Summer Challenge Week Three: Ice Cream

Challenge #3: What is your favorite ice cream flavor or frozen treat? When you were younger where did you go to get ice cream? Was it from an ice cream truck, a shop or an ice cream parlor? This week treat yourself to your favorite childhood ice cream or frozen concoction. Use all your senses as you indulge in this summertime tradition. Record the experience, memories, and thoughts on revisiting your favorite flavor or frozen treat in your sketchbook and share here on The Paper Compass.

"It’s summer. Eat ice cream.”

I don’t think I could say it better than my fellow mediaman team member Beth LaPointe’s current Skype status.

With sweltering temperatures, bright blazing sun, and extra hours of light that fill the evenings, summertime allows us the perfect weather in which to fully appreciate the delightfully frozen treat of ice cream. Whether it is from an ice cream parlor, Baskin Robin’s, or a treat that follows the tinny, beckoning music of the ice cream truck, ice cream is an inherent summer tradition.

The beautiful thing about eating something frozen in the summertime is that it requires the concentration that is so key to emersion in a single experience and excellent for creative thinking. You must strategize your method of eating as the ice cream melts. Do you lick around the edge of the cone? In concentric circles? What happens when you get down to the cone? Everyone has a different tactic.

Even more of a challenge in my opinion, are the sweet treats from the ice cream truck. With an architectural support structure composed of a single stick (unless it is a Chipwich or ice cream sandwich), you must eat it in such a way that half the concoction does not slide off in a slick melting pile when you devour one side. Many a Chocolate Éclair, Strawberry Shortcake, Sponge Bob and Mickey Mouse chocolate-eared ice cream pop have met this fateful end.

Where I grew up in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, Baskin Robin’s was a short walk from the house. If you left the backyard through the side gate—which was a flimsy wire fence that you needed to lift up-and- out of the looped closures—and proceeded down the narrow street that ran in front of a series of little bungalows, you would come out in the back alley behind the bike shop and Garden Catering, across from my Dad’s store. The bike shop would, a few years later, burn down in a raging fire at three in the morning that made the whole of main street smell like burning rubber. Garden Catering, on the other hand is still there, with its impossibly narrow white-sided shop front, an American flag out front and the neon OPEN sign glowing in the window. I can still taste the seasoned fries and apple fritters.

If you then turned left and went under the train bridge and up a small hill, you reached the shopping center in which my knowledge of ice cream was first formed. After the walk from the house, not only was Baskin Robins delightfully cold with its air conditioned interior, but the chilled air also carried a slightly creamy-sweet scent. Everything about the ice cream store seemed exciting at the time: the smell, the metal rimmed counter with its padded stools that spun, the small pink tasting spoons, and the freezer cases with the flavors displayed like a pastel watercolor paint box in their recessed tubs.

While my mom’s favorite flavor was Mint Chocolate Chip, and my Dad often got Rocky Road, I eagerly anticipated the summertime flavor of Bubble Gum. This pale pink ice cream, sprinkled with tiny colored bubble gum pieces, was strangely delicious and incredibly complex to eat. To this day I still like it and simultaneously do not completely comprehend why—perhaps sentimentality. As you lick the ice cream, you have to chew the gum—which is not chewy because it is frozen, so you end up swallowing it along with the ice cream. It defies logic and is not something not to be over thought…just enjoyed before it melts.

All of this is the inspiration for the third Summer Challenge: Ice Cream. Ice Cream and frozen treats are a summertime tradition and a great way to emerge yourself in a sensory experience or unlock memories for creative inspiration.

This week make time to indulge in an ice cream treat. I recommend revisiting a favor childhood flavor or experience, whether it is tracking down an ice cream truck or finding an ice cream parlor with a counter. Use all your senses to note the color, taste, texture, smell, and sounds of eating ice cream in the summertime. Note the experience in your sketchbook and share here on The Paper Compass

Summer Challenge Week Two: Books

Challenge #2: What is your favorite summertime book or reading experience? By the end of the week: dig up, check out, find, or purchase and begin re-reading your favorite summertime book or series. The book can be recent or from your childhood. Exercise your imagination and use all your senses as you rediscover your book, its plot and characters. Record the experience, memories, and thoughts of revisiting a favorite book or character in your sketchbook and share here on The Paper Compass.

For me, summer is the season for reading. You can find me whiling away many weekend afternoons or mornings on the back porch, deeply engrossed in the imaginative activity of reading. It is not that I don’t read all year long—often, it is hard to find me without several books on my person at once. It is more that the long lazy days and evenings of summer seem the perfect permission to escape into a book.

