WINTER REVIEW~Marching On...
January was pretty much all about hibernation and recovery from quality family time while deep in the text for the manuscript copy for
Still Standing, Sometimes Part II.
(Read as, "Lots and lots of WORDS about arachnoiditis, art, and life.")
After I completed these many words, I submitted portions of the Manuscript to the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Program for review for studio funding. In the works for about three years now, I am proud of the body of work that came out of this recent retreat into words.
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A brief excerpt from the INTRODUCTION for the book
"When something like this happens you don’t automatically write about it. Unless you are a real writer. Maybe for them it’s different? Maybe they creatively and concisely write about everything as it happens. I am not really that kind of writer. I write a lot but, something like this makes me do more write-venting than “writing” for public consumption. Now, as I sit down to write about it; I wonder, “Should I just start from the beginning?” The Catch 22: for a non-writer like me, the beginning is kind of NOW. I am sure others must do it this way all of the time. We are writing with hind-sight, trying to remember the emotions and events in order to convey this “important thing that happened” to other people. Seems like I needed this exact safe distance in order to be able to tell it at all. So much so that in several acts of cathartic release I actually burned many of the journals I had written to get the weight of this junk out of my way. The conundrum: from this distance, can I really tell it in the context it deserves? I am not sure but, it has been screaming to be told.
“The only rule that can guide me as a writer is to keep going, and to carry on telling a story that will not leave me, as the first reader, feeling cheated or disappointed at the end.” ~Neil Gaiman Keynote speech at the thirty-fifth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts,
as published in The View from the Cheap Seats
So, I am going to try."
My patrons subscribed at $10 and up received a patron only preview to the full Manuscript Intro and a pdf version of an Excerpt from Chapter Six.
In case you missed it; Get The December 2016 Newsletter to review early to mid-winter news and udpates.
February 2017 was about holding solitary space in mourning and communion with the transformation occurring in my life and the world as the landscape changes to accommodate the sudden recent loss of my First Sister.
while simultaneously coping with messages from Mother Nature.
and Now it is Time to keep MARCH-ing On.
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