Positively Negative, or the I'm terrible at titles post

I've been posting all the negatives I've been working with on Flickr. If you're interested in looking through them, you kind find them here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pattypaine/

Oh, Happy Day!

Thank you judge Lisa Williams. And thank you Katerina Stoykova-Klemer, founding editor of Accents. 


When I spoke with Katerina on the phone, I felt an immediate kinship and left the conversation certain that I had found the perfect home for this ms. I'm super excited to work with the Accents team, and am really stoked that The Sounding Machine could very well be out in time for AWP.

Fimo is Primo!

My friend Felicity came over the day, and we were feeling crafty so we got out the Fimo clay.

Felicity is having a baby in October, so she made these really cool photo holders that spell out "baby."

 We made a couple camera shaped magnets, too. I love the little flower that Felicity put in her lens.

 I mounted these on the wall with double-sided tape. I like them because I can easily change the photos.

Here's everything we made, ready to go into the oven. 

Project Summer and Super 8 was bad.

I spent a fair amount of time working on a grant project this summer. I think, bit by bit, we're making good progress. This project takes me pretty far out of my comfort zone. We're turning Qatari oral folk tales into a series of comics and illustrated stories. There are 5 faculty members and 9 students working on this project. Two of the faculty teach English, one teaches linguistics, one teaches art, and one teaches graphic design. The students are mostly from graphic design, but we also have students from interior, fashion and painting and print making.

The project has forced me to learn about sequential art, it's giving me a chance to work closely with students outside the English classroom, and I'm learning a great deal about Qatari culture. All great things. Not being expert in all aspects of this project makes me anxious though, no doubt it has something to do with the undeniable fact that I'm a control freak.

Anyway, here are some images of work in progress/early drafts:

I'm still working on the negative recovery project. The latest batch of negatives I'm working with are from New York in the 1920's.

Here's a couple:

To balance all this visual work, I've been writing, writing, writing. Mostly poetry, but also an essay called "Facebook: The Tyranny of Knowing."

What else....  Oh, we watched Super 8 last night. It was 33.3% Goonies, 33.3% War of the Worlds, 33.3% Transformers, and 100% bad.