Six years later, that blog has become this space.

This blog has taken me from Montana to Spain, back to Montana and then to Texas.

From teaching to being unemployed to working to being back in school (while teaching and working).

It has been here through two new cameras, and actually starting to learn photography. Discovering that I really love it, too.

Through births and deaths. Birthdays and breakups. Travel and quiet evenings at home. The ends of things and the starts of things and that weird in-between.

Over the past six years, I’ve posted, on average, about once a week. That’s nothing compared to many bloggers, but much more than others. But if there’s anything I’m slowly learning, it’s that it doesn’t matter. So please humor me while I lay on the cheese for a moment. I’m happy to have this space. I’m happy to get the chance to write here, or post some pictures, to have the chance to share with some old friends and to make some new ones, too. It’s been a small thing, this blog, but I have approached it with a lot of love.

So I thought it would be fun to highlight some of my favorite posts, the ones that have stuck with me. Maybe you’ll remember one, too?

2013

+ Reminiscing, Holiday in Spain (parts 1, 2, 3)

2012

+ Lifelist check: Counting Crows live

+ Writers are people who write

+ The up and onward and not the over and out

+ Thoughts on writing (and finding the time)

+ Backtracking for beauty

+ Making my move

+ On super clean showers and having beautiful days

+ Fairfield (not far from Freezeout Lake)

2011

+ Keep in touch

+ Whatever happened to romantic comedies?

+ On being brave

+ The road home

+ 30 Days of Creativity: Day 17 (Friday morning ritual)

+ 30 Days of Creativity: Day 3

+ Memory keeping

+ Waking up

+ Mimi, and writing about grief

2010

+ The year (of food) in photos

+ Seattle Public Library

+ Working and happiness and other Sunday night thoughts

+ View from my kitchen window

+ Last farmers market

+ Feels like fall

+ My handwriting is a font!

+ Update: cleaning things up

+ Bye bye winter

2009

+ Inspiration

+ Demolition

+ No more Bull

2008

+ An autumn weekend in Glacier

+ Noah

+ Whatever happened to Thanksgiving?

+ Home coming

+ (O)Porto!

+ Lovely Lisbon

+ Lots of cheers (ok, and a fair amount of tears, too)

+ Wanderlust

+ Eurovision!

+ Semana Santa/Holy Week

+ Paris in the (almost) springtime

+ An unthemed update

+ On being extranjera (foreign)

2007

+ Puttin’ me in my place

+ Colegio/elementary school

I expect no one to read them all, or to come close, but it was fun to go back. Perhaps there are some discoveries here for someone.

Who knows how long I’ll keep doing this. But I just renewed my domain for another year. I’m approaching this summer with excitement on many fronts, one of them related to posting here more often. This little space has become my little space, and I’m happy to continue to call it home.

You are welcome here, my blog friends, and I am thankful to share this space with you. Six years! Pretty hard to believe.

(image from Parker Fitzgerald, via flickr. The phrase always reminds me of my grandma, Mimi.)

I’ve still got the lingering smoker’s cough. I have so much I’ve been wanting to write about, so I’m hoping to take advantage of this break, the longest I’ve had in years, to do some writing here. And I’m catching up on my Flickr uploads, after getting a full year behind. (wha?) In the interim, a quote that didn’t make it into one of my papers, but that I liked anyway:

“When ‘conversation’ as a curatorial and creative process seeks to transform the distance between art and its audience, it does so by changing our sense of the ‘space’ of the artwork itself, by making us rethink fundamental questions concerned with the category of the aesthetic. These questions are somehow prior to the critic’s concern with genres and periods as the historical measure of art’s social vision. The conversational approach poses these questions: What kind of ‘knowledge’ do we expect from the practice and the presentation of art? How does conversation change our relation, as artists and audiences, to cultural experience and the social transformation of our times?”
—Homi K. Bhabha, “Conversational Art”

I’ve also been watching a lot of Gossip Girl, so…yeah. It’s kind of a high/low mix.

oh yeah, finally trying to jump on the Instagram wagon. Find me @emily05mle.

There were futuristic cocktails, complete with gelatinous spheres. There were appetizers and homemade ice cream sandwiches. Complimentary valet parking! And the things he designed were incredible. His stuff from the 20s looked Eames-esque. The predictions he made about everything from GPS to the dishwasher were eerily accurate. There was one article in particular, predicting all sorts of changes to come in the future – things he couldn’t have known, and yet so many have happened. I might stop by again just to take a picture. A creative, fascinating man.

