#52essays2017 – Essay #1 – Posted January 8, 2017

Invited by my friend Stacie Evans, I have accepted the #52essays2017 challenge as developed by Vanessa Matir [https://vanessamartir.wordpress.com/2016/12/27/52essays2017/].

What a brilliant idea and a great opportunity. I’m already engaged in a daily activism project. On Dec. 18, a friend sent me a personal essay written by Betty Reed called “Donald Trump is Cancer,” published in Entropy. That inspired me. So everyday since then, along with Betty, I have pledged to do at least one political action (broadly defined) every single day. This is how I have started the new patriarchal tidy time of Jan 2017. This is how I am finding on-going support in community and empowerment to counter my angst. That’s my political edge.

But the #52essays2017 challenge to write an essay a week will keep my soul-work, creative and innovative juices flowing. I’ve decided to use this activity to connect specifically to 3 other creative projects I have in the early brewing stages.

The first project is to go through my lifetime of collected letters and memorabilia and writings and achievements that are currently scattered about the house in various boxes, drawers and file cabinets. I want to corral them into some order. I’m the only one who knows why these miscellaneous doodads are important to me. Therefore, I plan to randomly select something to write about each week in an effort to create memoir and meaning.

The second is to catalog my photography and transform photos into pieces of other artwork and projects – including a Tarot Card Deck project started a few years back. Many of these photos will no doubt accompany some of the memorabilia archived during the first project.

Finally, I hope to transform the memorabilia, photos, and writings into art books—more on that later as I’m still ruminating about what that exactly means!

I can’t wait to see how this all unfolds!