"Abounding Images: An invitation to Imagery Power: Photography for Writers" 🎉📸

So pleased that my article was published today as a Women on Writing Spotlight article. Check out the prompt I share as well:

“Abounding Images: An Invitation to Imagery Power: Photography for Writers”

By Melanie Faith

 

                I found three rolls of brand-new film in a drawer earlier this week that I’d forgotten I’d purchased. It felt a little bit like unwrapping a Christmas gift to myself. Eager to head into the great weather, I took my ‘90s Canon Rebel outside for a few nature shots. The heft of the camera body nestled in my hands just right. Working with a physical, clicky dial to blur the background and focus on the foreground was like stepping back into a favorite pair of blue jeans—comforting and the perfect fit. Need I say that I took the rest of the roll and returned to my desk, smiling?

                I’ve also been taking a lot of photos with my cellphone camera and find it a wonderful photographic experience, too. It is featherweight, and I can take as many pictures as I please. Cellphone cameras have come a very long way in the past ten years. Smart phones are equipped today with much better software and make sharper photographs than any of my first digital cameras. And they’re quite easy to use, and super handy. Rare is the person without a phone as a near-constant companion, which (of course) makes them absolutely the best for capturing inconspicuously as we go about our daily lives. And sharing cellphone photos is so easy it’s a dream.

                Whether you prefer making photos with an old-school film camera that takes film or film cartridges, taking pictures with your cellphone, or a combination of both, there’s something meaningful and meditative about the art of photography. Much like the craft of writing, we begin to see our surroundings, our daily lives, and even ourselves a bit differently, a bit better in some ways, by taking the time to focus on elements we might previously zip past on our way to the rest of our appointments and to-do lists. The fact that no two people see the same images in the same way nor interpret them in the same way enhances our development as artists.

                Making a photograph, like making a poem or a short story or a song or a chapter in a novel or an essay, is deeply personal. We have so many options that it’s exhilarating. We get to choose the subject. We get to choose the angle we take the image from. We get to choose the crop or zoom of the photo. We get to choose if we print the photo to make it a physical object in the world or if we keep it a digital file. We get to choose if we make the photo part of a series on a subject or if the photo is a one-off and stands alone. We get to choose light source and time of day and if we scan or upload the photo to software to alter its hues (hello, black and white!) or shoot in black and white mode or with b & w film.  

                It is in making these choices, often intuitively and in quick succession and very frequently learning and experimenting as we go, that we grow in other art forms as well.

Thinking about making a better photograph certainly continues to influence and encourage my poetry as well as my prose. Photography, much like writing and other art forms, focuses on the importance of the image, the resonance of created expression, and the great fun and challenge when we take the world as we experience it and offer a new creation that very likely will connect with other people who themselves make writing and other art.

                There’s no prerequisite needed, and I’ve had students who made visceral, beautiful, jaw-dropping photos from disposable cameras, phone cameras, underwater cameras, instant cameras, pinhole cameras, film cameras of many makes, and even from photosensitive photographic paper.

The field of photography is wide open to individual interpretation and vision. Begin where you are, with that little “Hmmm, that’s interesting” when you’re out on a morning walk, and see where it takes you. One snap, one click, one moment documented at a time.

 

Try this prompt: Make a photo today of an object someone else uses every day. Aim to show a special quality about this object—whether its shape, its size, its hue, its placement in the home or outside, or some other quality. After taking the photo, either write a few sentences describing this object, why you chose it, and who uses it OR create a character who uses this object and write about that character for fifteen or twenty minutes. What would happen if the character reached for the object and it was missing? Go!

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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.  

New Notebook, New Season, New Doodle📝

Starting a new notebook—this little 5 x 7 beauty was a whole $1.25—is always a good feeling for me. Potentiality on each page. I’ve been experimenting with different types and sizes of paper for my doodles.

Last night, right before sleep, I broke out my new notebook, my 0.7 mm lead pencil, and my colored pencils and made an outlined sketch of a photographer. It was a peaceful, simmering hour as I drew a preliminary/reference sketch on scrap paper, opened the second page of the notebook (I often skip the first, as it sits a bit askew in the binding), and then started this drawing.

Filling in the figure was a particularly pleasant part of the process as well—colored pencils force a kind of quiet contemplation and over-and-over-and-over patience that slows my thinking and flashes me back to childhood hours quietly coloring or writing.

It’s probably not surprising that I would choose to draw a photographer in motion. One of my other happy places is photography (a few years ago, I wrote a book that combined my writing with my photography practice and tips, Photography for Writers).

Much like when writing, when I’m behind the lens, the daily drops away. I like the challenge of making what I see and how I see it into a composition. I like that it’s not an easy process nor a process I can take for granted or even a process that I fully steer, but that there are many do-overs available—as many as I have time and inclination to make.

