Life Class

Diana Athill's book (I'm about midway) is reading pleasure and writing inspiration. 

Her memoirs are such candid invitations to conversation--the kind of book you keep wanting to stop reading for a few minutes to write your own--that you feel like she's right in the room with you telling you what life was like for her. 

One of the things I love is how authentically she renders people, never painting anyone as saint or villain.  Nobody, including (and maybe especially) Diana herself, is idealized.  If pertinent to the story, she tells the kinds of things about herself that most writers (and ourselves in normal conversation) would leave out.

This book dovetails with a collage project I'm working on.  Lyn Belisle's class on "Postcards to Myself"  was a game changer for me and makes me see how similar visual composition and writing are. 

In this class, she teaches us to just glue images and shapes onto a large mat board without thinking  about where it's going.  There will be ugly patches and messy bits, keep moving.  Don't overthink, don't try to control.  (This is the hard part for me as I tend to over-think every single thing.) 

Then you stop at some point.  You take a pre-cut 5 x 7 mat and move it around on the big piece to see if you can find parts of the whole that click.  And voila! you find some.  You get your craft knife and cut them out, and then you keep looking and looking, thinking, "I made that!" 

I was always drawn to art, but for a variety of reasons only put one toe in that river and never got as deep as ankles.

Now here I am,  living in my cozy little cave filled with art supplies, rarely going anywhere, staying up all hours gluing and painting and cutting.  The bed, the floor, the sofa, the bathroom--every surface is covered with giblets of paper. My hands at this moment are splotched with burnt umber and green, white tempera paint on my nails.

Somewhere in this thick book of Diana Athill's  (I wish I could find it), she says something like this:  There is no greater pleasure than making something that without your doing it never would have existed.

The sun will soon be up and the skunk outside will be gone and I'll take a  trip to get my morning Diet Coke from Percy and Andy at the Whataburger window.  I'll be riding along so happy about Kamala, collages and chapters!