I also got the added bonus of feeling educated since the only way I knew anything about Bel Geddes prior to a few weeks ago was through the USPS industrial design stamps (which, for the record, I really love). He’s the radio designer:

Anyway, later in the evening, while my event buddy and I were trying to surreptitiously position ourselves in the sight line of waiters leaving the kitchen with full trays of appetizers, a dude walked up to us and gave us both high fives. Maybe that should have been a tipoff that this was about to get weird.

He’s studying to be a writer, he says. Well, first he tells us we should talk about something fascinating, or something daft like that. Then he said he was studying writing, “but not to get a degree.” I asked him what he wrote, and he said “I’m not a writer. I don’t write.” Which, perhaps not so surprisingly, struck me as odd for someone studying to be a writer.

My response, something I’ve been told more than once myself, was, “Writers are people who write.”

It became pretty apparent that he was drunk, kind of stinky, and purposefully obstinate. Go with God, dude.

But that exchange has kind of stuck in my head in the past week. Writers are people who write. It seems so straightforward.

And yet so many people who have studied writing, myself included, don’t do much writing. Writers are not people who read. Or people who grade others’ attempts at writing. Or people who talk about writing.

Writers are people who write.

It’s so simple, and yet so daunting.

But thinking about it encouraged me to sit down here tonight and bang out some thoughts on the screen…so maybe there’s hope for me yet.

(stamp image from usps.com)

But if we’re talking about writing, about coming up with characters and a scene, many scenes, or crafting and drafting and revising something with a little heft, changing this word for that and do-si-doing syntax for a better rhythm, well, I haven’t done much of that in a long time. And that kind of writing, for me, is more conflicted and best done at a computer, white expanse shining back at you while the cursor blinks.

In college, I majored in literature and creative writing. I wrote fiction, almost exclusively, forty or fifty pages per semester. Every time a story was due, I would walk around preoccupied for weeks, trying to come up with scenes as dynamic as the characters I had started to concoct. I loved writing characters, envisioning their morning routines, whether they would leave time on the microwave screen, whether they could carry a tune or not. The quirks. That part of the process appealed to my extreme attention to detail, allowed me to harness that trait that is otherwise a little exhausting. The problem was always making the characters do things. I wanted to place them on the stage, clap my hands and say, “OK, it’s up to you now!” Plot was not my strong suit. I wrote a lot of bathtub stories.

So to meet those classroom deadlines and turn in an actual story – beginning, middle, end – I would hole up in my apartment for the weekend. I would grocery shop in advance. I would buy beer. If at all possible, I would also clean beforehand, because even the most dreaded task becomes tempting when you’re sitting and staring and trying to make characters come alive and failing. And then I would play around and see what happened.

It was hard work, in some ways, but also really gratifying when I could make it go right. I assume this is how a mathematician must feel when a complicated problem is completed correctly, when the checks and balances lead you to believe you’re temporarily in control. Your effort justified.

I would rarely talk to anyone else over the weekend, especially about what I was writing, not wanting their input, not wanting to break the spell. I never knew how the story would end, figuring a solution would emerge at some point. The right moment to dim the lights. And honestly, sometimes that moment never came and I just ended it, sappily, when I had reached my page limit and couldn’t think of anything better. Before bed late, late on Sunday night (or more accurately Monday morning, if you look at it like that, which I never have), I would email my draft off to a couple of people. A friend or two, maybe my mom, maybe a creative writer who wasn’t in class with me. I would do one final draft read-through in the morning if I had time but wouldn’t check my email. And then I would make copies and distribute them to my classmates, feeling slightly nauseous while awaiting their critique two days later. It wasn’t finished, but it was done. For then. Ideas and people and places were on paper, things I had dreamed up, a few little risks I had taken. And as much as I had to force myself to do it, to be sequestered and anti-social for a while, I came back into the world feeling a sense of relief, of accomplishment, a turn of phrase ringing in my ears, a smirk on my face.

I miss that feeling.

I’m not sure how, but it’s a feeling I’d like to get back. It’s not so much “now or never” as “now or not now,” and in a way, that’s scarier. The obvious follow-up is “If not now, when?” A question without a clear answer. A mathematical problem without an obvious solution. A blinking cursor broadcasting the same message every second: write. write. write.

“Yesterday. I use the mail. I use the mail. I don’t pay any bills online. And it would be terrible for the Postmaster General to be paying bills online.”

It made people laugh, but it also made me think. “I use the mail.” (repeated for emphasis!) If I love the post office, and I want the postal service to continue to be a part of my life, I need to use it. I can’t be one of those people bemoaning the state of the universe when I’m contributing to it just as much as the next person.

