Pain and Possibility

Saturday 10:09am 12July08

I've been working with Gabrielle Rico's book, 'Pain and Possibility.' I have had the book for ages and started it before but couldn't remember how to do the word sculptures nor the spirals. I remembered that I liked doing them though. Plus she covers clustering as she does in, 'Writing the Natural Way.'

What I like about doing the word sculptures is that it brings back the fun and play of writing for me. I draw and fill out the word sculpture and write little pieces on the blank space of the page. It reminds me of when I was ten years old and decided that I was going to write instead of drawing since my brother was such a gifted artist and I didn't want my drawings to have to compete with his. When I was ten, I'd write a word or a topic and I would play at word associations and rhymes to create a piece. It was how my beginning writer's mind tackled doing it. That feeling as I was playing and once I'd completed something out of nothing was great because it came out of me like an emotion. It's good to be reminded of that.

And as I think of the term, pain and possibility, and I think of my ten year old self, I remember that it was a big time for me. I was giving up a passion I loved, drawing. Our family life was changing drastically with the addition of my mother's new boyfriend (who was to become my step dad) and his two daughters. I was at a new school and knew that I would change to another new school once we moved in with mom's boyfriend. We were going to leave the one apartment where my brother and I had our own bedrooms and we had neighbourhood friends that called on us to come out and play. There was always something new and dramatic that my brother and I had to adapt to without complaint. It was often a trying time that my mother reframed as an adventure and we wore the adventurers invisible clothes and I tried not to focus on the pain that came with all of our adventures.

Pain and Possibility (Interview with Gabrielle Rico)

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