Midnight Writing

I've said this before: everything seems more meaningful when done at midnight. Baking bread? Mundane. Baking bread at midnight? Magical. Writing poems? Meh. Writing poems at midnight- 3am? Brilliant and beat poetish. Cooking anything, making art, even just listening to the things outside are just simply more interesting in the middle of the night.

Except when one is battling coffee induced insomnia and it is one in the morning, then everything is just freaking annoying.

So, here is my Eat The Frog post for the morning.

This weekend Chad and I had a date night. We went to an antique shop and then had dinner with friends and played Cards Against Humanity. Whoa is that an interesting game.

 I am inspired. I really want something just like this to store my camera items next to my desk.

And this for the bedroom someday. Love the look.

Snacks while we chatted before dinner. Iowa cheese. Oh yum.

And this was a couple nights ago, but so beautiful. I ran to the car to get something and found this, pulled out my phone and captured it into my visual record of moments I have stood in awe. This is why people can believe in something greater than just the here and now, beauty like this overwhelms us.

I am still hanging in there, getting work done, preparing for the travel next month, and cleaning and grading and creating art. This is my life, the busy punctuated with moments of quiet grace.

Farmiversary and Reverse Bucket List Update

In 2010, just days before Isaac was born early I wrote this: The Reverse Bucket List. Someone, I don't even remember who, called me a failure. I was mad and sad and pregnant and huge and well, when I feel like that I write.




Today, I don't feel like that at all. Nope. I do feel like adding to it though.

First, the five things I wanted to add to my list in 2010:  

Things I would like to do:
1) swim in the Mediterranean
2) walk inside a building that is more than a 1000 years old
3) drink milk still warm from the cow
4) finish my novel(s) 
5) help someone else succeed at breastfeeding

Did all of those except #1. But I was pretty darn close. And #2? The building was probably only 800 years old, to be fair, but I say it counts.

1. Gave birth to a special needs baby, on my own terms, with a c/s that was how I wanted it to be. 
2. Fought to breastfeed and taught a doctor how to measure how many ounces a baby drinks from the breast by using a scale. Seriously. 
3. Learned how to audit my own hospital bills for errors. 
4. Learned how to shop around for better prices regarding hospital tests and labs. 
5. Learned how to ask for help.
6. Learned how to milk a cow and that Chad is better at it so it can be his job. Ha. 
7. Made cheese. Made a lot of cheese.
8. Explored caves. 
9. Started dying my hair purple again.
10. Tapped maple trees and made my own syrup.
11. Taught others how to tap and boil for syrup too.
12. Took a pottery class and made my own dishes.
13. Loaded pigs in a trailer, alone. 
14. Brought chickens to the butcher and helped in the initial kill. 
15. Returned to Chicago after a really long time.
16. Found her. She's not dead.
17. Applied and attended a writer's retreat in Georgia. 
18. Rode a bus cross country.
19. Assisted, alone and with the vet, pulling lambs from a ewe in labour distress.
20. Bottle fed lamb, calf, and piglets.
21. Published photography.
22. Published poems.
23. Published an essay. 
24. Got my passport.
25. Went to Europe. Took pictures.
26. Sang at Karaoke.
27. I wrote poetry again. 
28. I took myself seriously as an artist. 
29. I prayed at the Bone Chapel in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic. 
30. I rode a train across the countryside in a faraway country. 
31. I learned how to make tinctures and teas. 
32. I healed some more.
33. I cooked a pheasant.
34. Hosted a holiday meal at my home. 
35. Learned to kayak and row.
36. Built fence and rotated livestock.
37. Attended a wound that required actual first aid to stop the bleeding.
38. Learned to hula hoop.
39. Wrangled a loose calf.
40. Kept bees.
41. Rebuilt relationships, and nurtured other important ones.
42. Learned about Permaculture and shared it with others.
43. Made time for my art, and nurtured my own being again.
44. Helped a mama get donor milk for a baby in NICU.
45. Did the right thing even though it was really hard. 
46. Encouraged someone else to take their writing seriously too.
47. Got back on stage and read poetry aloud again after 16 years of being terrified to do so.
48. Learned how to cook lamb.
49. Bottled and started selling my secret spice mix.
50. Raised food for 60 other families in the last 5 years.
51. Stopped complaining about my toe. 
52. Grew my hair to my waist. 
53. Loved fiercely.
54. Walked on ice.
55. Brined olives (it takes two months and is kind of hard!)
56. Taught my son to walk. 
57. Started and admin several facebook groups that do a lot of good in the world. 
58. Read more books. 
59. Photographed a punk concert.
60. Ate Vegan food and didn't die. It was delicious actually! 
61. Learned to spin wool, even though I am terrible at it.
62. Sent that packet of poetry back in, revised. They didn't want it after all this time, but I got a personal response back and at least now I know. 
63. Didn't let rejection shut me down again.
64. Learned that most of the time, when people are being jerks, it's not actually my problem or about me. 
65. Learned how to apply eyeliner. 
66. Threw myself a birthday party. 
67. Joined a book club.
68. Made Crown Roast. 
69. Learned that I am my own worst anchor, let go of that chain.
70. Toured Jim William's mansion. 
71. Tracked wild pigs in Georgia. 
72. Watched turtle lay eggs and later watched the eggs hatch.
73. Drank Kumbacha. Yuck.
74. Rode a horse. 
75. Paid attention.

