These beings appeared to me last week in my Exploding Your Creativity workshop. They introduced themselves in a scene I wrote using my non-dominant hand. (We were practicing a Use Your Creative Limits exercise I love.) Then space kid and canine made their inky way onto construction paper. Now I'm a little obsessed with them. What I want to know is, who do you think they are? What's their story? Their background? Where do they come from? Where are they? What are they doing? What do they want? I have a few ideas, but I want to hear yours. Share in the comments if you like, or wherever I post on social media. I think something larger may happen with them but I don't know what yet...
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Whatever my recent Cabin workshops Refilling Your Creative Well and Exploding Your Creativity (in progress) have been doing for participants, they've been doing a lot to shake up my creative perspective, open up new mental windows and shine light on doorways to unlock in spirit, heart, body, soul. I haven't been doing as much of the homework that I assign as the artists who signed up, but I've enjoyed taking part in our quick bursts of different kinds of making within the two-hour weekly sessions. Below are a few first-starts I made in our Week One and Two sessions of Exploding Your Creative Well and a couple of the collages from the Refilling Your Creative Well workshops (in February/March and August/September/October 2022) that serve as compasses for the direction I want my life to be pointing at this moment. Looking at these assembled in a row, I can see some of my tendencies and habits that could invite me to break out of those boxes (which will be the focus of Exploding Your Well, Week 4). There are words I'd like to cut, phrases I could revise and images I'd develop if I wanted to refine them further, but that's not the point. They're not meant to be finished products -- or products at all. Throwing together colorful messes helps me get out of my head and notice what I'm noticing, which helps when I'm gathering material for big new projects as I am now. Whether or not you identify as an artist, may you find time, energy and materials this late fall and winter to scramble up text, images and colors (and then some). May that help you look at your world in different ways and surprise yourself. In February, for the first Refilling Your Creative Well workshop at The Cabin, we created medals for ourselves, wrote the ceremony speeches and presented ourselves with our awards, as inspired by Andrew Simonet. Below is my medal and speech. This medal is for Heidi, for enduring the little things.
For sustaining at her everyday job when she wasn't always sure she wanted to be there on campus, rules changing moment to moment, frozen bike rides, students absent more often than present, in two worlds at once: Zoom and in person, coworkers going maskless, policing students on safety, getting Covid and working from home while sick, exhausted, depleted. For learning a new class, a new system, a new platform and modality every semester since spring 2020. For showing up. To the email inbox. Oh that dreadful box of doom. What will today bring? A mini-heart attack with every open. And the eye twitches! Good gawd. After six months of online classes, she didn't think either eye would stay still again. This medal is for Heidi getting students to laugh, cry, spend time with each other, offering every flexibility possible. And whenever she could, she gave herself time. To write. To be. And one Sunday every few months to do nothing at all but be human. She learned not to work or take meetings on Sundays. Learned from her panic attacks, from days she felt as much aversion going into the classroom as she did on her worst years in high school. She stopped checking email after 6pm. Started checking once a day, even -- at least the personal email. So this medal is for Heidi. For learning to love herself a little more. Learning that she needs travel, creative well being and a supportive community to sustain her. And declaring that she's gonna make smaller steps to get to those bigger goals, dammit, because each day each day each day a little something is possible a tiptoe ounce atom of forward movement can be made toward giant impossible dreams. So this medal is for Heidi. For going after joy. This is Walter. Hello Walter! My partner/husband/love and I found Walter the Walnut bear in our recent trip to Oakland. Walter wanted to join us on our return home through the Redwood Forest. Here (above) is Walter enjoying the Sue-Meg Park campground. Here (above) is Walter on the shorelines of Crescent City. And in the Redwoods National and State Parks. I/we look forward to future travels with Walter! Experiencing new/favorite destinations through his eyes helps me look more closely. Thanks, Walter!
