Get Inspired: Photo Magic

February 9, 20151 Comment

This isn’t my photo, but I call it “ghost fish.” Somewhere on the edge of my imagination, ghost fish swim through a very creepy story.

February. Hand down the worst month of the year, am I right? Far enough from Christmas that we’ve forgotten it, far enough from spring that we can’t see it yet. Cold and gray and what do you mean I have to buy three sets of perfect Valentines and hang paper hearts everywhere?

We’re on the hunt for inspiration. Something to make us glow from the inside and remind us that the world is fascinating and that there’s so much out there to counterbalance the greeting cards. We’ve found some inspiration in books. We’ve found some from our kids. We’ve found some in our online community. We’ve found some in history. Today we’re going to feast our eyes and look at life through someone else’s camera lense.

Is there anything more mysterious that mist? It’s been used to the point of cliche, but there is still so much hidden in there to be discovered…

It’s no secret that I get a lot of inspiration from creative images. I have no visual artistic skills of any kind, but I endlessly troll the internet for photos that trigger something inside me. I keep a Pinterest page just for pictures that made me think, “I’m going to write a story about this.” I visit it often. If you read here regularly, you might find the roots of some of your favorite stories there. I also keep this Tumblr purely for my own pleasure. When I get into that certain place where nothing fits together right and I can’t put my finger on the problem, I just scroll through the images and feel the internal sigh of relief.

I don’t have permission to post all of my favorites here, but follow me around the net a while, and take a look at the magic that’s being created. You won’t be sorry.

Lissy Elle. She’s one of the first photographers I ever followed. Images like this one (and this one) hooked me forever. Her Flickr feed ranges from the dark and bizarre to the whimsical and magical, but they all capture a very specific emotion. Love her.

Ashley Lebedev. I first found this photo and was enchanted. That took me to her very interesting Flickr feed. Many of these are more staged than I like, but there are a few complete gems.

Along those same lines is this photo. It’s one of my favorites ever, and the artist, Lione Bakker, creates portaits that have such a luminous quality.

Someday I’m going to explore a post-apocalyptic world, and when I do, I’ll find out the story behind this.

I also love anything and everything that uses perspective creatively. Perspective is one of the most interesting things in life. The more we examine it, the better.

That said, this one makes me feel a little sick.

I know it’s all a trick, but I still find most of these resonant with stories I want to tell.

And my all-time favorite (because I want to tame the moon).

There’s a whole world above the clouds. If we could walk there, I wonder what we would find?

And finally, the wonderful way that photos can tell real life stories. So many people have done this well over the years, but Angelo Merendino is my new favorite. This series brought me to tears this week. I don’t like to be brought to tears, but this was worth it.

Did you click the links? Did you soak it all in?

February doesn’t seem so bad after all, does it?

Undefined Truth

February 2, 20152 Comments

Let me tell you a story.

Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Germany to a non-religious Jewish family. She grew up, went to the university and studied philosophy, but was prevented from becoming a teacher because she wasn’t allowed as a Jew to complete her teaching prerequisites. She spent time researching anti-Semitism before being arrested by the Gestapo in 1933. She was only in prison briefly and then left the country for France. At the beginning of the war, she fled with her husband and mother to the United States, having been given illegal papers by an American diplomat who aided Jewish refugees. After the war, she returned to Germany and worked for a Zionist organization that rescued children and settled them in Palestine. She began to write books. She became well-known as a philosopher, though she didn’t like being called that because she said philosophy was concerned with individual man. She considered herself a political theorist because she focused on the fact that “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.” She became a college professor and lecturer (the first female lecturer at Princeton, in fact.) Hannah died in New York in 1975.

The man who helped Hannah and her family get to the U.S. was named Hiram Bingham.

Hiram Bingham was born in 1903 to a distinguished Connecticut Christian family. He graduated from Yale in 1925. Bingham’s career in the foreign service took him to Japan, China, Poland, and England before landing him in Marseilles, France in 1939. When Hitler invaded in 1940, the French government put foreign refugees into internment camps and the U.S. government discouraged diplomats from helping these refugees. Bingham didn’t care. He cooperated with rescue workers to help over 2500 Jews flee from France as the Nazi’s approached. He aided the emigration of Marc Chagall, Hannah Arendt, and novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, even sheltering Feuchtwanger in his house for a while after aiding in his escape from the internment camp. As a consequence of all this, the US government pulled Bingham from France and transferred him to Portugal and then to Argentina, where he proceeded to help track Nazi war criminals in South America. Naturally, he was passed over for promotion, and resigned from the foreign service in 1945.

