My Better Half
How can you be a symbol
of my love
inanimate, cold, and barren
as you are?
How can a far flung
chunk of star
spinning slowly,
majestically
in my night’s sky
reflect the truth of who we are
of me and mine?
I look up
through an imagined pane…
And there you are
a distraction
an abstraction
searching for its name,
sailing through my spangled dark,
brighter than any spark
of heaven’s sequins.
And yet?
A mystery to me.
Surely there’s a science
to this madness,
to your slow motion pirouette
that matches mine.
You draw me to you
and I you to me,
clasped in an eternal whirl,
a planetary skirl that?
Changes the levels
of my restless seas
and the courses of my inner tides.
And yet?
This is nonsense!
I awaken, and you are gone
the fading notes
of a forgotten song.
I roll over in my fallen form
and there’s the truth,
beside me all along,
my better half.
You give my love its meaning.
Category: Workshops
What’s in a digital frame for writers?
Every time I walk through our dining room into the kitchen, my eye is drawn to the Aura Frame, strategically placed on the countertop between the two rooms—our son Ian gave it to me as a Father’s Day present. Most of the images that scroll through the screen are family shots—my sister’s birthday, me and my brothers getting together for the first time in years, a deer caught munching our garden flowers.
The screen and the online cloud it’s connected to are becoming a repository of photo-memories—images that remind me and others on our family network how lucky we are and the wonderful lives we lead. But it didn’t take long for me to perceive literary possibilities for the technology, and the more I consider its potential, the more excited I become about digital frames for creating and promoting my books.
Before I get into that, though, I need to give you a thumbnail of my status as an author. I’ve had a couple of books published by Thistldown Press—since gone out of print—and remain an unknown outside a small circle of readers and fellow writers. I’ve based my creative and promotional strategies on that reality, which means: I’ll continue to submit some manuscripts to established publishers; at the same time, I will self-publish most of my books; my promotional strategy in either case will rely heavily on direct, face-to-face sales to readers, as well as producing, promoing, and selling my work on Amazon through Kindle Direct Publishing.
How does a digital frame fit into that picture?
I’ll zoom in on a scenario that clicks for me. Imagine yourself at a book fair. You’re engaged in conversation about your recently released thriller with one person, but others are scanning your selection of titles. What if you had a digital screen set up at one end of the table, cycling through images of your books, including back-cover descriptions of the stories and testimonials? What if those browsing readers could tap the frame and launch a video reading from a book they’re interested in?
Does frame-tech have a creative slant? I think so. A book I am planning, under the working title Realta Road, will be set in a Rialta RV, whose owner—a bereaved husband—is driving across Canada. He and his wife had planned the trip for years as a retirement gift to themselves, but she succumbs to a sudden cancer just before they are scheduled to leave. The structure of the story will be the husband’s ‘journal letters’ to his wife, describing in increasingly fraught detail the misadventures he’s getting himself into between Chemainus, on Vancouver Island, and St. John’s, Newfoundland.
Next summer, or the summer after, my wife and I will embark on our own cross-Canada journey—the second time we’ve done it. I’ll be taking pictures and videoing as we go, collecting images that will help me describe Realta Road settings and characters. Would a scrolling frame on my desk populated with those images help keep me on track once we’re back home and I’m immersed in writing?
If you’re interested in digital frames as a promotional and creative tool and would like to join in an exploratory workshop, let me know.
Every picture tells a story
If you are interested in a workshop that engages participants in responsive writing to shared images (photos & paintings), please contact me. More info below…
Every picture tells a story, which makes art a source of inspiration for writers. The same goes for music, dance, and every other art form out there, but the visual arts, especially, are a trove of ideas.
Open up a family photo album and memories are triggered by the images you see. That’s a source for writers whose chosen genre is memoire. But images from other collections can also inspire.
What if your mode is historical fiction? Take a walk around Chemainus and every wall comes to life in your imagination. You can feel yourself being drawn into the large-as-life scenes and back in time—hear sails luffing, wagons clattering, trains chuffing, the rhytmic stroke of paddlers in dugout canoes.
Is there an image that inspires you? Perhaps it’s not even a specific picture, but a sequence made up of many related images, times, and places.
Craig Spence was inspired to write Waking Dream when he saw Diana Durrand’s mixed media piece Be Still and They Will Come, which has been displayed at the Cowichan Valley Performance Centre. Art galleries are great places to go in search of inspiration!
Stories or poems inspired by images aren’t descriptive exercises; they are works of art in their own right, which add a literary dimension to what you are experiencing.
Art, in the deepest sense of the word, is not meant to be ‘looked at’—or read, for that matter; it’s meant to be ‘invoved in’. Looking at a painting, or reading a story, becomes an imaginative act-—it’s participatory. So stories and poems based on imagery are works of art in their own right.
Would you like to participate in a free workshop built around responsive writing to shared images?
Waking Dream
They came to her
in a dream
on paws as soft
as evening light
They huddled in
the contoursof her restless soul
creatures of the land
between day and night
And she lay perfectly
still…
For an eternity…or so it seemed
Aware only of their being
and her delight
She dared not move
or even think…
of stirring…
for if she did
her moment…
she knew…
would take flight.
Craig Spence