COURSE 01 - 04 - Written Reflection Number 2

Written Reflection Number 2

Do you know what your motivation was to write? What is the original reason why you started to write? That is, what was it that originally caused you to write? DISCOVER what your motivations are. What drives you to be creative, to write (especially when it gets tough, in the grind)?

A kaleidoscope of colourful hard plastic sprawls out across the bedroom floor with a small boy seated at its centre. A set of Empire Strikes Back curtains hang down from the ceiling to the floor, partially blocking the cloudy daylight from pouring into the boy’s second floor south facing room. Like a tiny Buddha, no more than seven or eight years old, the boy sits cross legged on the floor. His upper body leans towards a box that’s tilted on an angle towards him, resting partially on his legs as he peers down into its void to view its contents. There’s a smell of old cardboard and plastic that hangs in the air as his right arm reaches into the box: the boy’s hand pushing through the plastic bricks like an excavator’s arm, which fills the quiet space with a crackly swoosh. Again and again, he scoops up a hearty handful of pieces in search of just the right piece, like one might scoop up water or soil in the palm of their hands. And occasionally, the boy’s eyes widen when the unforeseen possibilities presented by an unexpected piece becomes apparent, taking his project in a new direction. It’s a puzzle without a guide, a small sculpture being shaped purely by the boy’s imagination. Today, his latest space station takes shape, brick by brick, all selected from his collection of Lego.

PHOTO > Lee, Steven. “Still from ‘Memory at Play.’” YouTube, 22 Oct 2011.

Today, a couple of decades later, I can still remember the feeling of the carpet beneath the sides of my bare feet as I’d sit for hours in my room, finding the pieces that felt right to help sculpt alien worlds with my Lego which provided new adventures for my Lego figurines. Growing up, the Lego that was sold was generic, as there weren’t any movie or television show tie-ins to serve as the backdrop for the stories created by my childhood mind. And in many ways, I’m grateful for this lack of specificity, as it gave my inner child countless opportunities to create stories using the blank canvas provided by the Lego. My figurines could be characters from Ghostbusters, GI Joe, The Goonies, Indiana Jones, The Last Starfighter, Star Wars, or from the latest NASA shuttle I’d watched on TV shooting up into space, sending heroic astronauts into orbit high above the Earth. What awe those astronauts must have felt looking down on us, and I can only imagine that it’s not that different from the wonder I had as a boy gazing up at the enormous vastness of the night sky. And my figurines could go back to the moon, or even further out, to Mars, or even farther, to unnamed planets in other galaxies and solar systems. Ultimately, the only limit to the adventures I could have was my imagination.

VIDEO > Lee, Steven. “Memory at Play.” YouTube, 22 Oct 2011.

As I compose the first draft of this reflection, I’m in bed, laying on my stomach as my elbows prop my chest and head above the small notebook that rests in front of me. My right hand holds the pen that darts across the page in this notebook I’ve devoted to exploring the subject of writing, both from a technical and artistic practice. I’m jumping from idea to idea, and that’s okay as I let my mind wander from thought to thought about why I’m motivated to create as an artist. In some ways, I feel apprehensive about answering this question as I think back to the discussion in an earlier lecture about who gets to call themselves a writer. For me, as a child, and for me, today, the creative endeavours I undertake (be it drawing, painting, photographing, sculpting, or writing) all go back to the kinds of feelings I felt when I created with Lego. Feelings of anxiousness, awe, calm, contentment, curiosity, excitement, exploration, fear, happiness, interest, isolation, joy, love, pleasure, reverence, self-doubt, self-trust, solitude, tranquility, and wonder are just some of the emotions, both positive and negative (yin & yang), that I drift between as I create.

Like the countless hours spent with my Lego growing up, the process of creation provides me with beautiful opportunities for moments of solitude. Growing up, I often spent time alone, and it was something I was largely at peace with. It probably didn’t hurt that I have always had an inclination to lean towards introversion: the inner child in me is often an anxious, shy, and socially awkward little kid, something that is, for better or worse, still prevalent in me today. Novelist John Irving, interviewed by the Big Think YouTube channel, in a post called “How to Tell if You’re a Writer | John Irving | Big Think” describes how he knew at an early age that finding solitary moments was important for his psyche:

“…I noticed that the school day was enough to spend with my friends. I seemed to have a need to want to be alone… even before I started keeping a journal… I had a need to come home from school by myself, and to be in a room by myself, or in my grandmother’s garden by myself… the earliest sign was how much I liked being alone, how much I actually needed to be alone, the way you or I need exercise, or food, or a certain amount of sleep. There was that desire and comfort of being alone.”

