Where Did the Green Man Come From? / WordSparks

Green girl power!

Here’s the second in a series of posts about last week’s WordSparks Creative Writing Camp at the Salem Museum. I was genuinely thrilled to see these young people enjoying the fun of live drama as they gathered materials for their Green Man (and Woman) Masks and created an origin story for the mysterious Green Man seen for centuries in art and architecture. The kids came up with fantastic stories about how the green folk turned green! I’ll let the pictures talk for themselves.

Plotting out the play

Good idea!

What a smile!

Ready to go!

The audience awaits…

Wait a minute! We’re still working!

Follow the leader!

The play begins!

The boys plot their play

Action!

Tada!

The afternoon group gathers greens

Nice!

Collecting from the garden

… and more collecting

So lovely!

Howard and Kaylan

Bagged!

Making the masks…

At work!

Yes?

Rainbow eyes!

The team

Magnetic Poetry / WordSparks

I just finished up leading WordSparks Creative Writing Camp, so this week I’ll be sharing some pics and tid-bits from the camp. It was a great experience; I made some new friends and had a blast sharing writing with young people in my community. Who could ask for more?!

Monday: I didn’t take many photos on Monday since we were all just getting to know one another–and nothing quite says “eek!” like having a camera put in your face by an unfamiliar adult. That said, we got to know each other pretty quickly. We played some games, made some art, read some poetry together and wrote some of our own.

Isabelle leads the morning group in an ice-breaker game

From Monday’s “Six Ways of Seeing” exercise. A camper brought her finished work (six visions of an old-time radio) back the next day. Later we read Wallace Steven’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and wrote our own “Seeing Again” stories and poems.

Tuesday: We had fun with collage, blackout poem, and magnetic poetry. Here are some of the magnetic poems we came up with. (I haven’t credited these, as some were written in groups and some by individuals, and I didn’t want to leave anyone out by accident. I’m halfway sure, though, that the first two come from Caleb, the third is by Harrison and Howard, and the last one from Laura.)

I love the enthusiasm of these two. Managers everywhere would do well to keep these in mind:

Love the surprise at the end:

Oooh, dark! Also, why more than one heart? Intriguing!

This one is so wise… beautiful!

Check us out later this week for more about the week at WordSparks, including Green Man and Woman masks, self-portraits, and bleach t-shirts.

Life in a Box / Pictures from the Asylum

There was a popular trend in museums a few years back to make traveling “trunk” exhibits that could be checked out by schools or other groups. The idea of a museum-in-a-box was to bring some educational programing of the museum to people (usually children) who might not be able (or inclined) to visit otherwise–and to do it the way museums do best, through objects.

Jon Crispin‘s work photographing the 400 suitcases left in the attic of a New York insane asylum from 1910 to 1960 is perhaps more like life-in-a-box. The cases include the expected items a person might need when leaving home for a few months: family photos, toothbrushes, a sewing kit. Then there are the unusual, telling tidbits: the paperweight from the 1893 Chicago Worlds Fair, a set of yellow and white checkered drinking glasses, a miniature souvenir bat, a silver soup spoon, silk flowers, a World War II uniform. One man brought his zither.

Crispin’s photos are sparse, haunting tableaux of lives interrupted. The average stay in New York’s Willard Asylum was 30 years. “Looking at these suitcases, you just get the idea that that these people really had lives outside before they went to Willard,” says Crispin.

Green Man (and Woman!) Masks

(photo copyright Mary Crockett)

I’m gearing up for leading WordSparks Creative Writing Camp next week, so I’m getting my kids busy trying out a few of the projects I’ve planned. The first one we tried out is the Green Man (or Woman) Mask.

Basically, the Green Man is a leafy-faced dude who has appeared in art and architecture since ancient times. He looks like this:

(Green Man photos courtesy of Wikimedai Commons. First image by Johannes Otto Först, second and third by Simon Garbutt.)

The idea for the craft is to gather natural materials from the gardens and park surrounding the museum to use in a Green Man or Green Woman mask. Then we’ll write a mask poem… or mask story for the prose inclined.

As I got my kids to make some prototypes, here are a few things I’ve learned:

1. There is no “wrong” way to do this (at least by my standards).

2. Glue-gun glue is HOT!

3. When you go outside with a big basket and start throwing in lots of leaves, flowers, twigs, grass, etc., and them come back in and dump it all on your kitchen table, you can expect to find tiny bugs on and around your kitchen table for quite a while.