Lion Feuchtwanger was born in Germany in 1884. He fought briefly in World War I, but was released for health reasons. He was a playwright and later a novelist who was very influential in the life of famous playwright Bertolt Brecht. Feuchtwanger was among the first to recognize and expose the evils of the Nazi party. His Conversations with a Wandering Jew was published in 1920 and already described the anti-Semitic fervor that would overtake his country with eery accuracy. You can read more about the story of his persecution by the Nazi party and the many, many people who helped him escape here.

You can read about Bertold Brecht here.

You can read about philanthropist Martha Sharp, who worked with Hiram Bingham, here.

You can find your own meaning in these true stories wherever you want.

(All this information comes from the hallowed lines of Wikipedia. Yep, that's research.)

It’s Not Stuff; It’s Stories

January 26, 20152 Comments

My parents have moved to town! It’s a long, whirlwind story, but the happy ending is that this week they moved into a house less than ten minutes from ours, and now my children have both sets of grandparents living close.

If that sort of thing seems normal to you, then you probably can’t understand how this feels to me. Three quick pieces of information for important context: 1. I grew up moving every year or two and never lived in the same town as my own grandparents, and 2. I went to college halfway across the country from home and then married someone local, and 3. We proceeded to move to Argentina, where we lived for nearly a decade and where I birthed two of our three children.

Needless to say, I never, ever envisioned a life in which my children would grow up around all of their grandparents. Sometimes, life just gives you those unexpected bonuses. I couldn’t be more grateful.

Cut to this weekend, to my kids helping Gramma unpack in her new house. I was upstairs moving boxes of books to and fro, and when I came down, there were all three kids on the floor with my mom, beautiful tea cups and glassware on every available surface, having the time of their lives.

“Tell your mom what you just told me,” Gramma said to my son.

In classic kid fashion, he was too squirmy to respond, so it was up to Gramma.

“He just said, “Hey, this isn’t really about the stuff. This is really about the stories.”

These are the moments you can’t plan for. But oh, when they come.

Every tea cup has a story. Every nick-knack is a reminder of someone, of something, of some time.

Each little treasure they unwrapped was a double treasure, an object of beauty and also a little glimpse into their Gramma’s long and fascinating life. (Not so very long, Mom, only long to them.)

These stories are all around us every day. The things that fill our homes, that sit on our shelves, that hang on our walls. They are artifacts, stories just waiting to be told.

When was the last time you let your kids in on their secrets?

Some Golden Inspiration

January 19, 2015January 19, 20151 Comment

Because January is exactly like this, we’re on the hunt for inspiration these days. I’m not feeling quite as earnest as I was last Monday, so let’s just float around the internet and stare at beautiful and interesting things that might inspire us to create.

Ready? Set? Go:

This wind map is mesmerizing, and I can’t help but feel that there are endless story possibilities here. I’m picturing things floating on those winds. I’m picturing the air from our neighbors blowing over us. I’m picturing the endless motion of the world.
Just found this wonderful site with beautiful high res pictures offered up for free download. This is something I can get behind. Pictures inspire me, but I’m useless at creating my own. Check out this one. The stars, the water, the lonely house. Oh, the possibilities.
Humor as inspiration. I’ve been following these for a while, but here they are all in one place. Warning: Not safe for children! But this is a whole new way for art to inspire us. A way I can totally get behind.
Language as inspiration. I love, love, love these concepts. Especially hygge. And I love all those words that exist in other languages and can’t really be translated into our own. Language and culture are endlessly fascinating. Definitely planning to practice some hygge today.
Create! It doesn’t have to be a fantasy epic. Even if all you are creating is a little story or sketch to amuse your children. You’re making the world a warmer place.
Having a hard time getting started? Neil Gaiman has some excellent advice. (If you only click on one link today, make it this one.)

I’ve been reading some serious things and thinking some serious thoughts this week, too, but let’s save those for another day, shall we? Today, let’s make something small, something that only takes the little bit of energy we have but is something.

Maybe we’ll be surprised at how big a difference a small something can make.

Stories Actually (Are. All Around.)

January 5, 2015Leave a comment

Happy New Year!

We did it. We had our break. We were Christmassing all over the place. We recovered from that. We flipped over the calendar. We’re still trying to recover from that. And here we are. Back to work, back to school, back to winter.

Oh, winter, whatever are we going to do with you?

Tell stories!

In the spirit of bracing ourselves for long dark nights, for afternoons too cold to play outside, for snow days (and sick days) that hit when you weren’t prepared, I give you a short list of things that can be transformed from ordinary use into STORY TIME! And, guess what? You don’t have to be the storyteller. This one is all on the kids.