Being alone provides me with opportunities to recharge after being out in our hectic world.

Artists date.

Final elevator Statement of what motivates me

Works Cited

Big Think. “How to Tell if You’re a Writer | John Irving | Big Think.” YouTube, 23 Apr 2012.

COURSE 01 - 02a - “Finding Forrester”

Although I was familiar with Gus Van Sant’s 2000 film, Finding Forrester, it wasn’t until writer-spiritualist Sufani Weisman-Garza recommended it in her short Udemy course, The Divine Impulse to Write, that I finally decided to sit down to watch it. My expectations for the film were high, as I was curious to see how the student-mentor relationship between the characters played by Rob Brown and Sean Connery would play out and I suspect that the element of race, and growing up in the inner-city would also play a part in the film, as these themes are touched upon by the film’s trailer. I’ve always enjoyed films that explore the coming-of-age story, as it’s something that’s universally experienced by every human being. Growing up, films such as Dead Poets Society (1989), Good Will Hunting (1997), and The Karate Kid (1984) presented me with young protagonists who on different levels served as a mirror for my own life, with kids who were trying to find their place in the world as they meet incredible, larger than life mentors who helped guide them. And just last year, I was pleasantly surprised to find the theme once again explored in director Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (2023), one of the year’s best films.

In terms of what I already know about the film, in Weisman-Garza’s short course, she explained how the quote, “…we write first from our heart, and then from our head,” was a key idea from the film which explores the ideas behind learning how to write.

From Mike Fleming Jr’s 2010 article for Deadline called Secret JD Salinger Documentary & Book Now Revealed, I knew that actor Sean Connery was inspired by Salinger’s own life story when looking for inspiration for the character of William Forrester. And I know from having studied Salinger in university, that Salinger himself was famous for writing The Catcher in the Rye (1951), which is largely considered as one of the best novels ever written, as well as Nine Stories (1953), a collection of short stories, which are also considered as being some of the best short stories ever written. But following the success of these works, Salinger became reclusive, and eventually stopped publishing new work altogether, although he did continue to write. In a 1974 interview with Lacey Fosburgh of The New York Times, titled JD Salinger Speaks About His Silence, Salinger described how, "There is a marvellous peace in not publishing. It's peaceful. Still. Publishing is a terrible invasion of my privacy. I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.” But I also know from a 2021 article for Vanity Fair, titled In Hindsight: ‘Predatory Men With a Taste for Teenagers’ Joyce Maynar on the Chilling Parallels Between Woody Allen and JD Salinger, written by Joyce Maynard, that there was a predatory side to Salinger’s personality. In it, Maynard writes how:

“I name two events that caused the greatest emotional damage in my life. I’m not speaking here of personal losses—the deaths of my parents, the death of my husband. I’m speaking of times when I felt unsafe, diminished, and under attack almost to the point of questioning the worth of my own life. One happened when I was a teenager, with Salinger—an experience that ended my college education, isolated me from my family, my friends, and the world, and left me in a state of profound shame that endured for decades. The second, and arguably the more painful one, occurred 25 years later when, halfway into my 40s, I chose at long last to speak of what had happened to me when I was young.

It took me that long to recognize the truth: that I was groomed to be the sexual partner of a narcissist who nearly derailed my life. When I published a memoir telling my story, I was accused of trying to sell books, to make money from my brief and inconsequential connection to a great man. Adjectives applied to me by well-respected critics included the words “icky, masturbatory” (in Mirabella), “indescribably stupid” (in The Washington Post), and (from Maureen Dowd in The New York Times) “predator.” One writer, Cynthia Ozick—hardly alone among celebrated authors, weighing in with her condemnation—portrayed me as a person who, in possession of no talent of my own, had attached myself to Salinger to “suck out” his celebrity. In the eyes of many, I was a literary vampire. For some, simply a cunt.”

Ultimately, I don’t know how closely the inspiration for Forrester resides in Salinger’s story and the accusations that have been made against him by Maynard, and later, other women. In the end, I somehow don’t believe that the relationship between Connery’s Forrester and Brown’s Wallace will be predatory, or end with Forrester cutting off all ties with Wallace.