3. My baby makes a super cute Green Man.

The bearded lady. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

Diablo. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

Mr. Chin Music. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

The Green Girl. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

The Stache. (photo copyright Mary Crockett)

Blackout Poem / “Before I Went Away” (Does it matter if I’m making sense?)

Here’s another blackout poem, this one from page 5 of “The Beauty’s Daughter.”

Since I’m not sure it makes sense without more punctuation, here’s a transcription:

Before I Went Away

She had never known the true name.
There is no need for thinking, my sister.

When it was necessary to utter lies,
the truth allowed her to call herself

anyone: your sister,
his voice, his ancestry, eyes,

a compliment, her teachers,
their pupils, her friends,

such words.

Now, having typed it out, it still doesn’t exactly make sense. But that’s ok with me. A blackout poem isn’t so much as creating literal sense as it is finding an emotional cadence, right? (And yes, I’m aware the words “emotional cadence” probably don’t make sense to anyone but me.)

The kids, hubby and I just finished listening to an audio version of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, and I’m reminded of a great line from the immortal Willy Wonka:

A little nonsense now and then
is relished by the wisest men.

That said, I don’t think my nonsense makes me wise, but it does make me happy.

Blackout Poem / The Beauty’s Daughter

In a week or so (July 15-19), I’ll be heading up WordSparks, a creative writing camp, and I’ve picked up a great pile of books for us to use for blackout poems, collage and such. I’ve had a few more people sign up (spaces are still available — you can register here), so I may need to take another trip through the library discards and see what I can come up with.

I think I may have trouble parting with How to Prepare Your Own High-Intensity Resume. It is so high intensity!

Here’s “Some Book of Poems She Had Yet To Complete,” a little blackout poem I wrote from page 3 of a book called The Beauty’s Daughter by Monette Cummings whic I picked up at the library sale for a quarter. While part of me is squeamish about messing with a book (books are sacred!), part of me is wondering if I can fill the whole book with blackouts (bad me!).

Duckie in Pink / The original (superior) ending to the 80s classic

Here’s what I remember of seeing Pretty in Pink in the 80s: Molly Ringwald wore nifty hats! Molly Ringwald could sew cool stuff! People told me that I looked like Molly Ringwald! Yay!!!

Oh, and Duckie! I loved Duckie! He wore nifty hats too!

Other than that, the movie has been pretty much a blur in my gray matter for the last few decades until a day or so ago, when I sat down to watch Pretty in Pink once again… this time with my teenage daughter. I still love the hats. And Molly Ringwald can still sew amazing things (though the prom dress was much much uglier than I remembered it).

So here’s an unexpected revelation I had this go around:

Andrew McCarthy has semi-psycho eyes and there is absolutely no reason for Andie (aka Molly Ringwald) to like him.

Seriously. He doesn’t do or say anything particularly likeable. Not even wear a cool hat. So I did a little digging and found out that in the original ending to the movie, Andy ends up with Duckie!

SO MUCH BETTER!!

Here, from the Tampa Bay Times, is the script for the final shots:

Andie takes Duckie’s hand and walks him on the dance floor. The crowd separates and opens a large circle. Andie and Duckie stand at the center of the floor. Andie takes Duckie in her arms. She looks at the band leader.

BAND LEADER: He turns his back to his band and they begin to play again.

DUCKIE: He’s terrified.

DUCKIE:

“I can’t dance.”

ANDIE:
“Neither can I.”

DUCKIE:
“Are we crazy?”

ANDIE:
“Completely.”

Andie takes a few steps and starts dancing. Dukie follows clumsily. A few steps and they get in step. They dance without shame or concert for what anybody thinks.

BLANE: He turns back to watch Andie and Duckie.

STEFF AND BENNY: They glare at the new couple. Steff can’t hide the anger he feels at being undone by Duckie.

KATE: She glowers at Blane for his gesture to Duckie and Andie. He could care less.

ANDIE AND DUCKIE: The look at each other and smile. Duckie laughs. Andie squeezes him tight and lifts him off his feet.

FREEZE. MUSIC AND TITLES.

I’m pretty sure Will, a sweetheart of a character in our upcoming novel DreamBoy (coauthored with Madelyn Rosenberg), owes a good dose of his aesthetic to Duckie. In fact, I think it’s quite possible that on the subliminal level, the novel was a sort of mis-wired protest on my part against Blane and all his supposed perfection. Hmmmm… Ok, that might be an overstatement. Sort of.

Mary Crockett – Young Adult Author

writing / reading / books / life