1. Pencil toppers!

You know those annoying things kids get as prizes and love passionately for ten minutes but never use as erasers or actually keep them on pencils so eventually you end up finding them on the floor and secretly dispose of them? (Please tell me you do know what I’m talking about.) They make great storytelling devices! Something about their weird/cute faces suggests interesting ideas, especially if you combine the space man from the library with the Easter bunny from Grandma with the smiling flower their teacher gave them. Put them on pencils finger puppet style or just tumble them in a box like story cubes.

This really works. Lucy happened to get a whole set of these as a Christmas present, and we’ve just kept the pencils unsharpened, in a cup, and she’s been telling me stories while I wash the dishes (and sometimes while I play Playstation, since we’re being real here). She was particularly bored this winter break, so this was awesome.

2. Stickers!

This particular sticker pad makes faces, and though Lucy was excited to make a few pretty princesses, she was at a loss until I told her she could tell stories with them. Aha! Now she changes them out, they lose their glasses, then find them! They talk to each other. They go on adventures and meet strange disfigured people. Sets like these can be found at any craft store or even Target or Wal-Mart.

But! You don’t even need a book like this. Cheap $.99 stickers can also work. Especially if you have a bunch of random ones to put together. Something about that randomness encourages creativity. How could a little reindeer meet a mermaid? And why would the two of them be collecting stars? Boom. It’s a story.

3. Legos!

Obviously, building with Legos is one of the all-time best indoor time fillers. It’s already creative, it’s tactile, it’s a mini lesson in engineering. And once you’re done building, you have a toy to play with! But I’ve found that as my kids get older, they run out of gas on the “sit and play with Lego ships” front pretty quickly. That’s where making a story can extend the fun.

Have them prepare a story to tell you, a little play that their Legos perform for you. Inevitably the preparation for this involves building a few more accessories or men or ships or buildings. Then when it’s ready, you can have a performance. If you know what you’re doing, they can stop motion video it, but you don’t have to go there. You can just sit and be their audience. You can just video it on your phone and send it to grandparents. They’ll eat it up. Winter happiness for everyone!

Yes, winter happiness is a real thing.

For a little extra help, refer to the following pep talk as often as needed:

Winter isn’t going to beat us. It isn’t. We’re parents. We provide warm coats and hot chocolate. We tamp feet into boots and tug fingers into gloves. We bundle them up and send them out to get fresh air and work off energy in the snow and then mop up their messes and tumble snow clothes into dryers when they come back inside after ten minutes.

We’re parents. We’ve got what it takes.

And our kids? They’ve got energy enough to warm us all. They’ve got creativity enough to brighten every day.

And darn it, we’re going to make them use it.

Silver and Gold

December 22, 2014Leave a comment

Because it’s Christmas, and you can’t just have gold on Christmas. A snowman told me so.

It’s a busy, people, parties, presents, cookies, drinks, and family kind of week. I thrive on chaos, but we’ve reached a new high around here, so I may possibly have upped the stress eating more than is recommended. (Is there a recommended amount of stress eating? If the answer is none, please don’t tell me.)

Don’t worry, though. I still have your back. I know that (the ten of) you are counting on some distraction. Your kids are off school for two weeks. You need this Check it out:

I do this ALL THE TIME, but, you know, in my head. Making it into an Instagram account was genius, especially since they’re highly entertaining. Also, this could be a really fun game with kids.
You might find the rest of these entertaining, but you absolutely HAVE to watch the first one. With your kids. There’s this one moment…you’ll know it when it happens. It made my girls gasp and giggle.
Fascinating little story about a dude who built a theater in the desert and then, surprise! never got to use it. It’s abandoned now. It’s the pictures that make this worth while. I want to make up all sorts of fun stories about that place.
And when I’m done writing mysteries about the desert, I’m writing something very dramatic that takes place here. (But I don’t want to go there, thank you. Weather that could make those ice sculptures is not my kind of weather.)
Ever since we saw Mockingjay, this song keeps getting stuck in my head. I’m haunted. If you haven’t seen the movie yet and this song doesn’t make you want to, we need to have a long talk.
Not to let the real world into this space too much, but this was one of my favorite reads of the last couple of weeks. Chris Rock is a smart and thoughtful man. And that stands even if you don’t agree with his politics or like his comedy.
Joy is a choice (yes, I’m annoying and actually say things like that). Choose joy by watching this video. Walk off the Earth always makes me smile, so if this isn’t enough to lift your stress, click the links after the song and enjoy more of their delightful work. You won’t be sorry.

Feliz Navidad, everyone. Happy, happy days to you all.

