I’ve been reading this book club blog called “The Next Chapter” since the beginning of June.  They have been reading “Wreck This journal” by Keri Smith.  In this book, people are given instructions on each page on different ways to Wreck the Journal.  I’ve been enjoying looking at the progress of peoples journals.  Some at this stage in the game (they are on week 7) have a really glorious patina and in their destruction have become works of art on their own.  Since, I have a thing for journals, I purchased this book with the intention of playing along.

My work/career path right now is SO SERIOUS.  It takes a lot to give myself permission to just screw around in the studio.  So not only does it feel strange to be so awful to this book (some of the things they suggest you do is smear pages with dirt, chew on the pages, etc.), but it also feels strange to share things that I’ve done to this book, because my efforts aren’t… serious.

I’ve moved into my new studio this past week.  This is my first day off from work, teaching, or moving since the beginning of June.  I’ve been keeping a mental sketchbook of what I want to work on this past month and a half.  After a month an a half of not physically working on my art, I have a huge list.

When I walked into my studio this morning, ready to get to work, I of course, felt totally overwhelmed.  I noticed this book on my desk and decided to crack this book open today and started dabbling through the pages.

I worked on the book for about an hour.  I found myself feeling limited, which surprised me.  This book tells you what to do on each page, and I kept finding myself thinking, “But I want to do this instead” or “I’ll start with this ‘instruction’ but then I’ll embellish it”.

While working I was reminded of a practice that I used to do in my studio:  The first thing I would do after walking into my studio, would be to pull out a piece of paper and just mindlessly watercolor for a half hour.  By the time I felt done with it, I would have a new idea, or a struggle with a current project would seem more clear.  Sometime this process would help me remember what I was working on the day before, or would help me make a decision to get some new work started.  The act of getting my hand moving made the transition from home to work easier.

The thing I like about what is happening with this book is I’m not creating art pieces.  When I’m working on watercolors, I still have a dialog in my head about whether or not what I’m working on will be any good.  I’m still judging.  With this book I found myself trying to solve problems with the tasks presented to me, and looking for new avenues, with but had no intention of making an “art piece”.

Here is some of the pages I wanted to share today:

I started with this page, where it asks you to drip something on the page and then fold the book in half and make a print.  I poured coffee, india ink and speed ball ink on the page and got this:

Since this book is not designed to hold that much ink, it bled through about 4-5 pages.  Actually the pattern on the back looks pretty cool:

I then decided to cut through multiple pages:

And then I took all the scraps and scotch taped them to the front page of the book, which actually gave me an idea for a book project I’ve been wanting to work on:

I’ll keep working on this throughout the week/weekend.  Maybe I’ll be able to take some of the explorations in this book an apply it to my regular studio practice.

I can recite almost all the poetry that I wrote when I was a teenager. Those poems became my mantras and those mantras made life bearable. Since then I have written almost no poetry, or none that was as memorable as those verses. When I missed my sister I recited: We waded in crying, my sister holding my hand, Mother we hate the water, But she didn’t understand, when I was insecure about becoming a woman: See the pretty lady with the pretty lady pout, walking to the door, through the door, shaking in her doubt. I remember little else from those years but my collection of words.

The other day, a friend asked me how I dealt with sadness and my answers were: walk up a big hill, watch television, exercise. Surprisingly, my answer did not involve any practice that fueled that sadness into creation. As an adult I rarely rely on creative coping techniques and instead rely on practices that remove myself mentally from the situation. I didn’t realize this about myself until just now, typing out those words. I’m reminded of what Alison wrote in her previous post about quitting, “Won’t you miss out on discovering what it is you will say? (Writers often don’t know, until it’s on the page)”. When I don’t write I do miss what I have to say. How did I forget this and also, how was I so wise eleven years ago? My initial title for this post was “teenagers that don’t scare the shit out of me,” where I would list all of the blogs I read that are written by teenagers and how they make me more optimistic for the future. As much as I hated my teenage years, I’m realizing its redeeming qualities by reading what teenagers now have to say. It seems I have a lot to re-learn from myself of eleven ago.

