I’ve been pushing myself into new media terrains in 2021: black-ink sketching and photos, as I’ve shared here, and newly video. In the last few days I realized I’ve been homesick for writing. New angles on creativity have me back at baby stage (but just about communicative)—where, I am reminded, we can go further the more secure we are at home base.
The author Maria Popova is a reader and writer who uses visuals to great effect in her newsletters. I’ve come back to her immersively yet again in exploring playing text off images, but the first way I loved her was still through her words. In this post on the blog I try to curate a Popova exhibition and end up enumerating the ways her body of work resonates with me, and with my own. She’s a dear mentor of mine whom I’ve never met, and probably never will. At my best I consider myself her apprentice.
Trying New Channels? Bring Intention, Openly
As COVID has gone on, I’ve missed the ways I can read, capture and fill a room. I grew up in great storytelling traditions and that first leaked into my teaching, then irrigated its domain whenever I felt burnt out. I’ve started posting publicly on my YouTube channel to recapture and project some of how I am live.
At first I put the medium and tools first in my scheming. What should my niche be? What language(s) to use? I’m a polyglot, I should be one of those polyglot people on YouTube! The New Channel Energy was big.
I’m still excited about some new lighting and audio toys I invested in for the adventure. But when the time came to post a first video—with the prompt “Make a video about your favorite thing”—I surprised myself. The in-my-head-ness fell away and it was perfectly clear that whatever else this will be, my own stories will be a major tributary. I don’t need topical plans when I have experience voicing my experience. It’s always worked better when I stop architecting the trail and just step onto it.
So I didn’t bother setting up any new toys (and okay, it shows), but introduced a dear old one—meet Froggee, everyone.
(And yes, he vociferously objected to being classed as a thing. We talked about the Latin meaning of species and he was okay enough with that to let me post this.)
I’m not sure where this is headed, but what I said in this video, compared to what I wrote down in a light script for it, shows me that I’ll be posting for us, by us videos on being “twice-exceptional,” curious and academic (they usually call it “gifted,” a label I can’t hold for myself) with mental health challenges (in my case, ADHD and PTSD) or other neuro-divergence.
I’m over only being able to point my adult twice-exceptional students and coaching clients to materials written about them as school-aged children for their teachers, therapists and other “service providers.” The label is only as helpful and welcome as the community behind it.
Nothing’s ever finished, and mostly that’s great
My professional and artistic lives have ways of circling back on themselves to form meaningful patterns when I think I’m letting them run amok. Right after posting this video I got into a conversation with a writer who is processing some trauma through her work right now and wondering what to do with it. I dug up a draft of a chapbook I started in 2014 to showcase some possible forms her art could take. My own evolved into a one-person show I performed at the National Black Theater in 2016. I’d thought of the chapbook as simple prelude to that richer work. Looking at it for the first time in over a year, I was surprised at some things I like better in this first rendering.
Here are two excerpts, the only pair in the collection, the latter of which closes the work. Again that theme, what light means…
I am reminded of looking across the lake in Prospect Park at night and seeing the hi-rise apartment buildings with their checkerboard of lighted windows near Grand Army Plaza. Of how much that image says Belmont to me, and how much that tugs at in me even though I was never a patient there. Something about fortresses, lakeside homes, and places apart that still loom.
Puzzle (1)
I join her trying to find the bluest sky pieces.
She is back not for the first time
Doing the same thing over and not/expecting a different result.
There should be 1000 pieces
We are assured they didn’t take one away on the mental ward, of all places!
I pace, stare, leave, this is too hard for me now.
She is persistent,
Doing the same thing over and hoping to make it this time.
Puzzle (2)
Emerging from the subway where I have low-key rejected jumping:
A streetlamp-lit summer evening
Heedless of me:
Soft, unaccountably.
Pre-K across the street,
The gradient-blue is there,
Not hopeful,
Not emoting
Quiet time in the mind
This is not the puzzle blue I found with Janet struggling
To fit something together
Are we crazier if we can’t make a 1000 piece sunset or if we manage it?
This is the dark dawn blue of trusting how I feel again,
The moment that whispers stop for the sake of life
The wonder that will take all this precipice and recover and make it unity
purely lovable, contrasting the messes, still sheltering them.
What does some version of you need to hear?
I need my art to serve, too. What do you want to hear more about?
Right now, I’m especially interested in hearing from twice-exceptional folks and those who work with them on what they’d want me to talk about on video.
Get in touch! I love the conversations I’ve had with so many of you through these dispatches. Just reply to this email, leave a comment on Substack, or DM me on Twitter @jacobusbanks.