One-inch frames

Back to Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird. Remember her?

In the chapter “Short Assignments” (pages 16-20), Lamott reflects on the one-inch picture frame she keeps on her desk. The frame is a reminder for her as she writes that she shouldn't always focus on the big picture, but at each moment in the writing process, focus instead on the small "frame," the bit of the story that she is telling at the moment.

Lamott writes, “I remember to pick up the one-inch picture frame and to figure out a one-inch piece of my story to tell, one small scene, one memory, one exchange.” Thus rolls out the title of the book, as she recalls her brother sitting at their table at the age of ten, surrounded by materials on birds, completely overwhelmed by the project of writing a long report. Their father, a writer, put his arm around the boy and coached – just write it “bird by bird.”

I like this passage because it resonates for scrapbookers in a number of ways. We often start with a picture that tells its own story, after all. Many of us are moved to scrapbook by our pictures – the images from our lives that we want to showcase in some way. A commitment to journaling our lives (or others’ lives, if you’re doing it for someone else), however, requires that you write down something about the picture.

The idea of that one-inch frame serves as an important reminder to me. I often find that I have too many ideas circulating around my head for just one page and one picture, and I need to take a few minutes and think about my “frame.” Why this picture on this page?


I wanted to pull out an example to explain what I mean. Not because I think this is the perfect example or outstanding layout, but at least that it illustrates some of my point. I sat for a long time with this picture, trying to figure out what to say about it, what it most represented to me. It was taken when my sisters and I were all together for my mom's 80th birthday, along with my niece and her daughters from out of town. We had never all been together in the same place with our kids. It was the first time that my sisters' granddaughters had met each other, and the first time that one set of those kids had met my own children. In short, I had a lot to say about every picture I took on that trip.

The danger in moments like these is that I might give in to the haze swimming through my brain, give up, write the date and a short phrase, and move on… What I finally settled on for this picture was the fact that the girls had just met. It's not overly sentimental, just kind of the facts, but it communicates what the picture meant to me, at that moment.

Itasca State Park, Mississippi Headwaters. McKenzie and Sydney's last evening in Minnesota, heading down the trail to the headwaters, hand in hand with the second cousin they've only recently met, Alicia Rae. Family matters.

The truth is… Our writing isn’t going to culminate in some grand opus. Most of us aren't Charles Dickens, who wrote his masterpieces piece by piece in serial form. Our writing is a series of small (sometimes really small) stories that will roll together. One-inch frames that like a film reel will tell a much larger story.

I've been tagged!

Long, long ago, and because my blog is so sadly neglected, I'm just doing it now!

So, the lovely Terrie tagged me, and I have to list 7 random facts about myself and then tag 7 other people by leaving comments on their blogs. So, here I go.

1. I'm a country girl, born and raised, transplanted to town life.
2. I play piano.
3. The piano I own was my grandmother's, the one that she learned to play on. (Hmm. I need to do a layout about that.)
4. In a previous life, before I had two children, I worked with a local sheltie rescue. Check them out here: Central Illinois Sheltie Rescue
5. Some of my ancestors have been in the country long enough to qualify me for membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution. I've never joined.
   
6. I'm a great-aunt four times over.
7. I'm married to an avid bow-hunter, a fact which tends to structure most of my life from October to January.
   

Now, off to tag a few unsuspecting friends!

Audience...

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.
Hamlet, Act III, scene iii, lines 100-103

(Quick little note: posts and musings about Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird will start later in the week.)

I have a little issue with all of this online posting that we do. It’s fun – to see our own creations online, to see what others think about them, to see what others have created and then to have the chance to respond to them. But, here’s the deal. I also see people who are great scrappers, in my humble opinion, post about how nervous they are to journal because they’re afraid that it will sound silly, childish, whatever.

Let’s unpack this for a minute. Who are we afraid of sounding “silly” to? The kids whose pages we’re creating? These, after all, are the creatures whose butts and noses we’ve wiped, and who aren’t at all afraid (if they’re like mine) of mooning their parents with the living room shades wide open. The sister who at the age of 80 picks up your scrapbook because she desperately misses you?

I think we’re afraid of sounding silly or goofy or childish to the wrong audience. And so I want to talk about audience a bit.

If you’re reading this, chances are you’re a scrapper who spends a bit of time online. (Or a lot of time online. But I’m not pointing any fingers here.) You probably post your layouts, cards, and/or altered items on any of the hundreds of online galleries that are out there, you may have your own blog, you might be on a design team or be interested in being on one, and you might even be interested in publishing your work.