Finding Forrester was released in theaters on December 22, 2000. In 2000, the world’s economy was strong. American President Bill Clinton was nearing the end of his second term in office and had one of the highest job approval ratings in history. In spite of this, Clinton’s personal ratings were impacted by Republican investigations of sexual misconduct allegations involving Clinton. The American Presidential election had concluded on December 12, when the United States Supreme Court had halted recounts that were taking place in Florida, citing that no uniform statewide standard could be developed to fairly count the ballots, thereby allowing Republican Presidential Candidate George W. Bush to narrowly win the electoral college, and therefore the Presidency, even though Democratic Presidential Candidate Al Gore had won the popular vote. In terms of the world of writing, influential cartoonist Charles M Schulz, the creator and writer of the Peanuts comic strip, passed away in February 2000.

Although I had not seen Finding Forrester, I was familiar with the work of American independent film director Gus Van Sant, whose first features included Drugstore Cowboy (1989), and My Own Private Idaho (1991). Perhaps his most well-known work was 1997’s Good Will Hunting, which was also the first film of Van Sant’s that I saw in theaters. Good Will Hunting was written by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who also starred in the film alongside Minnie Driver, Stellan Skarsgård, and Robin Williams. The film focuses on the character of Will Hunting (Damon), a young, blue-collar worker in Boston, who is discovered to be a genius with particularly strong gifts in mathematics. Hunting is a troubled youth however and is taken under the wing of a university mathematics professor (Skarsgård) and a psychologist (Williams) who serve as mentors for the twenty-year-old who is conflicted about leaving his roots for a more stable and successful life based on the development of his mathematical gifts. Following the success of Good Will Hunting [in which Van Sant received Academy Award nominations for best director and best picture, as well as best actor (Damon), supporting actress (Driver), score (Danny Elfman), song (Elliot Smith), and wins for best supporting actor (Williams) as well as for best original screenplay (Damon and Affleck)], Van Sant went on to film a shot-by-shot remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho. The remake starred Vince Vaughn, Julianne Moore, and Anne Heche. This would be the second Van Sant film I saw on the big screen, and I remember being skeptical about whether or not a remake was necessary, especially if it was not going to do anything new with the material. Ultimately, I think the experiment of Van Sant’s to remake the Hitchcock classic wasn’t a success. Although I enjoyed watching Vaughn take on the role of Norman Bates, I found Heche’s performance as Marion Crane to be somewhat flat, and other decisions such as the inclusion of surreal imagery intercut with the murder scenes to be distracting. Finally, I was also familiar with Van Sant’s 2008 film, Milk, about San Francisco gay rights advocate and politician Harvey Milk, who was portrayed in an Academy Award winning performance by actor Sean Penn.

Overall, the most important feature of Finding Forrester I was looking for was how the portrayal of the mentor-student relationship would play out between Sean Connery’s character, William Forrester, and Rob Brown’s character, Jamal Wallace would play out.

Works Cited

 

COURSE O1 - 02 - Written Reflection Number 1

In the spring of 2024, I signed onto a series of courses that make up the Professional Writing Strategist, Marketing Director & Indie Publisher program as offered by Sufani Garza of the Place of Bliss Academy (POBA) on the Udemy platform. The first course in the program is called Writers Workshop #1 - THE DIVINE IMPULSE TO WRITE. This online journal will serve as a repository for my notes, written reflections, and other links and videos of interest I stumble upon over the course of taking these workshops.

Written Reflection Number 1

What do you do as a writer? What is your routine? What are your habits, current rituals - that is, what are you already doing to commit to a writing practice? Do you want to write more? Think about what you do and create, identify, and establish your own routine, schedule, and ritual.

I often feel as if I’m not doing much as a writer, that I don’t have much of a routine, or any discernible habits, or any specific rituals I can opine about. And during the times I am doing something, my monkey mind is great at telling me that I’m doing nowhere near enough to be able to call myself any kind of an artist, let alone a serious writer.

