Of Life, Brief and Beautiful.

First Mother's Day, and I had to choose to stand at the grave of the gone or celebrate the here and now, who we are today and how am I blessed in this moment. So I chose to eat brunch with my mother-in-law and later wander the art institute with my best friend, where we explored beauty, ancient and new and twisted and refined and it was there that I felt all the longings of our mortality. 

This is the story we are asked to tell : of life, brief and beautiful. 

To find it carved in marble, stroked in oil and acrylic, woven in the fabric of our collective creative conscious over centuries, seems the only true comfort, the only way to celebrate our legacy of love and loss. 

[Photos : 1, 2.]

Paris : A Recollection.

In a quiet moment at the Musée D'Orsay, I sit on a bench and watch a painter make his peace with a replica of Latour's La Nuit. In strokes he layers pastels over the soft concave and convex curves of her body, wraps her in a cloud of lavender and gray. 

Patrons tread quietly on marble tiles, stand arrested by the colors of Cézanne, Degas, Delacroix, Klimt. They peer out the second story windows at a brilliant sky. By my eyes, the clouds are different here than anywhere else in the world, brilliant white cotton and silk spun mountainous over sacred monuments. And the sun shines bright across twinned balconies, long bedroom windows, blue rooftop after blue rooftop. 

By no surprise I am in love here, and with here. I am unsure if it is the expected or unexpected that raptures me, the idea or the tangibility. As with art and life, romance and relationships, idealism and realism beg conversation.

So it is with memory - was I really there? I'm glad I wrote it down.

[Best friend returns from Paris tomorrow. Oh how I wish I could go back.]

The Ripe Word : Shop Update

Good news : I've restocked my Etsy shop, The Ripe Word, complete with new designs. Have a look! 

Insecurity in Art.

Last Tuesday morning as I sat in a cafe chatting with a friend and getting ready to launch my new art shop, my best friend was preparing her culinary midterm project. This is her first term in pastry making, and she was nervous. Ten minutes into the process, she accidentally sliced open her finger as her professor watched, sliced it open badly enough that she had to leave her midterm and go to the emergency room for stitches. The poor girl. Mercifully, her instructor told her she could retake the midterm on Thursday. He knows from experience the nervousness, the danger of being a brand new chef in a kitchen full of fellow brand new chefs.

And this morning was so much like another morning I remember. It was late August, at the very beginning of my sophomore year. I was standing at my easel for the first day of Drawing I. The classroom was warm in the haze of an un-air-conditioned building, but I was scratching away at my sketchpad, glancing back and forth between my page and the prop - a lone orchid on a stool in the middle of our circle. I glanced at the girl next to me. My orchids drooped, clunky with the weight of too much shading, while her feathery petals sloped delicately across the page. I felt suddenly, regrettably faint. My face flushed with anxiety and blackness clouded the corners of my vision. I couldn't breathe. The professor walked past, and noticed my hand poised motionless over the paper. 

"How's it going?" she asked brightly. 

In a shaky voice I asked to sit down. She went and found me a glass of water and let me sit, head between my knees, until I could breathe again. I couldn't bear to look up and see if the other students were stealing glances at me and my incomplete page. As soon as class was dismissed I rushed back to my room and collapsed in the middle of our floor to the half amusement and concern of my roommates. 

There are a hundred more moments like this one built up in my head : the time when, reading aloud in front of my advanced composition class,  I stumbled over the same phrase in my own essay several times before finally reading it right. The time when another art professor walked into the quiet and mostly empty art studio and criticized my painting, even though I wasn't his student. The time that I cut my own finger while slicing bread with Erica for dinner - I nearly passed out and she had to bandage my finger for me. 

These moments pile, one on top of the other, like bricks. My insecurity is the mortar that seals them all together into a thick barrier that separates what I am doing now from what I want to be doing in the future. I become hardened and indifferent to art, believing that there is no place for it in my life. I am not meant for it. It is not mine to enjoy.

But it's a defense mechanism, this wall. It puts me in a dark place where my blog posts and poetry and sketches stay buried, lest someone finds them lacking and amateur. It's where all my excuses are born, reasons to keep my cooking and my art and my writing to myself. It helps me hide away my thin skin.

But what joy is there in art unshared? A slip of the knife is an easy mistake. No matter how steady our hands, we are all thin-skinned and fragile, vulnerable and easily exposed. A wall will only bury us and who we really are. There is no joy in that.

