Mementos

20 July 2003 | Comments Off

Hi Kelley,

I am planning a 15th class reunion and we are wondering what are some of the mementos we can give our fellow classmates?

karla and bessie

Hmm. It seems to me that mementos fall into two basic camps: the commercially easy but relatively impersonal, and the lots-of-work-for-you but more personal. I suppose it depends on how much you like your class and whether you really want to (or have the time to) do a bunch of work just to give them a gift.

I’ve been to reunions where the main mementos were T-shirts and/or baseball caps. Neither of these excited me particularly, but they certainly aren’t bad in any way. Deciding what design to put on them can be fun, and they are easy to get produced. There are also things like mugs, calendars, etc. that can be produced with photos or text. On the work-your-ass-off side of the scale are the customized items — music, photo albums or montages, reunion books. The CDs I made took me at least 150 hours of planning, programming, duplication, and graphic design time, and I would assume that other customized items would require a similar commitment.

I can imagine lots of things that might be fun to do, but it’s not clear to me how feasible they are. Given time, you could project-manage a huge collaborative memento — everyone (who wants to) contributing a message to the class, or a piece of art, or a photo they took, that embodies their experience at school.

My take is that mementos, whether mass-produced or personally crafted, should be A) something that people can actually interact with (read, drink from, laugh and wonder over, or use in their everday world), and B) something that will reconnect them with their school experience. Giving them an object with the school’s name tastefully silkscreened on it does not, in my opinion, accomplish this: they already know the name of the school, after all. But something with a picture, or a text memory, or a special class motto, might do the trick. Mileage varies, as always.

You will have to pay for this stuff up front and collect the cost as part of what you charge each person to attend the reunion, unless you are fortunate enough to have a school budget already available for such things. So be warned: stuff is expensive (grin). If you want to make sure everyone in your class gets a memento, and not just those at the reunion, then the people who come to the reunion pretty much end up covering the cost of the mementos (and shipping) for those who don’t. Charge accordingly.

You haven’t said if this is a high school or college reunion, or anything about your class. I’d be interested in hearing more: where did you go to school, and what was it like? Are you happy about being in charge of this event? (I can imagine it being equal parts fun and nightmare, myself.) What are you hoping for?

Good luck with it. I hope you have a blast.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, friday pint, life, talk to me 

Sharing spaceships

12 July 2003 | 1 Comment

Wow. That was really wrong. She WAS a pig that day. I just lost a tooth yesterday afternoon. It had to be pulled out. It’s not a good tooth to lose because it’s a first molar (provides the vertical stop). My dentist is a cool guy though. He’s a bit on the eccentric side, but he’s great at what he does. He gives me all the Novocain I need and never tells me, “…it’s pressure, not pain”. I probably would have fainted if a teacher did that to me.

I should have said that the spaceship set is an interior one. My friend’s parents were kind enough to let us have their basement (3/4 of it). We’ve got an engine room, a transporter, a command center, turbo elevators and a forward viewer…complete with a starfield. It looks like the inside of a spaceship. On film, it looks amazing. So, we are definitely proud of our set. For EXT. SPACE scenes, we use a model. Alx made it out of a digital alarm clock and other household items. All painted up, you’d never know. We made a lot of our own props.

Unfortunately, we’ve had a few setbacks. I can’t play Agent Tallent because the girl who was supposed to play Nate, pulled several “no shows”. Since Tallent doesn’t appear until later, I have to play Nate. So, I have to exercise. I despise exercising. And the thing is, I’m in pretty good shape…just not “Nate shape”. Then I have to Tallent search (ha! couldn’t help it). There’s quite a bit of stupid shit popping up. I won’t get into it. I will say that we are not freaking out about stuff like we used to, so that’s good. And, for something that is low (super-low) budget, Wayfarer 1 is looking great. We are very excited and extremely pleased.

I will definitely let you know when the website is up and running (shooting for Nov). Even better, I could send you a cd. Could I do that??? Perhaps through some c/o address or other? In fact, if anyone here would like a FREE cd, just email me with the information and I’ll send it out. Uh… I’d be a little sketched about giving my address to a stranger, so I’ll understand if no one wants a disc. But, there are always p.o. boxes and c/o’s and fake names, etc., etc. So really, feel free. Keep in mind though, that it will be several months before any of this happens.