SUBVERSIVE SELFIES

Currently, the most significant amount of writing I undertake daily are for a subversive selfie project I’ve been doing on and off since January 1, 2020. It’s a project I started to illustrate a more authentic portrayal of my daily life. This project holds my interest because I found that people often use social media to paint a picture of their lives in a way that was very curated: where every photo or video appeared to represent a seemingly perfect life. Ultimately, I knew that if I was going to post regular selfies with written reflections on an ongoing basis, I didn’t want to present a false appearance of perfection and happiness. Because that just isn’t me, and never has been. At some point in 2020, I stumbled upon and purchased a black t-shirt that had simple red text on it, which read: “we are a sad generation with happy instagram pictures.” It was a perfect shirt that symbolized what I was pushing back against with my subversive selfie project.

ARTIFACT 01 > PHOTO > Steven H, Lee. “We are a sad generation with happy instagram pictures.” 14 Mar 2024.

With my posts, I do my best to present an honest look at my life, where I’m not afraid to shine a light on the struggles I grapple with such as:

  • issues with my physical health including:

    • my high blood pressure,

    • obesity, and

    • type 2 diabetes, as well as

  • issues with my mental health including:

    • my battles with the addictions of:

      • binge eating junk food, and

      • overspending, as well as

    • anxiety; and

    • major depression.

In terms of the routine attached to this project, I find that today I’ll snap selfies throughout the day mainly using my iPhone. At the end of the day, after I’ve retired to bed, I’ll edit the photo slightly, and compose the caption story directly in Instagram using it’s in-app editing options. I then back the post up by also posting it to Flickr. This workflow can be dangerous though, as the Instagram app does have a tendency to sometimes crash in the middle of my composition - resulting in me losing both the edited photo alongside whatever caption text I had written up to that point. When this happens, it really does test my commitment to actualizing mindfulness in everything I do, as I end up letting out an angry series of expletives that could probably make a sailer blush. When this happens, my small Maltese-Poodle Kira will, without fail, lift her head up and look over at me from her spot in the bed, before getting up to lumber over next top me, flopping down by my side, her head on my chest, as if to say “don’t get mad Daddy.” After giving her an appreciative belly rub, assuring her I was mad at my phone and not her, I then remind myself to breathe, and begin again. Altogether, it usually takes about an hour to compose a subversive selfie project post, and most days I’m happy with the results. The project gives me a chance to descriptively share a part of my day, and to convey the undulating series of emotions that I experience.

SOME KIND OF A ROUTINE

I don’t know why I let myself be so mindless when I loose my work, as it’s usually fairly easy to remember what I had written, and often this second draft flows out of me more concisely than the first draft. When my life was more organized, or I felt a deeper desire to create, combined with a kind of self-imposed deadline, I could wake between 4-5 am, get dressed, and head to a local Starbucks to write. But even as I handwrite this reflection in a small journal while sitting in a local Starbucks, I find myself distracted by the present moment. I’m sitting here and the busyness of the place has produced a heightened hum of noise that has me looking up from my page more often than I’d like. Usually, the busyness of a cafe doesn’t bother me, where, as writing guru Natalie Goldberg once described, the frantic noise often provides my monkey mind with enough amusement to keep it preoccupied as my hand moves across the page, forming letter after letter with my Papermate ballpoint pen, methodically constructing the words that makeup whatever stories I’m putting down on paper. Specifically, Goldberg describes this ability as being in the zone, and notes how she:

“…read an article by Lawrence Shainberg about athletes training for the ‘zone.’ The zone is a special place that opens up at moments of peak performance. In the middle of fast action and pressure - in basketball or soccer, say - everything slows down. The players feel calm, clear, confident. How do they prepare for this? Their coaching includes reading a book while watching television. One young Olympic archer practiced wearing earphones, listening to the radio as she shot her arrows. All this increased concentration… This is also why I write in cafes. The more activity in the restaurant the better - juke-box blasting, phone ringing, cook calling out orders - more entertainment for monkey mind, leaving the deep mind to do its task” (202).

Ultimately, I’m hard pressed to remember when I last got up at 4-5am to create. It’s been over a year, at least.