The thing is, I love writing letters. Sure, I love receiving letters (any mail, really, which may be why I get about 12 magazines via subscription) but really I just like writing and sending them, whether or not I get a reply. It’s reaching out to someone you care about. It’s a way of showing friends that they are on your mind. It’s a pause for gratitude. It’s a longer than normal break from the go, go, go lifestyle. It’s stepping away from perfection and allowing cross-outs and missing words and realizing “this should be four paragraphs and not just one.” It’s an excuse to use my massive pen collection.

And I have yet to meet someone who isn’t pleasantly surprised to receive a handwritten letter in the mail. It’s a day maker.

So I’ve decided to write more handwritten letters. And as a way of keeping track, I signed up for 52 Weeks of Mail, a plan to send one handwritten letter or postcard per week. Although the challenge started in early October, I have sent out about a card a week in the past few weeks, and with postcards from Spain starting very soon, I think I’ll be on track. Writing weekly is going to be sort of difficult, I’d guess, as far as remembering and planning and making time, but I’m also really excited about it. It’s not a chore – it’s prioritizing something that I really love to do and that brings happiness to other people, too. Plus, it will assuage some of my guilt. Ha!

So I’ve decided not to do November Blog Posting Month this year. I spend plenty of time online. I’m going to start writing more letters instead.

Did I tell you that I’m starting a calligraphy class in November?

I can’t wait to join one of the letter writing clubs around the US and Canada.

Send More Mail is a blog full of inspiration.

Do you write letters? Have a love of postcards? A favorite calligrapher?

Do you let world events influence you personally to the point where you sign up for ambitious projects so you feel less guilty?

(image from the portfolio of Mary Kate McDevitt, found via Pinterest)

Their readings were quite wonderful. Some poems were funny, some were poignant, some were intense.

But more than anything, what stuck with me was the poets’ courage. Their exposure.

I am not a risk taker. And I’m a really private person, despite posting thinly veiled emotions here, relying on some strange sense of anonymity I can’t quite put my finger on.

He read in a language not his own, despite an almost impenetrable accent made stronger by his limited hearing. He was shaking and sweating – so nervous after having written almost 20 books, after countless readings in his native tongue – and there was something so endearing about his discomfort. I don’t mean endearing as in cute, but as in humanizing – he seemed like any other guy, except that he was reading his funny and sometimes really beautiful poems, poems few could write. All of this from a man who intimidated me so much at first that I almost dropped his class. I wanted to hug him.

The next readings have stayed with me this week. She read from a couple of books, her newest about a breakup, and so many people in the room knew just who she was referring to, her former love who is well-known around town. She spoke of loneliness and disappointment and longing, emotions we’ve all felt, sometimes in the same combination, but are ashamed to admit for fear of seeming weak. She seemed, at times, weakened by all that’s come to her in recent years. But in being so honest, so out there, sometimes seeming almost on the verge of tears, she also appeared so strong, so gutsy, steely at her core. Someone not to be trifled with. I was sort of in awe of the whole thing. It’s not easy in a small town to speak about love and loss, about homesickness and isolation.

I was totally inspired.

After not putting myself out there for a long time, I’ve been trying to be a bit braver lately. Walk up and talk to people who pique my interest. Express how I’m really feeling to friends. Admit to my weaknesses, my exhaustion, my fear. And I’ve fallen on my face a couple of times. It’s sucked. But I’m OK. A while ago, I read somewhere “I’d rather be fearful than regretful” and that has sort of stuck with me lately. There’s a strange power in vulnerability.

In the next months, I’m going to need to be brave, to be open to new experiences, to see where new adventures may take me. I feel like a bird, scared but ready to leave the nest, just looking for the next branch to which I’ll fly.

Things have gotten away from me a bit lately, in general as well as in terms of this little June project. Life is in flux, in so many ways. And, in wanting to talk about it while also maintaining my carefully curated semi-anonymity here, I’ve found myself feeling stuck.

I say that I don’t want to get Dooced, but that’s a small part of things – sort of a cop out. I know that. I’ve been surprised to find how private I am, in a lot of ways. Maybe it’s smart. Or maybe it’s personal preference or paranoia – not wanting any random person to know the ins and outs of my life. Or maybe there’s more to it.

In the world of Facebook, we broadcast our whereabouts, our relationships starting and ending, our frustrations and happiness, our lunches. It has a tendency to make things that really matter seem on equal footing with all of the banal bullshit. Or at least that’s how it feels to me. I’ve heard about countless engagements and divorces, even deaths, via the status update. And I can’t help but resent that.

Recently I spent a little time with someone who has no qualms about telling everyone what he loves and hates. He has a tendency to express himself so openly that he sometimes looks kind of pathetic. Kind of angry. Kind of a lot of things we all are, sometimes, when we’re not just showing the PR version of ourselves.

