Torn to Pieces

A writer friend of mine always says that he begins his writing by making a collage.

Without thinking, he rips and tears images from magazines and then pastes them

onto a page without a lot of thought. He gives the collage a title and then writes

about it. I knew of another person who was in deep grief after the death of a close

friend. For several months she got up each morning and made a collage from

magazine images. She dated each collage and now looks back on it as a roadmap of

her journey through grief.

I myself love to play with paper, scissors and glue! I just enjoy the childishness of it

and am often amazed by what the images have to say to me. The documentary film

about Toni Morrison (which I highly recommend!) is entitled “The Pieces I Am” and

begins with an ever deepening collage of images of herself. Collage is somehow a

way to “make peace with our pieces”. A way of using images instead of words.

Much in the same way you might make a journal entry with words, you can just

begin tearing and pasting images onto a page – images that you like or dislike,

images of a certain color, images of your own face juxtaposed with other things.

Make sure the images touch and overlap each other. Don’t go for beauty. Go for

depth and fun.

Here’s to a week of kindergarten cutting and pasting – and adult commentary on the

whole thing. ENJOY!

Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer helps us get in the mood with this poem;

Action Plan

Consider the yellow post-it pad

before the pen riddles it blue.

Blank. Stack of blank.

Stack of yellow blank with glue.

Pray that blank might stick to you.

Imagine you might enter rooms

with so little plan of your own.

To be the slate, not the list,

the void, not the litany of Things To Do

To cultivate an emptiness.

To let whatever’s next

come next.