A Handmade Writer e-Course GIVEAWAY* UPDATED!
I am so excited about this giveaway! Amy Spencer is the wildly talented and creative force behind the blog, Bring Yourself and the author of The Crafter Culture Handbook and DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture. Her first novel, London Clay, is due to be published in 2011.
Amy is also an experienced workshop leader and crafter, and she's teaching an e-course called the Handmade Writer.
Here's a little sneak peak at the course: "The Handmade Writer e-course will help you gather together material from every source imaginable. You will learn about the craft of writing and how to sew these fragments together to build your own pieces of creative writing. This e-course has been inspired by the strength of craft communities as well as the impulse to transform everyday finds into something amazing."
The best part? She's giving away a spot to one of you.
This is a chance for you to make the leap, claim creative space for yourself in your life and take your writing a bit more seriously (even if you don't think of yourself writer!)
Read the whole course description here. It begins Monday 12th April 2010
* Givewaway rules: This giveaway is tiny bit different in that Amy offered this giveaway to me as a way to give you all a gentle, encouraging, nudge to go support A Field Guide To Now... so here's how it will work:
* To enter, make pledge there... and leave a comment here. * Comments can be just one word (say hello!) and pledges can be just 1$. * The winner will be chosen at random by Sprout. * Comments will be closed Saturday, March 6th at 5mEST.
The winner will be announced Saturday evening.
The winner (chosen randomly by SPROUT, who snatched at itty bitty snippets of paper with your names on them) is: Sonrie! Please email me & I'll put you in touch with the incredibly talented Amy.
hello, Monday
Beneath the covers when the day first sets in, I’m not quite here, not quite anywhere else either. Hello, Monday. It’s already 6:03 and the night was a slapdash mess of wake ups. The teeth, they keep coming. Arched back wailing at 3:27a.m. for ten stagger-around-the-room minutes, searching for Tylenol, and then again at 5:06, too early and too late for more or better sleep.
I lie awake, face in the pillows, the thudding of my heart reverberates in my head. My breath moves my ribs up and down, up and down, but I am not here, not all of me, not yet.
Under the weight and softness of my stomach my wrist bones, carpals and metacarpals, are crumpled like soft bits of clay and as I flex my fingers, pins-and-needles set in.
Somehow our boys, both of them, are already in bed between us.
This morning I can feel the way I’m sort of pushing around at the outline of myself with my mind. Hello, day. Hello, memory. Hello, this life of mine. I feel myself begin, reluctantly to inhabit my vertebrae, lungs, buttocks, thighs; in the nick of time I roll out of the way. Bean’s at it already: making a pirate ship out of the covers. Sprout, miraculously stays asleep (of course, now after a night of it) and he is perfect, perfect, perfect here beside me. Rosy, tousled. His hair smells sweet like only him.
The day comes fast then: wooden slats of window shades pulled up; snowmelt; shower steam; the fragrant bar of French lemon soap slipping from my still slack-fingered grip; coffee. The boys are both underfoot (vacation until Wednesday) which gives new meaning to the phrase “work from home,” which is what I try valiantly to do, meeting four deadlines, non-stop screen time, CS4, phone calls, 37 emails, everything interrupted by the repetitive cacophony of BOY.
The day is gray, and the is light translucent and dull, but I like the way the thermometer climbs to 38 before 11am, and how on the south facing fields I can see bare patches where the grass pokes up. I’ve been looking at the trees for signs every day now: the buds are swelling with the secret lives of leaves that wait for chlorophyll, for sun.
Inside, the boys and I are barefoot, and I look at them and feel the fragile container of my ribs nearly snap open with the thunk-thunk-thunking of my little hammer dulcimer heart. Bean with his thin arms and messy hair and growing-in-crooked teeth and ski-jump nose, and Sprout, who has been trying to run from the minute he learned to walk and whose gait looks a wee bit like a cross between a high stepping horse and Frankenstein. Some days I hardly have words. I have two sons. I don’t think this wonder ever goes away.
And so without stopping it’s night already. We visit friends after work and arrive home late. The sink is crowded; the cat wants fresh water; the refrigerator needs to be cleaned. Instead I let the boys stay up another minute. Bean and I eat toast with cloudberry jam. Sprout carries pot lids around the room. Nonstop, there went Monday.
How was your day?
PS--I have a super-duper exciting giveaway for tomorrow, that I can’t wait to share!
PPS--Did you see? I made some pretty Field Guide To Now blog buttons. Please grab one, if you'd like & spread the word. 30% funding tonight is awesome.This is the work I am learning to do
Hello friends! Where have you all scuttled off too this month? I miss you around here… I’ve been changing things up… have you noticed? It's still a work in progress. (I crashed my entire theme twice. I wish I understood CSS.)
