Words in Flight
I first published this image in a post titled Aides-Mémoire, which recounts a cross-disciplinary collaboration that I undertook years ago with a visual artist I’d never met. Every week, I would mail her a notebook containing a new hand-written poem, and she, in return, would send me a notebook containing a new drawing or a delicate paper sculpture unfurling from its pages:
I can still vividly remember the anticipation that I felt each week as I opened the mailbox to find Anne-Sophie’s latest envelope/artwork inside. I would tear the package open and flip through the notebook to find how she had responded to my last entry: subtly, obliquely, never in an obvious or literal way. I did my best to respond in kind, not just with poems but also with glued-in photos and cards and scraps of paper, items inspired rather than directly informed by Anne-Sophie’s enigmatic line drawings.
I must have carried a visceral memory of that playful, tactile, serendipity-affirming exchange when I decided last February to give away 50 handcrafted notebooks as part of a Special Event celebrating the fourth anniversary of my WriteSPACE community. This time, however, it was a one-way affair: all you had to do was register for the event, type your name and address into an online form, and voilà — a free notebook was yours for the asking, no strings attached.
Between the effort involved in designing, producing, and mailing out 50 unique notebooks and the agonisingly slow speed of snail-mail these days, many of my colorful creations have only recently arrived in their new homes. A few, it seems, have been lost in transit — although you never know, even migratory birds sometimes blow off course before finding their inner compass again! A number of recipients have not yet responded to my plea for news and a photo, but I trust that they will soon. 🥰
In the meantime, here are some of the many inspiring images I’ve received so far from writers around the world:
Notebooks at home: Collaboration (Kathy, USA); Compass Points (Karen, USA); Diving Deep (Lynne, UK); Freewriting (Kate, New Zealand); Ideas (Nicola, UK); Lines (Kirsi, Finland); Morning Pages (Bibi, Aruba); Notes (Katharina, Germany); Research (Soundarya, India); Structure (Catalina, UK)
A special shout-out to Heather S, a US-based historian on sabbatical at Oxford, who sent me this stylish blank book from Blackwell’s Bookshop, upcycled from the cover of a French novel:
What a treat it was to receive a package in the mail! In the words of author Lewis Hyde,“the gift must always move” — and these world-winging wordbirds aren’t just moving but flying high as they circle the globe.
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