"Buy the Fanciful Ones: A Tale of New Shoes" Published!

Excellent news! A light-hearted CNF flash memoir piece I wrote a few months ago about new shoes was just published at The Bluebird Word.

Read the piece here: “Buy the Fanciful Ones: A Tale of New Shoes” [clickety-click].

This has been a wild and wonderful week so far: I got a rejection letter this morning for some poetry, then I got word this afternoon that my shoe piece was published, and I have another piece that was accepted a few weeks ago which will be published this week as well. Stay tuned, and thanks for all of your continued support!

Write on through all the lows and highs of this writing life—you just never know what’s next. 🎉

P.S. Here are the mentioned shoes. 😁

Reach 🤩

Reach

Sketch in colored pencils & black felt-tip pen.

I haven’t shared a doodle in a while, so I figured it was about time to break out my sketchbook and play a bit.  

I was thinking yesterday, too, about swing-arm lamps. The kind architects often have on their desks, but sometimes also students and offices. I didn’t know that they were referred to as “swing-arm” lamps until a quick search-engine search delivered that little golden nugget into my life, which I now share with you. 😉

Speaking of innovation and knowledge, I read a book two or three years ago about the Bauhaus, a German school of design, arts (including theater, sculpture, pottery, stained glass, wooden toys, and poster design), and architecture in 1919-the early 1930s. Fine arts and crafts and some very sharp-looking designs were created by young students and their professors which continue to inspire designers of furniture and architecture. They made innumerable creations in their carpentry and metal-working workshops, from chairs and swivel lamps and photography and arts posters for theater performances given at the school to coffee-and-tea sets and glassworks and weaving and you name it. If the design was geometric, spare, innovative, and functional during that time period, it was probably cooked up and refined at the Bauhaus.  

I’ve never owned a swing-arm lamp, nor a gooseneck lamp (which I think of as their fanciful second cousin), but I’ve often admired both. There’s something very appealing about the way they’re designed—form and function working hand-in-glove. They don’t just sit there stationary, but offer instant flexibility for the user. Wherever the light is needed, le voilà! Here we go; instant warm spotlight. Then, economically pushed back when not in use—until the next time.

Continued growth as a writer often requires a reaching process that combines a hearty blending of the initial sizzle of the imagination intermingled with the stability and support of consistent application, mixing the heat of creating with the cooler temperatures of refining and editing the vision into new forms for sharing.

This end-of-year time gets all of our gears turning with goals we’ve finished and those we haven’t and those we’d like to dream up for next year. Without putting pressure on ourselves (because nobody needs more of that!), it’s a good season for this kind of if-you-can-imagine-it-you-can-make-it-happen reflection.

It’s a good time for downshifting, daydreaming, and putting some plans into action for the coming months.  I have the kind of mind that needs no encouragement to cook up a project or ten and imagine the endless permutations and exciting possibilities. I also have the kind of mind (and enough experience as a writer and creative) to know it takes time, organization, trial-and-error patience, and planning to see a project to its conclusion so that it’s ready to share. I try to give my imagination free reign for a while, and then I begin to organize that wide expanse into a series of steps (accounting for setbacks and a learning curve along the way).

I’m cooking up some fun projects for 2024 that I can’t wait to share. At the moment, one project in particular is very new, wobbly, interesting ground for me, stretching what I already know with the many, many things I don’t. It includes a-million-and-one steps that I’m learning (and reading about and trial-and-erroring and trying-again-and-againing).  Stay tuned!

I am delighted to share that I have three online classes that I hope will inspire fellow creative writers and artists to invest in their own dreams and goals and talents as well as to try new creative goals that will inspire reaching into new territory as well.

If you have a friend you haven’t purchased a gift for yet or would like to invest in your own artistic process, I’d love to work with you and a friend! Mark your calendars. All three courses accepting sign-ups now 😊:

*In Tune: Writing about Music in Fiction (starting Friday, February 2, 2024; 4-week class; NEW!):

https://wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/MelanieFaith_Music.php

*An Inside Look at Launching as a Freelance Editor (one-afternoon webinar; 1-2 pm ET; Friday, April 12, 2024)

https://wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/MelanieFaith_FreelanceEditorWebinar.php

*Art Making for Authors (starting Friday, August 2, 2024; 4-week class; NEW!)

https://wow-womenonwriting.com/classroom/MelanieFaith_ArtMaking.php

I also have craft books aplenty that make excellent gifts, such as: From Promising to Published:

Here’s to reaching into our imaginations and cooking up the projects that will interest and sustain our creative growth both now and throughout 2024!