I Still Believe in Mr. Click

December 15, 2014Leave a comment

I told you last week that we would be doing our annual “write a Christmas story” day. I was bracing myself a little bit. I always worry that one year they’ll open the advent paper for that day and let out a loud groan. Not this year! They were excited! I breathed a sigh of relief, handed them a pile of stickers and a few writing prompts and went to make dinner for a crowd while they got to work.

Ellie immediately went for the mysterious lump in the Christmas stocking idea. She says the part with the blue scratch is “because I needed to cross something out and then I decided to use that as part of the story.” That’s a kind of flexibility and resourcefulness I can get behind.

Her story:

December 14

I walk downstairs but something isn’t right. I look at my stocking. It is December 14th and there is a lump in my stocking. I am about to open it when… “Honey, breakfast time.”

Later I go down and there is a blue scratch on the stocking. I run my finger over it. I’m about to open it when… “Time to go to Grandma’s.”

I get home and see a second gash. I don’t bother to open it. Later that night I wake up at 11:55. I walk downstairs. 11:59. I open it. 12:00, and…

The end.

It’s possible the girl has watched too many Twilight Zones.

Scott was interested in the shrinking Christmas tree. He also decided to shoot for a rhyming story. Sort of.

One day at night, I heard a thump down through the chimney – but it wasn’t Saint Nick, but Mr. Click! Through the smell of his lotion, I could smell shrinking potion! He ran to our Christmas tree with much glee, poured Christmas shrinking potion on our tree and it shrunk! I ran to my trunk and got my lotion and growing potion! So that night no one knew that I had faced a fright! But they had some of their own…

Apparently he plans a few prequels, about the frights that the rest of the family faced. The beauty of the rhyming part is that now we have Mr. Click! He’s now totally a thing, like Festivus and the two moose that top our Christmas tree.

And yes, I might need to talk to my kids about how irritating cliff hangers can be. But at least they write with glee! And include our family! With punctuation they are free!

Seriously, I love love love reading the stories they write.

And please don’t hear me leaving out Lu, who is not quite ready to write out her own story, but who makes up the most thrilling tales anyway. I recorded her telling a story in front of the Christmas tree the next day. It is long and rambles because, five-year-old. But I’m proud to say that it’s about a monster who only comes out on Christmas Eve and that idea was all her own. If you have some serious patience (and ability to interpret five-year-old speak), you can watch the video below. You’ll be rewarded with moments of very dramatic acting, so there’s that.

If not, Merry Christmas anyway! May you receive no visits from Mr. Click and find no blue scratches on your stocking. (Unless your holidays are getting boring, in which case, bring it on.)

Make Your Own Magic

December 8, 2014Leave a comment

Lately I’ve been thinking of each month as a color.

October was orange. The exact burnt shade of the brilliant trees that line so many streets in my city. Breath-taking. November was deep green. The glorious fall leaves had all faded away and the evergreens were all you could see. Strong, steady, a little moody but in a way that makes you feel like cold, brittle days are no match for them.

December, though. It’s color can’t be easily defined. It’s less of a specific hue and more of a glow. I would call it white, but any artist can tell you there’s no such thing. December’s glow is soft and warm. It belongs with everything, but it could never be called neutral. It twinkles just a little, just enough to make magic seem possible, but not enough to blind you with its blinging dazzle. It’s a glow, not a shine. It suggest the comfort of home and the mystery of unknown possibilities at the same time.

December is a time for magic. Not the cheesy Hallmark Christmas movie kind of magic. Everyone knows that kind of magic isn’t real. Not the magic of a baby’s birth, either. That isn’t magic, but truth and love, and it echoes across the years with its own power.

No, this is the magical time where we look into the face of winter, our bitter cold enemy, and with a wave of our holiday wand, we welcome him as a friend. We embrace him. We build up a fire and bake cookies and cakes and then beg, actually beg, for snow. We bundle up against temperatures that would otherwise kill us and go outside to sing. To sing! We don’t even do that in the summer, people.

That’s real magic.

That’s magic we invent ourselves, digging into our collective imagination and arming ourselves with a narrative that carries us out victoriously into an inhospitable world.

Man, I love this time of year.

I mean, say what you want about how over the top this season has become in our culture, but we have created the ultimate fairy tale. We’ve transformed this bleak, frigid month of endless night into a bright bewilderment of joy. That’s my kind of magic.

We’re going to make up stories around here this week. It’s one of the things we do every year, a part of our wonderful, ridiculous custom of make-believe wonder. We’ll look around at the happy decorations we’ve draped in every corner, and we’ll let our imaginations roam. I’ll give the kids some ideas just to get them started.

