8 Panels from Concertina Journal

A valuable learning I am hoping to hold on to is the idea of trusting the patience/time needed to see work emerge that can be followed. It has required layering on top of the familiar—the bit of design I first wanted to preserve and being responsive to what is emerging even when what is happening looks like a holy mess. 

Work. Stop. Walk away. Return and add a bit here, a bit on another page, work out of the journal, cover, scrape off and so on.  New panels are posted below. 

#SOL16: Keep A Bower Quiet for Us

Afternoon Light (M.A. Reilly, 2016)

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:  

Its loveliness increases; it will never  

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep  

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep  

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.  

 - John Keats

I.

We hide the process of dying, alongside our limitations to heal. It is hard to remember that dying is actually a natural process especially when the person dying is your husband. There is such a strong inclination to save Rob, to keep him living somehow as his oxygen levels fall. But this is foolish. Selfish. He would no more want to live the way he has been this last week than would I. His interest in writing and reading, in Devon and me, in the world beyond the end of his fingertips has waned. And Rob has been adamant about never being hooked up to a breathing machine.

It's February 10, slightly before 9 a.m. when Dr. Gallinson asks Rob if he would allow intubation of a breathing tube and Rob is quick to answer, "Absolutely not."   

David has just told us that the cancer in Rob's body has spread from his lungs and spine to his sternum, ribs, liver, and spleen and that he is too weak to receive Opdivo--a new lung cancer treatment. 

How much time do I have left? 

"A few weeks, a couple of months."

Rob turns to me and immediately says, "I don't want to be put in a box in the ground."   

This morning I am remembering this exchange that happened a little more than two weeks ago as I sit in the chair beside Rob's bed. Our home is quiet. The loud drone of the oxygen machine has been quieted. Devon has left for school. Rob's mom is upstairs still asleep and Rob's skin is sallowed and he appears closer to death.

I have been with him for the last few hours, well before the sun rose, and now he is bathed, the bed linens have been changed, and he is resting and restless, mumbling and as I lean in I hear him say softly, intently, "Get a room ready, God."

"You're ready to go?" I ask.

"Yeah."

Rob 2.26.16

II.

Rob has been telling me he is ready to go daily. Sometimes the request is couched in metaphor:

Help me to cross the river.

Sometimes the request is direct:

How do I leave here?

Sometimes the request is fanciful:

Devon give me my driving glasses. I need to fly the red car out of here.

And so I sit alongside him and tell him about the life we have. I think about how a love, like ours, shows itself through ordinary acts. I want him to delight in this as it is this I will miss most after he is gone: our conversations of everyday life.

I tell him that Devon's team won their match and now they are 10 and 4. The 'Christmas' cactus in the dining room is blooming. Who knew moving it from the living room would have such an effect? That after lots of stormy weather, it looks like we'll have a sunny day. I tell him it's okay to go to that room God has readied for him--that is where he most needs to be. I show him that outside the windows beside his bed, the birds are riotous. What do you make of that? I tell him I have saved his voice on my phone. I say, it's the end of February and the promise of spring hangs about us, restless like we are. This is a time for rebirth. I tell him Dev and I will be okay here and that we will love him forever. I say all this as I hold his hand, rubbing my thumb alongside the base of his thumb as he sleeps.

I hold his hand as he sleeps.
I hold his hand.

And I think, Love these days is more action than words, Rob--more actions than words.

Looking at a Writing and Reading Process Connected to Research

Lately I am thinking about the amount of reading I am doing as I write two articles & wondering about how that process compares to research methods that middle and high school students are required to do at school. A few observations:

1. My reading list emerges alongside the writing.
2. My reading list is fueled by what I read. I read a lot of  the works referenced in a text. Like Frost knew: way leads on to way.  For example, I am anxiously awaiting Full House (Gould, 1996) as I need to read it in order to better understand a point that Brian Sutton-Smith makes concerning evolution and play. I could never have predicted this would be a text of importance as I began this work.
3. Sometimes an unrelated article I have read will later inform the work I am composing in surprising ways.
4. Sometimes I stop the writing and create a work visually. Not sure how this matters but it seems to help me write.
5. I know very little and am aware of this as I read and write. 
6. I could never list the resources I will read/view/listen to for any single article I write until I have the work ready for publication. Even then, my experience has been that editors and peer reviewers will raise questions that send me back to rewrite, reread, and select works to read I had not considered. If I was required to make a list of the resources I planned to use before I actually started, it would make me not want to write.
7. I never know what will emerge even when I think I have a good idea.  
8. Talking with key people as I have drafts completed helps me enormously. 
9. I have a handful of people (and now since Twitter some of that is changing) that I share initial drafts with and these confidants actually read and respond to the work. I am selective with whom I share drafts.
10. My husband is the best editor (not only in the narrow sense of surface text, but also in the deeper structure and thinking of the text) I know and thankfully he loves me enough to suffer through those early drafts and push me to think in ways that stretches my thinking and often my intentions.
11. I meticulously list the works cited as I write.  I don't leave this to some end time. 
12. Making the works cited page somehow makes me feel productive even when I am not producing pages.
13. What I am wondering about alters as I read and listen to taped interviews and classroom sessions. 
14. I could never write a thesis statement or chose one from a list of four choices (A, B, C, or D). Meaning emerges.
15. Just because I am writing it, doesn't mean I understand. Often I don't.
16. I listen to the interviews and classrooms sessions a lot, often.  
17. Vacuuming, driving, walking in the woods are all ways that help me to think about the work while not directly thinking about it.
18. As ideas flow, I visualize cognitive bifurcation happening inside my brain. It's a lot like tree lights blinking On. Off. Growing stronger.
19. I locate what will become *the article* in several different documents and later join some of these initial writings. Collage seems to be a method I employ.
20. I like to join dissimilar things and see what pops.
21. I write far more that I will ever use in any one article.
22. I reread a lot.
23. I do a lot of things not directly related to reading or writing, and yet so much informs the work.  Even when I am not consciously thinking about the work, my mind seems to be busy seeking patterns, etc.  For example, on a trip to have lunch with a friend one day I listened to Brian Lehrer show and had the opportunity to hear Jonah Lehrer discuss his new book. I though I heard him say something about reinvention of self.  And yet when I listened to the show again (thank you Stitcher) I couldn't find what I though I had heard. The insight nonetheless was important and will likely be a critical understanding in one of the articles: in a classroom I am studying, reinventing one's self is the curriculum. It is what play looks like inside of school.  The play is not the Minecraft. The play is the many ways reinvention occurs.
24. I rely on story in most of my 'non-fiction' works. Narrative informs everything. (Sorry Common Core people who think these things are unrelated. Not so for me.) 
25. I appreciate deadlines.
26. I detest deadlines.
27. I often doubt I will finish the work at hand.
28. I abandon writing and return it at time.
29. I am continuously amazed by how much I don't know which helps me to understand.
30. I read obsessively. It's like a hunger. 
31. I reread my work on screen as I am composing.  
32. I reread my work on paper when I need to do a deeper revision or edit. 
33. I need to hear the work aloud and find a pen in hand matters in that physically writing with a pen  helps me to find the 'right' word, phrase.  
34. I abandon most processes related to revision and editing and return to writing on screen as soon as these initial ways of delving catches some fire I need to follow.
35. I see in pictures, wholes. There is a logic to this that is critical for me as I revise.
36. I never use a rubric, checklist to guide my work.  I don't want an ending imposed. Impose an ending and I probably will find I have nothing to say.

********************

Now I wonder about how we guide students to think and compose as readers and writers. How does the list above compare with the expectation of school-based authoring? How do we manage the constraints and freedoms, both needed to compose well?  How is agency realized at school?

The Need to Compose & A Room of One's Own: Art Making & School-Based Writing

Creating Art
Yesterday I knew I needed to create something with my hands, not only my camera.  For awhile when I had a different job and oodles of time, I worked at collage frequently. I enjoyed making batiked papers for my collages, painting with watercolors and acrylics, collecting "found" papers, applying gesso to surfaces, using Liqiuitex or Golden gel mediums, having on hand a range of brushes, artist tape, some sponges, and course a brayer. It's the physicality of the work that interests me as the blank canvas begins to take on shape as I layer paper and paint.

I had been dreaming the last week of a room of my own.  It was a fairly massive space with very large canvases with the edges taped, ones taller than me, and serious rollers with long handles, and pans of paint. I don't have a room of my own.  So yesterday I unpacked art materials I had put away after starting my new job (now 17 months old), carted everything upstairs to the dining room table, covered it with paper and began to work.  A couple hours later, satisfied with the image, I photographed it and then imported it into Photoshop (CS4).  I let it sit on my screen for a few hours taking a look now and again. At about 11:00 p.m. I began to work with the image, layering parts of photographs I had taken the day before and playing. By that time, my home was very quiet and I worked for about an hour, and left the image up on my screen.

This morning, I returned to the image at about 6:00 a.m. and worked at it for awhile, but could not get it to a finished state so I left it alone again and went to work.  I got home at about 9:00 tonight and began thinning the image of the sun by blurring it.  This seemed to settle the work into an evenness that had eluded me. Because I work in layers, I can click off and on sections of the image to see differences, as well as reorder the layers to shift foreground and background.  24 hours later, I felt done and posted the image on RedBubble and Twitter.

School-Based Writing
Tonight I thought about the processes I went through to make the final image and contrasted that with the way "experts" on  several different videos I watched this afternoon teach writing. In preparation for some work I will be doing next week, I was reviewing video all afternoon.  I was dismayed at the amount of talk the guest teachers (expert consultants) did and how the kids regardless of the setting (middle school, high school) sat and watched the guests.  It was like an epic version of Waiting for Godot.

I also was concerned when the guests simply told the kids to write and gave them a few minutes.  Then the students were expected to confer with a partner for a minute or two and then read aloud their work. Throughout this process, each guest consultant kept referring to the students as writers. Most of the  work read by the students in each class was pretty mundane and quite unfinished, and certainly I can understand why, as creating was limited to 6 minutes, some talk, and then Pow: perform.  The expert consultants' comments to the kids were overly rewarding with statements like: "You are fabulous writers." "That's great work." "You're a poet." "You worked really really hard today in your groups."

I just didn't see any of that. And I am a hoping the kids didn't buy it either.  I'm confident the students can do better work, with greater difficulty and complexity than what 6 minutes of pencil to paper produces. So what I was thinking about tonight is the contrast in creating art--be it as a painter, photographer, or writer and the privilege I have to determine the time I need to create a work, the range of tools (physical and technological) I have to use, as well as the certainty that I can abandon or set aside work anytime throughout the process. The students I watched had none of these and I want to remind you that these videos (costly at that) are presented as models for teachers to follow. 

I kept thinking: When do kids learn that creating is tough stuff, not a six-minute task? When do students experience what all artists come up against walls that must be honored and pushed through? What might beginning teachers make of this?

Along Towards Morning (M.A. Reilly, 4.11)