I'm working to break down the walls I've built around myself, to bare my thin skin and share my art with others, no matter how painful the process, no matter how raw it makes me.

We have to be willing to slice ourselves open, to pour ourselves out onto the page. 

Are you in a dark place? What walls have you built around yourself? What painful moments are you holding onto, or rather,

What painful moments are holding you back?

[All images by me, Bethany Suckrow.]

Travel Memories : Exposure to Great Art.

When I signed up to study abroad in the fall 2008, I knew that it was going to change me. And I wanted it to. I think most people get to a certain point in life and get bored. College is a great excuse to travel because you can get credit for it, and because you can run run as fast as you can away from the third-year slog when you're sick of the whole school routine, but not ready to graduate. 

So there I was, bored out of my mind and ready for something different, something independent, and I'd been wanting to travel abroad for as long as I can remember. So I choose an awesome program through my university that offered optimal traveling opportunities - 3 days of school work, 4 days of traveling each week with a 10-day trip to the destination of my choice. It sounds expensive, and you're right - it wasn't cheap. However, it was the best deal out there. It was the cost of a regular semester of tuition plus the inter-continental airfare, a 3-month EuRail pass, a €150 per week stipend for travel costs, and room and board included in the charming Haus Wartenberg [est. 1694.] Yes my friends, it does exist, this beyond-perfect program. I traveled to a grand total of 24 cities in 15 countries in less than 3 months.

But what does traveling abroad really do, aside from letting you escape your normal routine? Why and how did it change me, particularly as a writer and creative? 

There are less touristy ways to explore a city, but to me, the museums are one of the best ways. This is the essence of culture and human thought distilled over centuries, passionately portrayed through painting and sculpture, writing, architecture, furniture, and personal artifacts. One of my fondest memories was an afternoon spent at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which houses the most extensive collection of his pieces and personal items in the world. Then, of course, there is the Louvre and the Musee D'Orsay in Paris, the Uffizzi and the Accademia in Florence, the Vatican Museum in Rome, the National Gallery and The Tate in London… I could go on. 

The opportunity to see this kind of work gave me perspective on the scope of art's emotional and cultural impact on humanity. Art matters. It is what remains of our legacy long after we are gone.

In that context, and at that time in my life, my perspective on my own writing and art shifted from being a source of anxiety to a source of identity, something to cultivate and be proud of. I still struggle with that concept, but I did come to understand that this is what God made me to do. The instinct to write when I was traveling became a source of solace and therapy, a way to commemorate my thoughts and experiences as I went, and to pay tribute to the artists that I deeply respect. 

Have you traveled abroad? What are some of your favorite museums? Pieces of art? 

~

Photographs:  

1 : Me in Prague, Czech Republic. October 2008.  | 2 : Sculpture heads, the Vatican Museum, Rome. September 2008. | 3 : Fountain outside of the parliament building in Vienna, Austria. September 2008.

[All images were taken by me, Bethany Suckrow, except for my portrait, courtesy of Brenda Ronan.]

This Little Idea I Have.

Instead of my regular bookish post on this Monday, we're going to have a little heart-to-heart.

You see, I was busy this weekend... But I wasn't busy with housework. I wasn't busy with office work. I wasn't busy hanging out with friends and celebrating my birthday for 3 days in a row.

I was busy with art.

And this art that I've been making is for something really important and potentially life-altering. It is deeply tied to my personal experiences - the people I love, the things that I think, the way that I process the world around me.

And I'm excited to share that with you when the time comes, but for now, let me just say,

Producing art allows for a lot of time to think.

And not having produced a significant volume of work in a long time, especially for the purpose of sharing it with others, I kind of forgot about that. And once I started in again,

I became so. 

incredibly. 

nervous.

Like, the palm-sweating, heart-racing kind of nervous every time I think about how much work it's going to take to make this idea fruitful. I'm torn between complete excitement and joy for this new possibility, and utter misery.

And it's silly when I think about the nuts and bolts of it, the simple and small gesture that I am actually doing as I create this. People do this all the time. And they're successful at it.

But what if I'm not?

My friend tweeted this link today, and I think it's exactly what I needed to read at this juncture in my life. Because I don't want to make myself so miserable that I sabotage my own ability to pursue this and do it well.

