In My Dreams I Write in Paris (but I Really Went to Frankfurt...)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this image of me writing in the perfect Parisian café: outdoors on a little street fragrant with coffee and budding chestnut trees. I even know what I’m wearing: a tan linen skirt, leather sandals, an orange silk top and a straw hat. My journal is brown leather and I’m using a smooth-flowing fountain pen just like I do in real life. Whatever I’m writing, it’s profound. Serious. Deep. It’s writing-that-matters. Better yet—it’s already contracted to be a best seller! As I write I see a group of little boys playing soccer nearby. The ball rolls close to my table. I smile, unconcerned at the interruption. I toss the ball back; I sip the coffee I just ordered. It’s a warm, sunny day and the words are unstoppable. I breathe in the image, feel it, believe it. So how come I still ended up in Frankfurt?

In my day-job I work with my husband, Dave Storey, and his company that makes his patented line of guitar picks. And every year, the world’s largest music trades show is held in Frankfurt, Germany. So well-prepared with lots of warm clothes, throat lozenges (you do a lot of screaming over the noise at music trade shows), and for some crazy reason my latest manuscript (I thought I would be bored and would have all this extra time to write. Talk about dreams…), I dutifully followed my husband through acres and acres of booths displaying everything from the latest in electric guitars to the hot new trends in accordions and xylophones. (Yes, my hearing is still bad. Very bad.) By the end of the week, totally exhausted from covering what felt like thousands of miles of pavement and stairs; bored with my de rigueur and funereal wardrobe of ubiquitous black clothing; and a little overwhelmed by the starkness of a big industrial city poised between winter and spring, I wondered why on earth I ever thought travel was a desirable occupation.

Maybe it’s because I actually had a good time. Despite the non-stop meetings and hurried rush to get to all our appointments with distributors, there were wonderful moments I’ll never forget, such as stopping at the exquisite Faber-Castell pen store and buying a set of pastel pencils, and later going to an orchid show at the Botanical Gardens the Sunday before we flew home.

Now, two weeks later, recovering from airplane flu and finally figuring out which manuscript is going to take precedence for the rest of the year (not the one I took with me), I’m writing again not in Paris or Frankfurt, but in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I wear jeans and turtlenecks, my coffee is homemade. I do have the fountain pen, but find I’m using it mainly to journal; my Alphasmart is much better suited for the manuscript that isn’t exactly profound, but makes me excited enough to want to follow my new set of characters deep into my much-needed sleeping hours. And the pastel pencils are wonderful; I can’t wait for the weather to be warm enough so I can take them sketching in the park. And if that isn’t enough, I can always pretend I’m in Paris wearing my straw hat. The imagination has no borders—why should I?

Tip of the day: Where do you wish you were writing right now? Envision your “perfect” writing environment and see what happens. No matter where you are, you can always bring an element or two of that perfect place into your current writing nook.

Getting Back to Clay

Sometimes it’s good to switch disciplines and to explore new creative territory. For instance, I consider myself a prose writer, but there’s nothing I enjoy more than delving into poetry or tackling a screenplay. It’s the same with working in the visual arts. I’m fascinated by art materials and the wide variety of new pencils, sketchbooks, and paints available on the market. But like so many other writers and artists I know, giving myself permission to whittle out a little extra space for something new can often seem impossible.

Until a few months ago, it had been nearly a year since I had allowed myself the opportunity to “write” in one of my favorite mediums: clay. My reasons for keeping my half-used 20-lb. bag of cone 4 terra cotta in the closet were about as weak as my list of “why I can’t write today” excuses: no time, no real studio space, nowhere to stack green ware (manuscripts) without it (them) getting broken (disorganized). Thankfully, by mid-January I got sick of my whining and decided the kitchen table was as good a work space as any other. So was signing up for a refresher class at a local Albuquerque studio, Mudfish Pottery.

I admit that for the first half hour of my first class I was totally overwhelmed. What on earth was I doing getting up early on a Saturday morning to travel all the way across town to sit with a lump of dirt? The mantra “make something” kept going through my mind. But what? At the same time I’d forgotten how good the smell of clay can be when the plastic bag covering it is opened. Better yet is the endless stream of ideas flooding my head and hands as I struggle to settle on just one project. In the end I followed the rest of the class and made a coil flower pot that for some strange reason reminds me of the south of France. I can’t imagine not having it close by on my bookshelf.

As a child, I hated being dirty. No mud pies for me. The writer’s world of clean white paper, smooth-flowing fountain pens, and precise typewriter keyboards fit me, or so I thought, much better than a messy art studio. Like a lot of my childhood misconceptions, how wrong I was!
It was a writer friend who suggested I might want to give up some of those early biases. I am forever grateful to her insight. Clay, rather than repelling me, opened me to the raw power of potential and possibilities. I took to clay like some close relative of the Three Little Pigs. In the early days of my new found passion, I would spend hours scouring my yard and house for improvised clay tools. I saw rocks and twigs, bark and broken household items all as coveted items for pattern-making and story-telling. One remarkable afternoon I took a leather-hard coil pot outside to carve a design into the rim. I remember thinking, “I’ve done this before.” It seemed to me that I had spent dozens of lifetimes piercing and cutting away at a similar surface. As I worked, I found myself engaged in a story that spoke louder to me than anything I had heard before. When I was finished I went inside and wrote it all down. Part of it became my inspiration for this current blog posting.

Working with clay I had to learn that cracks were for letting in (or out) more light. Fingers—not my brain--had to do the walking. And disasters could always be recycled: broken shards could be put in the bottom of flowerpots; birds and squirrels never noticed ugly glazes on the food and water dishes I placed in the woods around my house. More than anything else, though, I learned not to take myself too seriously. And at the same time, I learned not to laugh at myself too hard, either. Whether I’m writing, painting, or sculpting, the main thing is I’m having fun. That’s all I ever wanted anyway.

Tip of the Day: Don’t get stuck in a creative rut. If you’re a writer, go to an art supply store and buy yourself some fun materials for a new way to tell your story. If you’re an artist, add some words to your latest project. Turn a painting into a poem and vice versa.