Bye for now! I found the reminders below from summer 2016, written before the world changed and changed and changed again. Are these still my commitments as a writer? What is different, new? What can I lean into more? What can I reexamine? (This is self-inquiry -- you can answer in the comments but the questions are really for me.) What are your commitments? (This you can definitely answer.) In my writing,
I'm committed to aiming for big global topics and intimate, human connection. To cultivating empathy and discovering how to open up my own vulnerable truth in order to allow that from others. My audience, my collaborators. I'm committed to creating in a way that speaks to the silent and opens up a platform to allow the disenfranchised to speak. That offers opportunity for the empowered to listen. I'm committed to using my points of privilege and my experience as ways to advocate for others, for the outsiders, minorities, for targeted groups. I'm committed to listening more/deeper to the stories I intend to represent or leave space for others to represent. I'm committed to reaching higher every time, paying specific attention to the needs of each project. In my process, I'm committed to write every day, whatever that means. I'm committed to spending good time on one thing at a time, one pursuit, one project. When my focus isn't split, I feel better, the work goes better. I'm committed to taking my time. I'm committed to making the change I want to see in the world through what I write and how. I'm committed to self care, to kindness. To moving/loving my body. To taking walks and baths. And naps. To waiting. Not-doing. Un-doing. Wandering. Meditation. I'm committed to being a playwright first but continuing my exploration of poetry, fiction, nonfiction, memoir, screenwriting, writing for radio, even television. I'm committed to free falling. I am a person who can go deeply into a thing. I don't scan the surface, though I have a broad range of interests and abilities. I know where I want to focus, where I intend my attention with intention. I'm committed to being committed to my art. To going big. Turning pro. To learning and teaching and doing. To speaking truth and each time trying to get truer, more specific, more scary. I'm committed to learning how to say the hard thing well, to working with difficult material and making each story more global, more intimate. I'm committed to getting really exact and personal in my work so that I can speak what happened to me and what I deal with in my brain, so I can reckon with it by sharing, and so that others may be more willing to open, share and be human together. I've written and made art for survival. And look here now I've survived I'm surviving. How do I take that privilege and turn it into change? What do I do in my art to respond, to quake, to bellow? How do I stay strong, vigilant, healthy, mentally and physically-- and be a lookout, a safe keeper, be kind with big heart and help care for the oppressed and the silenced? Been in the midst of a big rabbit hole project this year I never anticipated with this cycle of centuries. What is a century? Most basically, a list. This collection of lists is becoming a novella of a book, a shadow box, a podcast. Learn more about the process through the MFA at CIIS Artifact Podcast where this month they devoted an episode to my process completing this series and trying to represent that visually with a shadow box. This weekend on Sunday (May 1) at MING Studios in Boise, I'll be reading from this series for the first time. If you're in Boise and want to hear, I will begin at 7pm through MING Studio's 7o'clock series. Sometimes they lock the doors right at 7, so get there on time :) It's $7 if you're not a member (and if you're an artist, you can be a member for $13 a year!). A lot of the stuff will be raw and vulnerable, freshly typed, so friendly faces please, for this work-in-progress reading. Thank you! Maybe I'll see you there. If not, you can check out some of my process below and the podcast to learn more. Photo by Frida Lannerström on Unsplash Alone time: scale rocks, run impossible sprints. Write with all my senses, limbs. With my own pace, clock, rhythm. Trust that. Spend weeks, months, years lying in wait, envisioning my next feast from my cave. Then it's time to act, to launch rocket in belly. The taste of my craving. Locking sight on her there. Embrace, attach, drag my target up cliff face to a spot safe from vultures, jackals. Engorge, rest. Resume slow. Dream my next fierce outcome. Stealth, quiet. In silence, listen to the orchestra around us in this mountain land. Tiptoe, keep clean, everything arranged as I like. Or I get ruffled. Always watching, preparing the next big leap. Waiting with whole-bodied attention. Inside I growl and bellow -- and sometimes outside. Mostly I seem calm. Hiding in splendor home, creating bizarre fantasies about all of you. Examining differences between the world and me, measuring the limits. Photo by Uriel Soberanes on Unsplash Happy. New. Year. (The more we say it, the more it's true?)
As challenging times continue for many/all(?) of us, I'm finding it even more important to reflect on wins, losses, missed opportunities and new connections. There are a lot more highlights than I expected from 2021 -- maybe if you look back, you'll find the same? I hope so. Here are some from my end: Highlights:
I did make progress on my 2021/2022 goals, but I notice my goals for the next two years do look similar to last year's (and the year before). As Andrew Simonet encourages, I'm trying to think more in terms of decades now, rather than years or days, so that's okay. Progress is progress. These are big goals for me. These days still aren't usual. I'm grateful to be healthy, have work, have a home to live in, be able to afford groceries, rent, bills and small luxuries, and be *relatively* mentally stable. 3 Big Goals for the Next Two Years:
As I've found it challenging to make bold steps in these days of continued uncertainty, finding myself occasionally paralyzed by the unknowns aided by past trauma festering in my ribs, I want to make this a year of more bravery, more stepping forward into what I know I need, letting go of what no longer serves me, more courageous joy, more openhearted rejuvenation, more grounding reflection. May 2022 be my year of claiming space for what I know I need. Thanks to those of you who shared your thoughts about my 500-word artist statement in process. Below is the 250-word version. They'll both live in the "About" section of my website shortly. Feel free to again share observations, what feels like the strongest pieces of language, how it makes you see/invites you into my work and questions, if you like. Regardless, thanks for taking an early glimpse. As a playwright and writer across disciplines, I study the distance between us, seeking connection across differences.
