Discoveries

My love letters to inanimate objects project is in its early days, but this is what I have discovered so far (who knows where the stream will take me next, 6 weeks in length I hope for more mutations and new creative challenges).

Several works have been completed and have been sent to their initiators. They will go live in Week 1 of the write-a-thon on website I am creating right now https://objectsoflove.wordpress.com . If you go there now you can see it in all its ugly duckling grandeur as I fiddle with themes and play with content. The subscribe button on the right hand side works however!

As you can see, one of the first things I’ve discovered is that this project wants its own space to play and breathe in.

Discoveries – preparation – 24 June 2011

Some people gave me my prompts early and I was unable to resist the pull of their nouns. Denying the tug of inspiration for the Write-a-thon seemed to go against the Write-a-thon’s deepest principals and so I went with it and began creating.

When I imagined this fun project a year ago I thought it would be a good opportunity to throw myself with wild passionate abandon into things far from myself. The deep and passionate love of an alien from the planet Sprunk for her 1973 Red Caddilac. The love of moon rock, the love of a small piece of lint that I found in my pocket, the love of high speed drill.

I thought, I can wrack my brain, find a way to love and communicate a passion for the most unlikely object.

So far my sponsors have enabled is for me to discover existing loves and swim in the ways objects become pathways to deeper experiences. A sponsor gives me a noun, and within a few hours I am swept up in cascading chains of memory and love for something real.

I may have slipped deeper into the world of creative non-fiction, a category I don’t understand and don’t feel fully comfortable with. Perhaps it is better to say I have slipped into the land of poetry. Poetry is a fantastical place. I am not a reliable narrator, even if I was trying to be. Part of me is still convinced my family had a goat called Strawberry even if everyone else knows our milking goats were Chocolate, Caramel and Vanilla. Truth, memory, hyperbole and imagination all merge and converge into story and the pleasure of loving something. Celebrating an object takes it further from the actual-ness and merges into a greater truth.

So these stories are lies. Some of them are bigger lies than others. But although they are lies, they are sincere. And while much is a fabrication it is safe to say that anything that casts an embarrassing light on the narrator is more likely to be based in fact.