I see, I like, I get inspired

It's hard to write about feeling inspired when one feels so...uninspired. I was so jazzed about delving into the story a few days ago - what happened?

On the topic of inspiration (and hopefully putting this out there will help me get re-inspired) I spent this weekend at my grandparents' place, and am reminded of a source of inspiration that resides with them. My grandma and grandpa have a cabin in the woods, inherited from his father who built it, where they spend the winter months buried under multiple feet of snow. My grandpa builds a roaring fire from the mountain of wood he has cut and stacked, and they sit before it, him with his used paperback thrillers and sudoku books, Grandma with a jigsaw puzzle spread out on a card table before her. We visit them quite often, to play in the snow and enjoy Thanksgivings & Christmases, or to visit just because we feel like it, and something I've done for as long as I can remember almost every time we go there is peruse the bookshelves.

In one of the bedrooms is a large set of bookshelves that spans an entire wall, filled mostly with romances, crime novels, tales of adventure and mystery. Most of these books were bought at used bookstores, garage sales, or obtained from a friend or relative, and they are all at least twenty years old. However, what draws me to these books each and every time is not what's in them, but rather, what's on them. I've spent who knows how long pulling these books off the shelves for no other reason than to become mesmerized by the illustrations on the book jackets. I pull one book out at a time to stare long and hard at the picture on the cover, to imagine who the people are and what they are thinking, saying, doing. Mostly they are pictures of beautiful women, often in the arms of handsome men, wearing long, beautiful dresses and fancy jewelry - I like to imagine the steamy affairs and dying vows of everlasting love that surely take place in those novels. Or they are just women's faces - one gazing deeply into a mirror, another peering from behind a peacock fan.

Once Grandpa went through and removed a large quantity of these books to sell them and make room for new ones; much to my annoyance, he took many of my favorites. Several of these depicted buxom wartime heroines with their hair flying in the wind, standing next to their tall, muscular, military beaus; one of my all-time favorites now lost to me forever was a volume wrapped in a shiny emerald green book jacket that depicted two beautiful Indian women with feet of shiny black hair. One of these women was leaning over an unconscious caucasean man whom I liked to imagine was her lover. I think the story I'd come up with was that he'd been slain by her jealous older sister, the other woman on the cover. The title of this book was Wild Jasmine, so the pretty younger sister who'd lost her lover was, of course, named Jasmine.

This is just one example of the ways that my creative mind is sparked by the visual things around me. I mentioned in the artist statement I read at the beginning of the semester that I used to get inspired by pictures in books, by the porcelain figurines my grandparents kept on their coffee tables, by all sorts of things that I could look at and imagine the story behind. I still do this, albeit less frequently, which is frustrating because it means that things don't seem to trigger ideas as often as they used to. However, I love the exercises we've done in creative writing workshops where we pull a picture from a stack of random images and must write the story that goes with it. Writing from an image is one of my favorite ways to work!

For this reason, I'm very excited that in just two weeks, I get to visit the place where my thesis happens. I get to go back to Catalina Island. I can't wait to take pictures of all the places that are in my story - Sugarloaf Books, the condo in Hamilton Cove, Leo's Drugstore, and more that haven't made their way in yet, but surely will! It's great to imagine how inspired I'll be after having gone there, seen everything again with fresh eyes and then, with a fresh memory and a host of pictures, be able to sit down at my computer bubbling over with inspiration. I can just imagine it!