kinetic prose

Isn’t it amazing? So many moving parts. So strangely fluttery under water, alien even in its own home…an elegant armored spaceship. And always so (sadly) dead when I find them on the beach.

A student of mine made an absolutely amazing animation involving horseshoe crabs once…layers of pristine white and shadows, so very cool and clever. I think I’m going to make mine from brown paper bags…and see if I can hide some story inside. Just looking at this photo, I think there may be a million such places. We’ll see…

I do love haikus. Here’s a shot of the first five days of my Baltimore Fun-A-Day project, for which I’m writing a haiku about something that happens each day, and then attempting to illustrate it. (Emphasis on the attempting.)

At the end, I’ll bind the signatures into a little book about January.  Title ideas?

Squishing the life out of the 31 individual signatures that will eventually contain my January haikus.

Just a quickie post today, as I (and the rest of the world) recover from the holidays and all that, to give a shout out to Fun-A-Day Baltimore. Yeah!

Fun-A-Day means spending each day of January doing something awesome. That is, you pick an awesome thing at the beginning — drawing a dog, singing a song, capturing a rainbow — and you do that thing each day of the month.

Last year I drew on library cards. This year, I’m planning a little collection of haikus and drawings inspired by whatever happens to me on a particular day. At the end I’ll bind them all together. So far… Day 1: reading a really scary book. Day 2: eating sushi alone.

You should try it! So much fun…and a great way to beat the cold grodiness of January.

Book club girls toasting a decade together. Huzzah!

It’s often hard to stay focused these days. It’s like there’s a constant gravitational pull from all the important satellites in my life — family, work, creative impulse. I’m thinking someone needs to invent a time machine, stat. Or some kind of reading-by-osmosis sort of situation. Got it, scientists?

Thankfully, the steady presence of a group of great girlfriends has kept me reading regularly at times when everything else was spinning like crazy. And last week, we celebrated a decade together, which still completely amazes me. That’s a LOT of books. A lot of food and wine. And a lot of witnessing of the magic that happens to ladies as they move from their mid-20s into their mid-30s. Not that we’re that old or anything.

You can see our ongoing reading list here. We’ve experienced some doozies (Gifted Hands by a certain brilliant Baltimore surgeon springs immediately to mind), but many, many more beauties. We’ve read outside our interests, embracing graphic novels, science fiction, science non-fiction, poetry, YA. We’ve braved some hefty — and some so-light-we-wonder-if-they-even-qualify-as-book-books — stuff. And we’ve learned so much talking it all through together.

Not everybody finds a group of friends like this, and not many groups stay together this long. I know I say I’m lucky fairly often, but it’s true. These girls are rock solid friends, incredibly smart and funny — and I’m lucky to be a part of it all.

Cheers, ladies! And welcome to decade number two.

Anna Bronski (the grandmother), Agnes Matzerath (the mother), and Oskar (the son)

I know, I can’t quite believe it either. After more than a year of building/writing/sewing, and more than a year before that conceptualizing, I’m finally finished my third and final Tin Drum-inspired poem doll, Oskar.

View all three poem dolls with details at my Baker Artist site.

As the unreliable narrator of the book, I should have known Oskar would be the hardest to pin down. When I first started thinking about this project overall, I originally thought of creating Oskar as someone who was shedding his own skin. But, seeing as how he wills himself to stop growing at the age of three, I ultimately decided to use growth and memory as the inspiration for my structure.

I’ve tried to make the physical experience of reading each poem doll mirror an aspect of the doll’s character, and also somewhat intrusive — as each poem touches on private, uncomfortable moments of their lives. You must lift Anna’s skirt, or unzip Agnes’s dress — in Oskar’s case, the reader must unbutton his suspenders to read his poem.

When you do, Oskar expands to reveal a poem written and sketched on shrinky dink material. I have always been intrigued by the idea of scrimshaw, and the shrinky dink material resembles it so well once it’s baked. I wrote a poem about the lies etched in Oskar’s memory and his bones…and the truths he will cling to as he allows himself to grow.

This was a challenging project, one that forced me to work with new shapes and materials, new tools — the dreaded stabby curved needle, for instance. And rightly so, as Oskar’s character challenges anyone who reads him. I know I’ve only scratched the surface of this family of characters…but for now, I will rest my needle (and tired fingers) for a bit.

Related: Why do we do the things we do?        Potato heaters and eels…