How to feel miserable as an artist:

1. Constantly compare yourself to other artists.

2. Talk to your family about what you do and expect them to cheer you on.

3. Base the success of your entire career on one project.

4. Stick with what you know.

5. Undervalue your expertise.

6. Let money dictate what you do.

7. Bow to societal pressures.

8. Only do work that your family would love.

9. Do whatever the client/customer/gallery owner/patron/investor asks.

10. Set unachievable or overwhelming goals to be accomplished by tomorrow.

Slowly, I've been telling a person at a time. The safe ones - my husband, my sister-in-law, my coworker. They're the ones who will tell me it's possible, tell me if my art is good or needs more work, tell me the mechanics of making this little idea that I have lucrative. No pressure.

And now I'm telling you, although I'm waiting until I can make it all official and professional and whatnot. That's how it's done.

But I share the beginning of this journey, in case maybe you're thinking about doing something like this, too.

We're in this together. So let's get started.

Inspiration : "Steal Like an Artist."

This week was sort of lack-luster, in case you couldn't tell from my last post. I'm not one to let the weather get to me often, but the incessant rain left my spirit sodden with... ennui.

Yet, hope springs new when you need it. My friend Kate shared a link with me on Facebook the other day, and it was a fresh well of inspiration:

Austin Kleon, author of Newspaper Blackout shared some intriguing and true insight for artists in his recent post "How to Steal Like an Artist (And 9 Other Things Nobody Told Me)." One thing that really stuck out to me in his post was this thought:  

"An artist is a collector. Not a hoarder, mind you, there’s a difference: hoarders collect indiscriminately, the artist collects selectively. They only collect things that they really love. There’s an economic theory out there that if you take the incomes of your five closest friends and average them, the resulting number will be pretty close to your own income. I think the same thing is true of our idea incomes. You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with [...] 

Identify one writer you really love. Find everything they’ve ever written. Then find out what they read. And read all of that. Climb up your own family tree of writers. Steal things and save them for later. Carry around a sketchpad. Write in your books. Tear things out of magazines and collage them in your scrapbook. Steal like an artist."

I remember when I took the class that convinced me that writing was the only thing I could do. I was a senior in high school taking Mr. Zonyk's Advanced Composition class. I was introverted, quiet, and starved for answers to big life questions: Where should I go to college? What should I study? Who do I want to be? (Clearly, not much has changed.) Zonyk, who I am convinced was Sean Connery's inspiration for Finding Forrester, gave us an assignment that I will never forget. He gave us passages of classic literature and ask us to replicate the sentence structure using our own words and subjects. In a sense, we were mimicking the writers. Yet, Zonyk was not encouraging us to rip them off, he was teaching us: 

We were learning how to uncover the secrets of good writing by examining sentence structure, vocabulary, and voice. After taking that class, I was a ruined reader - in a good way. Every time I read a book and fall in love with it, I find myself compulsively re-reading it to find and understand patterns and structure that distinguish the author. And I was a ruined writer - also in a good way. My new questions: 

How can I write about this or that experience? How can I write it better? I needed only to read, read and read some more to find the answers. 

So, thank you Kate, and thank you Austin Kleon, for reminding me that when we feel starved and empty of inspiration, or rain-sodden and depressed, we must continue to soak up the good things that will spur us toward new and better work. 

Keep going, friends. 

[ Photo, Images 1-3]

Creative Influences

Recently, my wonderful husband and I watched all three Anne of Green Gables movies start to finish. That's right. Matt not only sat through them, but he's the one that suggested we watch them in the first place! On VHS, no less.

I hadn't watched them in several years, so watching each of them again reminded me of my early teens when I watched them endlessly, amused at Anne's often silly yet sincere attempts to become a writer.

Funny as it is to reflect on now, I think it was watching those movies that encouraged me to think about becoming a writer. There are so many influences that encouraged me when I was young, but there was something about Anne's character and her desperate yearning to be a successful writer that mirrored my own imagination and passion for reading and writing.

If I think about it, there were dozens of stories, films and books that influenced me when I was young, that "raised" me as a writer, in a sense. Belle of Beauty and the Beast loved to read, Judy Blume's Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself is about a girl with a wild imagination and a flair for story-telling, Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy encouraged me to journal (although I didn't journal about spying on neighbors and classmates), and there were many, many others. Yes, most of them female.