To do:

1. Go on a sail boat. 
2. Visit California. 
3. Write and Finish the fairy tale book I am working on.
4. Take a photography class. 
5. Set up my own website for my writing and art.
6. Go to Ireland and go fishing. 
7. Return to New York City and read poetry there.
8. Take pictures of mountain.
9. Play with my kids more. 
10. Learn to fly a plane.
11. Learn to drive the tractor.
12. See Lady Chablis perform live.
13. Write even more.
14. Love even harder.
15. Grow more food, feed more people

Here's to six years on the farm, a fantastic adventure, and a freaking awesome life.

"It is never too late to be what you might have been." - George Eliot

At Bonaventure Cemetery. Not anyone I actually know.

"It is never too late to be what you might have been." - George Eliot 

Part two of my photography bio. This is the hard part, the personal part.

My grandmother was a photographer. My mother's mother. She was good too. This was in an era of dark rooms, chemical developing, and actually knowing how to use the aperture on a film camera. She took amazing pictures- of her children, landscapes, of things happening.

My grandmother was also abusive to her children, enough that two of them danced on her grave when she died. Their memories of her photography are tainted by this abuse. To me she was a doting grandmother when I was a child and a sickly old woman with a temper and dementia when I was a teenager. She once grabbed me, by my neck, from across Thanksgiving dinner to accuse me of being a lesbian because I invited my female best friend to eat with us that holiday. I know she was mean and violent and I never doubted any of the stories told about her.

I know that she handed out a lot of pain to people in her lifetime. I have a difficult time sifting through all the memories of my family though because every single person was also a liar when it came to telling it to us as children.

For example: A drunken uncle once told us he had secret documents relating to the JFK assassination taped to the back of a picture at his house. Later he told us that our grandmother was the Babushka lady, the lady with the headscarf seen unflinchingly taking photos of the assassination and that no one has yet tracked down.

She was in Denver when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Another family member claimed that Melba was actually Princess Anastasia of Russia and showed us a hand typed autobiography that she had written about her escape to America.

She wasn't even born yet when the Tzar's family was killed.

It was all bullshit. Intertwined with accusations of child rape, drug abuse, and other illegal harms. We believed it all, as children often do. There are no dinosaur gizzard stones that the Smithsonian tried to buy. The Life magazine didn't steal anyone's negatives. My grandmother was not the elusive babushka photographer nor was she Anastasia.

So when one of my family members reminds me that my grandmother was a photographer too? That my work reminds them of her daring work? It is very much not a compliment. It is the worst insult they can think of in the moment, a sweet and subtle emotional stab wound to the heart. No one overhearing the conversation could know what horribleness that drips from such words, but I do.

I write poetry like my grandfather and photograph the world like my grandmother. I still have all my fingers though and I try really hard to be the end of abuse in a line of awful mothers, cherishing my children and being mindful of the power and cruelty of words as well as hands.

I am sure I take more after my aunt than I do any of the others in my family, not just because she is one of three people from that side that still talk to me. I hope I also take after my dad's side too, I know I look quite a lot like his grandmother Madeline. But how much of this inheritance actually matters? I am not them. I have my own life experiences that have shaped me, my own abuses, loves, and travels.

I am not them.

This is the anchor that holds me to the seafloor when pursuing photography as an art. Twisting and twining of seaweed and rusty chains, these associations are what hold me back- not just in art but in writing too. When I dredge up these family and childhood memories, they are not just mine and it picks at the wounds of everyone involved. I can only hope that they all understand that I tell my own history, tell my own stories, and that telling them sometimes keeps me up at night.

