Portable Muse Cards: Relaunch! 📓🖊
One of my fun summer projects has been this box redesign of my Portable Muse cards. This time, I used my own photography for the box front and back and chose another, clearer font. Ta-da! The Portable Muse.
Same great prompts to get your Muse moving! The perfect gift for you and the writers in your life.
More deets below:
“Are you a creative writer whose Muse has gone into a sputter? Wondering: "What should I write about today?" Or are you a teacher with a classroom or workshop filled with eager scribes who need fresh prompts? Wonder no more!
What are they?
• A series of 30 prompts on handy-dandy, beautiful cards. One varied prompt per card. Some include quotations, some situations, others a title or a setting.
• Sure to inspire fiction, essays, poetry, and more!
• Very portable! Slip into your pocket, purse, backpack, or tote and carry them with you to write in cafes, waiting rooms, on your commute, or wherever the day takes you!”
Check out these and other fine products at my Etsy store: WritePathProductions.
Photography for Writers Class 📸
Looking for a fun online class this month? I’m teaching Imagery Power: Photography for Writers that starts next Friday, July 16th.
Just a few spots left—reserve your place today. I’d love to work with you. 📸 Learn more here.
My Photo Published, "Moment Series--Wish and Shadow" 😎
Thrilled to say that my photo, “Moment Series—Wish and Shadow,” was published today in the art gallery of Songs of Eretz Poetry Review.
Check out a few reflections I made about my photo as well as the work of the amazing poets, such as my dear friend Charles A. Swanson, and artists featured in this Summer 2021 Love Issue.
✨On Developmental Editing: More of the Scoop at …But I Also Have a Day Job ✨
Photo Courtesy of Laura Chouette, unsplash.com
Wonder how a developmental edit works? The answer by super talented writer and fellow Daria aficionado Ian Rogers at …But I Also Have a Day Job. @IantheRoge 🙌
While you’re there, read his insightful interviews with inspiring writing advice from cool writers, such as Gina Troisi.
Also, check out TRAM, the awesome indie zine out of Toyama, Japan that Ian co-edits.
Also, get ready for his debut novel, MFA Thesis Novel, dropping in April 2022 at Vine Leaves Press @VineLeavesPress --it's fantastic and funny. I’m excited for readers and fellow writers to get their hands on this literary gem. 📘📚🖊
Photo Courtesy of Laura Chouette, unsplash.com
"3 Ways Writing and the Visual Arts Inspire Each Other" 🖊📓📸
Thrilled that my craft article, “3 Ways Writing and the Visual Arts Inspire Each Other,” was featured today through Women on Writing. [Article below.]
Also check out my July-August online Imagery Power: Photography for Writers class that starts Friday, July 16th. Sign-ups open for a limited time! I’d love to work with you and your creative friends. 🙌📸📕
“3 Ways Writing and the Visual Arts Inspire Each Other”
By Melanie Faith
Over the years as a writing teacher, I’ve discovered that many of my talented writing students are also visual artists. From fellow photographers to sculptors, painters, and collage artists, there’s something about the skills used to write vivid imagery and/or scenes that also translate well into other art forms, and vice versa.
So, what can a writer learn from photography (or another visual art) that will enhance their prose or poetry projects?
· Focusing on bite-sized portions create resonance. When you write a scene, chapter, stanza, or paragraph, there’s a format you have in mind—after all, a single chapter or poem can’t last forever. Just as you can’t include everything into a single scene or chapter or poem, you can’t include everything in visual art. A visual artist focuses on parts of a scene for a landscape photograph or painting; it has to stop somewhere. As writers, we make decisions, especially in later drafts, about both what details are extraneous to the whole as well as details or images that must remain to create a unified whole that speaks to a reader’s/viewer’s own experience.
One of the many definitions for “resonance” at Dictionary.com, states: “The ability to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions,” while Merriam-Webster.com defines the term as “a quality of richness or variety” and “a quality of evoking response.” Ultimately, in both writing and visual arts, this is exactly what we want: layers of meaning from the writer/artist that are interesting and hook the reader/viewer so much that the imagery presented stirs their own emotions just experiencing our art.
Made with my ‘90s Canon and Kodak Gold 200 film: “Curlicue L3.” 📸✨
That’s one of the great joys of reading, writing, and making art: the more specific and focused our own works are, the more others will click with the work and want to spend time with it. Creating bite-sized portions of art informs, entertains, and captures the human need to be understood. What could be better than that?