I know the same level of honesty or bluntness, the total lack of filter, whatever you want to call it, isn’t me. And I’m thankful for that, in a lot of ways. But I’m also kind of in awe of it and trying to learn a little something from that acceptance of vulnerability. It’s so goddamned refreshing. Somehow it’s different from the unfiltered broadcasting of big and little, good and bad. And that’s something I’m still sorting out: how to respect the importance of how we feel, be honest and authentic, even in cyberspace, while still maintaining my own sense of boundaries and what feels right to me.

“The heart of authenticity is the courage to be vulnerable.” – Brené Brown

OK, so blah blah – what does all of this have to do with creativity, you ask?

I’ve been reading a bit of Brené Brown’s blog after watching a TED talk she gave about vulnerability. And I came across this post about living a creative life. This thought really resonated:

“I had the creativity scars that many of us have; the ones that come from not being able to draw a still life in middle school and being told that I better stick with writing and reading.”

Yep. Because my grades were all-important for so long, I grew to dread art class – the one class that would get in the way of my perfect report card. Not only was I, along with others, given the impression that I had no talent, no ability, but we were also graded A-F dating back to grade school art classes. Maybe the kids who couldn’t carry a tune dreaded music the same way? I have no idea.

I spend a lot of time now pointing out that “I’m not artistic, just kind of crafty.” Because anyone can be crafty. Crafty just relies on the willingness to try, to buy random supplies, to not get your feelings too hurt if it doesn’t turn out the way it looked in the magazine photo.

But isn’t the same true for so many aspects of creativity?If you’re just willing to try and not be embarrassed and practice, you can do it, at least kinda. I won’t pretend I have innate drawing ability or painting ability or musical talent. I could work at all of those for a long time and not create a single masterpiece. Or a single thing that didn’t look like a fourth grader was involved. I’m not foolish.

But there are things, creative things, I do pretty well. Writing is one. Photography is another. And there’s no shortage of crafty projects!

But there’s also the unsung creative heroes: Problem solving. Curiosity. Wandering. Decorating. Fantasizing.  Cooking.

And so, in honor of some of those, a few things that have been inspiring to me in the past couple of days, in the midst of moving chaos and carpet cleaning and furniture stacked up in the kitchen and to the rafters in the garage.

• My garden style pinboard on Pinterest
• The Empire State building looking like this
• Bon Iver cover songs

Bon Iver, Your Love (The Outfield cover)
Bon Iver, I Can’t Make You Love Me/Nick of Time (Bonnie Raitt cover [with a little Leon Russell intro] live on Jimmy Fallon) (two of my favorite B.R. songs mashed into one!)

• 29 Ways to Stay Creative video on Vimeo
• Coffee can lanterns
• Vision and Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (just arrived yesterday!)
• The Hairpin
• my journal
• The book I’m trying to read (more on that soon)
• The homes in Brothers & Sisters reruns (ok, and Dave Annable)
• Sunshine on my shoulders and walks to nowhere
• Also, walks to get ice cream

A few photos coming tomorrow.

Do you feel creative? Artistic? Crafty? Inspired? When? Where? Why not?

This morning, pre-magazine lunch break, I was thinking about my Day 9 post and about the various mediums at my disposal. Still photos. Video, if I get less self-conscious about it. The written word. Expressing my thoughts through music.

But what about smell? Aren’t smells some of the most evocative in terms of nostalgia, in terms of memories?

Because we’re here among friends, and I don’t have a background in biochemistry, I’m going to tell you the best idea I have in terms of a future invention: a smell capturer. (copyrighted, as of right now!) I envision it looking a bit like a Flip cam or something, where you could stick it out and capture a smell – churros frying late at night, the smell of their accompanying chocolate mixing in (with a splash of drunkenness, just to capture the entire experience of waiting in line). That untouchable smell of chic in high end boutiques. The smell in the spines of old books. Hell, libraries in general would work for me. Would smells not be some of the best memories to bring home, from places near and far?

And we’re not talking those cloying, fakey fruity smells that come out of candles. This is the actual smell of fresh cut grass, the smell of electricity and earth before a thunderstorm. I have a feeling this library candle might not soothe me the same way a walk in the stacks does, because it wouldn’t smell quite right:

Just in case there are any lingering doubts about the power of smells, and to get back to that New York magazine, today I was looking at this page:

and found that all of a sudden, I was thinking of my friend Anna. She just popped into my head. And of course, she has nothing to do with “What to Buy Your Gardening Grandparent.”