To prove to you what a bibliophile I am, I will confess that one of the things I liked most about the summers of my adolescent and childhood were the school and library summer reading goals and the academic summer reading list. Meant to inspire kids to read, I needed no further urging and would set lofty numerical goals checking out half the books at a time, or plan out how I was going to read every book on the list. The summer reading list is how I discovered summer classics such as Tuck Everlasting and The Great Gatsby, along with many other books that now line the shelves of my bookcases.

From the summer reading list, I developed the ritual of reading classics in the summertime. While the “perfect beach read” is often eagerly devoured, I still continue to set goals to work my way through some of the classics. One of my favorite haunts in the summer before and after my senior year in high school was the Book Rack, introduced to me by my friend Crystal. It was a used book store in a dated strip mall, shadowed by a massive Banyan Tree, off of PGA Boulevard in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Packed floor to ceiling in a semi-organized fashion, the store smelled of dusty paperbacks, linoleum and air conditioning that was so strong it caused the front plate glass to be covered with condensation. Our destination was the wall at the front of the store that held used literary fiction, the volumes somehow less intimidating with their dog-eared covers and yellowing pages. This is where I purchased Sylvia Path’s The Bell Jar, Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent, and where Crystal introduced me to J.D. Salinger’s Nine Stories.

Another highlight of the Book Rack was that, on lucky occasion, if you asked the woman at the front desk if they had any original Nancy Drew books, she would reach into a bottom drawer and pull out a small plastic basket of the increasingly rare blue-backed girls’ serial novels from the 30s, 40s and 50s.

Back in the summers of 4th and 5th grade, I devoured my mom’s collection of Nancy Drew Mysteries, sometimes one a day, and developed a lifelong fondness for the girl sleuth. The liberation of summertime seems to echo the freedom of Nancy and her chums, racing ahead of a storm in Nancy’s roadster, a mystery just around the corner. For me and my overactive imagination, slow ordinary summer afternoons especially seem to simmer with the expectation that an adventure is right around the corner...even if it is just in the book that I am currently reading.

All of this is the inspiration for the second Summer Challenge: Books. Reading is (or should be in my humble opinion) an integral part of summertime whether it is for leisure or to pass time when traveling. Revisiting a favorite summertime book from your distant or recent past can be a great way to unlock your imagination, be inspired by a remembered character, or revisit an old favorite from a new perspective.

This week make time to visit your bookcase, library or local bookstore to obtain a previous summer favorite. Exercise your imagination and use all your senses as you rediscover your book, its plot and characters. Record the experience, memories, and thoughts of revisiting a favorite book or character in your sketchbook and share here on The Paper Compass.

I will leave you with one of, what I think, is a quintessential summertime passage from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, when Nick first meets Daisy and Jordan:

“A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags…The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few minutes listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear window and the caught wind died out about the room and the curtain and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.”

Summer Challenge Week One: Candy

Challenge #1: What was your favorite childhood candy? By the end of the week: find, purchase and consume (or devour) your favorite childhood candy. Use all your senses. Record your experience, memories, and thoughts in your sketchbook and, if you'd like, share here on The Paper Compass.

While I have many childhood memories of summer, one of the most prevalent is of eating frozen Charleston Chews in a damp bathing suit while laying on the blazing hot Astroturf-carpeted tennis deck of the Innis Arden Country Club in Old Greenwich, Connecticut. The time spent at the country club is disproportionately recorded in my memory, but that makes sense as it involves several semi-prominent childhood experiences: my first (and only) synchronized swim performance to Pink Cadillac; the first 6 foot long sandwich I had ever seen (and eaten); and The High Dive. There were hours filled with golf and tennis lessons, many laps completed in a sloppy-but-determined manner as a member of the junior swim team, weekend family cookouts, and the highlight of the day: a single piece of candy, as allocated by my dad, and signed for using the “chit.”

Candy was kept in an industrial-sized freezer behind the white laminated counter of the pool snack bar manned by teenagers with their collars turned up. Rather than taste, logic governed the selection of the Charleston Chew: it was the biggest (read: longest) piece of candy in the freezer. Hence it was the best ROI for the single selection my brother and I were given. After standing on my toes to sign the chit with a stunted golf score card pencil, the candy was taken up to the tennis deck to be either cracked into pieces and eaten slowly, or gnawed at, the chocolate melting first, until a bite sized piece came off.

In retrospect, I marvel that I still have teeth.

Candy seems to (sadly, yet fortunately) hold less appeal as we grow older. Yet, it is a powerful vehicle for tapping into memories and into the mindset of our younger-selves as seen in the instance above.