So, who is your audience?

In most of the publications about journaling that come close to talking about “audience” as a writerly term, we always assume that our “audience” has something to do with heritage… that we’re creating what we create for our kids, for our family, for us to look back on or be remembered through… Simple enough. My simple answer to the question, “Who do you scrap for?” would be, just as simply, “My kids.”

But I don’t think it’s that simple. If I’m creating a layout for an online forum’s challenge, it has to be in my head as I’m working on it, even if I’m thinking at the same time that it’s going into my son’s “Age 9” scrapbook. If I’m scrapping that way, my audience is NOT just my son. It’s everyone that I can imagine reading the journaling, from the owner of the site, to the DT, to regular members, to the many surfers and lurkers who browse through galleries where we’re not members.

Now, I’m not saying that’s bad. But I do want to point out the disparity in who we SAY we’re scrapping for, and who we’re really scrapping for.

No matter what kind of product that a writer produces, whether it’s a cookbook, a short story, a play,… one of the first questions that that writer tackles is, “Who is your intended audience?”

Note that word there. Intended. Who do you want to read your work? Who are you pointing it toward? Who do you imagine sitting at the other end of the creative process, reading what you’ve produced?

I think that as scrappers who have an online audience, we have to do some hard thinking about this audience question. Be honest. Are we really journaling for ourselves, our kids, or whomever we imagine reading this creation fifty years from now? Or, when we say that we’re nervous about journaling, afraid of sounding silly or stupid, are we really saying that we’re writing more for our peers online than for those who are going to care about what’s there on the page fifty years from now?

Exeunt, pursued by bear.

Didja get the book?

Just checking in. I'll do a real update later today or sometime on Monday, with some thoughts about audience. But I wanted to check in and remind y'all to look for Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. Grab a used copy from an online seller or a local bookstore. If you're in a university town, I'd lay odds that you can find it at a larger used bookstore near campus, too. And most large book retailers would either have copies on hand or could easily order them.

A word of caution: if you're buying online, make sure that you're buying the book and not the documentary film made about Anne Lamott. They have similar titles.

Exeunt (for a short time) pursued by bear.

birds

I have some extra time during the summers – or at least I have more flexible time. So it’s often the time that I try to catch up on “fun” reading. For me, fun reading includes anything that I don’t have to prepare to teach, whether it be a novel that I’m dying to sink my teeth into (like James Patterson’s latest installment in the Women’s Murder Club series) or some recent scholarship in my field that I haven’t had time to read. As I scanned my bookshelves the other day, I saw a book that I’ve had a love affair with for a long time.

A few years ago, I took a teaching job that required me to teach, among other things, a general education course that would have a heavy emphasis on writing. I’m not a stranger to thinking about writing or even to thinking about teaching about writing… I started graduate school in an English program, taking courses in rhetoric and writing studies. But I switched fields before I had to actually teach a writing class. So, in my anxiety about having to actually teach units on writing or devise assignments that would help students develop their writing skills, I asked a writer friend for some recommendations. Her first suggestion was Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

Lamott wrote the book as a reflection on the art of writing, from the perspective of a published writer who now has to teach students the skills they need to become “good” writers, if not published writers. Toward the end of the book, she riffs on what passes through her mind on the last day of class, what she would really want to leave her class with:

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious. When you’re conscious and writing from a place of insight and simplicity and real caring about the truth, you have the ability to throw the lights on for your reader. He or she will recognize his or her life and truth in what you say, in the pictures you have painted, and this decreases the terrible sense of isolation that we have all had too much of.

Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don’t be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done.

If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about being sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act – truth is always subversive.

OK, so “subversive” might sound a little scary. It’s hard to think about a scrapbook page being subversive, I suppose. But the heart of Lamott’s observations relate pretty directly to how we journal or why we journal. Writing from a place of insight, of simplicity, of “real caring about the truth.” She points exactly to how I hope I can learn to write. I’m not there yet.

So, I have a little suggestion, and I’m curious to see how many of you might be on board with me. I’d like to put Bird by Bird back on my summer reading list. And I’d like to pull some sections out to refer to here in my blog, to draw connections to how we journal and why we journal on these creations of ours. In case you want to read along, I checked the amazon.com prices … you can get it used for as little as $4 or new for a little over $11, and it’s pretty easy to locate new copies in brick & mortar stores. And really, it’s a great read, full of her own insights about how she has lived her life – or how she hasn’t lived it, for that matter -- as a mother, daughter, friend. I’d advocate for putting it on a summer reading list even without the journaling challenge.