Further example: last night Matt's bandmates came over to practice new songs. Afterward, Matt's longtime friend and bandmate, Thad, pulled his old video cam-corder and played "old-skool" video footage from their old band. Some of the footage dated back 10 years, to their days of pipe-pants, spikey hair, pop/punk tunes and the occasional "rude-boy" outfit. It was hilarious to see and hear some of their influences, to listen to them laugh about their old haunts, friends, clothes, and how much they tried to be like this or that musician.

Influences can come from anywhere - books, film, music, images, fashion, and more. From stage of life to stage of life - from childhood, adolescence, young adulthood to adulthood - creative influences shape our imaginations as fixed icons that speak to us and later help us remember who we were and what we were like and what we loved when we were young.

After mulling over this concept through the past several days, I came across this quote:

"At all ages, if [fantasy and myth] is used well by the author and meets the right reader, it has the same power: to generalize while remaining concrete, to present in palpable form not concepts or even experiences but whole classes of experience, and to throw off irrelevancies. But at its best it can do more; it can give us experiences we have never had and thus, instead of 'commenting on life,' can add to it." — C.S. Lewis

This speaks more to writing and fiction than music or fashion, but even so, when we think about how art influences us, when we recall those images, words, or sounds that inspired us most, we regard them as a part of what made us who we are now. They speak of life in terms that we understand, and therefore add to it.

So my question for you is : Who were your influences growing up? 

Do you have boxes of tattered and love-worn books from your youth? Old movies you watch on occasion? Albums or songs that throw you back in a time machine of places, feelings, friends, sights and smells? Stacks of magazines with corners folded to favorite looks that you still try to emulate or wish you could wear? 

This Artistic Life.

Two confessions:

1. I am a public radio addict. Morning Edition, Eight Forty-Eight, Fresh Air, All Things Considered, This American Life. Without cable and time, I have limited connections to what is going on in the world. Thanks to public radio, namely WBEZ and NPR, I'm at least tuned in. More than that, I find the sound of their voices comforting, their stories fascinating, and let's not ignore the fact that it has rescued me from the utter dread that is pop music radio.

2. I have taste. I have a deep love for all things artistic and I consider myself an artist of words, images and food. But I often recognize as I write, paint, photograph or cook that while I know the difference between what's good and what isn't, I am just not up to par with others out there. It took me a long time to admit this, and while the thought is somewhat discouraging, it's also inspiring. So the more I see of something that's good, the more I aspire to become good... After all, art and excellence take practice.

Just ask Ira Glass, creator of This American Life.

I dedicate this video to impeccable taste, and to the day when our abilities finally live up to it...

Persist in your art.

Stranger than Fiction

I've decided to stop fighting it.

What exactly? I was driving home yesterday contemplating, once again, my writing woes. My ever-encouraging twitter friend, Friederike, tweeted a word to me the other day:

"Very often, our characters tell us what they are up to. We must take our time and wait a little to find out what they want."

And then, in response to my whiny, "But what to do while I wait for them to speak to me?" Friederike said, "Have a coffee and watch your soul while you are waiting for your characters to do the work."

Again, an all too wise response to my needlessly worrisome writing self. At that point, I was asking myself what characters are speaking to me. Do I even have any? I was never planning on being a fiction writer. But is that what she meant, and does fiction versus nonfiction make any difference here?

In the midst of my brain working through this idea, my ears were half-listening to my car radio, which was faithfully playing NPR's All Things Considered. The host was interviewing a writer that just published a new novel. What was his inspiration and theme behind the book, she asked? I was suddenly all ears.

The writer explained that his work centered around the belief that home is not always where we are most welcome or a place that we can take refuge from a misunderstanding world. What happens to people who live with that discord?

For reasons I cannot explain, his description of pulling together his ideas into a novel pulled together my own disjointed ideas about what it means to write.

I've been fighting for a long time the idea that I should write fiction. It seems to me that any attempt I've made is not literary, but a deep-seeded and irresistible need to reconcile misunderstandings in my life - people, experiences, memories, social, political and religious issues. Every version of my fiction has been some attempt to tie those things together so that I can make sense of them, or remove them from myself. Like Dumbledore's Penseive, my writing extracts those things that will not rest within myself until they've poured out of me onto the page in black and white, where I can examine every detail. (Kudos to J.K. Rowling for that concept. I wonder if she ever thought about that in terms of her own writing experience?)

