How to draw closer to your mystery
The above audio is a reading from a transcript. It is a thirdhand creation story. They are not my words, but the story was told to me orally by someone I loved, and for almost twenty years has lived on a microcassette unplayed. It is an unearthed treasure and I wanted to share it with you.
There were poems inside this
Old hand-bound journals I made using repurposed fabric, found paper and ribbon.
How am I not myself? T-shirt
I designed a t-shirt dreamed out of a favorite movie of mine, I Heart Huckabees, and put it up on Society6.
I drew the chalkboard art depicting how everything is the same even if it’s different. See: The Blanket Truth — “We’re all connected.”
“How am I not myself?” is from the scene where Jude Law is confronted about the “mayo” story. A reminder that the repetitive stories you tell about yourself are propaganda.
The resurrection of Phantom Kangaroo
More than 10 years ago, I created an online poetry magazine called Phantom Kangaroo. Its birth could be described like this:
Strange occurrences of kangaroos appearing in areas where they should not be are sometimes reported. Often they appear ghost-like, disappearing or hopping through walls.
Some speculate they are aliens, or spirits haunting us from another dimension. Someone suggested animal teleportation, maybe they bounce in and out of existence. Whatever they are, these phantom kangaroos are an omen. A cryptic warning that you will soon be falling into the unknown. They seem to say: I am real and I am a hoax, and so are you.
Sometimes poems seem to say the same thing. Sightings of these poems can be found here.
I was in my mid-twenties, poor and living in a studio in West Oakland. Phantom Kangaroo was a passion project that, at times, couldn’t sustain itself. Like the cryptid, it hopped in and out of existence. At one point the domain was held hostage by algorithms wanting thousands of dollars to give it back. So I waited it out.
This past year of sheltering and cocooning forced me to rummage through my inner cauldron for all the things that bring me life. Creating a space for poetry is one of them. For the past few months, I worked late nights and weekends to put together something that was long overdue — Phantom Kangaroo: The Anthology. It is a 296-page hardcover book of 300 magical and paranormal poems published during the past decade.
Now that it’s complete and no longer haunting me, I have resurrected the magazine. Issue 24 will be published on June 13, 2021, along with the first ever print magazine. Phantom Kangaroo remains an eerie place for poems. The door to the unknown is now wide open.
Five steps for creating a new idea
This short, creative self-help book was written in the 1930s by an ad exec and it is, by far, the most useful text I’ve come across on the subject of creating new ideas.
“An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements … This technique of the mind follows five steps. I am sure that you will all recognize them individually. But the important thing is to recognize their relationship and to grasp the fact that the mind follows these five steps in definite order — that by no possibility can one of them be taken before the preceding one is completed, if an idea is to be produced.”
The steps — summarized as succinctly as possible — are:
Gather raw material — specific and general. In advertising an idea results from a new combination of specific knowledge about products and people with general knowledge about life and events.
Masticate your material — take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. Make connections. Write every new thought down. Do this until you are beyond tired and even then go further.
Make absolutely no effort of a direct nature — drop the whole subject and put the problem out of your mind. Watch a movie. Listen to music. Go for a walk. Sleep.
Out of nowhere the Idea will appear — this is the way ideas come: after you have stopped straining for them and have passed through a period of rest and relaxation from the search.
Take your little newborn idea out into the world of reality — do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious.
“When you do this, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light.”
Create dangerously
“To create today means to create dangerously. Every publication is a deliberate act, and that act makes us vulnerable to the passions of a century that forgives nothing.” —Albert Camus
Follow your inner moonlight
“Follow your inner moonlight; don’t hide the madness. ”
Dream cards
These are words that were said in dreams and typed on to trading cards and watercolored.
4 creative things you can do to be happier
Goddammit write your morning pages!
Any personal project — really anything! As long as it yours.
Sing, dance, play.
Sketch something everyday for 21 days.
Goddammit write your morning pages!
Any personal project — really anything! As long as it yours.
Sing, dance, play.
Sketch something everyday for 21 days.
Be a wholehearted creative
The wholehearted creative woman knows that art is not simply the work of her hands. Her truest artistic work is being fully herself in the presence of others. The book, the painting, the meal, the presentation are all simply evidence of a deeper art happening within the soul of the artist.
“Art is what happens when we dare to be who we really are. ”