Entering the Creative Life

November 15, 2017, was the last post. Why has it been so long since I've posted? I became gravely ill less than two weeks later and had to stay in the hospital for six days because of a serious infection prior to gall bladder removal. My plan had been to spend Thanksgiving break doing those things a professor does not always get to do well during the semester, such as giving a good bleaching to the shower and starting new projects that don't involve graduate school. Two months later I am in a new semester and have recovered. I had no essays to grade this weekend, so I was able to continue one project I have been working on for a year, continue a project I began a couple weeks ago, and get serious about a third project that I am now serious about.

I basically quit writing creatively when I married in 1999. It wasn't that I did not like writing; I began when I was twelve when I entered a time of questioning regarding social situations. I simply found other things to do to occupy my time. I had begun teaching high school in 1997, and that drained much of my energy. I then discovered that some things for the home could not be bought, so I endeavored to make them, such as thick curtains for our west-facing kitchen window and affordable dinners. In other terms, marriage made sewing and cooking, two activities I had disdained in adolescence, though my mother tried to teach me, necessary, practical, and, in a way, creative. It was a creativity not found in words.

Going to graduate school for an MEd, a graduate certificate, and an MA further limited my time. Cooking from scratch and sewing no longer had places in my schedule as my time was consumed with reading and academic writing. But in Fall 2016, as an adjunct professor, I looked for an opportunity to support the English faculty where I teach and discovered the Creative Writing Club. I went, initially, so I could demonstrate campus involvement for when a position opened. I stayed because I found the presentations interesting, and now I am co-sponsor.

Thanks to a one-year-old's birthday party in April 2017 and talking again to the wife, who teaches fourth grade, of another faculty member, I learned about black out poetry. I used it as the first presentation of the Creative Writing Club's Fall 2017 series of presentations, and I just presented again as the second presentation of the Spring 2018 series.

So, now I have three projects I'm involved with for the purposes of expressing my own creativity. I am again making fabric out of plastic so I can sew bags for shopping (the pattern is from http://www.morsbags.com/), I am experimenting with a new design for coasters, and I am working on my own black out poetry.

From L to R: plastic fabric, coasters, black out poetry