This inspires the first Summer Challenge: Candy Treat. What was your favorite childhood candy? Where did you buy it or whom shared it with you? Did you have it all year round or was it something seasonal, like the frozen Charleston Chews?

This week make it a To Do list priority to find your favorite candy from childhood. Once you have it, take a good 15 minutes to enjoy (or take in) the experience of eating it. Record your thoughts, memories, and experience in your sketchbook—and here on the blog in the comments section!

Summer Challenges Commence! Tapping into a Season of Creative Experiences

“She needed the sun to mellow and temper her mood to the sticking point.” – The Awakening, Kate Chopin

Summer is my favorite season for creative exploration. Fall is for thinking and working, winter for nesting and dreaming, spring for planning and awakening, and summer—summer is for relaxing and adventuring. This combination of playfulness and exploration seems to unlock something within. The veil between the current moment and memory seems thinner, more transparent, lending itself to glimpses of our childhood; our own current desire to slow down and enjoy, even if just for an afternoon; and sometimes it allows us to rediscover our inner wanderlust and desire to try new things. All of these elements come together to create a perfect season for tapping into our deep well of personal experiences for creative inspiration.

Last summer, inspired by a random childhood memory of bubble gum, I decided to revisit Big League Chew. It became a weekend mission to locate a pack of Big League Chew, which I was lucky to find down town at Walgreens. On the way back home, I opened the pouch and the scent of the powdered strings of gum, with its deep chemical purple color, transported me back to elementary school and the local 5&10 store C.W. Curry’s in Old Greenwich.

All this before I even put the gum in my mouth, which was its own time-travel experience. I was so excited by this endeavor that I enlisted my childhood partners-in-crime, my brother and sister, to do the same thing by the end of the week. This call to action, usually in the form of a text message, to hunt something down to remember it better, continued informally over the summer and was a point of much discussion of old and good memories. It also was a great source of details for stories that I was writing in my creative writing workshop that I take in the summer with Julia Thacker.

This summer, I thought that I would use the next eight weeks, the “dog days of summer” to invite all The Paper Compass readers to embark on Summer Challenges and share their experiences. I will post the challenge and then everyone can reply in the comment thread. You can speak of the memory, or the act of doing the challenge, or discuss a creative project that you may be inspired towards. Many of my memories were captured in my sketchbook or short writing assignments. I encourage you to do the same so that you can record the experience for future inspiration.

I hope that you will join us on this playful and creative exploration of the summer season.

Delay Tactics: In Search of the Perfect Sketchbook or Refreshing Your Relationship with Your Sketchbook, Part II

A few weeks ago, inspired by my desire to reclaim my sketchbook usage from the acres of business meeting notes taking over its pages, I set out on a short walk to the local art & craft store. With the treaspassing fickleness of Goldilocks, I had been through many sizes and shapes of sketchbooks in the previous months. My intention now, was to return to my visual, idea exploration roots in the soon-to-be-found, Perfect Sketchbook.

With the precision of a visual thinker and one who obsesses over paper, I had been mulling it over for weeks. I wanted a sketchbook that was at least 8.5 x 11, thin rather than thick for ease of carrying, have a hard cover, rich smooth pages possibly perforated, a pocket and an elastic closure for when I abusively stuffed things inside the cover.

Thirty minutes later, twenty of which had been spent comparing sketchbooks from the generous selection that crowded the long aisle, I was still not satisfied. The options existed but never in the right combination. I headed home, determined and stubborn and still without a sketchbook.

In the next few days, I hunted down sketchbooks during visits to book stores, paper stores, and art stores all without discovery of The One. It was beginning to turn into an exercise in over-thinking and (I began to scent) a procrastination tactic. There was a lurking left brain sense that only this Perfect Sketchbook would help me return to a sense of play and productivity. Not true, I said. It is only a vehicle, only a tool.

So I returned to my starting point in the aisle of the art & craft store that smelled satisfyingly like fresh paper and oil paints. The worn linoleum of the aisles was smooth and dusty under my soft-soled shoes. I worked my way back through the aisle, touching the textures of the sheets, the heft of the book in my hand, until I found it: a sketchbook very close to my dreamed up specifications. With its canvas cover, slim page volume and thick paper, I decided it would do just fine.

The lesson learned was not one of looking and not seeing (although that too is true) but of setting an expectation level that prevented me from quickly taking action. This idea that I needed The Perfect Sketchbook to begin my new mission, was a classic over-thinking tactic of believing in the tools more than myself.

When I came back to the aisle of the art store, I let myself experience the selection as it was, rather than projecting what I wanted onto it—which inevitably lead to nothing being the right fit. Similarly, sometimes when we are creating, it is easy to shut ourselves down based on an aspiration, rather than taking an idea from where it currently is and working through the many stages of action to make it into what you want it to be.