Writing teaches me to trust my brain and get present in my body, two things I once thought impossible. I mine monsters that plagued me through child-and-early-adulthood (and still chase me down), amplifying them to mythic metaphors in locations loaded with personal history, so I can grapple with my mind as a human who lives in an absurd world, just like you. By revealing my most vulnerable secrets, I hope we can see each other more clearly. In my work, tactile language, playful contradictions, kinetic imagery and haunted landscapes bridge spaces between words, between universes, between you and me. I uncover how my disorders, scars, terrors, regrets, curiosities, heartbeats, delights and wonders link with yours, the earth’s and the cosmos’. I cook our rawest parts together in hot lava stew. By physicalizing my most difficult moments and mashing them with yours, along with surprising bursts of dazzling beauty and mystical forces, I hope laughter and meet-cute swoons can bubble alongside the brutality of reality. I want us to take more time to pay attention with intention, to see that the shadows inside us we can’t bear to acknowledge also overwhelm the stranger next to us, those too far away to comprehend, nonhuman persons and unrecognizable entities – and that we share intoxicating joys, dreams, desires, too. Without shame, we can unveil, heal and embrace our weightiest, wildest places for love of interdependence between everything. Hello! I'm working on updating my artist statement. Below is a draft of the full 500-word version (that I can cut down as needed for various applications, but would live on this website along with a 250-word version). If you want, feel free to share your first impressions, using the following questions as guideposts: What is the strongest language -- words/phrases that linger with you? After reading the statement, is it clear what kind of art I make? Is it clear why I do it? Why (I hope) it matters in the world? And how I do it? Does it make you want to see my work? If you already know my work (a bit or a lot), does it sound like what I make, or more aspirational, something I'm reaching for but doesn't quite fit yet? Thank you for reading and any help you'd like to give! Observations and questions are welcome, prescriptions less so. No troll remarks needed, either :) As a playwright and writer across disciplines, I examine the gaps dividing genres, people, perspectives and my own disjointed fragments. Studying the distance between us, I seek connection across differences. I write what terrifies me, juxtaposing the rough and the funny, the silken and sharp, the gorgeous and grotesque to catch a glimpse at what it means to exist on this planet.
Writing teaches me to trust my brain and get present in my body, two things I once thought impossible for me. Swimming through memories I can't believe happened, I mine monsters that plagued me through child-and-early-adulthood (and still chase me down), amplifying them to mythic metaphors in locations loaded with personal history, so I can grapple with my mind as a human who lives in an absurd world, just like you. By revealing my most vulnerable secrets, I hope we can see each other more clearly. Sensory details spark mirror neurons that unite nervous systems. In my work, tactile language, playful contradictions, kinetic imagery and haunted landscapes bridge spaces between words, between universes, between you and me. As I exorcise my past, my peripheral vision widens. Disparate pathways coalesce. Through searching research, conversations, surveys and letters shared with me, I uncover how my disorders, scars, terrors, regrets, curiosities, heartbeats, delights and wonders link with yours, the earth’s and the cosmos’. I pour together collected stories, observations and devised collaborations in hot lava stew, cooking our rawest parts together. Cathartic release brings breath. My play see in the dark: a new myth churns a recurring nightmare from my adolescence with our fears of the other and climate disaster. In a future Juneau, Alaska when all the glaciers have melted, the ice fields have vanished and nothing is recognizable, an isolated community of mutant outsiders must decide what to do with a newcomer: the young girl with a great power that threatens to destroy their village and everyone in it. This play collides environmental collapse, collectivism, poetry, a genocidal shadow beast, radical love and the value of compassion over suspicion. By physicalizing my most difficult moments and mashing them with yours, along with surprising bursts of dazzling beauty flooding with waterfalls, oceans and mystical forces, I hope laughter and meet-cute swoons can bubble alongside the heartbreaking brutality of reality. It's hard being alive today. I want us to take more time to pay attention with intention, to see that the things inside us we can’t bear to acknowledge also overwhelm the stranger next to us, those too far away to comprehend, nonhuman persons and unrecognizable entities – and that we share intoxicating joys, dreams, desires, too. I want us to take stock of our hidden monstrosities. Without shame, we can unveil, heal and embrace our weightiest, wildest places for love of interdependence between everything. What if we held unconditional friendliness toward all citizens of the multiverse, ourselves included? I want to hold out a hand and sit with you through your struggle. Together we can get through this thing called life. |
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$1, $10, $100, whatevs :) Heidi KraayProcess notes on a work in progress (me). This mostly contains raw rough content pulled out of practice notebooks. Occasional posts also invite you into the way I work, with intermittent notes on the hows and whys on the whats I make. Less often you may also find prompts and processes I've brought to workshops, as well as surveys that help me gather material for projects. Similar earlier posts from years ago can be found on: Archives
April 2024
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