The day the Christmas shrank down teeny tiny…

How the snowman ornament lost his hat…

When the Christmas books all fell open and their characters threw a party…

There’s a mysterious lump in my Christmas stocking, and it’s only December 14th…

Joy to the moon…

We’ll laugh. We’ll laugh a lot, I’m guessing. And we’ll roll our eyes a bit and we’ll try to out-do each other. We’ll set our minds free and see where they go.

But I have to admit that the whole time, I’ll be thinking of the biggest story of them all. The one I’ve been telling them since they were just little babies. It’s cold outside, but there’s nothing to fear. All is warm and bright in here. This isn’t a time for the dark and the sad. It’s a time for presents! Be excited! Be glad!

(What? Of course my narrative rhymes. It’s Christmas, people.)

Tell Me A Story, Baby

December 1, 2014December 1, 2014Leave a comment

So, I did this thing.

It was years ago and basically just a part of my constant desperation to entertain my kids and keep things merry and bright in a land where Christmas means 90 degree weather.

This was five years ago. Ellie was 5. Scott was 3. Lucy was just a little thing that lay around and looked cute.

I made a big paper chain and wrote an activity on each ring and we pulled one off every day in December and did the activity. This was not an original idea, obviously. Surprise! I didn’t invent advent! But seriously, it was magical. It spread the fun and excitement of Christmas out over the course of weeks instead of just one or two days. We’ve been doing something like it every year since.

And then! Because it is really hard to make up 24 activities (and because I really hate crafts and so can only do a very, VERY few), I made random activities like this one: Everyone uses the plastic nativity set to tell the story of Baby Jesus. Mommy videos these stories and posts them online. The kids loved telling the story. They loved being on video. It was a happy half hour. Then I posted them and the grandparents far away in another country could see the little darlings. Fun, easy, no prep necessary, no cleanup necessary. Basically the perfect activity.

And that was before I knew how it would feel to watch those videos five years later.

You guys. That thing I did? It was one of the best things I’ve ever done. Watching them now? No words.

They’re a bit long, so if you can’t make it through them all, I understand. But it would be a crime not to post them here at all. A serious crime.

Here is Ellie, age 5. Her version is very sweet and conscientious.

Here is Scott, age 3. His version includes a flying donkey and is all told in his adorably raspy little voice. It kills me.

We didn’t have one of Lucy from back then, of course, but after the wonder of watching those, we made one of her this year. Oh yes. Now, she was slightly influenced by having watched the other videos a few days before, but the king who tried to make the wise men his slaves? That’s all her own.

Enough of our cuteness. Go make your own!

Seriously.

Go make your own.

In five years, you’ll be so glad you did.

P.S. If you don’t have an unbreakable nativity set that your kids can play with, buy one now! They are the best for storytelling. The best. In addition to that weird brown plastic one in the videos (which I bought at an Argentine dollar store) we have the Playmobile set. The 8 and 10-year-old still play with it. Highly recommend. Or get this little one. It’s cute and inexpensive.

More Monday Morning Treasure

November 24, 2014November 24, 2014Leave a comment

That’s right, I’ve got another stash for you, to brighten up your holiday week. If you’re in the middle of the rush, put a pin in it. These will make a nice little break while the turkey’s roasting (or when you’ve disappeared into a back room to escape the relatives).

As promised, we saw Mockingjay this weekend. It totally won me over. I won’t add any spoilers here, but I did learn that Suzanne Collins had a hand in the plotting, which explains why this movie had its own arc and was satisfying, even though it was only half of the book. On a side note, it was heartbreaking to watch Phillip Seymour Hoffman doing his amazing thing. Completely heartbreaking.
My kids are off school this whole week (I know! It WAS just a few weeks ago that they had two weeks off. The joys of year-round school.) so we’re getting all festive around here. This season makes me want to make up stories that mock the famous Christmas tales. Why is that? Anyway, I’ll resist, but mostly because this already IS the parody you’re looking for. CLICK IT.
Speaking of the holidays, this is a wonderful idea for a gift for your child. It can’t be wrapped up under the tree, but how amazing would it be?
And on the topic of children’s books, we feel this way about book jackets, too.
This story going around on Facebook has me thinking of the power of real life stories. It’s all about really seeing people.
While we’re thinking about other cultures, check out these idioms from around the world. I want to find ways to casually drop these into conversation during this holiday season.
If that doesn’t liven up the conversation enough, I’m going to make one of these napkins for our Thanksgiving table, but with my own topics of conversation. The man who invented this was a genius.
Something beautiful for you before you go. Kilian Schoenberger’s photography is stunning. The Scotland pictures are going to be inspiring me for a long time. That one above filled me up better than a Thanksgiving dinner.