Well, then I saw this ad on the facing page, which I swear I had not looked at up to this point:

Light Blue is the perfume she wears, but just some of the time. But ironically, it’s also what I often wear. And when I smelled it, I didn’t think, “There’s my perfume,” or “Light Blue.” I thought of my dear Swedish friend, now living in Barcelona, and getting ready to go out when I was visiting her in Pamplona. One specific night of trying on clothes and shoes and listening to Fito y Fitipaldis and pre-gaming in her apartment, where we had to be kind of quiet and keep the door closed because we didn’t want to disrupt her roommates. I have photos from this specific night.

much later that night (and the elusive author shows her face!)

But the smell brought me there, to that very room on the outskirts of town, to a moment I wouldn’t have even thought about photographing. And there was something kind of wonderful about it all. An entire creative walk down memory lane, all brought on by a perfume strip in a six month old magazine.

So now the obvious question: if you had one of my magic smell capturers, what would you capture?

Hello, June! This may be a fool’s errand, but I’ve decided to try 30 Days of Creativity, starting today. The whole idea is to make something, anything, every day for the month of June. And since it’s still rainy here and not especially summer-y, I thought I might give it a go.

In March 2009, I took almost 800 photos. In March 2010, 725. March 2011: 55. Time to pick things up a little bit. Hopefully what they say on the 30 Days of Creativity website is true: “Your brain is like a muscle. When you exercise it, it gets stronger.”

I’ll be posting here, on Flickr, and on Pinterest. Wish me luck!

A manifesto by Terry Tempest Williams, from a book on creative non-fiction:

I write to make peace with the things I cannot control.

I write to create fabric in a world that often appears black and white.

I write to discover. I write to uncover. I write to meet my ghosts. I write to begin a dialogue.

I write to imagine things differently and in imagining things differently perhaps the world will change.

I write to honor beauty. I write to correspond with my friends.

I write as a daily act of improvisation. I write because it creates my composure.

I write against power and for democracy.

I write myself out of my nightmares and into my dreams.

I write in a solitude born out of community.

I write to the questions that shatter my sleep. I write to the answers that make me complacent.

I write to remember. I write to forget. I write to the music that opens my heart. I write to quell the pain.

I write with the patience of melancholy in winter. I write because it allows me to confront that which I do not know.

I write as an act of faith. I write as an act of slowness.

I write to record what I love in the face of loss. I write because it makes me less fearful of death. I write as an exercise in pure joy.

I write as one who walks on the surface of a frozen river beginning to melt.

I write out of my anger and into my passion.

I write from the stillness of night anticipating — always anticipating.

I write to listen. I write out of silence. I write to soothe the voices shouting inside me, outside me, all around me.

I write because I believe in words.

I write because it is a dance with paradox.

I write because you can play on the page like a child left alone in sand.

I write because it is the way I take long walks.

I write because I believe it can create a path in darkness.

I write with a knife, carving each word from the generosity of trees.

I write as ritual.

I write out of my inconsistencies. I write with the colors of memory.

I write as a witness to what I have seen. I write as witness to what I imagine.

I write by grace and grit.

I write for the love of ideas.

I write for the surprise of a sentence.

I write with the belief of alchemists.

I write knowing I will always fail. I write knowing words always fall short.

I write knowing I can be killed by own words, stabbed by syntax, crucified by understanding and misunderstanding.

I write past the embarrassment of exposure.

I trust nothing especially myself and slide head first into the familiar abyss of doubt and humiliation and threaten to push the delete button on my way down, or madly erase each line, pick up the paper and rip it into shreds — and then I realize it doesn’t matter, words are always a gamble, words are splinters from cut glass.

I write because it is dangerous, a bloody risk, like love, to form the words, to say the words, to touch the source, to be touched, to reveal how vulnerable we are, how transient.

I write as though I am whispering in the ear of the one I love.

“1970 knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence. In our quietest and loneliest hour the automatic ice-maker in the refrigerator will cluck and drop an ice cube, the automatic dishwasher will sigh through its changes, a plane will drone over, the nearest freeway will vibrate the air. Red and white lights will pass in the sky, lights will shine along highways and glance off windows. There is always a radio that can be turned to some all-night station, or a television set to turn artificial moonlight into the flickering images of the late show. We can put on a turntable whatever consolation we most respond to, Mozart or Copland or the Grateful Dead.”

– Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose

A beautiful passage, no? Do you agree, or do you find the constant possibility of “connection” even more isolating than living alone in a remote canyon like the book’s protagonist? Are our expectations so different as to open up a greater chance of disappointment, and thus loneliness?

— Charles P. Pierce, from the interview with Chris Jones on Son of Bold Venture