Tuesday, October 28, 2008

A River Metaphor

The Gihon River runs right past my studio window. It's calm at this time of year, meandering on its own journey. It will join another river and eventually empty into Lake Champlain.

There are fifty-one residents at the Vermont Studio Center now. Seven of us are writers, the rest painters, sculptors, print makers and photographers. Even the staff are artists and writers. Meal time conversations stretch my thinking. I hear about a watercolor that didn't work out morphing into an oil. I think of the picture book I turned into an early chapter book.

I'm working on a collection of poems for children. Of course, I forgot my thesaurus (I still prefer my hard copy). When I'm stuck, I let my eyes soak up the river. It flows around the Red Mill and cascades over the falls. I imagine it carrying ideas to me, just the right word tumbling down the falls, the perfect image flowing past my window.

The collective energy of this community is like the river, in a way. I want my ideas to tumble around, flow downstream, pool, and if I can get out of my own way, become larger than they were.

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