Sometimes we need art to absorb toxic angst lest we poison ourselves with anger. -ag
Nothing much. Inspirations and notes. I like to keep it clean, between.
Sister Corita Kent’s rules and Bertolt Brecht, Berlin 1931. Black Scranton Steamtown Magnet. Giving blood is the least I can do to give back; to justify my footprint, my consumption of resources. Always give back. I’m rooting for you Wanda. Nod to Ginsberg’s HOWL on the City Lights Bumper sticker I’m considering putting on the car. That’s an Allen Ginsberg quote scribbled at the top of the board. The Howlmobile does not have a name. Allen into Al; Big Al after my grandfather. Once upon a time, I was Little Al. The Proofreader’s Marks remind me of the Hobo Code.
Post-its to remind me what my brain was thinking. Or should think more about in the future. “Coney Island of the Mind,” Ferlinghetti. “Peter Pan Goes Wrong panto.” Show me why your vision will work (writing workshop). Building Sandcastles. Show within a show. LESSON: Dialogue & time period. Solo performance devising workshop (Fringe?) LC ART 105 OA syllabus + updated content due 5/22 – GOAL 5/15. Most important dates and appointments are written in the planner. Or on the mini board on my desktop.
Above that: the sweetest Christmas correspondence from my daughter in L.A. Bonjour, Miranda!
“The show is over. The audience get up to leave their seats. Time to collect their coats and go home. They turn around – no more coats and no more home.” A postcard from the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh – Untitled (1991) by Christopher Wool.
Simply saying I turned 51 last week does not convey the heft of these years I’ve accumulated.
I am officially old enough to sit around and talk about the old days.
It was kind of Lawrence to have me as a guest on his revived public access program “Stories, Wisdom & Recipes.”
Find it on Electric City Television via ECTV.Network or watch via YouTube, below.
peace & blessings -ag
Leroy Sprout.
The first name was chosen by a third grader at Drums Elementry last week when we could remember the name I gave my turtle puppet last year.
This morning one of last year’s students remembered.
“Your turtle’s name is Sprout,” she quietly informed. It must have come to her after our first session last week and she’d been waiting days until this morning to see me again so she could reveal it.
Of course! His name is Sprout.
I meant to look it up but it was an unusually busy week.
Sprout was named last year or maybe the previous fall when the students (then in second grade) and I began our study of storytelling by using superhero stories from comic books, tv, and movies as examples of how stories work.
It’s an especially fitting name now that we’ll be creating four new stories in which each of the student’s characters is inspired by the function different parts of speech play in a sentence. You know, Nouns are matter-of-fact, they know the names of things. They are good at trivia. Adjectives are sensitive with highly-attuned senses. They give vivid descriptions. Verbs are active and adverbs tell them how to act. Conjunctions bring people together or provide alternatives. They are natural mediators. Pronouns are shape-shifters, adapting and filling in for others as needed.
The topic of the plays will have something to do with plants, so Sprout will have to make an appearance. Perhaps he can cameo as a deus ex machina, of sorts. A mystical character that can step in like a higher power and intervene if the story gets stuck. I delight knowing there will be a moment in the future I get to teach them what a deus ex machina is and how it functions in a story.
At the rate they are going, they may not need an intervention. I almost cried as they showed how well they had absorbed the lessons of the previous year.
Within minutes, they named their characters, gave them traits based on the parts of speech as described to them, and began drawing pictures to show what they look like. One student’s character is a cactus and looks suitably spiny. Another student ran over to tell me that he was going to be the villain in their story. “Great! I told him. Your character can cause problems.”
I shared his announcement with the room.
“Your characters don’t need to be superheroes,” I told them, “but some of them will be heroes in that they are solving problems in the play. Other characters will be causing the problems.”
One group quickly selected the rainforest as the setting for their play. I told them to do research. Find out what the threats are to plants in the rainforest. “It’s people,” a student responded without hesitation.
The energy and enthusiasm of third grade is astonishing. I wish I could siphon some off the top and pump it into my morning college classes.
On the 50-minute drive home, listening to Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, I bookmarked a passage from chapter five to write down when I got home.
“A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, ‘Do you think I could be a writer?’
‘Well, the writer said, I don’t know. Do you like sentences?’
The writer could see the student’s amazement.
‘Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences?’
If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter, he said, ‘I like the smell of the paint.'”
-ag
Among my favorite volunteer gigs has been on the panel of judges for Poetry Out Louds’s regional competition at WVIA studios. Shot in January, the program will air this week on Thursday, April 7, in conjunction with National Poetry Month.
Memorizing and reciting poetry is an excellent exercise for the brain as well as ideal public speaking practice. Additionally, in reading poems, we are experiencing the rhetoric of poetry – the rhythms of the language as well as the vivid and creative word choices – which can inspire and inform the choice of more engaging language in our own writing and speech.
Tune in at 7 p.m. to see the program or find it archived online after the broadcast date.
Our regional winner went on to become runner-up at the state level – find out why!
There’s still room to participate in this free workshop on Thursday! Call to register so we know to expect you. 🙂
Attend one or all – there will be a different creative writing project in each session! -ag
There are probably other things I should be doing right now but this is what’s coming out.
-ag
(WordPress upload looks darker than the image in my photoshop window?)
Set in the frighteningly near future of 2040, The Ferment is an audio drama about a college student who gets caught up in an anti-fascist rebellion as the United States of America dissolves into disparate regional countries with closed borders and diminished freedoms.
Thanks to spring break, I found myself with the time to pull the project forward from its back burner and make significant progress on the characters and story details. It’s proving a timely outlet for my economic and political angst.
I imagined this project as a fictional podcast prequel to a feature screenplay set in one of the new “rehabilitation” camps (Comfort Stations or ComStats) where homeless “nomads” are incarcerated until they can potentially be reintegrated into society as productive consumers contributors. I still hope to get this screenplay written as well, but as the prequel will be much cheaper to produce, why not get it written first.
Due to an overloaded work schedule the past couple of years after grad school, I’ve hardly managed to produce more than a handful of poems even as several script projects are burning holes in my brain demanding attention. My work schedule continues to shift. I’ve been looking for summer work as I move into the second half of this semester teaching five classes as an adjunct at three different schools. I pray to continue making teaching sustainable but after six years of structuring part-time jobs around adjunct contracts, I’m starting to wonder if a full-time professor position is an impossible dream.
After leaving the newspaper in 2016 and then going back to school in 2017, I gave myself until age 50 to figure out how to manage the rest of my life. It’s a month before my 51st birthday and the future is less clear than it’s ever been. I’m overwhelmed with fear of poverty and exhaustion and chronic underemployment. The only thing I know for sure is that regardless of what forks lie ahead, I have to save time to work on my art. I love teaching and helping other people to find their voices and speak their truths, but I cannot allow the brutality of American capitalism to determine my worth. What’s the point of fighting to survive if my soul is lost in the process?
Gregarious Expressions 