Salt Alum, Molly Caro May came in yesterday to speak about her first published memoir and it was an awakening for me. She read excerpts from her book and I was carried by her words. I was inspired to write...and also thinking ahead about my artist statement and project statement at the end of the semester. I am one run on sentence sometimes. During the Q & A portion, I felt brave and asked her if she "had any tips or recommendations on how to awaken the mediocre writer." After a short burst of laughter from my classmates, she answers that she gives herself journal prompt like questions and allows herself to write for at least an hour (I think)...or even minutes.
I came home and started writing...as usual, I fell asleep, this time, mid thought...
Don’t fluff the hustle.
Last week was difficult. It just was. I don’t know if I feel disconnected or what. But I couldn’t handle it.
I felt like my brain was unraveling with every turn of wheels on the bus.
What does it all mean? I don’t fucking know. I just know that I must make photographs…and make
photographs that are compelling to me. Photography is the window and a mirror. Right now, if
photography was a mirror, it would see me eating cake on the phot
What the hell? What was I even saying? I know I probably started talking about cake because I made a photograph of a chocolate cake out of guilt. I was guilty for not photographing the sweet buns offered to me by a sweet Filipino woman the first time I visited my subject's house. I have no idea what question I was writing this prompt to.
Were I'm trying to get to is that writing has never been my strong point. I envy the lyrics and the poets (essentially the same thing), who can craft up a world with words. I hope that by the end of the semester, I've at least unleashed some sort of inner writer in me.
To steer clear into another subject, we are working on a conceptual video. The term, conceptual, is still a thing I'm trying to grasp. I took my classmate, Nicole, to Peaks Island and we got to enjoy the beautiful scenery while filming the world around us.
Here she is having an American Beauty moment filming a plastic grocery bag blowing in the wind. Everything was so beautiful around us and the time slipped away from us. It got dark quickly and we still had a ways to walk to get to the ferry terminal. As we were walking, right after I had just mentioned how I wished a car would stop and give us a ride...one pulled up beside us and rolled down the window. Desperate, Nicole and I hoped into the car ignoring our guts. He spoke in a deep tone and a thick accent and I was scared. I started the conversation right away that we were students from Salt and that the time got away from us and we needed to be on the 7:30 ferry and it was currently 7:30. He mentioned being a Documentarian himself and having just reached out to our director early that morning and asked us what projects we were working on. Nicole took the lead and mentioned that she was Switzerland working on a project about asylum seekers from Burundi. They started speaking French and I was only able to pick up a few words. My guts were wrong and he turned out to be very kind and offered us to come back to his place for a drink if we missed the ferry. Fortunately, the ferry was running late and Nicole and I both shot out of the car and sprinted to it without exchanging our information. The next day he reached out to our director again hoping to get into touch with us (especially the sweet Swiss girl). In a twist of events, we went from walking in the dark to meeting a real life Documentarian. It was a pretty neat experience.
And a post about writing got completely away of me! But what a good exercise it has been. Maybe I do need to make myself sit down and write more...no more writing before bed when I'm exhausted.
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