Mostly, photography is a place of rare transcendence where the world slows and I make my thinking and my seeing into something at once me and not me. It’s a good space.

This is my first go-’round with sketching what I’m calling a silhouette portrait. Kindly ignore the erased shoulder and erased original feet, which I only realized after pondering them were pointing in the wrong direction from her body’s stance along with the smudge at the bottom of the page by the date. We’ll just call those markers of authenticity.😁

I have to say, though: I was a little surprised that one or two elements of this drawing felt to me like what it feels when I’m behind my camera: a liminal in-between space that just is what it is and unfolds as it should (if, frequently, not as I would have originally imagined).

Or maybe this is just my fancy-pants way of saying I couldn’t believe it actually sort of resembles a human and not a stick figure. 😆

The little notebook says “Plan” on the cover, but as we know, there are many things we simply cannot plan. Mostly, we can move, slowly, in a slightly new direction and see what happens, and then repeat the process as the happening unfolds. Drawings, photographs, writing, ourselves—all unfolding.

“Interior/Exterior: Reflections on Drawing a Scene” 🖼️

Happy March! I had so much fun writing a fresh flash essay about my doodle last month that I decided to create another one to share. 🤗

“Interior/Exterior: Reflections on Drawing a Scene”

I almost wrote this reflection yesterday afternoon, but I was hungry and promised myself that after eating I’d get right to it.  And then, I just needed to pay a bill quickly and I’d sit right down and write. And then, I remembered a time-sensitive email, and then…well, you know the rest.

Yesterday’s writing didn’t happen.  

Alas, I had the “perfect” hook pop into my head yesterday, but tonight is no longer yesterday. So, scrap that. My tone today is different, and my hook has evaporated like a cartoon bubble. So be it. This reflection won’t be about whatever that would have been, and that’s okay, too.

Earlier this week, I also promised myself some time to doodle during a break, and I did follow through on that intention. I decided to try to draw a scene—a whole interior SCENE!—which I haven’t attempted since…probably middle school. Yeah, it’s been a hot minute.

I usually doodle one thing at a time, or parts of a scene, or words/phrases paired with a mini doodle or two, but to fill a whole sheet with myriad elements kept my brain and my hand hopping.

I put on some music, broke out a coffee-table book filled with gorgeous photos, picked the one that called to me most as a reference photo that I then adjusted as I went.

I started my scene on a scrap piece of newsprint paper I bought online this summer in a jumbo, 500-sheet package.

There’s something about knowing that I’m not going to save the first drawing because it’s on the kind of paper that tears when an eraser hits it that frees up my creativity. Nobody will ever see this first sketch so, who cares? Onward!

Without contemplation first, hand motions of pencil on paper are often quite soothing.

I try to get that way about more things: that not skipping ahead to envision outcome. Sometimes, my creative process lands, and I don’t stop to examine or even to think about forming whatever I’m creating until I have a draft or five. Those are the best days.

More often, though, my mind loves nothing more than just to keep skipping ahead. Ahead, ahead, ahead!

I’m certainly not the only creative to find my process varies like this. Depending on my day, my mood, how tired I am, how hungry I am, fill-in-the-factor-here, the challenge of crafting something is either easier than imagined, or more frustrating than imagined, or (most frequently for me) somewhere in-between, but it’s rarely the same type of journey more than once.

Each piece needs something different of us, like every friend, like every life circumstance.

My original sketchbook scan in all of its uncropped glory, spirals and all.🤗

So, my interior scene (which I also drew in pencil first, free-hand, on the sketchpad page and then traced with felt-tipped marker and pops of color from watercolor pencils) has some walls that are certainly not architecturally sound, a baseboard that shouldn’t look like it’s cutting through one of the plant’s fronds, some picture frames that are crooked despite practicing perspective, and a chair that I’m pretty sure doesn’t even resemble a chair.

On the other hand, I got the happiest kick while drawing the arched doorway between the rooms that reminded me of more than one friend’s home, and drawing the little locks on the big bay window, and then having a light-bulb moment about adding in a pop of life-giving green on the plants, and attempting some splash of light across the floors, and making the one rug a sisal rug with squiggle motions, and then drawing lines for wooden floors, my favorite flooring—all, nothing but joy and in the flow. 

The floors!

The wooden floors. That’s right—I was going to write something about those yesterday.

There was also originally going to be something about the lemonade I tried recently and loved. But today’s reflection needed to be the way it turned out here—about the challenges (for me, anyway) of drawing whole scenes in scale and with perspective but doing it anyway, and something about the comfort of putting elements together that make an interior that becomes exterior, which is also, pretty much, what we do when we create, whether it’s a conversation, a painting, a poem, a dance, or a birthday party. So be it.

On the balance, not bad for a cozy interior. Not great or professional, but not shabby, either.  Onward!