Mood:
luckyTopic: Daily Eruptions
I am so lucky that I got to spend part of the fifth anniversary of 9/11 looking into the faces of some very beautiful children. It was my first day working with elementary students in an afterschool program. My goal is to get the children to think about creativity as it informs their entire lives, and to understand they can be creative in many different ways and enjoy doing it. Creativity and art are two separate things, so we will be playing lots of games to get the children to immerse themselves in spontaneous creation without worrying about the end product.
The kids I'm working with range from kindergarten to fifth grade and it is a really interesting experience to be surrounded by kids with that range of development. The younger children are so open, even if they're shy, and you can tell that even though they just met you, they trust you. The older kids are a little more reserved and skeptical, and there are two people in particular I may need to win over. They may be just a little too cool for me and my crazy ideas, and they are already setting themselves apart physically from the rest of the children.
We played the name game I learned in a college psych class where you choose an adjective that begins with the same letter as your first name and go around in a circle and have to remember all the name combinations of everyone who came before you, except that I was the only one who had to remember and that loosened the kids up some and got them laughing. We ended with a game where we all stood in a circle and each person in turn performed a movement, then we had to do all the movements in sequence like some silly dance. The kids loved it and jumped right in. The scary thing is that even the younger kids know hip hop moves I can't reproduce! I can tell already that my eight hours with them are going to go too quickly!
As for the rest of 9/11/2006, I finally feel I have my artistic response to the WTC bombing. It took five years, but I know what I need to say now. (I may be ahead of my time in some ways, but I am very slow in others!) Of course, "knowing" what I want to say, and actually saying it are two different things, and I haven't actually written my response yet. But I will. Hopefully, this week. Then there's a question of dissemination. I think my response needs to be physically manifested onto a small artifact (also not yet designed) and mailed, which will mean time spent creating the art and gathering addresses for people I don't have currently on file.... It might mean I won't have time to design and make holiday cards this year. Or it might mean I spend a year creating the response and the mailable artifacts and that my response goes public in time for 9/11/07.
I don't know yet. But I am happy, at least, to have some coherent idea at last for my response. Other writers and poets and artists were articulating ideas within days of the bombing, and I was amazed they could process so quickly and questioning my own artistic merit because I was just overwhelmed and speechless. Holding my infant nephew on my lap as I watched the towers collapse was the only thing that gave me strength five years ago, and thoughts of him and the children he will grow up with are still my primary sources of strength and hope now. Listening to Sherman Alexie and Naomi Shihab Nye speak at Hugo House in Seattle a month after the attack finally stopped my emotional hemorrhaging. Maybe writing this and mailing it into the world will allow me to finally remove the bandages.
