Thinking about the creative process...

I've spent the bulk of this solar rotation working on my manuscript.  I've never finished a novel-length piece before, and I am determined to have this one finished before the end of the year.  It's placing demands on my creativity like I have never had before, and I'm enjoying the challenge.  Like all would-be writers, my dream is to see the book published and on store shelves, but I'm trying to avoid thinking that far ahead right now.  For the time being, I am contenting myself with letting the journey be journey is the destination.  In the meantime, the subjects of creativity and the creative process are on my mind as I take a short break from Pages.

Creativity, whether with words or the visual arts, is an interesting and fickle entity.  The best analogy I can think of from my own experience is that creativity is like an ember.  It's always smoldering, but you have to give it a little kindling and stoke it into something hot and lively.  My own stoking / creative process has become increasingly interesting as I have grow more disciplined and organized as a wrier.  Sometimes I write well when I write in a library or crowded coffee house, wearing my earbuds but not playing any music through them; it makes me feel strangely comfortable and insulated when I do that.  Other times I write better in an empty room with music up nice and loud.  And, as always, there is always a tumbler of hot, strong coffee close at hand.

Today has been a music day, and as the story I'm working on right now is set in 1960's Mississippi, replete with dusty roads and vanishing point cotton fields, there is only one option:

What is your creative process?  By what means do you stoke the ember of ideas into a roaring blaze of creativity?

Back Home

Sometimes, coming back is the hardest part. It has been a very...unique year for me.  I have to come right out and say it: I'm exhausted.  Not that I'm complaining, I mean, good Lord, I've had opportunities open up this year of which I didn't have the audacity to dream before they did.  I graduated from UWF in the spring, went to India over the summer, went to Britain for a couple of weeks after that, came home to find the new family home ready for occupancy; I mean, who'da thunk?  Needless to say, I thank God for these blessings.

The only downside to this year has been the discovery that I am a homebody as much as I am a wanderer; I think it's a 50/50 split.  I love to travel, but in the three weeks I spent at home between India and the UK, I felt like every day was a race to experience as much "homeness" as possible before leaving again.  I wanted to eat my favorite meals, see all of my friends, go to all of my favorite places and do it all now.  Now that I am home to stay for a while, I feel more at peace than I have felt since I began seriously preparing to go to India four months ago in June.  And it's a good thing too, because as tired as my body is, the last thing I want is a restless mind.  And, after the trip to the UK, my funds are sufficiently depleted so as to afford the luxury (weird enough sentence for ya?) of having no choice but to stay in my hometown for a while.

In a way, India messed up my five year plan.  My plans, post-UWF, involved developing my photography work into a more profitable venture and simultaneously finishing a novel over the fall, seeking publishing, and applying to work for a television production company after the new year.  Neat and clean.  But now, I feel tugged in a slightly different direction.  I saw too much and established too many relationships during my service in India to proceed with a completely conventional career.  No matter what I end up doing long-term, I want to support missions overseas, India and otherwise.  I cannot tolerate the idea of a career that will eclipse my ability to help meet needs in India, because in my perhaps-too-emotionally-biased opinion, the needs of my brothers and sisters overseas are far more important than working my way up to a corner office on the top floor.

Life has checkmated me into facing some hard decisions.  My perspective is different than it used to be; perhaps in a good way, perhaps in a less-good way.  Time will tell.  Coming back to the US, I view the priorities of many people as absolutely absurd, and the hysteria on both sides of the upcoming election is, for lack of a better word, laughable.  I have a hard time both listening to and talking with people about certain subjects.

So, that's where I am right now.  Whenever internet service is reestablished at the new place, I will resume my standard routine of displaying photographs and inflicting my written rambles upon the public via the blog; in the meantime, I'm currently ghosting in and out of coffee shops to write and edit.  Pray for me, if you like, as I look inward, look forward and look around for the best path to take.  Real life is tough.

An update from my Italian grandparents -- two people who gave me kindness when I needed it most.

Two years ago, I sat in the Ristorante La Giostra in Florence, Italy.  Apart from the single candles that sat on every table, the only light in the room was an omniscient golden glow that descended from Christmas lights strung along the walls and wrapped itself around everyone and everything in the dining room.  I sat alone.

Florence was everything I wanted in a city.  It was beautiful, diverse and busy--but not so busy that I felt overwhelmed.  There was balance, just like the proportions of the Renaissance statues to be found all over the city.