This is the photo bomb that I was thinking of yesterday. Legacy and letdown. The phoenix rising from the ashes of a dysfunctional history.

Can I take from this and create some new legacy without whitewashing the histories that brought us here? What is it that is said in writing?
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
-- Anne Lamott”

It isn't too late for me to be a photographer, a poet, a memoirist. It isn't too late for any of it.

Photo Bomb

It is a complicated history I have with my camera. I have always loved photography.

I loved the mildew smelling old photo albums we had when I was little. I loved the machiney feel of my dad's old Nikon film camera. I loved black and white films and pictures. I just loved it all. When I decided that my habit of getting woozy and passing out at the sight of blood eliminated the career track of trauma surgeon, I turned to photography. I worked on the year book at the first high school I went to. I played around with cameras as much as I could, though this was when it was all film and I understood nothing about aperture or shutter speed or film type and when I would get packets of developed film back from Walgreens I would say a little hopeful prayer that something good would have come out of the roll. Usually just 1-2 photos did. It was so frustrating. This was before the Internet was the amazing trove of human knowledge too and our library had nothing of help.

It was frustrating to have this vision in my head, to be in so many moments that I knew could be artistically saved, and not have a way to save any of it. Of course I could throw words on to the page and I taught myself to draw and paint eventually, but I longed for the experience of creating photos that saw what I saw in the world. Captured the magic I encountered.

When we moved, the new high school had a photo lab and a professional vocational class. It also had a waiting list a mile long and students had to start at year 1 of 4. At least that's what I was told. Crushed. The same was true of the drama program. Theatre had also been a huge part of my life at my first school.

So I wrote. I painted. I drew. I dreamed. I read. I experienced.

I went to college eventually. In that time, photography changed. It changed fast. Digital cameras happened.

After college, my first job was an internship at the State of Iowa Historic Preservation Office (SHPO), because at that point my interest was deep into historic architecture and old house restoration. Working there gave me access to the files on my neighbourhood and house. My job was to drive all over the state and photography, with a digital camera, old houses and buildings.

I could take a picture and right away see if it turned out. My job was to take pictures of historic architecture of all kinds, rural and urban. Public, fancy, residential, shanty. Oh, it was the best job. I loved it. LOVED IT. I wanted a camera like this, but alas, I was a new college graduate and the camera was something like 9,000K$. Yike. Still, madly in love. The biggest heartbreak when the job was downsized and I was let go, wasn't having to go t o work at a credit card call centre (though that was pretty darn soul crushing and awful), it was breaking up with that camera. Packing it away and saying goodbye. Tears. Big awful, ugly, tears happened.

When Lily was born, Grampa gave me a tiny point and shoot camera so we would take more pictures of her. I did that and I used them to start a blog. There was no photo editing, pretty low quality pictures, but again, I was able to see and shoot. I did my best with what I had and was grateful.

Chad saw how happy it made me to take pictures. Christmas when I was pregnant with Holly, he bought me the D40x Nikon. I still had no idea how to use it. I carried it everywhere with me, it fit in the diaper bag. I just shot on auto.

That worked for me for years. Three kids in though, it was just harder to manage to bring with me. Soon, I only took photos with my phone. I missed out on a lot. When we upgraded to smart phones and Instagram, that just became the default. It wasn't as sexy as the feel of a real camera, but the best camera for the moment is the one you have with you.

That brought me to the point of having my photos published. So many people commented on some of my creative photography, especially the landscapes, and encouraged me to submit the work....and I did. It was very well received actually. 

http://flyway.org/art/visual-art-by-danelle-stamps/

This was taken without filter on an overcast day with my phone. No, I take that back, I increased the colour saturation to make the photo match the actual colour around me. The camera adjusted it to be blander. I held it up and made the colour match. So the world could be in my moment. This was after I decided that the alligator was not actually going to eat me. See it there in the water? Perhaps it didn't see me?

I still didn't know how to use my Nikon off the auto setting though. That bothered me.

Recently, I began looking into classes, whoa money. Then the brilliant idea hit me.... I work for a college that dose tuition waivers for employees AND offers photography classes. Bingo.

Last night, I purchased the book, filled out paperwork, and walked into a classroom as a student.

There is more to this story. I'm not sure if I have the words put together in my head to share it just yet.