresses many of her ideas obliquely through her graphic memoir, suggesting fun games to strengthen her readers' imagistic powers in the fourth quarter.

Lynda Barry has a website that has said it is 'coming soon!' for at least a year. There are some great images of What IT IS on her myspace page, but I find that format really difficult to navigate.

She typically teaches writing classes at least a couple of times a year, and I hope to have the chance to take one sometime for the hit of inspiration I know I'll receive.

And yes, I know I'm frothing at the mouth about her, but she and What IT IS are worth the froth.

Collage for creativity and self-understanding

I love to collage.  Its a way that I get unstuck creatively.  I don't consider myself a visual artist, and so collage isn't something I do for 'work'.  Its all just fun, and so I can love my collages in a way that I find I can't love my writing-- that is, completely uncritically.  My collages are like letters sent to me my by my subconscious. 'This is what you're into right now', they tell me. Sometimes startling patterns emerge.

The key for me is not caring how it turns out. The collage doesn't need to be pretty, or sophisticated, or even interesting. Its a game.

When I'm feeling miserable about something, the images help me to discover what else is happening in the murky backwaters of my subconscious. It may be that a part of me finds the situation funny or exciting, and I am not as pathetic as I'd assumed I was. Collaging helps me to break out of feeling habits by scratching beneath the surface.



I find words and ephemera from old magazines, newspapers, books from the street, whatever flotsam is lying around that grabs my attention. The only rule is that I can't stop and think about why I like a word or image until the collage is finished. (Although I'm always breaking that rule.)

I collage when I can't write, when I'm raging, overwhelmed, confused, depressed, elated, blissed out, flummoxed. I explore my dreams, ideas, or stories I'm creating when the writing feels tight and airless.

I collage often. After taking words and images and pasting them on paper, I can usually make my way back to the pen or the keyboard. I've listened.