When I reconnected with my goal, I knew that it wasn’t about obtaining The Perfect Sketchbook, but actually reconnecting with my visual, curious, playful self on paper using the sketchbook. In stepping back to see the big picture of the goal, the elements of what would work opened up before me.

Thinking Points

This experience was a nice way to see some of my behavioral and thinking habits and inspired some questions that may be of interest to you too.

• What artist tools do you use that make you feel more creative than others? Do these empower you or limit you in anyway?
• What ideas are you not putting into action because of lofty ideals? Is there a place that you could start teasing out the idea and be comfortable experimenting?
• Are you attached to a certain style of sketchbook or type of writing or painting tool? If so, what would happen if you swapped it out with something different? How would your work or thinking process change?
• Are there any points of a project where you are stuck? If you re-address your goal on a broad level, does it help you see beyond the sticking point?

Recommendation:
If any of the above points resonated with you, take the time to try something different or step back and gain a different perspective. Write/draw/explore the answer in your sketchbook (of course!) Also, responses and sharing to the above questions are always welcome.

What the Water Taught Me or Refreshing Your Relationship with Your Sketchbook, Part I

Postcard No. 3

Remembering Night Swimming

Mixed Media, Collage

Several weeks ago, right on the heels of the amazing Ghost Hunter’s weekend, my boyfriend and I arrived home to find our basement flooded with nine inches of water.

Driving home in the cloud soaked twilight, the neighborhood was an eerie scene, with the rain streaming down and fountains of water bubbling up from the manhole covers and storm drains. My intuition said it didn’t bode well for our seepage-prone basement and I was, sadly, correct.

We lost a few things, some that can be replaced and some that can’t, but thankfully important items, like my sketchbook that my mom kept from when I was little, made it through perfectly dry. My large, unwieldy art portfolio was in the basement and while some of the contents were quickly subscribed to the trash bin, other items, like my sketchbooks from college, I couldn’t give up on and I dragged them upstairs and set about a campaign to dry them.

For weeks, my sketchbooks were spread out on the radiators around the house or, on nice days, propped up in the windows of the back porch, the breeze fluttering the thick damp pages.

Not being one to sentimentally return to mull through things, it was an interesting lesson for me to see how my use of a sketchbook has changed. In college, my sketchbook was filled with images, sketches, design ideas for silk scarves and pillows. I used my sketchbook as a place to try out ideas and play before putting paint to paper, or dye to silk. Sometimes, there were also just big, emotionally-driven, playful drawings or the drafts of poems that later were published.

The sketchbooks, as they steamed and curled on the radiators, lived and breathed with images and the play of ideas. They clearly showed a colorful phase in my artistic journey.

In contrast, I realized that my current sketchbooks are filled with more notes than ideas. That business meetings and To Dos dominate the pages and the occasional “this-meeting-should-have-ended-20-minutes-ago” doodle decorates the edges. There are also notes on books I am reading, or activities and ideas for things that I want to improve in my Creative Thinking class. So while it is important material, it is very distant from the colorful playfulness of the pages of the previous decade.

I like the liberty of having a sketchbook for work, but it made me realize that I need a sketchbook to play in again—and that I need to take the time to play; to return to more visual exploration and expression.

The other thing that I saw in my open and drying sketchbooks was that they held the blue prints of many projects that had made their way from idea to tangible object. Which was an interesting observation—creating a master sketch seemed to make something happen. That or I was just closer to a finished project at the time that I was testing it on paper.

The damage of the basement flooding served as a catalyst for not only looking at my artistic process but specifically my use of sketchbooks and the role they play in cultivating ideas. The resulting search for a new sketch book and its insights are topics for my next post… Until then, I invite you to think about your artistic journey and how you can refresh your relationship with your sketchbook in the activity below.

Sketchbook Meditation

This activity is designed to help you take a look at your own work and see if you there are some new directions or explorations that may stimulate new ideas or work flow habits.

Take out your current sketch book (hopefully it is always nearby!) or, even better, if you keep sketchbooks, take out a selection at random and line them up. Flip randomly through the pages and observe what you see about how you work. Some questions to ask yourself:

• Do you use a lot of words or do you use more images?
• Is there a focus, or do you cover a wide variety of ideas and topics?
• What mediums do you use (paint, ink, pencil, mixed)?
• Is the information organized or random?
• Do you go back and review pages or information?
• How many of the ideas in the sketchbook made it into bigger, tangible pieces?
• How many of the ideas are “blue prints” and how many are exploratory or from playing?

