Loose Leaf Notes

I can’t find my working notebook or an available empty one, so I started this on the back of a used envelope. Now at the keyboard, I’m wearing a bright orange Halloween cat cap with black ears that stick up because having it on helps me to keep my sense of humor. My office has unraveled, as if I pulled an imaginary string and all the stacks of paper fell from the counters and spilled out of the filing cabinet onto the floor. Not only am I navigating through piles of junk in my office, my living room is a mine field of strewn newspaper clippings, photos, glue sticks, scissors, colored paper, and more.

My friend and fellow Writer’s Circle member, Rosemary, spent many hours working on a collage for the Hotel Floyd. The hotel owners invited local groups to decorate themed rooms, and a small group of us have been working on the Floyd Writer’s Room since the start of the summer. The idea for the collage was to create a piece of art using the photographs and stories I’ve been collecting that would show our group’s presence in the community.

Along with stories and images from our Spoken Word Open Mic nights and our past performances at FloydFest, Rosemary and I collected magnetic poetry words, Scrabble board spellings, scraps, flyers, and special paper to include in the mix.

Even with a full time job and her daughter’s wedding in August, Rosemary found enough time to come up with a whimsical creation the size of a poster. She was happy with the final composition, but in the end the materials failed her. A decoupage liquid caused the whole thing to wrinkle and buckle. After many hours and expense invested, she was disheartened enough to want to abandon the project. The word “landfill” was uttered.

With the hotel under construction, Rosemary’s collage ended up in my living room with the rest of the purchased art for the Writer’s Room. Throughout the month of September, I and others in our writing circle brainstormed ideas on how to salvage it. Everything from a creating a graffiti-like poster, a portable poet’s standing sign, or scanning and photo-shopping it section by section were considered, but each idea seemed to involve sinking even more time and money into a project already in the red. And no one seemed to have any time.

In late September, Fellow blogger David St. Lawrence and I both took photos of the collage, zeroing in on different sections. I picked out some favorites and got them professionally color copied. The copying cost much more than I had expected, which meant that professional framing wasn’t an option if I was going to at least recoup Rosemary’s and my material and copying expenses. I wanted to do that as well as find a way to honor the work.

I awoke one recent morning with the idea of a Floyd writer’s scrapbook on my mind, a book that could incorporate prints of sections of Rosemary’s collage and also have room for full newspapers clippings about our events and a sampling of writer’s poetry and prose. Although I’m more comfortable collaging in a book than for something to frame and hang on the wall, I didn’t want to take on all the work. A writer’s scrapbooking party was scheduled, so that each writer in the group of nine would have the opportunity to create a page or two of their own, but on the night of the scheduled get-together no one was free to attend.

So I took the plunge and now it’s almost done. Searching down poems in old Museletters and FloydFest programs, finding just the right photo to cut into just the right shape, copying and pasting newspaper articles together has taken its toll on me and my house. But I’m happy that Rosemary’s collage, the inspiration behind the scrapbook, is getting the mileage it deserves and that our efforts as a group to bring spoken word to our community will have a visual history one can follow. Rosemary’s collage has provided some ready-made 8×10 scrapbook pages, but most of those have been clipped or added to. It’s been fun to mix the original photographs that Rosemary altered back into her work in an Alice Wonderland fashion.

Update: Not only that, but I’ve been using the prints of parts the original collage (photos # 2 and 3) to make flyers for our spoken word events (see last photo of Mara). There are two long narrow framed pictures with three 3×7 openings which hold six prints of views of the collage hanging in the writer’s room. Soon there will a writer’s scrapbook to add to the bookcase in what we have been calling the “writer’s study.” I’ll bring it to the pre-opening open house this Sunday for all who worked on decorating the themed rooms. More about the green designed, themed room Hotel Floyd HERE. Their website is HERE.