Arrivederla!

Lindsey

That’s nice of you! I will definitely take a CD when they’re available (I will send you contact information privately). I hope some other people will take you up on it; it’s good to Share Art.

I think it’s fantastic you built a spaceship in the basement. I regard it the way I regard being an astronaut or a spy or a sixth dan black belt in aikido — something cool for which I have neither the talent nor the predisposition. A real wow, people are amazing moment. You go.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, friday pint, talk to me 

I am not a plant

12 July 2003 | Comments Off

There’s a discussion on Nicola’s website (scroll down to the last question) about the role of music in her work. I’m curious about how you use music in your writing? Thanks.

Anonymous

I’ve been enjoying that conversation. Music has always been essential to me, but it took that question and Nicola’s response to make me think in more detail about how I feel about music and how I use it in my work.

I’m a verbally-centered person. Language is my primary tool to ground myself, to express myself, to connect with others. That’s part of the writing deal, of course, but it can be limiting. Some things are not so easily expressed in words. Sometimes a person just has to dance, or cry, or throw their arms out and try to hug the world. Music is my conduit to this part of myself.

There are things I’ve learned about myself only through particular pieces of music that have taken hold of me throughout my life. Music is one of the few things in the world that I respond to by wanting to move, to feel, to think, all at the same time, instead of giving preference to thinking as I often do. And it has meaning for me beyond just the words and the beat. Some music has become a part of my self-identity in a way that’s hard to articulate — not just I like this or I get this but I am this: this particular intersection of rhythm and voice and word and sound is about me, for me, of me.

My work so far tends either to use music overtly in this way, or to pretty much ignore it as an emotional force and just treat it as another feature of the environment. Strings is an example of the former, as is my most recent (unpublished) story in which a woman imagines herself a rock star. Those stories are, in one particular way, the most revealing and personal pieces of fiction I have written. In Solitaire, music is background.

It’s hard for me to imagine using music in my work the way Nicola does in hers. We have a fair amount of overlap in our musical tastes, but we experience even the music in very different ways. What a surprise (ironic smile): Nicola and I are different. Different people, different writers. Segue to one of my hot buttons: I get grumpy sometimes at assumptions that my work must automatically always be informed by hers, as if she were the sun and all the rest of us are plants or something. Someone commented online a while ago that since Nicola and I are partners, I had clearly modeled Solitaire on the themes of Slow River. I find this more annoying than I can possibly express.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I am not slamming your question — in fact, I appreciate the careful setting of context (“this discussion on Nicola’s website made me wonder…”) without the actual request to “please compare and contrast yourself to Nicola.” And of course I do compare and contrast myself to her, as she does to me. Maybe I should give her approach to music-in-fiction a whirl just to see how it goes. It’s good to stretch. But I’m not sure that I could assign specific pieces of music to a moment in the story without wanting to go all the way with it and turn it into the sort of experience for the character that it is for me. And that’s not always right for the work.

As I write this, I am listening to what I think of as the early Aerosmith “trilogy”: Get Your Wings, Toys in the Attic, and Rocks. Steven Tyler is wailing about being back in the saddle again. The bass line kicks ass. I am dancing in my chair. Time to go do some work.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, friday pint, music, talk to me, writing 

Dreaming big

12 July 2003 | 3 Comments

Congratulations on an awesome book! I hope you succeed beyond your wildest dreams and have a life of writing, beer, and Nicola.

Cara

I must admit that succeeding beyond my wildest dreams is a stretch goal, because I dream big. I’m thinking, well, okay, what’s my wildest dream of success, and I can’t even post it here, it’s just too over the top.

I find that I am not embarrassed to have these dreams, which are a very powerful force in my personality and my life. But I am sometimes embarrassed to share them with other people. The endless question: what to reveal, what to keep private. It’s hard to have precious things misunderstood or dismissed. Yet I also believe that dreams are harder to achieve if they are too closely guarded, never made external in any way. It seems to me they need to be expressed somehow, even if it’s just out loud to myself in a field miles from nowhere in the middle of the night. It’s mighty powerful to say, “I want this.” It sets up echoes that come back at the damndest times.

So thank you for your kind wishes. I hope so too. I want it.

Posted by Kelley | Filed Under blog, friday pint, life, talk to me