Something about having the kickstarter widget broadcast in the sidebar was really throwing off my mojo the past couple of days. I started to hate seeing the amount of funding flatline... and it has been interesting to listen to my own inner dialogue turn doubtful, even as I’ve gotten the most exciting new (!) and incredible support because of it so far. (Can’t tell yet....not for a while.)
I am discovering that art and risk become something else entirely once a dollar sign is attached. It’s made me take myself seriously as a writer and artist in a hundred ways I never saw coming...and for a long, long time I never took art and writing seriously (although they were the things that made my heart sing) because my father—who was an enormous influence in my life when he was alive—pushed me towards a ‘worthy’ profession. While he appreciated art in a sort of distant and abstract way, he implied often that to pursue it would be self-absorbed and indulgent, compared with pursuing a career in the service of others—as a teacher.
So I became a teacher.
To this day, one of my greatest regrets is that I listened to him when he told me that interning at Ms. would be a frivolous waste of my time. I still wonder how my career would have been different had I taken that internship that I’d been offered.
So it’s been a long time coming for me to believe that my words and art can be a career. And this way, this project has been an incredibly tender and scary and exciting process of self discovery.
I have been breathing, eating, sleeping and dreaming ideas and words. And I’ve been thinking about the community on the web, and what makes it, and about how if we could meet, we’d look each other in the eyes and laugh and share delight and there would be no question in your mind that you’d put ten bucks behind me. But here, in this almost imaginary place, filled with a vast, unfathomable amount of information and creativity, I am small.
So.
There it is.
In the middle of the night I wake up wondering what failing at this might look like. I watch the snow falling outside the window and wonder if it was foolhardy to leap without a parachute, holding only the strings of handful of helium balloon hopes. Then I wake up in the morning and I can feel excitement zinging in my veins. This is what I want. This creative, terrifying journey. This work.
+++
Every winter I wait for a time when I can no longer remember the way the world looked before white, and then I know that spring is near. I wait until I feel myself falling into the faulty labyrinth of memory. Like a mime, I like to put my hands up against the pretend container of the present and see how well it holds me. And today it happened.
Today I can’t remember leaves. I look at the gray birch out my window, the one that is tall and leaning with the rot gnawing at a burl where a limb was torn away in a summer thunderstorm, and I cannot see it green with shimmering leaves. Logically, I can remember it, but I cannot really see it in my minds eye any longer. This is the beginning of spring fever. This is when snow is wet and heavy and slides off the roof hard and fast in sudden melting avalanches. This is when, invisible mighty things start happening in the earth.
Sap will flow. The birds know. Soon they will start building nest with mud and sticks.
+++
I'll be posting about the project once a week from here on out...and over on the kickstarter site maybe more often. (I don't want this blog to become all about this project all the time.)
Please know that your gentle words of support are just as valid and and inspiring and helpful as a pledge. I get that times are hard, and there are other, bigger things (Haiti, for one).
And I am curious tonight: have you ever ventured out on a limb for something that you wanted or believed in? What was it? How did it turn out?
In case things ever seem too serene:
Last night, post workout, DH and I were both in the pre-dinner hunger coma stage of things, trying to pull together tacos, while Bean was insisting on coloring and baking the Shrinki-Dinks (aren't they toxic or something?) he received in the mail from an aunt for his birthday, and Sprout was walking in circles (yes he's WALKING!!) wailing pathetically. He's cutting a new tooth, just in time for his birthday and he's a snot river and his usually happy-go-lucky personality has been somewhat diluted as a result.
So anyway, you can picture the scene right? Well. Then picture this: Me pouring Sprout a sippy cup of milk and in the split second (everything happens in those split seconds!) I turned to reach for the top, he reached up to his high chair tray and grabbed the full cup and proceeded to gasp and gulp and sob--but not tip the cup upright again--as he poured the entire contents onto his shocked little face. (I'm not used to him walking yet--and didn't even know he could REACH his high chair tray. Oh dear.)
I just stood there not sure if I should begin wailing myself, or laugh (I chose the latter.) He had milk in his ears, people. In his eyelashes, down his shirt. You'd think it had been an entire gallon--the way the floor was covered.
So anyway, I know I sometimes get kind of serious and poetic here and I wanted to make sure no one's getting any ideas that it's totally zen and serene here all the time. Because it is so not. (As I write, Sprout has pulled a basket of toys onto his head. NOTE TO SELF: Stop putting things on shelves to get them out of his reach!)
And also: please, please go take a peak at A Field Guide To Now and back this project! I get between 5-10,000 unique visits here a month--which means if you, brilliant, awesome readers would each go and back $1 the funding goal would be reached. It's all-or-nothing funding--which is a cool concept, but totally nerve-wracking at this point as I watch the number of days count down. (I want this more than anything.)
+++ PS: it's Sprout's birthday tomorrow. Can you believe that? A ONE year old. Sigh...