HOSPITAL MEMORIES

I remember in September 2021 when I was hospitalized following a suicide attempt. The first few days I was kept under observation, in a small room with cement cinder block walls, and a heavy steal door. A security camera was in one corner of the room, up high, covered by a metal plate with a plexiglass window from which the camera peered down at me from behind. The plate was flesh with the wall and the ceiling, protecting the camera from any possible damage that might otherwise be flung at it by the room’s occupant. Part of me wondered how long it was hung without such a protection in place, how many were damaged before a more fortified camera was installed. The corner of the room had a metal toilet, with a small metal sink on top of it, but it was out of order. I sat and slept on a single sized plastic mattress that sat on the floor. I was given one blanket, and a single pillow to rest my solitary head upon. There wasn’t much to do. I practiced meditation, and breathing exercises. At one point I used the Ho’Oponopono prayer as a mantra, along with what is often said during a loving kindness meditation.

“I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.”

“I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you… may I be safe. May I be happy. May I be healthy. May I live a long life with ease.”

Then I’d repeat it for someone I loved. And someone I was having difficulty with. And then, for the entire world. Eventually, I felt a great release, a deep, full bodied sobbing, that started in the pit of my stomach, in my solar plexus. Later that same day, when the hospital psychiatrist saw me, he asked me if there was anything that could make things easier. To that, I asked if I could have a pen or pencil, and a notebook to write in. He said no, that they couldn’t give me such an object after a suicide attempt. Even though we had talked about how I’d never engaged in cutting, or any kind of physical self-harm to my body aside from taking too many prescription medications, in an attempt to die by overdose.

He added, “You were crying earlier the nurses said. How come?”

I told him how I had been meditating, and that it had brought up fairly strong emotions that had been stuck inside me for too long now. I explained how it had been cathartic, and said that writing was also cathartic for me. But his answer was still no. Later that night, I would be moved from isolation to a bed that sat in a hallway, with other beds in front and behind it, with other patients sound asleep. Another patient had been brought in by the place, and was clearly having some kind of mental breakdown, shaking, screaming. It was a sharp difference from how I had been brought in. I had been down, so quiet, handcuffs keeping my hands secured behind my back, cutting into my wrists. At one point I stood in the doorway of the little cell they were putting me in, and the doctor asked who the patient was, and seemed shocked that it was me because I appeared to have everything under control. There was no screaming, no yelling. I wasn’t physically trying to resist being put away.

I wasn’t in the hallway for long, that afternoon I moved from the emergency room at my local hospital to a mental health unit, in another hospital, about an hour’s drive away from where I had been. This would be my home for the next week or two. After getting a brief tour, and putting what little I was allowed to keep away, I showered, and put on a clean pair of hospital pyjamas. It felt good to move up from the hospital gown, although I had kept on a pair of bumblebee boxer shorts I had on when I was first admitted and ordered to strip off my jeans and shirt. With the brown pyjamas in place, I retired the boxers to a drawer next to my small bed, as I had been wearing them for several days now. I was tempted to stay in the privacy of my room, and just sleep. It would have been so easy to ignore everyone in the outside world of the ward, but I knew that wouldn’t help me in any productive way.

So I left my room. I went to the nursing station and asked if they had anything I could write with, and to my surprise they provided me with several small elementary school exercise journals, and a pen. I was excited, and relieved, and I found a spot in the cafeteria area where I just wrote. I wrote down the words I had committed to memory, the words scratched into the back of the metal door that kept me locked away in the emergency room. I wrote how the plastic mattress felt cold under my naked legs and feet. I wrote about meditating, and sobbing.

Each morning had a routine. I’d get up, meditate for 10-15 minutes, and then journal for thirty minutes. I approached the journaling as prescribed by Julia Cameron, in her book The Artist’s Way. It was a way for me to clear my thoughts, to quiet my monkey mind. I had been given several of these small journals so one ended up being reserved for these morning pages. Then, the nurse would come and take my vitals, as well as my blood sugar, and give me my medication. I’d then shower and head out to the common area to have breakfast. At different points during the day I found time for writing practice, as described by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones. Ten minute exercises devoted to different topics. At one point, I was allowed to use my iPhone to find the number of my counsellor that I had been seeing at my university. I also used it to open my Kindle app, and jot down some of the ideas Goldberg listed in her book for writing practice topics. Eventually, I had to stop, as they noticed I’d had my iPhone for too long. It was probably the first time in two decades that I’d been without a smart device or computer for any length of time longer than a few hours. And it was a bit of a relief.

Works Cited

  • Goldberg, Natalie. “Thunder and Lightning: Cracking Open the Writer’s Craft.” Open Road Integrated Media, 2000.