dreaming in words and pictures
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Last summer, early in the season, I was sort of taking a break on poems before starting my Persephone project and decided to try my hand at some more fiction writing. It was something I had done on occasion and usually dipped in and out of (mostly horror stories.) Part of it was I suddenly had so much time at the end of the day without nightshift and commutes. Like during pandemic lockdowns, I would spend my days working on things and then be unsure where to turn my attention to after dinner. I could have started watching streaming offerings early, or maybe read if my concentration was getting better, but I decided I might as well use that time to write. I was also sort of scared still--that I would starve, that I would be flailing having given up the security of a full-time job. I figured if I could write something a little more marketable than poetry, maybe that would be a nice thing to fall back on. Eventually, I placed a pause on that and went back to poems, and as I took on more writing jobs, felt a little more secure in my abilities to make the rent.
However, the stories, and the better part of a novella sitting at 25 K words were still rattling around in my dropbox---some horror, but also some smutty historical romance stuff. Less bodice ripper and more porntastic, I figured it was ridiculous and tucked it away once I was writing poems again, channeling some of those more scandalous energies into the Persephone project. I would read them occasionally, even submitted a couple horror pieces (but got no actual response either way) The novella, I wasn't sure if it was just a fun exercise, but a while back, I dug out the file and its much less terrible than I remember after sitting a year.
Writing fiction is strange to me. It always feels a little like dreaming through your fingers. Or hallucinating via keystrokes. Poems are more like little machines that you stoke with a stick and start the fires burning and the tiny wheels turning, and a few minutes later, you have a poem. Many of the writers I watch on youtube often discuss the two different kinds of novelists--the pantsers and the plotters. Even in my limited experience, I am definitely the former..even my smutty novella still doesn't quite know where its going, though I have a dim view of what may be over the next hill. It is also how I make everything--poems, collages, videos, paintings. For someone who is actually sometimes organized to a fault, creative endeavors, what actually happens in their stories or structure or scope is still a mystery (and why occasionally projects turn out to be entirely different beasts than intended.)
I've been working on a new set of collages since the weekend..moody blue-ish green and dream-like. Slowly, with each new one I make, I feel a story clicking inside them, some small gears catching metal. This was true of a couple recent collage series, basically everything but the technogrotesque pieces and home improvements ones that are in response to poems that already exist. Otherwise, I have refrained from writing pieces to accompany the latest ones--though this may change. Sometimes the collages feel like similar stories just in a different language. The materials I find and use end up building the story, which ends up being far less guided than even the mediums that involve language In that case maybe its more like dreaming through images.I found a picture of a governess and worked her into a tun-of-the-century early photographic image. Suddenly I was thinking about Turn of the Screw and Jane Eyre, and any novel that involves a waifish girl wandering the hallways of a decrepit mansion with sinister inhabitants. As in, exactly my sort of thing...
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