A few:

http://childhoodflames.blogspot.com/

http://www.lauramarling.com/

http://www.lookbook.nu (many of these kids have blogs)

The story my literature class was reading referenced the great jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, so on a sunny afternoon after jotting down a lesson plan, I wandered to the public library and picked up a box set of Parker’s music. Teaching, as I’ve come to understand it, requires asking incessantly What will help illustrate? What in the world will the students be excited about? The hard part, though likely inevitable as a first year teacher, is the failure. How cool! I think, popping disk 1 into my stereo, and listening to the ways in which the music could speak volumes about the character in the story. I’m not a music theorist, but I’m emotionally attuned to music enough to be able to say that a certain rhythm is persistent or a melody moves from smooth to angular and to think about how that could represent the character’s persistence or moodiness. It’s not a lecture class, so I didn’t prepare a great speech on how the intricacies of a particular song mirror the quirks and trials of the character; it’s a discussion class. The students, I figured, would carry their weight in making connections between the jazz and the story.

The lesson I continue to be smacked with goes something like this: Teach: Guess whose music I brought in today? Students: (Silence) Teach: It’s someone mentioned in the story. His nickname is Bird. Students: (Silence) Teach: It’s Charlie Parker. I’m going to put on a Parker song so we can listen to the kind of music Sonny [the character in the story] wants to play and eventually masters. Students: (Silence, some smirks). The music plays, and some of the students start giggling, likely embarrassed by the awkward feeling of sitting in an English class, staring forward at a teacher who is clearly excited about the outside media she’s brought in to illustrate the text but is now pacing around at the front of the room to jazz, trying to perfect the volume level and praying the students will find something useful or interesting in the exercise. The first song finishes and another one starts, and the teacher can sense that the giggling, shifting-in-their-seats students are done with Charlie Parker and feel sorry for the lost soul at the front of the room who thought this might be “cool.” The silence after the music is far heavier than any silence that comes after “Will someone read x out loud?” or “Does anyone have an idea about y?” It is the silence of pedagogical flailing. The students know it, and the teacher, with all of her good intentions knows it, too. Slowly, painfully, the teacher asks a few students for their reactions to the music, and when the answers fail to penetrate the level of “yep, it’s jazz,” the teacher steers the conversation back toward the comfort zone—the routine—discussions of plot, character, and theme.

But maybe I’m a little hard on myself. Not all learning happens in the classroom. I’ve experienced as a student how something my prof. said or did clicked weeks or months later. And maybe there is value in being pushed a little out of the comfort zone, departing from the usual let’s get in a circle and talk about the reading routine. The lesson in the moment of flailing, as I understand it, is a simple one: teaching is hard. Teaching something you love has its own peculiar challenges. I’ve never brought music to my composition classes because the material never plucked at my soul the way fiction does, begging to be discussed and presented in ways that can, with hope, encourage students to find intrigue and value in narrative. And maybe the crux of the problem is that I’m expecting students to find that intrigue in the same ways I do, without doing much explaining regarding my pedagogical choices.

Like making and, maybe more so, revising art, teaching requires a keen understanding of one’s purpose as well as an open mindedness toward purpose and meaning that comes to mind (both teacher’s and students’) in the moment, in the classroom. I know that the dreaded questions are the most vague and often feel rhetorical: What did you think? What does it mean? So??? But I ask them anyway. And my hope is that, as I gain confidence in myself as a teacher and my ability to impart wisdom about the material at hand, I’ll continue to ask those questions, but I’ll have a few specific and interesting back up plans. I’ll know exactly why I had them listen to jazz, besides the obvious reference in the story, and I’ll be able to talk about it with grace. Until then, I’ll flail, but I’ll pay close attention in the process.

I have not destroyed any of my journals, but I have destroyed many of the extensive plans I’ve made in some of these journals. Plans that were a quick fix for a happier future away from the life I was leading at the time. Some of these include:

Opening a vintage shop

Traveling through Thailand for several months

Studying abroad in China

Then India

Then Budapest

Becoming a fashion designer

Becoming a writer

Becoming a photographer

Moving to New York

The important thing I’ve taken out of making (and subsequently destroying) all these plans is my desire not to settle for a life that excludes creativity or adventure.

At present I am living in San Francisco and outside of my day job of managing two coffee shops, planning probably the most challenging endeavors to date: a long duration art performance piece based on Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills. I will be chronicling my piece, Unstills, at the website www.unstills.wordpress.com and will also be writing some pieces about it for My Destroyed Journals.

It seems natural to begin this dialog by discussing the title of this project and how it fits in with its overall objective.

The simple/literal story is as follows: Over a period of 12 years I had amassed a catalog of 10 journals that I had religiously kept since the age of 13. At the age of 25 I threw them all away.

The metaphorical implications of this act: When I was maintaining these pages, I was convinced that I would benefit somehow by every once in a while returning to them. As my future self I would have the ability to see where things went wrong or how I would have done things differently. This tangible change of mind meant something to me, it felt like progress.

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