Gallery 1988’s Crazy 4 Cult is underway. Some inspired illos are on sale, including this gorgeous print from Mike Mitchell, “Portrait of an Iron Giant as a Young Vin Diesel.”
The Guardian has a piece on British actress Natascha McElhone and her new book After you, a collection of her journal entries about the sudden death of her husband two years ago.
This particular bit caught our attention:
She started writing to Kelly almost immediately, as a release and an effort to contain her grief out of sight of her children; Theo, the eldest at eight, had asked her not to cry in front of him. The early entries are full of the derangements of a mind in shock; one of the first things that crossed her mind after hearing the news was a hope that the windows in their London home were shut, so that nothing of Kelly’s spirit could escape. Later, when she returned home, there was, she writes, such a palpable sense of him – the shirt on the door; the lingering smell – that “there is a period of time where I think, someone is still buzzing; there is a reverberation of them around you that you clasp, latch on to, in the hope that it will materialise into something more than a vibration. And of course it never does. There’s that hope. It’s very irrational. And you know it is. But it still gives a sense of comfort or relief.” These are things she could record only in the knowledge that she was “writing to someone who’s not around and you’re not going to get a response”.
Interestingly, McElhone’s oldest son also took to writing, creating a poem about his father and Rex, his baby brother. It helped end a particular cycle in their grief:
McElhone’s eldest son wrote a poem “about Martin’s soul flying out of one window and coming through another into Rex’s”. She has tried to mimic their childish ability to live in the moment. “If there’s anything good [that's come out of it] I think it’s that I don’t have any expectations. I had quite a lot, when I was younger. Living with very limited expectations is a much more immediate way of living.
Writing is not only cathartic, but it creates a tangible artifact of our feelings. Something we can observe, outside of ourselves, and possibly manage. Reading about pain gives us perspective. Writing about it can heal us.
Storybird has an all-hands meeting every Monday. Here are a few things from today’s pow-wow that were significant:
Any way you look at it—we’re cooking.
Kudos to Rowling and WB for letting a British crime director paint an increasingly thick and grimy patina over Harry Potter.
Rebecca Dautremer recently caught our eye with her lush colors and strong camera angles. Like Janice Nadeau, who we featured a few days ago, Dautremer is French. But the former hails from Quebec while the latter is from France. At first blush, I would have thought the reverse, given how Nadeau’s whimsical art deco style conjures up an easy cliché of France while Dautremer’s aggressive palette and POV seems younger and more suitably Quebecois. I’d hesitate to say this to them personally, though. France and Quebec are as similar as Scotland and Ireland, and their residents are equally bothered by mixing up origins and influences.
Apricot is a bit self-conscious, but the love and tenderness of this short film—both in the story and production—is winning. Steal 10 minutes: close the door, go full screen, and turn up the sound. You’ll be glad you did.
Art deco pixie dust is sprinkled throughout the work of French artist Janice Nadeau.
Writer, teacher, and librarian Pat Ezell (aka wirelesslibrarian) attracted our attention with several charming Storybirds about mice, pigs, and talking trees. Given her pedigree, we asked her about the social side of writing and the influence of feedback on emerging writers.
Ernest Hemingway got up early in the morning so he could write in quiet. Truman Capote swore that he did all his writing lying down, crafting his stories either in bed or on the couch. Shakespeare would shut himself away in his chambers for days at a time when he was writing. Okay, I totally made up the bit about Shakespeare, but it sounds plausible, right? Writing has typically been thought of as a solitary and frequently clandestine endeavor. But is lonely writing the only good kind?
When I was in third grade, my teacher chose to “publish” a story I had written, thanks to the purple magic of the mimeograph machine. Yeah, I’m kind of ancient. Anyway, everyone in Mrs. Hall’s class got a fragrant, violet-inked copy of my masterpiece, and the whole experience was very powerful for me. Because my teacher saw value in my writing, I began to see myself as a writer. It made me want to write more, to write better, to create the most amazing stories ever read. That’s what a little bit of encouragement can do for you, and I think that writing in and for a collaborative community like Storybird can nurture the same desire to be a writer that Mrs. Hall instilled in me.
The world is seemingly a very different place today. Shakespeare and Hemingway and Capote did not have such a broad sounding board as we now enjoy, but I suspect that authors have always looked for affirmation and guidance. Jane Austen always read her work to her sister first. Rick Riordan shared The Lightning Thief with his nine-year-old son and then tried it out with his middle school students before he submitted it for publication. Stephen King always shares his first drafts with the grave digger at a local cemetery. Umm, that part about Stephen King is complete fabrication, but it sounds right, doesn’t it? The point is that maybe authorship isn’t done best in isolation. Maybe being able to connect with others to share our writing can make us better writers. With Storybird and other forms of social media at our fingertips, we’ve just got a bigger family to bounce things off of.
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Image: Fancy Fish by Victoria Usova
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Cover, end paper, and bookplate design by Sara Wood and Bobby O’Herlihy for an assignment by typographic illustrator Jessica Hische.