This isn't right, I tell myself. Great writers don't turn their lives into fiction for a good story. There's always that speculation that something within their works - a character or a scene or a setting is a fictionalized, dramatized version of something real to the author. But many authors would, and have, denied those theories outright. And then the critics and readers idolize them: "He's just that genius that the work is entirely fictional!"

Underneath the guise of literary genius, every good piece of writing has soul, and what is soul but personality, your collection of beliefs, experiences, passions, and talents that are not quite like anyone else's?

This is what I'm not going to fight anymore: you, dear readers, friends, loves of my life (and people I might not necessarily get along with) are the interesting characters that fill my thoughts and speak to me. Experiences and memories, you are a part of who I am. I am passionate about you. I am inspired by you. I know you and you know me. You drive me to words. Black, white, gray, and every color and shade in between. You speak to my soul, and I'm listening, truly listening now.

After all, life is stranger than fiction, right? So don't be surprised if some version of you lies within my words. I won't be surprised, anymore. I may not pen the great American novel any time soon, or ever, but this is what I know.

I won't go against the grain anymore, for you are ingrained in me.

A Writer's Weekend.

Once again, my Twitter friend Friederike has been the exact dose of support and inspiration I needed following my last post. A non-Facebooker, she has some great insight to contribute, so make sure you read it. Friederike, I am learning so much from you!

[Photo taken from another Twitter friend, Wakako, on her ultra-inspiring blog, Baum-Kuchen.]

On a related note, my weekend was good. Saturday, which I have dubbed my creative workspace/time, was somewhat productive although not as much as I had hoped. I made a few decisions, though.

1. My weekends will now be free of social media as much as I can help it. I won't Facebook, Tweet, or email on Saturday or Sunday. The reason being that I have realized how much more positive and creative I am when I leave it alone for a couple of days. So if you need me, truly need me, then you have my cell phone number and you can call or text me. [Translation: if you don't already have my cell phone number, then you don't need me.]

2. Every Saturday morning will be dedicated solely to the act of sleeping in, getting up and eating breakfast on my porch, and writing or art-ing. Just me, myself, and God. ;)

3. Celebration with friends and family is important to me. So my Saturday morning wasn't the most productive, but my Saturday night was a blast with all the friends that came out to support my husband and his band. It made me realize how important interacting with my loved ones is to my creative endeavors.

Where once I thought that scheduling in time to be creative was unnecessary (maybe even contradictory), I now find that it's fundamentally important to being consistent and committed to my art. Surprisingly, it has satisfied a deep need I have to reconnect with myself. I feel like I've said this before, but I'll say it again: making time for our own creativity is one of the healthiest things we can do for ourselves.

In fact, I have a theory. My theory is that the more consistently we make time for our art and our selves, the moments when we feel drained and tired and tapped out and frustrated and angry because of work or drama will seem less hopeless. We know it's there waiting, we just have to remove ourselves from distractions and allow it to restore our faith and our confidence.

This weekend I am going home to see family and celebrate Labor Day on the lake. There will Bocce-ball tournaments, hours and hours in the sun and under the stars, planning my cousin's wedding, and eating lots and lots and lots and LOTS of food, and a few quiet moments to write. That's what I call Pure Michigan. [And Pure Joy.]

Write Your Own Story

Oh how I adore my dear co-worker, Kat. Always the design-savvy eye, she saw a notebook at Michael's the other day and knew I would love it. In the lower right-hand corner of the front cover was a small embossed graphic of a typewriter, with the words inscribed, 

"Write your own story." 

So she bought it for me! How sweet is that?

When she handed it to me, I was reminded once again of what an abundantly creative weekend I had. I had the whole glorious Saturday to myself! It was spent admiring the gorgeous sunshine and everything it touched, writing about it, and... painting it. Yes, painting. Haven't done that in ages, so I was both proud of myself and deeply comforted by the fact that I could do it... I haven't lost it - the need, the ability, or the delight I find in it.

Needless to say, the weekend was everything I needed it to be, including Sunday.

Here's my thought: the act of creating, whether it is writing, painting, music, dancing, or even cooking, is an act of dedication. You are dedicating your creative energy to the miraculous story that is your life.

So, I say, create your own story. 

Write your own story. Paint your own story. Sing your own story. Or as my very wise writing friend insisted: Dance your own story. Cook your own story.

Whatever it is you are good at, doing it is a testament to who you are at your core.

Dedicate. Document. Devote time to it. Delight in it.