Perhaps

I woke up this morning to the ding of a rejection email hitting my inbox and felt an overwhelming sense of relief. I submitted a few poems weeks ago and it has been nagging in the back of my mind that my favorite concept of the bunch could have been done so much better if I hadn't tried to play it safe.

When I took my first ever art class in high school I knew eff all about art. I had a pretty solid understanding of color theory and doodled sometimes, but that was it. Halfway through the semester, we were doing landscape paintings, mine was of a castle in Scotland with a meadow and many trees in the foreground. I settled in a nice pastel almost washed out, non offensive color scheme. My art teacher kept coming by and telling me it was too light, too generic, not bold enough. She finally walked up to my desk, dipped a brush in lime green paint and smeared it across my pastel meadow. "You have to push the values." she reiterated and wandered off.

I sat, quietly fuming, for a few moments before adjusting the rest of the painting to match the awful bright green in the foreground. And she was right, the painting looked much better after I was pushed out of my comfort zone and had to be bold. Once the other values were pushed, the green she had smeared across the painting looked perfect.

I can create comfortably. I can write proficiently without shifting around and glaring at the walls and feeling like maybe I need to wash my hands or sit in the bottom of the shower with a stiff drink afterwards. I can paint and draw without someone adding splotches of bright green paint. But my strongest work in anything comes from those "oh fuck" moments. It comes from the "there is no way I can salvage this, I should just give up" moments and working through them or shelfing the project until I am ready to work through them.

Today when I got the generic, "your work is not right for us" notice I was relieved because I knew in the first draft and concept work of that poem I felt the lump in my throat and the discomfort, and that I edited all of that out in favor of something no one would probably love, but no one could really hate either. And now I have it in my head that not only do I get to rework that poem, but that I should definitely write an entire manuscript of uncomfortable poetry. I have a title all picked out and a million other things I should be doing, but who am I to hang up on my muse?

Which brings us to what I spent all morning doing, because it certainly wasn't actually writing these poems. No, I made a book to write them in, inspired by a sort of poetry manifesto I did several years ago in college.

Much like this go around, I was inspired first with a title. "Perhaps". I made a mini book (about 3.5 x 3.5, 18 pages) from one large sheet of watercolor I had mix media'd. The dirt looking stuff on the cover is tea, incidentally. 

I started with the word Perhaps and just went from there. Any time I got stuck, I wrote the word perhaps again. 

I wrote on the bus, I wrote at the pizza joint I would treat myself to any time I went to the bank, I wrote between classes, hunched over on the sidewalk, pretty much anywhere an idea hit me I was writing. 

This was also before I ever heard of zentangling. Call me a hipster but I was doodling like that before it was cool. 

"Perhaps" never was entirely finished, but some of the content was cleaned up and turned into a 3 part mini zine series a few years later. It should have been about 5 or 6 parts, but I naturally ended up distracted by some other project and now it's been several more years and I don't think "Perhaps" will ever be "finished". 

With that project in mind, but wanting a book that was a little bit bigger to fit a full manuscript worth of ideas in, I set out to make a journal.

I started with a mixed media masterboard on bristol board. I wish I had thought to take progress photos because this was one long series of "oh fuck" moments. 

Initially I had thought I would coptic bind the notebook with the pretty cover, but the idea of the inner pages being boring made me sad, and the idea of decorating a million pages made me bored. Thankfully I had one last piece of GIANT drawing paper to jazz up. 

It was unintentional how much the end color schemes resembled "Perhaps". I like what I like, I guess. 

This is the other side of the paper, before I added some watered down white acrylic to subdue the nonsense. I do have to write on it after all. 

Ah, I missed photographing a few steps after this due to tense moments. The paper and the cover were all still very damp with paint so putting the holes in tore chunks instead of neatly piercing. I added a ribbon for structural integrity purposes and kept going.

The cover turned out perfect. I just need to cut some letters out to stencil the title on once it dries. 

I love how the edges of the pages look. The entire reason I didn't let it dry was to get that damp torn look. I recall now that usually when I make these books I let them dry and then wet the edges again to tear them. Definitely works a little better... 

I need to let this dry about 50 years before I write in it now, but I am very pleased with how it turned out. I can't wait to start drafting my poetry manuscript in the free time I specifically cleared up so I could work on rewriting the two novels I am already working on... I'm pretty sure I don't even like poetry.