So let me know what you think. Are you on board, want to ride along?

Coming next week -- talking about audience. How do you decide who you're journaling for or to?

An added note: Check out the challenge forum at Creative Scrap Shack, where DT member Terrie McCoy Pieper has begun posting journaling challenges!

Hmm. Page One. Entry one.

Once I made the leap to start a blog, I decided that I wanted a theme for it, beyond just the obvious – scrapbooking and other paper arts. So, to begin, here is a bit about me and a bit about what you can expect from this little corner of the web.

I’m a historian by training, a cultural historian really, as my degree was completed in a theatre history program. (And that also explains all the Shakespeare and theatre references peppered throughout the blog.) So I come to this scrapbooking hobby (obsession, really) with a particular interest in what historians refer to as “primary” documents. In academic lingo, this means simply that the source you’re reading or analyzing has not been filtered in any way through another party. Typical primary source documents are letters, journals, diaries, and in literary history, the poems, dramas, and fictions in their original form.

So, what does this have to do with scrapbooking?

From my historian’s perspective, no matter how much bling, flower power, or patterned paper we glue on to the page, today’s scrapbooks are all just a few steps along the evolutionary road from (mostly) women’s diaries, journals, letters, scrapbooks… throughout history. When a historian looks back to the 19th century to try to understand what an average woman’s life was like, some of the best sources we can find are those that may have been penned in her own hand – a diary, letters to a sister halfway across the country or across the ocean, or even, sometimes, if we’re lucky, a very consciously created memoir for her children. And they’re “good” sources for a few reasons. They’re primary sources – first-hand accounts. But they’re also incredibly exciting for a historian to find and read. To simply hold. They are a direct link, a conduit.

I was on the phone with my father yesterday, and the story he related to me got me started thinking about this again. My aunt (his sister) apparently has at least one of their mother’s diaries. My grandmother was tough pioneer stock, raised in a farming family in southern Minnesota before moving to the North Dakota prairie to start her own family, just before the Great Depression and Dust Bowl years. I had no clue that Grandma had left any diaries or journals, but as I think about it, it makes sense. She was college-educated, having studied to become a teacher before marrying my grandfather, and she was inquisitive, interested in the world and the people on it, through her entire life. She was a letter-writer, and I’ve saved many of the cards and letters that I received from her over the years.

As my aunt sat reading her mother’s words, in her mother’s own hand, she suddenly began to realize what life must have been like on a day to day basis for her mother and father, as they joyously celebrated the births of (eventually) seven children, and then toiled and worried and cried as they fought to feed their children. My grandmother, in the pages of her diary, recorded how much money she had earned doing extra work, or how much money my grandfather had earned on odd labor or livestock sales.

After reading several pages in Grandma’s diary, my aunt called my father, and as they began to talk about those very lean years, and about how little most of the younger children knew about just how hard it was, my father (the oldest child) and my aunt (the second to the youngest) together began to put the pieces of their histories together. The conversation may not have happened, or at least would not have happened in such a pointed fashion, without that diary, without that very tangible connection to my Grandma’s life as wife and mother on the North Dakota prairie.

As a historian, but also as a granddaughter, daughter, and mother, I’m deeply connected to the genealogy of journaling and scrapbooking as I sit down to work on one of these highly crafty pages that we seem to be producing today. What I desperately want to retain, even among all the product and color and interest in design, is that sense of a primary document that my children can hold when I am long gone. It’s not simply a “memory” that I am recording, in other words. It is my legacy, my record for my children of not just what happened, but how I experienced it, or how I saw them experience it. I’m not an overly emotional person in my writing (though in my daily life, it’s another story!). So my own journaling doesn’t tend to get incredibly mushy. Sometimes, it’s simply a story, a story that I could imagine myself wanting to tell one of my kids in 2030, when she’s expecting her first child, or in 2045, when I may be long gone.

While I’ve been consciously aware of how I write and why I write in my own layouts for a while, I only recently began to notice that the industry itself talks about “journaling” in pretty limited ways. I have yet to read an article, for example, that connects our modern scrapbooks to the history of women’s journaling and correspondence. And I have yet to read an article or series of articles that uses “writing pedagogy” – that is, tools to learn the craft of writing – to help scrappers approach their journaling.

I’m not saying that we all have to become great writers. But I do think that learning some very basic writing strategies or tools could help. So, while I retain permission to write about just about anything between these margins, one of the strongest focuses of this blog, at least for the first few months, will be journaling.

If you’ve found me in this first week, I hope you check back!

Exeunt, pursued by bear.