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| One of the yarn bowls I painted two evenings ago. It will look very different once it is fired next week. |
Two evenings ago, as the snow swirled outside the large windows of the Illini Union Bookstore, I listened enthralled to a reading by Andre Dubus III. He urged the writers in the audience to write, that writing was the point, that being published was nice, but that we have to write in the face of the inevitable rejection letters. He described writing his novel House of Sand and Fog in twenty-minute segments while sitting in his car before he went in to teach at one of several jobs he was juggling at the time.
After the book became a bestseller, he worked on building his family home. At his reading at the bookstore, he spoke of framing his daughter's bedroom. His agent asked him if he couldn't now pay someone else to do that, couldn't he get back to writing? He was writing, he told his agent, but he also wanted to build his daughter's bedroom, that it was like tucking her into her blanket at night.
Dubus was describing making things. He built his novel a piece at a time, and later, he built his family home. They were both acts of creation.
When I left the reading, I headed over to the Pottery Place, where I painted yarn bowls with a dozen other knitters. Yarn bowls are ingenious containers that keep yarn from rolling away under the coffee table while one is knitting. I had never painted pottery before, but my nephews have painted gifts for me. As I chose colors and brushes and came up with a design, I felt like a child, playful and ready to experiment. As I painted, I got lost in the process. The blank surface of the bowl was like my blank computer screen or a blank page in my journal: an invitation to create something that had never existed before.
I left the Pottery Place just as it closed, accompanied by another knitter, someone I had met for the first time that evening. We talked about how remarkable it was that in this world of mass production, we had just painted bowls that were almost certainly unlike any others in the world, and how that was like the knitting we did, too, as we tweaked patterns, chose yarn, and knitted with our very personal tension, so that my stitches and hers would be different.
I came home wanting to write, to knit, to paint some more, and soon. What I needed to do was to sit down at the kitchen counter to grade a paper. The next morning, I had to teach, and to give feedback on a couple of dozen drafts. And that was okay. The delight and inspiration from my evening lightened the work I had to do, and I went in to campus the next day reminded that my students were creating, too.
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| The cardigan I have been knitting and hope to finish before the winter is done. I had to take apart over forty rows of over six hundred stitches and start the cardigan over in October, when I discovered I had twisted it when I joined it in the round, but I haven't become discouraged yet. |
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| I finished knitting this hat last night. I began it during one of the pauses in knitting the cardigan, when I had to wait to get advice about a next step. |
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| My favorite chair, where I often read and write and where I am writing this. The red notebook is my journal. I went through about half a dozen notebooks last year. |