Sitting alone in this luxurious restaurant, the walls near its door covered in snapshots of the celebrities who had previously dined there, it struck me how out of balance I was in this perfectly-balanced city.  I wasn't sharing this experience with anyone.  Not the city, not the sights, not this meal of goat chops and parmesan-crusted zucchini.  It was just me, in my khaki pants and blue shirt.  I usually took delight in the freedom of traveling alone.  But that night, surrounded by candles and laughter, served by a head waiter descended from the Hapsburg line, a beautiful young woman of my own age dining with her mother at the next table, I was struck by the ridiculousness of my being in La Giostra without a companion.  For a brief moment, I saw myself walking with that young woman, laughing and discussing art and history and dreams as we passed the Ponte Vecchio on a walk along the Arno.  But my reverie was just a reverie, and I was snapped back to life with the arrival of the secondo.

I enjoyed the food.  I paid my bill, complimented the staff and emerged from the restaurant feeling melancholy.  I had done what I wanted to do: I was in Italy.  I had gotten what I wanted in Florence: a meal at the best restaurant in town.  Every day was a learning experience as I moved in and out of museums, churches and palaces.  But it was a quiet trip.  I would go most of each day without talking much.  And that night, it became a fact to me that travel was not always best when the traveler was alone with his thoughts.  I might be a modern Hemingway in my own mind, sitting on riverbanks and hilltops inscribing a leather-bound notebook with thoughts and impressions, but to whose benefit was my facade of quiet mystery?  I shook my head as I walked and vowed never to eat at La Giostra again unless it was a shared experience.

The melancholy of that night abated, but that moment of clarity was like a bite of Eden's apple--there was no undoing it.

Two weeks later, I was on a train.  I had left the Hotel Bonconte that morning singing beneath the weight of my backpack and camera bag because I was on my way to Venice.  Venice was the city of dreams.  La Bella Venezia, floating like a ghost city in the early morning mists of the Adriatic.  The city of Marco Polo, and my final destination in Europe.

I boarded the train with my customary haste, barely clambering into a trailing car before the final bell sounded and the doors hissed shut.  I walked the length of the car and settled into the first compartment I found which was unoccupied.  It was a weekday, and it took a while to find a space with no commuters reading novels or talking on their phones on the way to work.

It was a pleasant morning outside.  I had a pleasant view of the Adriatic shoreline for the first leg of the trip.  The rocking of the train and the serene blue of the water relaxed me, and I settled into the well-worn seat to write in my journal.  I would enjoy Venice greatly, but I was still alone, and the knowledge that I would be in a guest house with internet that evening gave me the comforting knowledge that I would be able to video chat with my family.

But, in the space of a moment, I wasn't alone any more.

The train had just stopped in Faenza.  Some people got aboard, others got off.  Two of the people who had just boarded, an older couple, smiled at me through the clear plastic compartment door and entered.  I smiled back and they sat down.  The old man was bright-eyed, sanguine and cheerful.  His wife was missing teeth and bore an inscrutably mischievous expression that hinted both a quiet demeanor and the threat of sharp wit.

The man leaned forward in his seat.  His English was serviceable, if spoken with a concentrated effort.  "You American?"

"Yes," I said.

He smiled broadly and leaned back in his seat.  "Ah!  And what do you think of Mr. Obama?"

And thus I met Renato.

Renato and his wife, Lina, lived in Faenza, and he was more than happy to hear my benign opinion of President Obama, and to eagerly tell me about himself and his family in return, as well as to give me a crash course in some basic Italian to prove to me that it was not a hard language to learn.  A retired train conductor, Renato and his wife were traveling the train on his lifetime pass, which he told me was one of the perks of twenty years of unbroken work in the industry.  They were on the way to Bologna to eat lunch at the Bologna Centrale station cafe, apparently a favorite spot among train personnel for a well-prepared and inexpensive lunch.  Would I like to eat with them?

Renato asked me this question in a way that seemed impossibly friendly for someone he had just met.  I was instantly wary of some surreptitious scheme that would see me jumped by a confederate at the station and relieved of my cash, camera and passport.  But I had an hour to kill before my connecting train to Venice would arrive, and Italian trains on this side of the country were usually late by as much as an hour, so I agreed.

Lunch turned out to be delightful.  For the first time, as an American traveling abroad, I was made to feel like a novelty instead of a commodity, and it was both pleasant and humorous.  Entering the restaurant, Renato jovially called out to people he knew, greeting them in Italian before gesturing to me and saying "Americano!"  I felt like a bullfrog brought home by a young boy with a proud herald of "look what I found!"