· Layer it up: the more meaning the merrier! In an essay or poem or novel, no matter what the theme is, there’s more going on in the writing than just a sentence-or-two synopsis of what literally happens or what its main idea is. Reaching into the grab bag of literary analytical terms, there might be one or several concurrent elements that contribute to make a scene, chapter, poem, or visual arts piece seem so real-to-life, including but not limited to: symbolism, auditory or taste or visual imagery, synecdoche, metonymy, juxtaposition, simile, and/or metaphor, and more. Below the immediate level of what the work is “about” literally, the deeper, gooier, more subterranean meanings reside and represent where the creator does some of their best work.
Working subtly to show something deeper about human life beyond the immediately obvious—indeed, the word crafting is splendidly apt here—writers and artists work emblematic representations of ideas, emotions, and conflicts into their work to deepen and connect with reader/viewer experience. Real-life ain’t easy or simplistic, so our writing and art better not be either—there should be more-than-meets-the-eye occurring concurrently with the easier-to-spot initial image or dialogue.
As writers/artists, we shape and sculpt ideas so that they are both what they appear to be and also much more than they at first suggest. That kind of composing requires both literal and figurative decisions that make the utmost of each word, each line, each paragraph/stanza, each page, or each canvas, digital chip/pixel, and/or paint.
· Both writers and visual artists actively compose reality. That is, we consider how parts of a whole interact with each other, we leave in necessary imagery and crop out unnecessary or cluttering details, we omit and/or change the pace of reality by slowing down/zeroing in focus on some elements so that others fade into the background, and more.
The element of careful and mindful composition is somewhat subconscious (at first draft, before editing, anyway), and it’s also where a lot of the plain fun of being a writer or artist occurs in the conscious stages of making.
Some subjects, themes, and ideas we might be innately drawn to, such as trains, but the majority of our work revolves around recurring ideas or symbols from an array of life experiences that seem to recur, both in our lives and later in our work—to take the train example further: the artist’s father might have been a 9-5 commuter for many years and so the recurrence of trains in the artist’s work may suggest a whole host of ideas from family responsibility related to jobs, feelings of missing a parental figure, to what it means to live in the suburbs but work in a city, and more.
Writing and the visual arts integrate many decisions at both the conscious and subconscious level of creation: exciting and complex composition that continues to inspire, mystify, challenge, and motivate our work from the first experiments in each medium through all of the works we produce and share.
Clearly, writing and the visual arts are meaningful, rich explorations into self-discovery and also important genres for commenting on and sharing ideas about the complexity of human experience. One art form—writing—can inform and inspire growth in visual arts as we reach to become better self-expressing writers and insightful communicators to a wider audience.
Ekphrastic Magic Project 📸📓
Super excited to have a poem I wrote in a fantastic project, “Ekphrastic Magic," a photography and poem collaboration, this summer. It is part of an international photo festival in Barcelona, Spain!
Many thanks to the amazingly talented Amy Jasek at Film Shooters Collective for the artistic camaraderie, for her vision and hard work in putting this project together, and for the wonderful invitation to take part.
Learn more about Revela’t and their festival.
Photo Courtesy of Markus Winkler at Unsplash.com
Great News: Beyond Words Literary Magazine Second Printing
So pleased that this issue of the stellar international literary journal, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, from last June has now gone into a second printing! 😍📸
I have photography in the June 2020 issue as well as in their current May 2021 issue.
Get your copy/subscription today @beyondwordsmagazine . Also, consider submitting your words or art.
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
❄Featured in Snowflakes in a Blizzard ❄
Pleased to share that my craft book, Photography for Writers, is featured this week in Snowflakes in a Blizzard, a wonderful book blog.
Learn more about the blog as well as check out their other great featured books here and here.
"Within Reach"--Ekphrastic Work Featured Today 📓🖊📸
I’m thrilled to announce that a poem I wrote, “Within Reach,” based on a fantastic photograph by talented film photographer Martí Blesa was published today as part of Film Shooters Collective’s NATIONAL POETRY MONTH, DAY 5.
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Check out all of the posts each day during April at Film Shooters Collective!
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Within Reach
by Melanie Faith
It is, indeed,
something
good to be
one and small
Photo courtesy of: film photographer Martí Blesa
of many who are
one and small.
It is, indeed,
filled
with gray
potential,
elemental
to advance
in ordinary sandals
against cement.
More and more
rectangles
await our future.
Stacked lenses
mirrored,
so when we wave—
that pleasant
pain bloomed
there in the back
of the neck—
we wave back
looking up.