Write on!

 

New Doodles and Reflections 🎉

I felt like doodling some teapots yesterday, and then I sat down and wrote a few reflections that fell out of my head in essay form on the theme. Just fun to share. 🌞

For a few years, I bought a lot of tea kettles. I wasn’t starting a collection; I was gifting them.

 

If you had invited me to your wedding or to your housewarming party or to a similar occasion in that stretch of time you likely received one of these beauties wrapped in a roll of polka-dot or confetti-print paper. I bought them one at a time, brand new, and with the individual receiver(s) in mind. They were, in that way, personalized.

 

Sometimes, I picked enamel ones with a spate of blue, green, or red geometric designs or tiny, hearty yellow flowers across the belly; other times, I picked a plain kettle of shiny russet or a penny color; or a glass or porcelain teapot. It depended on the store’s stock and sometimes on my mood or the color combos that seemed to match the friend or cousin or coworker I was shopping for. Some of the kettles came in printed cardboard boxes and some did not. Regardless, I hand-selected and filled-in a personalized message for each kettle.

 

I always added a box or two of the sachets filled with pocket-square sized, often-flavored tea (orange pekoe, black tea, green tea with mint, English breakfast tea, lemon or another fruity flavor with fun, often alliterative product names) to go along with the gift so that it was immediately useful, immediately (I hoped) a part of the recipient’s daily life.

 

In my enthusiasm to gift, I could have planned better. Thinking back on it now, I guess I could have/should have asked if they even liked tea. I could have just gone with something on a registry, to ensure they didn’t get doubles and have to return it. I didn’t know if any of my recipients already had kettles. I loved tea, still do, and what I wanted to gift most was what I loved most: the ritual of starting with something basic and elemental and fortifying—water that would also become some steam, herbs—and within just a small amount of time (usually less than 5 minutes) a whole experience: a break, or a companion for the morning, or afternoon, or evening when sleep was futile, was created. Over and over, this comforting surety of rest and fortification.

 

Most tea is made now (mine included) in a small microwave that gives a tiny chirrup of beeps and then stops. Sometimes, I wait with my eager spoon a few feet from the muted window as my mug spins and spins inside the machine, and sometimes I use that time to fish through my many boxes to find the flavor of the day. It never gets old—selecting the flavor.

 

I don’t have a kettle at the moment and haven’t gifted anybody one in years, but I still love everything about these simple beauties: their hollowness and their heft; their handle like a purse a great aunt handmade for me when I was a kid that lifts up or can be tucked back, out of sight when not in use; the elephant-trunk curve of the little spout; the dainty lid with its knob that makes an easy lift-and-remove or fit-into-the-groove possible.  They do not require an app to operate; they run on the thought to use them, time, and patience.

 

Those minutes waiting for the water to bubble are a handbrake—Slow it down, down, and down again. The additional moments of the sachet simmering fragrance also speaks a similar language—Don’t leap ten steps ahead; be here. 

 

One day soon, I may likely find the perfect one to gift myself. But even if that time is a ways off, there is the ritual of the cup, the water turned to curlicue steam, the flavor. There is the everyday transformation to stillness and reflection: much like words, available for combination, creation, consumption, and recreation. A small part of the day, but one that betters in its own steadfastness, in its own pleasing way. 

 

Purple gel pen, colored pencils.

Some kettle practice. 😉

My first kettle that somehow ended up in proportions looking rather like a genie lamp! 🤣

Home Phone ☎️: An Illustrated CNF Piece

“Home Phone”

 

You probably remember the first phones in your life, too.

 

My grandma had a black lacquer rotary telephone on her desk in her living room for the first 23 years of my life. It was a beauty. The sound and the little spin, as one disk moved back and then surged forward before fitting back into place again whenever a number was called, were delights. This phone was short and shiny and, as my parents reminded me when I was nursery-school little, not a toy and not to be used unless an adult said it was okay and gave us a number to use. Otherwise, hands off.