After going through the questions above, think about what you may want to introduce that is different in your current sketch book. Maybe you realized that you want to play more or use more visuals. Maybe you want to better balance blue prints vs. playfulness. Maybe you want to use paint, rather than your standard pencil.

Pick one item/element from your observations and introduce it to your sketch book in the next week. See what happens and how you feel about your relationship with your sketchbook and documenting your ideas. Hopefully it will be a little bit of a “refresh.”

Want to get an idea of how others are using their sketchbooks? Check out http://sketchbooks.org/

“Star-Stuck”: Stop Censoring and Begin Championing your Curiosity (inspired by my weekend talking to ghosts and ghost hunters)

It is not every weekend that I get to go ghost hunting, nor is it every weekend that I get to meet and hang out with the people that I watch on TV on a weekly basis. So you can imagine my delight (if not outright glee) when my boyfriend surprised me with a TAPS(The Atlantic Paranormal Society) ghost hunting weekend at The Spalding Inn in New Hampshire lead by Jason Hawes, Grant Wilson, and Brit Griffith whom you may know from the Syfy hit show Ghost Hunters.

It is no secret that Ghost Hunters is one of my favorite shows. Watching Jason, Grant and the team calmly explore extremely creepy places, debunk hauntings as rattling pipes, etc. and enthusiastically document unexplained incidents, is a weekly ritual. It appeals to my Nancy Drew-side with its mix of adventure, practicality, and the uplifting knowledge that there are mysteries out there to be explored.

So when I found myself standing next to Jason Hawes in the lobby on the first night of the weekend, you can understand that a.) it felt unbelievably surreal and b.) that I experienced my first case of (subtly) being “star-struck.” More importantly, for the purposes of this creative thinking blog, I would like to call it “star-stuck,” meaning that I suddenly had an incredible opportunity to have a memorable conversation and receive the answers to about 10,000 of my ghost hunting questions (or at least say something interesting to a very normal and cool person) but I found that my internal dialogue was being censored by my preconceptions. I didn’t want to say something that every other fan had most likely said. I didn’t want to pester him with a question that he had most likely answered a zillion times. I opened my mouth and the only thing I managed to say during this fantastic opportunity was “I really enjoy the show.” Lame.

With the entire weekend still stretching before me, I resolved that a moment like that would not happen again, not with the TAPS team or with any other person that I found interesting and had the opportunity to meet in my lifetime. For me, the ironic part was that since I teach, and also present to clients at work, I know what it is like to answer questions, and frankly, they are my favorite part of any presentation. Questions are great because they give you a place to start an interesting conversation. So, with that knowledge, I bolstered my courage. I also made a list of all of the things I had ever wondered during the show and identified my key questions: have they ever encountered any people living in the abandoned buildings? Were there any situations where they had felt afraid? Do they do anything special to master or control their fear when being in an unfamiliar (and sometimes sinister) place?

Not only did I get to ask my questions to Jay and Grant at the Q&A session on Saturday, but also afterwards when we were hanging out in the lobby and the pub. During the investigation time, I even volunteered to ask questions to the ghost of Mr. Spalding who haunts the inn—and (through the K2 meter)—he answered back. Now that, is a memorable conversation.

I took many great things away from this experience, but one of the inspiration points for me was tapping into my curiosity and taking advantage of those rare chances you have to ask questions. One of the ways that I am continuing to cultivate this is by keeping a question list in my sketchbook. It is a great source of new discovery points, especially as I try and let my imagine run wild. This means I ask questions such as “What would I have asked Jim Henson if I met him?” or “What was Edison’s inspiration for the lightbulb?” In making it somewhat limitless—out of the boundaries of time and space reality—I discover a lot of cool things that I want to explore.

Within the more practical boundaries of reality, this is also a very helpful activity for when you are going to lectures, discussion panels, or networking events. I recommend identifying someone that you hope to speak to at the event and then list five questions that you would like to ask them. Then make sure to ask when you have the chance!

Curiosity Building Exercise:
In his book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Gelb, recommends creating a list of 100 questions to help stimulate your curiosity. I find that creating any list of 100 things can be daunting (although I recommend the challenge of it—it leads to some good questions.) I like cultivating the habit of curiosity through questions in sets of five. I recommend focusing on people or subjects that you have an interest in learning more about. A good starting place, for instance, is to take one of those crazy college entrance-like questions such as “If you could have dinner with someone from any point in history, who would it be and why?” Then make a list of five or more people that you find fascinating—then imagine you get to actually have dinner with them: what would you ask? List five questions for each person. See where it takes you. Happy discovery time.