Tag: travel

curiosity, culture, and cuisine

Suppose it’s a Social Studio

What do I mean by social studio?

Inspiration for a social studio came directly from the experience of enduring COVID in a nonprofit arts organization. With a very small team over a matter of months, we transformed a mosaic studio into an online creative space, adding skill-building and artistic opportunity for peer groups of kids, teens, and young adults.

A studio is a special place, different from an office, classroom, or conference room. It’s home to curious tools and unusual materials. The furniture is often specific to the task. The customs and habits of studios are made and maintained by their keepers, always an odd bunch. Studio spaces are imbued with magical thinking, places where common logic branches, flips, curves, explodes, and transmutes. Not unlike a garden.

Learning is central to most studio processes, and sometimes direct instruction (like a class) does happen. In other spaces, the learning activity is more aptly described as transmission or osmosis. curriculum-based teaching methods are less useful. Hands-on coaching is more common. A place to be and a for one’s songbird soul, I suppose.

In the upcoming studio circle, one tantalizing possibility is arising. What is it like to unfold our work side by side over time? I am always studying up on Quaker meeting practice and quilting bees as I prepare.

I imagined the online studio as if anyone could drop by like a neighbor. My life was full of such occasions at the Washington Writers Retreat, and among creative clusters in DC. It was that way in the Coronado District in downtown Phoenix years before, too. Corner office conversations on the front porch or in the shed out back. Quiet time together. Hands moving, hearts changing.

Circles and cycles organize our time in the studio. Each hour comprises three 20-minute movements. First, greet each other and chat at the top of the hour. Next, focus on a topic for 20 minutes in the middle. Then, mute ourselves to work quietly together to the end of the hour. Same time-cycling in the second and third hours with bio breaks in between. I leave the screen on, mute myself, and move about my space as needed. It’s odd at first, then becomes coffee shop cozy.

How to arrive in the circle?

Set your intentions for the session and be ready with your work at hand. It’s important to arrive at the top of the hour so our cyclical timing will work, and perfectly fine to step away anytime. Though I am a writer and the topics center on creative practice, it’s always an option to bring your handiwork and simply listen.

What does drop-in really mean?

Pretend you live nearby. You know I’m doing this process during these hours. Drop in when you have the time. Stay an hour, more or less. Come back each week, more or less. You are welcome in all cases 🙂

What should I be doing in the social studio?

Good question! Self-directed inquiry among friends is the point. Here are some places to start.

The Completing & Creating prompts are here.

Try taking the questions two at a time and working in Dynamic Duos

Examine the unfolding effects of Appreciative Inquiry. More evidence of My Love Affair with the Circle.

Ask yourself what Animating Tensions are at play.

Bring something to color or draw to the table, and sink into questions 3 and 4. Soothing patterns and shapes help me go deeper into where I missed the mark and what needs mending.

To Each Their Own

Prompts this week are tying back to the Washington Writer’s Retreat, a five-year social engagement among a community of writers and artists. More than thirty scholars stayed in my home in Mount Rainier, Maryland, and we sat around my table often.

Creative practice became central to the experience. Its importance, what it is, and how it is done. The short answer is: uniquely. Of course, there are patterns that follow notable texts and teachers. The upclose view at the retreat included interesting deviations.

For example, a prolific historian was the model of stoic discipline. He stayed for six weeks. Each day, he got up, drank one cup of coffee, exercised, worked on his own projects in the morning, ate a modest lunch, and took afternoon phone calls.

His routine was deliberate and consistent. Importantly, it worked for him. He was on his eighth academic tome.

As host, I was witness to it all. From my perch, his routine was rigid and exhausting. I relished my daily opportunity to sleep in as needed and had happily tucked the necessities of each day around my own amusements. I loved it when guests left, not for the goodbyes but because flipping a room is the perfect time to listen to music, dance, and fuss the day away. It was a secret pleasure.

Months later, another academic stayed in that same room. She mostly toodled on her bike, exploring the city with her sister and niece. We all knew she had a massive book proposal to write. No matter, she filled an ice chest with luscious lunches, taking successive days in what appeared to be vacation mode.

Having a project and doing it was part of the invitation to stay at the retreat. A vacation in DC wasn’t precisely the point. I grew suspect. In the days before Airbnb, I was careful to bake integrity, trust, purpose, and focus into the decision to invite a guest. As a social exchange, building a reputation of productivity around the retreat was also important to me.

Then she came home one day, parked her bike, wrote the proposal, packed up, and drove off. The book was quickly greenlit and is now done. She’s doing field research on women’s health in Africa. Perhaps it was me who missed the point.

In reflection, the greater insight is apparent. Every person who stayed had their own way of working. Some sat with me in blissful chatter for hours over a simple soup. Others cocooned behind a closed door. Turns out one or two folks just needed a place to be. That was ok, too.

Social Tender

My father’s lifelong postcard collection lines one wall of our shared home office in Tempe, Arizona. Arranged in notebooks stationed on uniform wooden shelves acquired for exactly this purpose. Benignly neglected precisely the amount of time for them to become useful again.

This time to me.

He was a 5-year-old rabbling around a crowd of kids, playing street corner baseball in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Trading baseball cards at first, a social tender among the young guys whose parents had dragged them here from Kansas, or somewhere else. Soon it became postcards, a collectible literature of the places he’d already seen and was getting to know.

This peripatetic paper trail now right in front of me, with Mister 88 still chatting out parental wisdom and political philosophy from his comfy corner chair. As he would (and often does) say, “Well, what now?”

Also, is there any ice cream? Can I have a coke? Where is the remote?

He is still and very definitely human. I am, too. But to have these two angelic intelligences paired together again in pursuit of such folly as a lifetime of postcards. Who wouldn’t?

Over time, the postcard collection swelled far beyond the bounds of his family, professional, and worldly travels. He missed certain places and has filled in those spaces with small paper pallettes that carry not the weight of memory but of desire, curiosity, and vicarious adventure.

Social tender, a tencil term that ties me to my father’s early trades. He worked his way into new circles of friends, different family units, and collegial communities as his young life followed alongside his father’s faculty positions. Eventually, Dad’s profession would take him across political aisles and well beyond the boundaries of polite society once or twice.

What is key to me is the social materiality of his early exchanges. Before dimes, or even dollars, he had those postcards as a way of trading introductions, information, stories, and alliances (White Sox and KU basketball, for Dad). That social practice is the DNA of his professional reputation, leading to outcomes far greater than the substantial exchanges of public funding he accomplished.

I’ve thought to monetize Dad’s postcards outright to the marketplace. Piece out his shop at the end of its run. But what a shame to miss the more glorious values available in there. Traveling through it together, all the places we have and have not been. As a collection, it’s an elegant and relevant cultural relic, too.

Timely and timeless, neatly tucked into plastic pockets. A family wealth stacked and bound, ignored and found laying about eighty-some years later. What does this paternal past have to do with picture-perfect Phoenix today? Plenty. Some of these postcards tell that story, too.

Hanging around with Dad and his collection is like sitting next to a living time machine. His mind is so fluid now, we can easy skip from his childhood to his career. Life loops back on itself. Time is slower, and less orderly. He loves to meander through memories. I like to absorb those histories. In the meantime, we sort postcards, laying down stacks of size, subject, and sentiment that takeover the available tabletops.

He played cards with his father when he was young. So did I, and here we are again.