Third Down

Tonight feels like the third down against an aggressive team like the Miami Hurricanes. Luckily my center lineman is strong. Built to hold off distractions, so that I can run from the pocket. I know it's summer and football is months away, but one of the artists has been working through this marching band idea and she has football fields and yard lines and diagrams and I've been listening to Emilyn Brodsky's Band Camp and thinking about number thirty-eight and number sixty-three and well, it feels like I'm stuck at the twenty-yard line with just two downs left in the game.

I need to get my final presentation finished. I am having difficulty figuring out how to present 100 panoramic photographs of artists' tables. The animation I tried using Power Point didn't span the table like I wanted it too and I broke up with Prezi. She wants to get back together and says she'll let me map the path through the pictures, but I'm not so sure I believe her. Slide show with poem voice-over, sounds so easy. Why has it been so hard? You know, I want the Ken Burns effect along the table tops and a smooth transition that shows the artists' and writers' progress. I want my voice and maybe a jingle-jangle, nostalgic track to play behind it. My purposes are not complicated. I just need to find the right tool. Suggestions welcome.

We have several assignments to work on during this writing institute. One professor who facilitates the sessions talked about accountability and finished products and the other professor said get started, write away and don't worry if you don't finish. I know I want to create finished pieces, even if they are in draft form.

I've been productive here and the one good thing about leaving on Friday afternoon is that I get to go be productive at the Highlights' Foundation camp in Pennsylvania on Sunday. There idea that there is more to come comforts me.

We meet around the conference table in the museum each day to draw, share and write.

Here's what I've done at the table each in the woods at the Atlantic Center for the Arts:

1. 1 piece of 3-D art imitating Britto to use a model in class next year
2. a mixed-media (maybe mobile) piece of folk art assembled from 25 individual pieces: Schooled (working title)
3. one finished altered poem, Collins' "Introduction to Poetry"
4. several pages prepped in an altered journal, 
5. more than 300 photographs (though only 150 or so have been edited and examined so far)
6. a screencast on Google Scholar
7. Two narratives (comments received as a writing student and comments shared from a student)
8. two days of sustained studio work with a sister
9. 8 blog posts
10. a revised unit/project plan for the Art of Analysis (in the format school requires)
11. a focused two-week Image Grammar a la Noden (action verbs) plan
12. an explanation of a problem of practice
13. a date-night with my husband
14. An argument piece on testing
15. a spoken word poem (third draft) 
16. a recording of said spoken word poem ( I don't like how I've read it, and it's too long...)
17. a series of artists' #table pictures I've been curating with Twitter and on Dropbox
18. 6 research documents downloaded and read
19. a volume of poetry consumed for dinner each night
20. a re-read of Gardner's Art, Mind, and Brain
21. thinking, a lot,  with the Lowell Nesbit (in the Writer's Studio loft)

If I number things and list them I won't have to pay attention to packing and leaving. The writing institute has been my sun and moon, my all in all, my daybreak and dusk. This experience, this place, the Atlantic Center for the Arts has filled me with light and given me energy to create.

I love it here.