Ah,I’ve been reveling in my week in San Francisco spent on the beach (mostly) before the San Francisco Writers Conference which starts later today (Thursday). Oh, and I’ve been editing, but as we know editing is not my favorite activity so it’s been a long sloggy slog. Still, I find inspiration from the beach and the ocean, so I’ve been jotting things down furiously. (Thank you, iPhone, for your note app.) Hopefully, I will have lost a few Midwestern pounds by the end of my trip.
As a beach walker and someone who dabbles in other arts such as drawing and jewelry and metal work, I’m always on the lookout for found objects that I can use in my work. Interesting shells, very small sand dollars, unusual and small pieces of driftwood, and now sea glass – I pick all this up for a later installation. Or maybe I’ll get it home and decide it wasn’t worth the five calories to bend over and pick it up, I don’t know. I won’t know until I begin to build whatever it is in my head.
It’s always a wonder: where did this piece of glass come from? Where did this limb originate? How far did it travel? Across the Bay, or somewhere thousands of miles from here?
It’s not always a successful day of scavenging at the beach. Sometimes you can walk for miles and not find a thing of interest. Just sand, just waves, just seagulls. Wild wind, sunshine, maybe dense fog. (Although some of those things are interesting, you just can’t take them home with you.) Sometimes the debris looks toxic or dangerous and um, no… I won’t touch that.
Other times you arrive and start walking and all of a sudden things twinkle, and you bend down to find THE MOTHER LODE of sea glass. Or you may happen upon an area that is littered with sand dollars, all perfectly formed from the size of a quarter to bigger than your hand. Or you’ll be the only one on the beach to find a starfish curled up and dying.
Walking the beach is like writing a novel. First, you clear your head. Then you look around you. You pick up what you think might be compelling and start your story. There may be days when you go back to the beach for inspiration and you might not find any you can take home, but you just might find something intangible that will fit the story somehow. Some beach days are miserable, cold, wet, windy. Others are glorious, warm, sunny, not a cloud in the sky. Yet all points are needed. Some finds might be garbage, but you remove the unwanted once it’s apparent.
I don’t really believe in “muses” but I need the beach, just as I need the mountains. Both seem to stir the creative deep inside.
The first step is to get there; the second is to submit.
