The Creative Notebook, Post #2

Glimmers, gleanings, list & collage

Hello! I meant to post this over the weekend, but between the Creative Notebook Zoom meeting and helping to man (person?) the Ethel table at a zine festival here in Durham, it’s been busy! (By the way, if you don’t have Wild Apples, my short collection of flash memoir and writing prompts, there are some copies up for sale on again on the Ethel site!)

On to the notebook …

At the Zoom workshop this weekend, we talked about glimmers and gleaning, lists and collages. I’ll post a version of the handout I gave participants below:

The Creative Notebook with Joanna Penn Cooper

First Zoom meeting, October 2024

Welcome! Here’s a question: Why are we keeping a notebook? Why are you?

Here’s what I wrote down: To access play and flow; to create a record for myself; to generate ideas for projects.

Today I’m thinking about

·       Collecting 

·       Gleaning: from our environments into the notebook; from the notebook into other forms; back into the notebook or into projects outside of a notebook

·       Amusing ourselves

·       Accessing other ways of knowing—inner selves, other versions of ourselves, the “knowing” that comes with play

Let’s think about lists

First: Did you do some gathering of “glimmers”? How did that go? How easy or hard was it for you to get into that mindset—the collecting, allowing, receiving mindset?

Do you want to share any of them, or your experience gathering them?

Planning page from my notebook

Second: Let’s play with lists some more. Here are some journal ideas from poet Bernadette Mayer (1945-2022). (There are many great ideas for notebook posts at that link— check it out!)

I’ve also recently run across a couple places (from writer-teachers Erika Meitner and

Janisse Ray

) the idea of listing our obsessions and/or what we what to learn more about.

Prompt: Let’s spend five minutes listing obsessions. Things we think about a lot. (See Janisse Ray, Craft and Current p. 151)

Third: Let’s think about other ways to have fun, play around with/in notebooks.

Think about one-liners. I wrote a post about one-line poems here (the monostich/epigram).

You can collect one-liners.

You can glean them from your notebook.

You can make them into comics. (I showed a few of mine. I’ll post one below.)

You can write a “cento of self.” Or a cento lines and others. (From poets.org: From the Latin word for “patchwork,” the cento (or collage poem) is a poetic form composed entirely of lines from poems by other poets.)

You can make a collage!!

I will also show you a book Ethel made, using the idea of collecting/gleaning!

Prompt: Play with rearranging some lines from your notebook— write them on a new sheet of paper and then cut them out and rearrange them, gluing them back in your notebook. How do you want to arrange them on the page? Can you play with adding color or image?

Find lines in your notebook that could stand alone as one-panel comics!

Happy Notebooking!