 

My parents also had a rotary phone at home. It was wall-mounted in the kitchen. It was also tan, which is not nearly as glam as black lacquer. It made the same delightful sounds, though.

 

When I was in middle school, I got my own white and gray plastic phone for Christmas (heavy as a brick and with push buttons and a little antenna, so you knew it was fancy pants), but it was still on the home landline. Both phones rang when any incoming call arrived. I wouldn’t have my own line and number until college; my first cell phone a few years after that.

 

Whether you curled the rotary phone’s cord around your arm like a bracelet (its own sense memory that will never vanish) or used the push-button phone, there weren’t special plans or phone cards like today, so we were reminded repeatedly that unless it was a local number (read: free) we weren’t to dillydally. We didn’t spend a ton of time on the phone, anyway, because all a phone did was make voice calls then.

 

This morning, when my cell-phone rang (unrecognized number, no pick-up), I decided to draw from memory Grandma’s beautiful rotary phone. I surprised myself by forgetting that, unlike a clock dial, there wasn’t an 11 or a 12 (duh; I’m not sure why my brain thought that), but I’d already inked it in that way, so I turned to a fresh page.

 

Then, while penciling in the numerals a second time, I flashed back to the alphabet above some of the numbers. That’s right! I found some great reference shots online (I should have started there—you live, you learn), and drawing #2 was off and running!

 

Some surprising things I relearned:

*They literally wrote Operator alongside the O on the dial. No subtlety here.

*There was that little metallic clicky thing (like a game-show wheel spinner) on the bottom-right-hand side of the dial.

*Drawing even circles is unexpectedly, legitimately hard. I pencil drew and redrew the three circles involved in the rotary at least twelve times. Ironically, I almost bought a compass last week.

* There was no Q on the rotary dial. None! I triple checked that on a half-dozen phone photos online. (Yes, I used a phone to find photos of phones. I am just that meta. 😊) Why no Q? The Q gets no love. Sorry, dear Q. You have a buddy, though: Z wasn’t there either. Wild! All of my formative years I used phones without these consonants and never once gave it a thought. While there are plenty of online theories about these omissions, my favorite one says that Q and Z were left behind because they resembled 0 and 2 too much. Hmmm, not so much, but an interesting theory, right?

*Memory put the numerals starting at the top and running right to left, like a clock, but the zero was on the bottom right-hand and the numerals ran down the left-hand side.

 

Some things, though, you never forget:

*Getting your first calls where someone specifically asked for you. A sibling or parent had to put down the receiver and walk into another room to get you (often hollering down hallways or running outside so that the other person got to hear a banging screen door and more yelling while waiting), sometimes knowing but more often not knowing who was on the other end of the line. Much shuffling and nervous hem-hawing ensued for both parties.

*Everyone overhearing your one-sided conversations, so you kept them a bit circumspect: “No way. When? Where? I’ll ask. No, I can’t. Next week? Maybe. I’ll see. He said what? She did what? Who said?”

*The sound of my grandmother’s warm tone on the other end of the line that I haven’t heard since 2000.

*The pleasing heft of the receiver.

*The satisfying little clunk hanging up. Much as I love my cell phone, especially after upgrading to a smart phone that has an app for everything under the sun, pressing the little red button does not give the same emotional zest as a rotary gave. You could guess a roommate’s, sibling’s, or friend’s mood by the way they either gently or frustratingly returned the receiver to the cradle.

 

In case you ever wondered: yes, you can still buy a rotary phone. In just about any color you’d prefer, from olive green to lemon yellow to vibrant orange. People sell both authentic ones and brand-new replicas online. While the era of the home phone has gone the way of the dodo, these beautiful objects—whether used for their original purpose or as cool time capsules for a shelf—are fairly affordable. Many that I saw were in the $40-70 range (but some go over $200 for the more-coveted colors, like red and bubblegum pink).

 

I wonder if my nieces, who are growing up always knowing a cell phone, will want one once they are on their own in a few years. I kind of hope so; I’d probably even gift them one for the fun of it. I’d like to call them and have them hear my voice in the same way I used to hear the voices of my relatives and friends. Through an object that only did one thing, but gave many layers of meaning and feeling.