We ate and talked, and I asked Renato and Lina to sign an empty page in my journal, as a way of remembering them.  Renato went the extra mile by adding their address below.  The two of them, with Renato doing most of the talking, were a sweet relief to me on my quiet trip across Italy.  After three weeks of entering and exiting places of interest with no more impact than the ghost of an enemy of the Medici, I found myself with a pair of surrogate Italian grandparents; two older companions who were eager to give of their time and share a meal with a traveler who was much lonelier than even he realized at the time.  "Hemingway-esque sojourn" be damned, I had finally established a relationship, and it was grand.

After our meal of lasagna and salad, Renato graciously escorted me to the platform for my next train.  He consulted every timetable twice to make sure that I made I was on the right line to go on to Venice.  I bade him and Lina goodbye a little after noon as they boarded their own train back to Faenza, and I sat on a bench on the platform to continue my journey.

The journal in which Renato and Lina’s names and address were written went on with me to Venice, two trips to India and a college tour of great American cities from Charleston to New York.  I never wrote to them.  I always meant to.  In fact, the memory of them only grew fonder in my mind as I grew older and saw what a blessing our time was together.  When swapping travel stories with people, I would always smile and reference my “Italian grandparents in Faenza.”  But work, college and several moves always distracted me from writing to them, or anyone else.

Two years later, this year, I heard from my father that there had been a damaging earthquake near Bologna.  My first thought was of Renato and Lina.  By this time, my own grandparents had all passed away after long illnesses, and I was and am extremely sensitive to the plight of older people under adverse conditions.  The idea that they might have been injured in an earthquake sickened me, and I felt guilty for not having ever written to them.

That night, I opened a page of stationary and wrote a letter to them.  I pulled my travel journal off of its revered place on my bookshelf and thumbed through it until I found their address, still barely legible in Renato’s unique handwriting.  I copied it down as best as I could and posted it the following day.  I was not overly hopeful for a reply.

Today, at a moment that I did not expect it at all, I received the following envelope in the mail:

I couldn’t believe it.  The letter had reached them.  I opened it with trepidation, not sure what I was worried about but worried nonetheless.  A smile so big it hurt crossed my face, and I felt a surge of emotion in my throat and behind my eyes as I read the letter’s contents.

This happened several hours ago, and I am still smiling as a write about it.  Renato and Lina were okay.  Furthermore, they remembered me and still wanted to show me hospitality.  What a rare, beautiful thing that spirit is.

It’s easy to write about travel as a marketable subject of interest and quantify human contact into an abstraction.  The depth or number of local relationships forged during a trip are used by the pretentious as badges of the nebulously defined “accomplishment” of being a “traveler” instead of being the dreaded “tourist.”

I have no time to engage in these arguments.  At the end of the day, a few things are true as facts and the rest is interpretation.  And the facts in this case are: I was a young man traveling alone, and I met a wonderful couple that remembered me as long as two years later.  I have friends in Italy.  They call me Stefano.  And it means more than they know.

We could all take a cue from Renato and Lina's unhindered hospitality.

Doin' the work...in the sky!

Yours truly, doing my thing in a small airplane over Alabama yesterday.  I tagged along with my buddy Sheldon when he went up to shoot some air-to-air video aviation footage for a project he's currently working on. The inflation of my shirt is due to the absence of a door on my side of the airplane.  Yep, you heard me correctly.  We don't mess around.  Big thanks to Sheldon for grabbing a few [awesome] shots of me while we were up in the air.

The new cards have arrived...

Thanks to everyone who helped me with the development of my new business cards a few weeks ago.  The cards came yesterday afternoon, and boy are they pretty. From a design standpoint, I wanted to ensure that they fit in with my life's "vintage travel" motif.  If you know me, or even if you knew me at certain periods of my life (I went through a pretty intense Indiana Jones phase), you know all too well that the romance of 1940s travel and adventure is one of the heaviest influences on my life.  Before you say anything, I know.  The world has changed.  Ultra-light packing has pushed the steamer trunk out of vogue.  The modern American insistence on dressing to be "comfortable" on airplanes has effectively replaced the conservative gray traveling suit.  Scottevests and canvas bucket hats are more practical than field jackets and fedoras.  I understand all of this, and to a certain extent I appreciate it.

But when it comes to presenting one's self to the world, and for capturing the spirit of adventure in your own mind, I defy you to tell me that this is a real improvement over this.

In that spirit, the cards...