Prompt Challenge – Page 2 – Green Chair Press Blog

Prompt Challenge: Process

The word for my prompt challenge group this month is “process.” It’s got so many possibilities I haven’t known where to start. But I noticed I’ve been paying more attention to how I, and the people around me, go about doing tasks. How I make dinner, how I organize my day, watching my husband repairing some trim in our kitchen…
Recently I’ve been making collages that combine my haiku and my very large box of scrap paper. So I thought I’d photograph the process for a blog post.
First I selected 8 haiku to hand-set in my “house font” Bembo (the only one I have in metal). Then I letterpress printed them on my favorite paper, Hahnemühle Copperplate. Here’s the chase with the haiku all locked up and ready to print.

Ready to print

Next I made a debossed panel above each haiku, using the method here.The collages sit inside the panel. Copperplate is a soft mould-made paper that takes both letterpress and the panel-making technique very nicely.

Making a debossed panel

Before I got started, I dumped all the paper out of my scrap box and organized it by color and the stored the colors in separate large envelopes.

Collage making scraps

Then the fun begins—start cutting and combing the scraps . Most of the scraps are japanese moriki, but some are my own paste papers. Over the past month I’ve made a collage pretty much every day, usually first thing—it’s been a good way to ease into the day, thinking about color and shape combinations.
Once I finish one, I hang it up on one of the long steel rods I’ve affixed to the wall, using magnets. Looking at them this way gives me ideas for future pieces.

Many collages

Here’s a closeup of one of them. To give you an idea of scale, the finished piece is 8×10 and the collage is 4-1/2×4-1/2 inches.

Collage

Prompt Challenge: word-paint

The March word for my prompt challenge book group is word-paint: v. To describe or depict vividly in words; to make a word picture of.

Our meeting isn’t until the end of the month, but last weekend I did a show-and-tell of my books down in Albuquerque to Libros, the New Mexico Book Arts Guild. Barbara Byers came up after my talk and showed me the doodle she made as I talked—imagine my excitement when I saw it was a word-paint! She kindly scanned it and sent me a copy. Here it is:

Prompt Callenge: jump

The March word for my prompt challenge book group was jump, a word with no less than 24 definitions, according to the OED. Chess was a theme used by half the people in my group. Laura had cut-offs from a book she’d made with chess imagery, and used them to make a book with nearly 200 pages. Each page was numbered and many had instructions of the variety “jump to page N” which created a sort of random walk through the book. Julia made a pop-out book, where parts of the images jumped off the pages as they were turned. And Suzanne rediscovered and finished a book she’d started several years ago with verbs about escaping—jump, fall, spring…
I had a hard time getting going this month. I wanted to try handwriting whatever text I chose, but couldn’t come up with a theme. It’s spring, my garden is beginning to show life, and the bunnies will soon be back to feast on the new tiny shoots in my backyard. So I finally settled on rabbits and immediately found this promising stanza in the poem Darwin’s Bestiary by Philip Appleman.

3. THE RABBIT

a. Except in distress, the rabbit is silent,
but social as teacups: no hare is an island.
(Moral:
silence is golden—or anyway harmless;
rabbits may run, but never for Congress.)

b. When a rabbit gets miffed, he bounds in an orbit,
kicking and scratching like—well, like a rabbit.
(Moral:
to thine own self be true—or as true as you can;
a wolf in sheep’s clothing fleeces his skin.)

c. He populates prairies and mountains and moors,
but in Sweden the rabbit can’t live out of doors.
(Moral:
to know your own strength, take a tug at your shackles;
to understand purity, ponder your freckles.)

d. Survival developed these small furry tutors;
the morals of rabbits outnumber their litters.
(Conclusion:
you needn’t be brainy, benign, or bizarre
to be thought a great prophet. Endure. Just endure.)

Here are a few pages from the book I made. It was quite different to write the lines without the help of the grid I’ve been practicing with. I notice I went back to non-slant almost immediately. And despite trying to work out the line length and kerning ahead of time, I need more practice on that as well!

Prompt Challenge: Jump

The book continues with jumping rabbits…

Prompt Challenge: Jump

And now the rabbits are in Sweden, starting to multiple

Prompt Challenge: Jump

The book & poem continue, and it ends with the rabbits taking over (or enduring….)

Prompt Challenge: Jump

Prompt Challenge: aleatoric

The February word for my prompt challenge book group was aleatoric: Composition depending upon chance, random accident, or highly improvisational execution, typically hoping to attain freedom from the past, from academic formulas, and the limitations placed on imagination by the conscious mind.
I suppose “aleatoric” sums up our monthly prompt challenge—the chosen word is supposed to provoke a book or composition that depends on chance (the random word selected).
What I did was use the challenge to goose my haiku writing practice. I try to write a 3 line something every day. Lately the results have been very flat. So for most of February, I took inspiration from the daily word from the OED (it’s mailed to me each day, you can subscribe yourself from the link on the right column of the OED home page). Initially I intended to use the actual word in my 3 line poem, but some were pretty challenging (for instance, “alley opp” and “pigeon milk”—an imaginary substance which, as a joke, a gullible person may be sent to buy) so I tried to riff on the definitions instead.
Once I had about 20 haiku, I picked 8 at random. Then I picked 8 more scraps from my box of scrap paper, paired a scrap with the haiku and made a collage. The haiku are mostly non-keepers, but I expected that, given that’s been true of the haiku I’ve been writing for years. But I’m pleased to say my haiku practice has been given a good prod, and I’m happily writing them again.
Here’s the accordion with the collages and haiku, and a close up.

Prompt Challenge: aleatoric

More Asemic

Here’s my response to January’s prompt challenge, asemic (mark-making that resembles writing but actually has no linguistic meaning). These collages were made from my letterpress and wood type prints. The collage is 3-1/2″ x 3-1/2″, on 6″ x 9″ paper and sits in a hand-debossed panel on the paper.

Collage, Green Chair Press

Prompt Challenge: Asemic

The January word for my prompt challenge book group was asemic: a word for mark-making that resembles writing but actually has no linguistic meaning. From the wikipedia definition: “Asemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means ‘having no specific semantic content’. With the nonspecificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would deduce meaning from an abstract work of art.” There are lots of examples on pinterest or this blog.
The word made me remember a book by Macy Chadwick called Letter by Letter. While not asemic writing, it has been the start of my own exploration into the idea of scribbling. She says

Letter by Letter is about the tactility of language. It was inspired by the String Alphabet for the Blind, from Scotland, 1850, where each knot signifies a letter of the alphabet…letterpress printed with handset type and polymer plates on Mulberry paper treated with persimmon dye. Each page includes a knotted linen thread.

The alphabet is described here as

The string alphabet is formed by so knitting a cord, a ribbon, or the like, that the protuberances made upon it may be qualified by their shape, size, and situation, for signifying the elements of language

Below is a page from Macy’s book, followed by a closeup